This book offers an introduction to, and a new interpretation of, the thought of Max Horkheimer, a leading figure of the Frankfurt School. During the 1920s, Horkheimer formulated a history of bourgeois society which was to dominate his subsequent concerns and is essential to an understanding of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Underlying this history is a concern about the authoritarian trends which accompanied the economic and political crises of the inter-war period. Peter Stirk's new study illustrates how Horkheimer rejected most contemporary philosophies either implicated in, or impotent in the face of, these authoritarian trends. The result was his alternative approach to understanding the nature of the crisis - the interdisciplinary research programme of the Frankfurt School - as well as a vision of a future society rooted in the contemporary debates about planning and in a broader philosophy which drew upon Kant, Hegel and Marx. The book looks in detail at Horkeimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-written with T.W. Adorno, in which he revised and radicalised his history of bourgeois society, and also examines his later work on the subjects of the political mechanisms of contemporary society and a fragmentary philosophy of pity.