Habermas’s intellectual formation recapitulated Marcuse’s path into the Institute

Evidence

Thus there arose a remarkable combination of factors which resembled what had happened in 1932-3, when Marcuse joined the Institute. Habermas had been schooled in his view of the crisis of the present age through reading Heidegger and other conservative cultural critics, and his approach had become more incisive when he encountered the writings of the Young Hegelians, especially the young Marx, and ultimately when he read Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness and Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. … Arnold Gehlen first achieved world recognition with his main work, Man, in 1940. This gave an anthropological justification to the glorification of discipline and order, so that his collaboration with Nazism seemed to be as little a matter of chance as Heidegger’s. Adorno regarded Helmut Schelsky as particularly dangerous because he showed his fascist tendencies less openly than others did. In his preface to Sociology of Sexuality, however, Schelsky explicitly supported the programme of the counter-Enlightenment. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2291

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader critical theory narrative of Institute recruitment and intellectual lineages established in earlier chapters.