Horkheimer saw a hedonist philosophical lineage vindicating egoism as true enjoyment, not abstract fiction.

Evidence

In the present epoch, egoism has actually become destructivethe fettered and distracted egoism of the masses, as well as the outdated egoistic principle of economy, which is today only showing its most brutal side. When the latter is overcome, the former will be able to become productive in a new sense … The idealistic morality which is preventing this from being seen is not to be rejected, it must be realized historically and must therefore not yet be eliminated either. There is no definite answer to the question of what fate awaits egoism, that `urge for death and destruction’ now generally condemned, in a more rational form of reality. But there have been signs recently which all point to one and the same conclusion. Certain thinkers, in opposition to the dominating ethos, have neither concealed egoism nor minimized it nor attacked it: they have supported it. Not as the miserable, abstract fiction it appears to be in some economists and in Jeremy Bentham, but as enjoyment, as the greatest measure of happiness, in which the satisfaction of cruel urges is also included. These thinkers have not idealized any of the original instincts history has given theminstead, they have denounced the distortion of the instincts caused by official ideology … These psychologists [the hedonist psychologists Aristippus, Epicurus, Mandeville, Helvétius, de Sade and Nietzsche] seem to be pointing out, through their own existence, that liberation from ascetic morality with its nihilist consequences can bring about a change in humanity in the opposite direction to that of spiritualization. This process, transcending spiritualization, does not throw humanity back to the previous spiritual stage, as if the first process had not taken place. It carries humanity to a new and higher form of existence. These thinkers have contributed little to making this a widespread reality; this is above all the task of those historical figures in whom theory and social practice were united. In them, the mechanisms of bourgeois psychology, as the decisive forces in their lives and as the objects of theory, vanish in the face of their historical mission … because the dismal ethos of a declining epoch, which denies happiness, has no more power over them. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 742

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the Frankfurt School’s unorthodox, anti-Bentham notion of egoism as enjoyment including satisfaction of cruel urges, and contrasts spiritualization with a higher transcendence.
• XREF: Connects to de Sade’s and Nietzsche’s genealogies of morality, which the Frankfurt School read as unmasking ascetic ideology. — connects to: Horkheimer defended egoism but insisted gratification flows through communal interaction — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 233

Broader Connections

• Horkheimer defended egoism but insisted gratification flows through communal interaction #corroborates (0.82) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 233