Horkheimer argued radical intellectuals need not live like the poor they champion

Evidence

Nowhere are their revolutionary sentiments so clearly articulated as in the work of “Heinrich Regius,” the name Horkheimer borrowed from a seventeenth-century natural philosopher to put on the title page of the aphorisms he published in Zurich in the first year of exile. Yet it is in one of the pieces in Dammerung, “A Fable of Consistency,” that he implicitly justifies the combination of radical beliefs and a bourgeois standard of living. … Horkheimer finishes his “fairy tale” by cautioning: “Both drew the consequences, and both consequences favored the tyrant. With the general moral prescription of consistency, there seems one condition: it is friendlier to tyrants than to poor poets.” — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 171

Categorization

• XREF: This addresses the classic mandarin/intellectual-hypocrisy debate about Critical Theory — connects to the standing ‘claims that is’ interest in how theory relates to lived practice. Also echoes the later Gehlen-Adorno Grand Inquisitor debate noted elsewhere in the book.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that consistency ‘is friendlier to tyrants than to poor poets’ is a genuinely paradigm-shifting inversion: it reframes moral purity/virtue as potentially serving power rather than opposing it. Dense enough to sit with for days.