Overview
Gesammelte Schriften is a multi-volume German edition of Max Horkheimer’s writings, edited by Alfred Schmidt and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. It is not a single continuous monograph or a narrative book. Rather, it is a collected-works edition that assembles Horkheimer’s published essays, philosophical writings, lecture courses, unpublished manuscripts, notes, and correspondence, together with editorial apparatus. Its materials span the period from 1914 to 1973.
Because the work is organized as a scholarly edition, its “contents” are best understood through the individual volumes and volume groups. The edition includes Horkheimer’s early literary and philosophical work, his essays and interventions from the 1930s and 1940s, the text of Dialektik der Aufklärung (co-authored with Theodor W. Adorno), later writings on instrumental reason, postwar lectures and notes, posthumous writings from several periods, extensive correspondence, and a final volume of supplements, indexes, and bibliographic material.
Contents by Volume
The first volume contains Aus der Pubertät: Novellen und Tagebuchblätter from 1914–1918, an early collection of novellas and diary pieces. Volume 2 gathers Philosophische Frühschriften from 1922–1932, the philosophical writings of Horkheimer’s early academic period.
Volumes 3 and 4 collect his writings from 1931–1936 and 1936–1941 respectively. These volumes belong to the period of Horkheimer’s mature critical-theoretical essays and related texts. Volume 5 contains Dialektik der Aufklärung together with writings from 1940–1950; this is the volume in which the famous co-authored work appears within the edition. Volume 6 presents Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft together with Notizen 1949–1969.
Volumes 7–8 collect Vorträge und Aufzeichnungen 1949–1973: lectures and recorded notes from Horkheimer’s later philosophical activity. Volumes 9–11 contain Nachgelassene Schriften 1914–1931—posthumous writings from the early period—including lecture courses on the history of modern philosophy and on the history of German idealist philosophy, as well as an introduction to contemporary philosophy. Volume 12 gathers Nachgelassene Schriften 1931–1949, and Volumes 13–14 gather Nachgelassene Schriften 1949–1972.
Volumes 15–18 consist of Briefwechsel, the correspondence, arranged in four chronological groups: 1913–1936, 1937–1940, 1941–1948, and 1949–1973. These volumes make available letters that document Horkheimer’s intellectual and institutional relationships across the decades covered by the edition. Volume 19, Nachträge, Verzeichnisse und Register, provides supplements, lists, bibliography, and indexes; contributions to this volume include work by Jan Baars and others.
Character of the Edition
Gesammelte Schriften is therefore an archive-like edition rather than a work with a single argument, plot, or cast of characters. Its unity lies in its presentation of Horkheimer’s intellectual output across genres: literary juvenilia, academic philosophy, critical-theoretical essays, co-authored work, lecture courses, notes, posthumous manuscripts, and letters. The edition’s chronological and generic arrangement allows readers to trace the development of Horkheimer’s writing from his early literary experiments and philosophical formation through his central contributions to critical theory and his later postwar reflections. The final volume supplies the editorial and bibliographic apparatus that makes the collection usable as a scholarly whole.
The edition’s thematic centre is the elaboration of critical theory as a form of negative critique rather than a closed philosophical system. Across essays, lectures, notes, and posthumous manuscripts, Horkheimer returns to the entanglement of enlightenment with domination, the reduction of reason to instrumental calculation, and the resulting problems of authority, mass society, and diminished individual autonomy. The collection also preserves his engagement with philosophical traditions—materialism, metaphysics, idealism, and religious thought—not as antiquarian exposition but as a way of diagnosing the present. The co-presence of Dialektik der Aufklärung with adjacent writings makes visible how its motifs belong to a broader field of Horkheimer’s concerns: the critique of positivism and traditional theory, the analysis of social domination, and the search for a critical stance that refuses both resignation and dogmatic utopia. The later lectures and notes show these concerns in a more pedagogical and aphoristic register, while the posthumous manuscripts and correspondence document the working-through of concepts across drafts, teaching, and intellectual exchange. The edition’s significance is thus twofold: it provides a textual foundation for reading Horkheimer as a philosopher of critique rather than a system-builder, and it makes available the generic range—essay, lecture, note, letter—through which that critique was formulated, revised, and transmitted.
