Horkheimer’s critique of egoism lacked clear causal grounding in economic and social tendencies.

Evidence

There was, however, nothing in what Horkheimer wrote to suggest how the anthropological doctrines dismissing egoism had developed, depending as they must do on the dialectic between growing human capacities and social structures. Nor was there anything to suggest where the inherently better aspects of egoism came from, how the sudden change in it came about and on what economic and social tendencies it was based. He merely referred to a break, by the representatives of similar historical interests, with the `catholic tolerance for certain human ways of reacting which disturb the introduction of the new economic order’, to the original progressiveness of the principle of free competition, and to the ambiguity of a civilizing process reaching back far beyond the beginning of the bourgeois period which simultaneously emancipated human beings and inwardly enslaved them. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 740

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School’s broader ambivalence toward Enlightenment rationality, echoing Horkheimer/Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment intellectual debts. — connects to: Critical Theory lacked grounds independent of both nature and rationality. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2146; Horkheimer’s planned book remained ambiguous about how interdisciplinary and economic analysis fit together. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1315