The racket theory stayed an unverified torso built only by Horkheimer and Adorno

Evidence

Kirchheimer was the last of those who contributed to the Institute’s war effort by taking up a full-time job in Washington. He was the only one who had an essay ready in 1943`The Question of Sovereignty’, in which he briefly mentioned the concept of the racket but did not manage to make its central significance plausible. Kirchheimer’s article appeared in 1944 in the Journal of Politics. Parts of Horkheimer’s essay were later incorporated into Eclipse of Reason. The theory of the racket therefore remained an unfinished torso developed by Horkheimer and Adorno. The most important ideas from it were incorporated into the Dialectic of Enlightenment, without Neumann or Kirchheimer or others having collaborated closely to check the extremely drastic, far-reaching assumptions involved against concrete economic, political and legal material. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1335

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader Frankfurt School study—the racket theory appears in Dialectic of Enlightenment fragments and Eclipse of Reason, and its anti-empirical development fits other critiques of Adorno’s speculative method. — connects to: Horkheimer’s racket theory saw survival as compulsory team membership