# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/max-horkheimer
# Generated: 2026-09-01T09:19:56.724Z

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url: "https://fame.am/person/max-horkheimer"
name: "Max Horkheimer"
slug: "max-horkheimer"
description: "He mapped how reason itself could turn against us — how the tools of enlightenment, bent toward efficiency and control, could hollow out truth and crush the individual. As director of the Institute for Social Research, Horkheimer built the intellectual architecture of critical theory and diagnosed modernity's pathologies with surgical precision."
tagline: "German philosopher and sociologist (1895–1973)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/AdornoHorkheimerHabermasbyJeremyJShapiro2.png?width=1200"
gender: "male"
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  isoCode: "DE"
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  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1895-02-14"
deathDate: "1973-07-07"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Born 14 February 1895 in Germany, Horkheimer took the helm of the Institute for Social Research and became the Frankfurt School's architect. Through the 1930s he published foundational essays in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung that advanced a materialist theory linking reason, society, and domination under capitalism. The war years sharpened his focus: in 1947 he released Eclipse of Reason and, with Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment — works dissecting instrumental reason, authoritarianism's roots, and the erosion of autonomy. He also kept aphoristic notebooks from the late 1920s through the 1960s, published after his death as Dämmerung. Horkheimer died 7 July 1973, leaving critical theory as a permanent lens on power and thought.