Financial insecurity drove Horkheimer to criticize the bourgeoisie yet bind himself to it

Evidence

This was the Horkheimers’ fear of not having sufficiently large finances at their disposal. It was this fear which had enabled Horkheimer to produce some of his severest criticisms of the bourgeoisie in his aphorisms in Dawn, and which had nevertheless driven him to make the peculiar contracts with the Society for Social Research which were mentioned above. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 272

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that material fear both licensed radical critique and produced conservative institutional entanglement is a genuine dialectical puzzle rather than a solid-but-standard point.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s recurrent theme of institutions emerging where information about trust is costly — here the Institute’s contractual peculiarities as a response to fear.