Horkheimer’s dialectical insight substituted for empirical research into facts

Evidence

Horkheimer gave the procedure its materialist note by connecting changes in the meaning of concepts with changes in the social function of those concepts. The dialectical development which he presumed to exist was based on the assumption that there was a process, effective in every possible field, inhibiting or releasing those forces which were seeking the best possible condition for humanity. There was hardly any distinction between this and the determinism of Hegel’s idealist dialectics. What Horkheimer stated here was said on the basis of his knowledge of the dark' writers of the bourgeois period, whom he thought so much of, and it was more or less independent of any particular scientific research. This was one more example, alongside his wide-ranging contribution to Studies on Authority and the Family, and his 1938 study on the change in the function of scepticism, Montaigne and the Function of Scepticism’, of how much faith he put in his dialectical insight into what lay behind the facts, without wasting too much time on research into the facts themselves. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 203

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the learned-corpus claim that theory can emerge inductively from long collective research rather than precede it — here the inverse case.