Horkheimer saw authoritarianism as an old absolutist form mediated by liberalism

Evidence

In 1938 Horkheimer, apparently under the influence of Wittfogel’s ideas about oriental society, stated in a lecture about the Institute that `The authoritarian state is nothing new, even in the bourgeois epoch, but rather a return, mediated by liberalism, to authoritarian forms which have their source in absolutism … Naturally, the power to dispose of the gigantic productive resources of the twentieth century requires a different authoritarian apparatus from that used in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.’ — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1156

Categorization

• XREF: Wittfogel’s oriental-despotism influence echoes later debates about hydraulic societies and centralized power. — connects to: Horkheimer’s fascism theory generalized beyond orthodox communist capitalism-as-agent doctrine. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1070
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that fascism was not new but a return mediated by liberalism to absolutism — where liberal atomization made a spiral of lasting despotism possible — is a dense historical-causal thesis worth sitting with.

Broader Connections

• Horkheimer’s fascism theory generalized beyond orthodox communist capitalism-as-agent doctrine. #expands (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1070