Horkheimer and Pollock’s critical worldview formed through shared naturalist and revolutionary reading

Evidence

Their awareness of that contrast was intensified by their reading together of Ibsen, Strindberg and Zolanaturalist critics of bourgeois society; of Tolstoy and Kropotkin, social revolutionaries who advocated a form of life marked by asceticism and universal love; of Schopenhauer’s `Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life’ and Spinoza’s Ethics, of Karl Kraus’s paper Fackel (Torch) and Franz Pfemfert’s Aktion, which was a forum of literary opposition to war and to the bourgeois world of prewar Europe, marked by its editor’s radical political views. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 164

Categorization

• XREF: The reading list that politically formed Horkheimer anticipates the Institute’s later program of interdisciplinary critique — worth cross-referencing with the Lukacs/Korsch influences recorded later in the book. — connects to: Complementary personalities of Horkheimer and Pollock underpinned the Institut’s success — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 99

Broader Connections

• Complementary personalities of Horkheimer and Pollock underpinned the Institut’s success #expands (0.75) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 99