Racketology

Cover

Preface

This collection of texts was written, translated, and assembled from Spring to Winter 2025. The first section of the dossier consists of texts written by Max Horkheimer (or at any rate found in his papers) and introductions to these texts. All of them were written between 1941 and 1946 in connection with a project—racket theory—undertaken by the Institute for Social Research, the history of which is detailed in Introducing Racket Theory. On the Sociology of Class Relations and Fragments and Texts on Racket Theory were immediately connected to this project, while Two Unpublished Fragments by Horkheimer and Adorno is a sort of post-script to it.

The second section consists of ‘elaborations’ on the themes, concepts, and arguments broached by the Frankfurt School in their racket theory project. Variations consists of short fragment-essays about a broad range of topics that were collectively written. Drafted with the intent to put racket theory to the test, it is in many ways the most synthetic and original part of this collection. Class and Rackets (Part 1; Conditions and Part 2; Domination) focuses on the question of class in a reconstruction of racket theory drawing from Horkheimer’s pre-racket writings in the 1930s, Adorno and Horkheimer’s fragments on rackets, and Otto Kirchheimer’s works on political organisations. From Racket Theory to Real Domination compares racket theory to the work of Jacques Camatte, critiquing the latter in the process. The Economic Limits of Racketology and Racketology and the Development of Competition are a pair of essays by Mac Parker and Jack Barrett on the relevance of racket theory to economics, specifically the theory of competition: Mac’s relatively negative evaluation is complemented by Jack’s relatively positive one. Horkheimer and Korsch: Collectivisation during the Spanish (Civil) War or The Spirit of the Anti-Racket tackles one aspect of racket theory that was mostly passed over in the other chapters: the possibility of what Horkheimer called “anti-racket forms,” which were implicitly described in Karl Korsch’s analysis of collectivisation during the Spanish Civil War.