Introducing Racket Theory

On the History and Themes of the Frankfurt School’s Racket Theory


The texts collected here belong to the materials on ‘racket theory’ composed by members of the Institute for Social Research between 1941 and 1944. More specifically, they were mostly (probably) written by Max Horkheimer, albeit with considerable input from Theodor W. Adorno and occasional feedback from others.

The translated fragments have previously been published in the twelfth volume of Horkheimer’s Gesammelte Schriften; we have used the texts there as the basis for our translations. With the exception of “On the Ideology of Politics Today,” the fragments translated here were sourced from an internal ‘publication,’ a typed booklet of twenty “Concepts” (aphorisms) attached to the Festschrift edition of the Philosophische Fragmente—the first version of what would become the Dialectic of Enlightenment—printed as a limited-run mimeograph for Friedrich Pollock’s 50th birthday in May 1944.1

The translations of the two internal memos are based directly on scans of the typescripts from Horkheimer’s Nachlass.

Finally, this collection includes a critical edition of Max Horkheimer’s 1943 essay “On the Sociology of Class Relations” transcribed and edited by James Crane. Passages enclosed in [square brackets] indicate differences between three textual variants (“1a),” “1b),” “1c)”). As with the memos, we have used the digitized portion of Horkheimer’s Nachlass as our source.2

When citing Horkheimer’s Nachlass, we have used the format MHA (Max Horkheimer Archive) Na 1 (Nachlass) [digital container number], [page number(s)].

* * *

The history of the ‘racket theory’ corpus is difficult to reconstruct. We have found it helpful to divide our subsequent analysis of the racket theory project into three major sections, which are not exclusive in terms of content. Our narrative starts with the earliest use of the term in Max Horkheimer’s essay “The End of Reason” (1942). After this, we turn to analyzing the stream of texts which were explicitly composed for or about publication(s), mostly written between spring 1942 and fall 1943. Then we treat the topic of reflexivity and the specific character of the racket theory project that flows from its particular form of reflexivity. Finally, we briefly discuss some particularities of the core racket theory texts before concluding. Translations from additional German sources are our own.

The Beginnings of ‘Racket Theorie’

In the development of early Critical Theory as a whole, racket theory is in many respects the successor to the Institute’s 1930s socio-psychological studies on the role of ‘authority,’ defined as the psychological internalization of class domination,3 in modern society, which culminated in the 1936 publication of Studien über Autorität und Familie. The remaining members of the Institute—specifically Horkheimer, Adorno, Löwenthal, and Paul Massing—would return to the more general problematic of ‘authority’ and ‘authoritarianism’ in the late 1940s with the Studies in Prejudice series that Horkheimer edited with Samuel Flowerman for the American Jewish Committee, and especially in The Authoritarian Personality (1950), where Adorno would build off of the same Frommian concept of the authoritarian character structure that grounded the 1936 Studien.4

Horkheimer’s essays “The Jews and Europe” (1939) and “Authoritarian State” (1940) were also important precursors to the racket theory project. These two essays touch on many themes that would reappear a few years later in the racket theory corpus: fundamental commonalities between fascism and liberal capitalism, the decline of law and return of direct domination, the worthlessness of reformism, etc. The essential difference between these essays and the racket theory corpus is the absence of any unifying concept in the former. From 1942, the concept of the racket would quickly come to fill this role in both their short- and long-form reflections on economics and politics. It would serve as the term mediating between their presentation of the constant of impersonal domination in capitalist society as a totality and the variable forms of more personal or direct domination through which the former increasingly found expression in the everyday lives of the subjects of late capitalism.

The story of the racket concept in particular begins with the final issue of the Institute for Social Research’s official journal, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science—the short-lived (1939-1942) English-language successor to their Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (1932-1939)—in Summer 1941, which has retrospectively become known as the “State Capitalism” issue (Nos. 2 and 3 of Vol. IX), named after the central idea of Friedrich Pollock’s two controversial contributions: “State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations” and “Is National Socialism a New Order?” Though Horkheimer and Adorno’s work from this period has traditionally been interpreted as an extension of Pollock’s state capitalism thesis, such readings almost entirely ignore the substantial critiques both Horkheimer and Adorno level against Pollock’s theory—largely in agreement with the better-known critiques of Neumann and Kirchheimer—in the ensuing debate over whether the Institute should publish the text at all.5 This confrontation with Pollock’s theory was a crucial ingredient in the development of the racket theory project.

The final issue of Studies opens with Horkheimer’s essay “The End of Reason,” which was written in close collaboration with Adorno. In the Horkheimer Archive, amidst the drafts for “End of Reason,” there are a number of excerpts, with unique handwritten corrections and notes for revision, from one section of the essay in particular under the title “Racket Theorie.”6 This passage seems to have acquired a newfound, retrospective significance for Horkheimer and Adorno as they worked on the earliest drafts of the Fragmente in Spring and Summer 1942. The excerpt provides a provisional definition of the racket as a form of social domination—“[p]rotection is the archetype of domination”—after its violent historical reappearance in the transition from the “interlude” free market liberalism to monopoly capitalism: “Monopolism has […] led social domination back to its true nature which had continued to operate only where the humane form of domination had left some loopholes to inhumanity.”7 The passage concludes with the earliest formulation of a research program devoted to the racket itself: “A study of such border phenomena as racketeering may offer useful parallels for understanding certain developmental tendencies in modern society.”8 The apparent marginality of racketeering relative to the monopolistic planning of states is exactly what made the racket so promising as a model for the explanation of monopoly.9

Thwarted Plans for Publication

Prompted by internal debates opened during the composition and publication of the “State Capitalism” issue, Horkheimer prepared a memo (the “LA Memo”) in April 1942 about the ‘non-philosophical’ problems—many of them related to so-called state capitalism—that would have to be tackled in his planned book on dialectics, which would eventually become Dialectic of Enlightenment. The word ‘racket’ only appears once in memo, indicating that it was not yet the focal concept for the planned work. A slightly earlier letter to Felix Weil from March of ‘42 related Horkheimer’s desire to recruit Weil as well as Friedrich Pollock (and perhaps Henryk Grossmann and Arkady Gurland) to assist with writing the sociological-economic part of the dialectics book.10

By the Summer of ‘42, Horkheimer and Adorno had begun work on what would become Dialectic of Enlightenment, and they were increasingly aware that an extended treatment of their new thinking about class, authority, and the economy would not fit in the ‘dialectics book.’ This was largely due to the fact that the theory of the racket was conceived from the beginning as a multidisciplinary project, something Horkheimer and Adorno could not accomplish without collaborators in political science, law, and economics. In August of ‘42, they—probably Adorno working on the basis of prior discussions with Horkheimer—produced another memo (“Notes for the Programme of the Book”) outlining their plans for an independent book on what they were now calling “racket theory”11 or “sociology of rackets.”12 Inspired by this second memo, Adorno quickly drafted the essay “Reflections on Class Theory,” a text which he told Horkheimer could be “readily broken up and transferred to different places in the end product [i.e. the planned book] as needed.”13

The rudimentary plan of these memos gestated into more concrete plans for a 1943 yearbook—presumably a continuation of or successor to Studies in Philosophy and Social Science—that would include contributions from the likes of Arkady Gurland, Herbert Marcuse, Franz Neumann, and Otto Kirchheimer. Kirchheimer’s contribution would be about “rackets in the labor movement” and “analyze the differences between industrial monopolies and the trade unions,” while Neumann would write “a study on the possibilities of political forms which do not have the character of rackets” and Gurland’s essay would deal with “certain statistical data with regard to the changes in the working classes.”14 Marcuse’s contribution was presumably to be the essay he was working on at the time, a study of “how new forms of control, manipulation, and behavior express themselves in the language of this age” entitled “Operational Thinking and Social Domination.”15 Horkheimer confided in Marcuse that he “[had] the feeling that the realization of this plan would be the first step toward giving [sic] a piece of Critical Theory which would not be purely philosophical.”16

There were, however, some significant problems with this plan. As Thomas Wheatland has shown in The Frankfurt School In Exile, the Institute for Social Research’s affiliation with Columbia University, which facilitated the former’s emigration to the United States in 1934, was contingent on both the Institute’s financial autonomy and the continuation of their pre-existing social research using quantitative and empirical methods.17 With the Horkheimer circle’s bitter break with Erich Fromm, the leading empirical social researcher of the group, in 1939 and the Institute’s rapidly worsening financial situation, they had become incapable of fulfilling either of Columbia’s desiderata by the outbreak of WWII.18 In addition to recurrent suspicions towards the Institute core’s Marxist, or even communist, sympathies19 and an undisclosed quota system that limited the number of Jewish faculty members,20 a more permanent affiliation between the Institute and Columbia’s sociology department was endangered by the latter’s internal disputes over its own direction and leadership between 1939 and 1942. After the Institute failed to secure a source of external funding for any of the ambitious group research projects it proposed in this period, Horkheimer, who had since moved to Los Angeles in Spring 1941, finally responded to Columbia’s reluctance to support the Institute beyond offering a teaching appointment to Franz Neumann in 1942 by making the decision to radically downsize the Institute in late 1942.21 The lack of any institutional affiliation meant that funding for the yearbook would be hard to come by.

At the same time, several of the contributing authors—Marcuse, Neumann, and Kirchheimer—had recently obtained gainful employment at the Research & Analysis branch of the United States Office of Strategic Services and would have little time to complete their projected contributions.22 On top of these two problems, one of the major planned contributors, Henryk Grossmann, found himself increasingly at odds with the inner circle of the Institute both theoretically and interpersonally.23 Plans were quickly scaled back from a full-fledged yearbook to a smaller mimeographed edition,24 but even this apparently proved unfeasible. Otto Kirchheimer actually completed his essay and wound up getting “In Quest of Sovereignty” published in The Journal of Politics in May 1944 after it became clear that the Institute’s publication plans had come to naught. Marcuse would eventually repurpose some of his work from “Operational Thinking…” for One Dimensional Man.

That’s as far as plans for publication in book form got, but Horkheimer also produced a series of fragments related to the racket idea and a substantial essay on the topic. While we know that Horkheimer started work on his fragments in 1942, the exact date is not entirely clear. The most likely possibility is that at least some of them were started in Spring or Summer 1942 and thus provided a rough conceptual basis for the subsequent racket theory texts. It is also unclear what exactly Horkheimer planned to do with these fragments: whether they were intended for publication or merely a means for internal theoretical edification or etc.

In early 1943, Horkheimer began writing a more cohesive essay on racket theory, hoping against hope that he still might be able to produce the planned yearbook or at least find some outlet for the racket idea. The text received the deceptively unimaginative title “On the Sociology of Class Relations” and would only be published in full posthumously. Horkheimer sent out copies of an early draft to various Institute associates—Marcuse, Kirchheimer, and Neumann—for feedback in September 1943 and produced a finished draft on the basis of their feedback shortly afterwards. “Sociology of Class Relations” stands out as the most integrated and wide-ranging text in the entire racket theory corpus.

Horkheimer continued to periodically revise the fragments with input from Adorno until Spring 1944, when they were all, with the sole exception of “On the Ideology of Politics Today,” compiled together in a staple-bound typed booklet (complete with a table of contents, pagination, and a prefatory note) under the title “Concepts as a Supplement to the Festschrift for Friedrich Pollock.”25 As that title suggests, this compilation was a companion volume to the original Philosophische Fragmente version of Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Horkheimer and Adorno had dedicated to their friend and collaborator Pollock on the occasion of his 50th birthday. The preface to the Philosophische Fragmente would also be the first and last time that “On the Sociology of Class Relations” was mentioned in print. Adorno and Horkheimer explained that the essay was excluded along with “all English works produced in the same period, regardless of their connection to the fragments,” but nevertheless belonged to the “whole work” which they “[hoped] to complete… in the not too distant future.”26

After the limited ‘publication’ (so to speak) of the “Concepts” and the Philosophische Fragmente, Horkheimer and Adorno shelved the racket theory texts for a few years. They eventually returned to them in 1946-1947 while preparing the new edition of what was now titled Dialectic of Enlightenment for publisher Querido and, slightly later, Horkheimer’s book Eclipse of Reason. Among the extensive changes they made to the text of Dialectic for the Querido edition, the fragment “Strafgefangene” (or “Prisoners”) from the “Concepts” was incorporated into the fragment “From ‘A Theory of the Criminal,’” itself a lengthy excerpt from the full “Theory of the Criminal” of the “Concepts.” Beyond this, none of the older, unpublished work was included.

“On the Sociology of Class Relations” fared slightly better. In 1946, substantial sections of it were revised and repurposed for Chapter IV of Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason, “Rise and Decline of the Individual.”27 Among the most radical of these revisions was the elimination of the concept of the “racket” from the text entirely.28 The publication of Eclipse marked the end of the Horkheimer and Adorno’s attempts to publish their writings on the racket from the early 1940s,29 though not the end of their preoccupation with the problem of the disappearance of socialist internationalism with the ‘racketization’ of the labor movement.30

The Reflexivity of Racket Theory

Much of the authoritative secondary literature on racket theory to date has approached these early sketches searching for some basic incoherence that is meant to explain why the project would ultimately remain unfinished.31 However, the points of incoherence often imputed to racket theory under the assumption of its necessary failure prove to be the same problems the critical theorists consciously adopted as their point of departure for the reflexive contextualization and construction of racket theory from the beginning.

From its inception in “The End of Reason,” the concept of the racket has a paradoxical historical status: in the transition of modern capitalist society from “liberalism” to “monopolism,” the ‘archetype’ and ‘true nature’ of social domination that remains the condition of class society, i.e., ‘prehistory’ as a whole, is revealed.32 In each of their subsequent contributions to racket theory, Horkheimer and Adorno will contextualize their theoretical efforts both within the process of ‘racketization’ society undergoes in the transition from ‘liberal’ to ‘monopoly’ capitalism and in the ‘negative invariance’33 of human prehistory as a whole. Closing his first thesis of his essay devoted to rackets, “Reflections on Class Theory” (1942), Adorno formulates the historical discovery of prehistory in the language of the Manifesto: “All history is the history of class struggles because it was always the same thing, namely, prehistory.”34 The last line of Horkheimer’s “On the Sociology of Class Relations” (1943) is a direct interpolation from Marx’s remarks on the method of political economy from the ‘Introduction’ to the Grundrisse: “the anatomy of the man is the key to the anatomy of the ape.”35 In a letter to Felix Weil from January 1943, Horkheimer explains: “The meaning of that truth is that once we know man, we can discover his beginnings in earlier forms of life. Once Fascism had developed in European society, we now are able to find its hallmarks in earlier stages of human history, but it would be an error to say that, because of those traces, the development was a necessary one.”36 Throughout the fragments, the racket will appear under the dual aspect of ‘static’ and ‘dynamic,’ historical variable and prehistorical constant, according to this parallax. This accounts for the centrality of the problem of law in the sketches on racket theory, and more specifically on what Evgeny Pashukanis called “indissoluble internal connection between the categories of the economy based on the commodity and on money, and the legal form itself.”37 For the subject of modern social domination is in the end neither the state as collective capitalist nor the conspiracy of the rackets, but “the unconscious colossus of real existence, subjectless capitalism, [which] inflicts its destruction blindly.”38

In a pair of letters written in February 1943, Horkheimer is clear: the theoretical perspective required for racket theory is none other than the Marxian critique of political economy, which alone makes it possible for the social theorist to “to deprive liberalism of the weapon to think of itself as of the ‘natural’ economic system and to show up the identity of the meta-economic structure of both the present day collective and the old free market system.”39 The twist, however, is that the Marxian theory of social totality becomes illegible in the fragmentation of the social sciences into a system of rackets this theory is needed to critique: “This is what the critique of political economy, which established dialectical relations between the totality of the social sciences, has become among these academic groups, a kind of dealing between the different rackets which confirm one another that they are indispensable.”40 The same ‘racketization’ of society in the transition from free-market, ‘liberal’ capitalism to monopoly capitalism that underlies and drives the development of racket theory simultaneously undermines and frustrates the intelligibility of the theory itself. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the false modesty of epistemological pluralism which posits the a priori insurmountability of the division of labor in the sciences is as vicious as the pre-established harmony of the sciences was in the dogmatic philosophical systems of the past. The dispute unfolding within the social sciences between special-scientific pluralism and the renaissance of metaphysical holism is interpreted as a refractory expression of a generalized social crisis characterized by the simultaneous fragmentation and consolidation of political rackets. The lack of conscious coordination between the sciences is the reverse side of an unconscious agreement each has with the existing order of society. This reality became increasingly pressing for the racket theorists in the 1940s as they found themselves increasingly forced to seek funding from various government and non-profit ‘rackets’ whose patronage was conditional on the silence of critical theory towards the total mobilization of American society during WWII. The content of racket theory rebounds on its form.

In a letter written in August, 1942, on the style of his collaborations with Adorno, Horkheimer writes:

I’m far from imagining that our thought could “break through in America” … . We no longer hope for more than that, should the day finally break, what we’ve written will be but a small star, flickering, though barely visible, in the horrific night of the present. For what else should the gaze which stares into the fireworks of magazines and the other slick products of scientific and unscientific mass culture see when it turns away from it all if not darkness? … Any theses of ours, as the guiding principles of a successful publication, would at best only add a new shading of color to the bouquet of rockets.41

The degree to which their stylistic experimentation during the composition of Dialectic of Enlightenment was influenced by their conception of the racket as a form of social domination has yet to be fully explored.

Additional Remarks on the Texts and their Content

As mentioned above, all of the fragments that we are translating and publishing here were all included in a booklet except for “On the Ideology of Politics Today.” Before discussing the content of the fragments from the “Concepts” compilation, some attention must be given to this particular fragment. While this fragment is incomplete—it breaks off mid-sentence—it still contains a particularly pointed criticism of Friedrich Pollock’s theory of state capitalism, one which has prompted previous interpreters to attempt—unsuccessfully, in our view—to direct the criticism away from Pollock himself.42

The five fragments from the “Concepts” that we selected for translation and publication are all closely related on a thematic level. In particular, they dedicate significant space to analyzing the conflicted relation between rackets and law—both concepts serving as synecdoches for specific forms of domination. The particularism of the racket is also its “fundamental illegality;”43 it is the antithesis of the abstract, universal domination of law. Despite the apparent conflict between rackets and law, they are inseparably bound together in reality. The state’s justice is founded by and can only be administered by rackets; law in class society is “set in pre-established harmony with the rule of cliques which hold weapons and means of production.”44 Its apparent universality is set up for the advantage of a particular class. The law has an elective affinity with money, commodities, and private property. In spite of the universal validity of both forms, the sanctions of law gravitate towards the poor in particular just as commoditized wealth goes to the rich. Thus rackets and law are in a chiasmic relation of speculative identity and non-identity: rackets found the law; law is foundered on rackets.

The figure of the criminal holds a special place in this tortuous interplay of universal and particular. The criminal is punished for transgressing the universally binding restrictions that enable collective survival in the state—the so-called common good—in the interests of their own benefit. But, as Horkheimer argues, “[t]he enemy is never the object of punishment, for it is always administered to the defenseless.”45 Thus, punishment does not follow the logic of self-defense taught by Hobbes: it is an impassioned act of revenge against someone already disarmed that reveals the “illegality of the law.”46 Law constitutes itself as human society’s defense against nature, but behind this rationalistic alibi is the same cruelly natural fate it was supposed to prevent: painful death without reason.47

Another form of false universality and unity assumed by the racket is the fascist ‘collective’ or ‘community.’ Whatever internal unity such a formation possesses must be placed in the context of its violent competition with other ‘collectives’ and suppression of the outcasts unlucky enough to be excluded from the benefits of any racket. Of course, this aforementioned unity is also largely transient, if not entirely illusory. Such ‘collectives’ are invariably characterized by violently enforced internal hierarchies and struggle within each level of their hierarchy. The racketized form of collectivity is present also in the working class in the shape of the reformist unions and parties that narrowly seek after privileges for their members. This is not an inevitable result, but rather a betrayal—one that leads to the destruction of its all-too-clever perpetrator.

* * *

Turning our attention to the two memos, we must recognize that these are somewhat special documents, as they were not intended for external promulgation. We have chosen to translate and publish them because they provide unique insight into the Frankfurt School’s racket theory project and their internal working process more generally.

The “LA Memo” (“On parts of the Los Angeles work program that cannot be carried out by the philosophers”) is difficult to date exactly, but it is definitely from some point in April 1942. The document is of special interest because of its strikingly clear formulation of the sociological and economic problems motivating the Institute’s research at the time. The language used in the memo indicates that it dates to the period when Horkheimer and Adorno still believed that a treatment of racket theory could fit into the ‘dialectics book.’ The “Notes for the Programme of the Book,” dated August 20th, 1942, were accompanied by thirty sheets of “excerpts from texts on the history of rackets” (seemingly compiled by Adorno) from September 15th, 1942.48 These excerpts were mostly from works from or about Ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy that dealt with topics relevant to the themes of the racket theory project (political power, state violence, etc).

Both of these internal documents show the Institute’s continued interest in synthetic interdisciplinary social research that would incorporate history, philosophy, economics, sociology, and psychoanalysis. It also indirectly shows the difficulties of such a project. The ambitious outline found in “Notes for the Programme of the Book” recalls the similarly ambitious 1934 plans for Studien über Autorität und Familie, plans which the Institute was still incapable of fulfilling then despite having more financial resources at their disposal as well as actual stable working relationships between all the major contributors.49


Read the Fragments and Texts on Racket Theory

Read “On the Sociology of Class Relations”


Notes


  1. See James Crane, “Translator’s note: Reconstructing the Formation of the Encore.” in Substudies (blog), 4/18/2025 ↩

  2. MHA Na 1 639, [39]-[218]. ↩

  3. Max Horkheimer, “Authority and the Family” [1936] in Critical Theory: Selected Essays (Continuum, 2002), 68-69. ↩

  4. For more on Erich Fromm’s importance for the Freudo-Marxist ‘analytic social psychology’ of the early Frankfurt School, see J. E. Morain, “Analytic Social Psychology as Critical Social Theory” in Margin Notes, Vol. 1 (2024) [Link] and J. E. Morain, “Escape Velocities” in Parapraxis, Issue 05. (2025) [link] ↩

  5. For more on Horkheimer and Adorno’s criticisms of Pollock’s state capitalism thesis, see James Schmidt, “‘Racket,’ ‘Monopoly,’ and the Dialectic of Enlightenment” in Persistent Enlightenment (blog), 1/12/2016 and James Crane, “On Reading Critical Theory I: Perspectival Distortions” in Substudies (blog), 5/9/2025 ↩

  6. Typescript “Racket -Theorie’. Auszug aus ‘Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung,” MHA Na 1 638, [337]–[351]. ↩

  7. Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason” in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Vol. IX, No. 3 (1942), 366-388; 374. ↩

  8. Horkheimer, “The End of Reason,” 375. ↩

  9. Thus Horkheimer: “The same sociological mechanisms apply to the monopoly and to the city racket.” Ibid. ↩

  10. Max Horkheimer to Felix Weil, 10 March 1942, in Max Horkheimer, A Life in Letters: Selected Correspondence, eds. and trs. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 202-206. ↩

  11. Theodor W. Adorno to Max Horkheimer, 15 September 1942, in Theodor W. Adorno und Max Horkheimer Briefwechsel 1927-1969, Band II: 1938-1944, eds. Christoph Gödde and Henri Loritz (Suhrkamp, 2004), 288. ↩

  12. Max Horkheimer to Theodor W. Adorno, 17 September 1942, in Adorno Horkheimer Briefwechsel, Bd. II, 295. ↩

  13. Theodor W. Adorno to Max Horkheimer, 15 September 1942, in Adorno Horkheimer Briefwechsel 1927-1969, Band II, 288. ↩

  14. Max Horkheimer to Leo Löwenthal, 14 October 1942, in Max Horkheimer Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 17, eds. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and Alfred Schmidt (Suhrkamp, 1996), 340-342. ↩

  15. Herbert Marcuse to Max Horkheimer, 14 September 1942, Na 1 Nachlass Max Horkheimer, 565, [79] 68r; Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, tr. Michael Robertson (MIT Press, 1995), 299. ↩

  16. Max Horkheimer to Herbert Marcuse, 17 September 1942, MHA Na 1, 565, [78] 67r. ↩

  17. Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School In Exile (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 43. Cf. James Schmidt, “The ‘Eclipse of Reason’ and the End of the Frankfurt School in America” in New German Critique, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Winter, 2007), 53. ↩

  18. Schmidt, op. cit., 82-87. ↩

  19. Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 255-256. ↩

  20. For more on the quota system, see Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile, 89. ↩

  21. Wheatland, op. cit., 87-91. ↩

  22. See Franz Neumann et al., Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort, ed. Raffaele Laudani (Princeton University Press, 2013). ↩

  23. See Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 273, 293. ↩

  24. Max Horkheimer to Otto Kirchheimer, 2 August 1943. MHA Na 1 532, [39] 316rf. ↩

  25. Typescript, “Konzepte als Zugabe zur Festschrift für Friedrich Pollock,” MHA Na 1, 803, [327]. ↩

  26. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002), 254. ↩

  27. For more on the composition of Eclipse and the incorporation of “The Sociology of Class Relations,” see James Crane, “Collection: Society and Reason (1943-1947). Transcriptions and translations of previously unpublished materials from and around Horkheimer’s Eclipse (1947)” in Substudies (blog), 4/28/2025. ↩

  28. See Leo Löwenthal to Theodor W. Adorno, 25 May 1945, in Theodor W. Adorno und Max Horkheimer. Briefwechsel 1927-1969. Band III: 1945-1949, Eds. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Suhrkamp, 2005), 415-418. ↩

  29. See Max Horkheimer to Leo Löwenthal, 25 January 1946: “‘The Sociology of Class Relations’ will anyway not be published in the near future, and it would not be much fun since parts of it have now been taken out for the book.” MHA Na 1 546, [145]. ↩

  30. See Max Horkheimer to Herbert Marcuse, 28 February 1948 in MHGS, Bd. 17, , 931-934 and Max Horkheimer to Leo Löwenthal, 30 August 1948 in ibid., 1025. ↩

  31. For a criticism of some of the most authoritative versions of this interpretive convention (e.g., Rolf Wiggershaus, Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Willem van Reijen and Jan Bransen), see James Schmidt, “‘Racket,’ ‘Monopoly,’ and the Dialectic of Enlightenment” on Persistent Enlightenment (blog), 12 January 2016. ↩

  32. For more on the paradoxical position of the racket in the longue durée of class society and modern monopoly capitalism, see Re Tejus, “Class and Rackets, Part I - Conditions” in Critical Theory Working Group Blog (blog), 2 June 2025. ↩

  33. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno to Max Horkheimer, 2 July 1949, in Adorno Horkheimer Briefwechsel, Band III, 282-283. ↩

  34. Theodor W. Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory,” in Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford University Press, 2003), 93-94. ↩

  35. Cf. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), tr. Martin Nicolaus (Penguin Books, 1993), 105. ↩

  36. Max Horkheimer to Felix Weil, 1/13/1943, in MHGS Bd. 17 (1996), 397. English in original. ↩

  37. Evgeny Bronislavovich Pashukanis, The General Theory of Law and Marxism. Translated by Barbara Einhorn (Transaction Publishers, 2003), 41-42. A special thanks to John Clegg for pointing out the strong affinities between Horkheimer’s approach in “Theory of the Criminal” and Pashukanis. ↩

  38. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, transl. E. Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 2002), 89. ↩

  39. Max Horkheimer to Adolph Lowe, 17 February 1943, in MHGS, Bd. 17, 431. English in original. ↩

  40. Max Horkheimer to Friedrich Pollock, 10 February 1943, in MHGS, Bd. 17, 423-424. English in original. ↩

  41. Max Horkheimer to Paul Tillich, August 12 1942, in MHGS, Bd. 17, 313-327. ↩

  42. E.g., Gunzelin Schmid Noerr’s “Editor’s Afterword,” to the English translation of the critical edition of Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Tr. by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 2002 [1987]), 235-235. In a footnote, Noerr writes that “Zur Ideologie der Politik heute (Fragment),” […] reads like a critique of a positivistically abbreviated reading of Pollock’s theory of state capitalism.” Ibid., 280 (fn 71). According to Noerr, this ‘positivistic’ approach to the theory of state capitalism would entail “the positivist substitution of historical, political, or psychological laws for economic ones.” Ibid., 234. However, Horkheimer accuses Pollock of making exactly this kind of substitution—and specifically of psychologism—in a letter to Franz Neumann dated August 2 1941. MHGS, Bd. 17, 117-118. ↩

  43. Max Horkheimer, “Die Rackets und der Geist” in MHGS, Bd. 12, 290 ↩

  44. Max Horkheimer, “Zur Rechtsphilosophie” in MHGS, Bd. 12, 262. ↩

  45. Ibid. ↩

  46. Ibid. ↩

  47. Max Horkheimer, “Theorie des Verbrechers” in MHGS, Bd. 12, 269. ↩

  48. Typescript, “Exzerpte aus Schriften zur Geschichte der Rackets (von Theodor W. Adorno)” MHA Na 1, 805, 182ff ↩

  49. See J. E. Morain, “The Origins of Studien über Autorität und Familie” in Critical Theory Working Group Blog (blog), 4/27/2024. ↩