Horkheimer combined personal psychological dysfunction with exceptional institutional management skill

Evidence

Horkheimer himself was an extreme example of the `strange psychology’ which he described with bitterness in one of the aphorisms in Dawn (see above, p. 49). But in him the Institute had as its director a young academic manager who was able, in difficult times, to create both the external and the internal conditions in which distinguished academic research could flourish. Horkheimer frequently accused Pollock of not showing enough interest in the Institute’s intellectual tasks, and of having a tendency to monopolize its business arrangements. Horkheimer himself was interested in both. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 446