he suggested that the Institute would be an alternative to a German university system that served as a training academy for ‘mandarins’ who who would go on to uphold the status quo
It’s hard, though, not to be sympathetic to their excoriated, Mammon-fixated fathers. All they wanted (conceived of in one way) was the best for their precocious, privileged, one might even say bratty sons.
That said, Schopenhauer’s eschatology, which Horkheimer shared, is not Marx’s. For Schopenhauer, there is no ultimate redemption, no punishment, no heaven, be it on or beyond Earth. There is, rather, pointlessness on a cosmic scale
But their relationship took a different turn as she became part of the coterie.
Nearly all the leading lights of the Frankfurt School – Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Löwenthal, Pollock, Fromm, Neumann – were resistant to the Weltanschauung transmitted by paternal authority, and many rebelled in various ways against their fathers who had become very materially successful.
