Horkheimer saw only sensitive privileged classes as able to perceive society’s contradictions

Evidence

However, precisely where theory and suffering coincided, revolutionary action and fearless commitment could not, in Horkheimer’s view, be expected. The fact that `many people are poorly off, even though everyone could be well off … necessitates the poisoning of the public mind with lies and is driving this social order towards collapse’. Yet, among those people who suffered through this poisoning, Horkheimer considered only the more sensitive members of the privileged classes, who were also able to perceive the evil in the fact that there was no organic relationship between the individual and society, that each person’s contribution was not duly recognized and that the good things in life usually fell to the worst sort of people. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 198

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s organic intellectuals and the classical Marxist problem of false consciousness among the proletariat — why revolutionary subjectivity arises among intellectuals rather than the workers themselves. — connects to: Only the more sensitive privileged classes could perceive the evils of social atomization — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 198; Horkheimer endorsed analyzing trivial phenomena to reveal society’s contradictions — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 663; Horkheimer held that moral character is a luxury only economic security can purchase (+1 more)