Horkheimer addressed authoritarianism, militarism, economic disruption, environmental crisis, and the poverty of mass culture using the philosophy of history as a framework.

His most important works include Eclipse of Reason (1947), Between Philosophy and Social Science (1930–1938) and, in collaboration with Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947).

In the same year, when the Institute for Social Research's (now known as Frankfurt School of Critical Theory) directorship became vacant, after the departure of Carl Grünberg, Horkheimer was elected to the position "by means of an endowment from a wealthy businessman".

The Frankfurt School attempted this by systematically hitching together the different conceptual structures of historical materialism and psychoanalysis.

In the midst of the violence surrounding the Nazis' rise, Horkheimer and his associates began to prepare for the possibility of moving the Institute out of Germany.

Horkheimer's venia legendi was revoked by the new Nazi government because of the Marxian nature of the institute's ideas as well as its prominent Jewish association.

He emigrated to Geneva, Switzerland, and then to New York City the following year, where Horkheimer met with the president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, to discuss hosting the institute.

[2] In 1940, Horkheimer received American citizenship and moved to the Pacific Palisades district of Los Angeles, California, where his collaboration with Adorno would yield the Dialectic of Enlightenment.

In the late 1960s, Horkheimer supported Pope Paul VI's stand against artificial contraception, specifically the pill, arguing that it would lead to the end of romantic love.

Max Horkheimer with the help of Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Leo Lowenthal, Otto Kirchheimer, Frederick Pollock and Franz Neumann developed "Critical Theory".

[16] Horkheimer's work is marked by a concern to show the relation between affect (especially suffering) and concepts (understood as action-guiding expressions of reason).

He did not think that either was wrong, but he insisted that the insights of each school on its own could not adequately contribute to the repair of social problems.

Horkheimer focused on the connections between social structures, networks/subcultures and individual realities and concluded that we are affected and shaped by the proliferation of products on the marketplace.

It is also important to note that Horkheimer collaborated with Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin.

[17] He was convinced of the need to "examine the entire material and spiritual culture of mankind"[3] in order to transform society as a whole.

It included: "Materialism and Morality", "The Present Situation of Moral Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research", "On the Problem of Truth", "Egoism and the Freedom Movement", "History and Psychology", "A New Concept of Ideology", "Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology", and "The Rationalism Debate in Contemporary Philosophy".

Horkheimer's book, Eclipse of Reason, started in 1941 and published in 1947, is broken into five sections: Means and Ends, Conflicting Panaceas, The Revolt of Nature, The Rise and Decline of the Individual, and On the Concept of Philosophy.

Nonetheless, Horkheimer and Adorno believed that art was an exception, because it "is an open-ended system with no fixed rules"; thus, it could not be an object of the industry.

Rolf Wiggershaus, author of The Frankfurt School believed Horkheimer lacked the audacious theoretical construction produced by those like Marx and Lukács and that his main argument was that those living in misery had the right to material egoism.

In his book, "Social Theory", Alex Callinicos claims that Dialectic of Enlightenment offers no systematic account of conception of rationality, but rather professes objective reason intransigently to an extent.

[7] Charles Lemert discusses in his book Social Theory that in writing Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno lack sufficient sympathy for the cultural plight of the average working person, unfair to criticize the tastes of ordinary people, and that popular culture does not really buttress social conformity and stabilize capitalism as much as the Frankfurt school thinks.

[25] Ingar Solty, in a February 2020 Jacobin magazine article, notes that the work of Horkheimer, Adorno, and the Frankfurt School as a whole is marked by "the vast historical defeats suffered by the interwar socialist movement."

He notes, "Horkheimer and Adorno thus became increasingly pessimistic with regards to the working class's ability to overthrow capitalism ... Horkheimer did not conduct empirical research on capitalism and its crises ... the hierarchical nature of the international division of labor, the organization of internationalizing capitalism in a system of nation-states, the origins of imperialism and inter-imperial rivalries, or such ... For Horkheimer, the working class had been a revolutionary subject only in the abstract ... [it] was essentially an empty placeholder for the subject which would overthrow an economic and social system which they considered wrong.

Solty contextualizes Horkheimer's (and, by implication, the Frankfurt School's) "return from 'revolutionary optimism' to 'revolutionary pessimism'" by noting, "[m]any postwar radical leftists and anti-capitalists, especially those not organized in real workers' parties, were disappointed revolutionaries.

After the short-lived socialist revival, the Cold War and the internationalization of the New Deal as the Keynesian welfare state seemed to have completely absorbed what was left of revolutionary working-class spirit.

Solty identifies Horkheimer's (and, implicitly, the Frankfurt School's) work as an important influence on that of Michel Foucault:[28]Ultimately, both Horkheimer and Foucault only considered the defense of remaining elements of freedom and the identification of "micro-powers" of domination a possibility, but changes in the macro-power structures were out of reach.

In other words, a Left was born that was no longer oriented toward "counter-hegemony" (as per Antonio Gramsci), as a way of building toward power, but rather "anti-hegemony" (Horkheimer, Foucault, etc.