Horkheimer first made thinking itself a form of resistance in 1942

Evidence

Yet despite the hortatory note of “Authoritarian State,” it was becoming increasingly apparent to Horkheimer that the chances for barbarism were greater. In the same article he expressed for perhaps the first time the argument that the life of the mind was becoming the last refuge of revolutionary praxis, an argument that was to appear with increasing frequency in the subsequent work of the Frankfurt School. “Thought itself,” he wrote, “is already a sign of resistance, of the effort to allow oneself no longer to be deceived.” 74 Once “barbarism,” or at least its fascist embodiment, had been defeated, without leading to the “beginning of history” that had seemed its only alternative, Critical Theory began to question the possibility of praxis itself in the modern world. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 497

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Horkheimer and Adorno posited a hidden utopia within reason to explain resistance to demythologization. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1389