Horkheimer’s dialectics project answered the self-limitation of scientific rationality and scientism

Evidence

While Marx achieved only a provisional presentation of the dialectical method in his works on the critique of political economy and on social theory, with Horkheimer the opposite was true, as the sequence of his works in the 1930s shows. The dialectics' project stood for the constant continuation of his work on the philosophical basis of social theory, and was his response to the restriction of rationality in the sciences which he had diagnosed in his Remarks on Science and the Crisis’, which appeared in the first issue of the ZfS, and to the hypostatization of this restricted rationality by `scientism’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 198

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘scientism’ here as the hypostatization of a restricted scientific rationality — important for pinning down the Institute’s polemical vocabulary.