Horkheimer and Pollock formalized their lifelong friendship with a written contract

Evidence

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. 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

• CANDY: Two teenage friends literally signing a contract governing their debates is a wonderfully concrete, tweetable image of the young Frankfurt School.
• XREF: The scheduled-debates contract resembles the communitarian rule-making of small utopian groups; also echoes the deliberate pair-friendship structure in Goethe’s conversations. — connects to: Horkheimer and Pollock formalized their friendship into a contract for critical debate — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 164
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 164

Broader Connections

• Horkheimer and Pollock formalized their friendship into a contract for critical debate #corroborates (1.00) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 164