Humanism in Horkheimer’s Essays of the Second Part of the 1930s

Horkheimer’s project of reconstructing the interrelationships between the historical and socio-economic processes that mark modern times, bourgeois society and the movement towards self-understanding of the modern world through the speculative work of philosophers, scientists, and politicians, developed throughout the 1930s. This chapter will examine Horkheimer’s analysis of bourgeois society in modern times, in order to detect his evaluation of the humanism of early modernity.