Horkheimer prized political aggressiveness over intellectual amiability in his associates

Evidence

For Horkheimer, what was important was Adorno’s maliciously sharp eye for existing conditions' and his aggressiveness. He missed this in Fromm, and said to Pollock after their first meeting in New York in June 1934 that Fromm does not particularly appeal to me. He has productive ideas, but he wants to be on good terms with too many people at once, and doesn’t want to miss anything. It is quite pleasant to talk to him, but my impression is that it is quite pleasant for very many people.’ … At the end of 1936, after Alfred Sohn-Rethel had visited him in Oxford, Adorno warmly recommended to Horkheimer that support be given to Sohn-Rethel, who was working in isolation towards the same goal as he was, i.e. the destruction of idealism from within. After reading part of Sohn-Rethel’s draft of his Sociological Theory of Knowledge with Marcuse, Horkheimer responded coolly that, although there was much intellectual power behind this dreary sequence of sentences full of words heavy with significance', the work's position with regard to history itself, as it is, is not much different from that of a Jaspers or some other professor’. The peculiar irony of Marx's categories was nowhere at work'; Sohn-Rethel had succeeded in denuding the concept of exploitation of any aggressive content’ in a way that not even Mannheim had achieved. … Adorno’s enthusiasm for Sohn-Rethel gave Horkheimer an opportunity `to emphasize the vast difference between your way of thinking and his’: It may be that your work on Kierkegaard still bears some traces of an idealistic way of thinking which you broke away from by writing the book, but in many places it is your maliciously sharp eye for existing conditions which strikes the decisive note. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 654

Categorization

• XREF: Adorno’s ‘maliciously sharp eye’ prefigures the later Horkheimer/Adorno Dialectic of Enlightenment division of labor; also connects to Sohn-Rethel’s famous ‘social synthesis’ thesis later developed in Intellectual and Manual Labour. — connects to: Horkheimer’s strategic indecision reflected a Jewish condition requiring Machiavellian skill for security — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1744; Horkheimer’s perfectionism made directorship unsustainable, shrinking the Institute — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1098
• QUESTION: Sohn-Rethel’s reception history — how did the group’s cool response shape his later marginalization in Critical Theory?