Gesammelte Schriften VIII: Vorträge und Aufzeichnungen 1949–1973. 4. Soziologisches; 5. Universität und Studium
This volume of Max Horkheimer’s collected writings is a German-language documentary collection rather than a single continuous book. Its full title places it within Horkheimer’s post-war lectures and notes from 1949 to 1973 and identifies two numbered complexes: “4. Soziologisches” and “5. Universität und Studium.” The numbering indicates that these are parts of a larger sequence of post-war texts, not free-standing treatises. The volume gathers lectures, shorter addresses, and written notes from Horkheimer’s years in Frankfurt after his return from emigration, and it is concerned with the tasks of sociology and of the university in post-war German society.
Soziologisches
The first major section collects Horkheimer’s sociological texts from this period. These pieces concern the character and self-understanding of sociology as an academic discipline, its relation to philosophy and to empirical social research, and the role of critical social theory in the reconstruction of post-war society. They belong to Horkheimer’s continuing work at the Institute for Social Research and to his participation in sociological debate in West Germany. The texts do not present a systematic handbook of sociology; they are interventions, lectures, and notes in which Horkheimer insists that social inquiry remain connected to the analysis of society as a whole and to the fate of critical, independent thought. The section documents his resistance to a narrow, merely technical or value-neutral conception of social science and his concern that sociology preserve the memory of historical experience after the collapse of Nazism.
Universität und Studium
The second major section turns to the university and to study. Its texts address the place of the university in democratic reconstruction, the relation between teaching and research, the education of students, and the public responsibility of academic institutions. Horkheimer writes from within the university, but not as a neutral administrator: the texts reflect his concern that higher education not be reduced to vocational training or to the production of technically useful functionaries. Instead, the university is treated as a place where the capacity for critical reflection must be preserved and transmitted. The section thus belongs to Horkheimer’s broader post-war effort to contribute to the rebuilding of democratic intellectual life in Germany and to defend the dignity of independent thinking in social practice.
Across both sections, the volume records Horkheimer’s attempt, after the end of the Nazi regime, to counter the scientific and political repression of historical experience and to carry the forces of critical thought into the present and future. Together with the texts gathered in the preceding volume, these lectures and notes show Horkheimer as a public academic and sociological thinker rather than as the author of a closed philosophical system. The volume’s interest lies in the range of its post-war interventions: its recurring concern with sociology as a critical discipline, with the university as an institution of reflection, and with the conditions under which independent thought can survive in a reconstructed democracy.
Underlying both sections is a distinction between sociology as a specialized science and social theory as reflection on the whole. Horkheimer does not collapse the one into the other; the texts ask how empirical specialization can proceed without forfeiting the question of the historical totality in which it operates. The same double demand governs the university section: professional knowledge is necessary, but it becomes a form of closure when it presents itself as neutral expertise. The volume’s significance lies in its refusal to resolve this tension programmatically—critical thought has to work through disciplines, institutions, and routines while resisting their tendency to become ends in themselves. Read as a whole, the texts show Horkheimer treating sociology and the university as unstable mediations of theory and practice, not as secure foundations for either.
