Activity

Benjamin’s writings in the last eight years of his life were examples of Joseph Schumpeter’s notion of creative destruction, reducing history to rubble the better to find a path through its ruins

the positivists – at least those whom Horkheimer characterised thus – suspended facts in aspic and falsely eternalised the status quo

Horkheimer’s vision in his inaugural lecture was that philosophy should open up a synoptic, critical view of human life that empirical research and interdisciplinary work might fill in

Adorno and Horkheimer returned the abuse: they regarded Brecht as a petit-bourgeois poseur and apologist for Stalinism

the Institute for Social Research as it evolved in the 1930s. It was Brechtian in its inverse relationship between scabrous critique and changing that which it critiqued