Horkheimer and Pollock formalized their friendship into a contract for critical debate

Evidence

Moritz Horkheimer’s paternal authority was reinforced threefold: by the structure of the middle-class family, by his success as a businessman and by Jewish tradition. According to plan, the boy was taken out of school in his penultimate year, and started as an apprentice in his father’s business in 1910. … The friendship was sealed by a contract containing exact regulations on how, for how long and at what time of day debates over differences between them and decisions should take place, and the contract defined friendship as an `expression of critical human energy, the creation of solidarity between all human beings’. It was evidence of an effort, faced with the contrast between ideal and reality, to create a private stronghold from which the battle with reality could be conducted. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 164

Categorization

• CANDY: Two future Frankfurt School founders signed a written contract specifying when and how long they could argue with each other — a wonderfully precise nerdy fact.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in institutions and their founding — friendship-as-contract as a proto-institutional move anticipating the Institute’s own legal-bureaucratic structure. — connects to: Horkheimer and Pollock formalized their lifelong friendship with a written contract — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 164