Horkheimer reframed his postwar role as transmitting liberal-bourgeois tradition into the administered world

Evidence

Horkheimer was still living ambiguously, and he was still contemptuous of the society of his time, although more secretly than in earlier years. What he was doing above all, as a teacher and speechmaker, instigator and co-ordinator, was to advertise liberal-bourgeois cultural traditions which it was important to rescue and pass on into the administered world, no matter how faint and weak the traces of these traditions were becoming. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 520

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The shift from critic of the administered world to curator of its last liberal remnants is a genuinely unsettling inversion of Critical Theory’s founding posture.