Conclusion

This chapter reviews Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse's articulation of the initial versions of their neo-Marxist critical theories from 1927 to 1933. It talks about critical theorists who saw neo-Kantian trust in bourgeois culture and science as a product of the bygone pre-1914 era. It also details how Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse rejected idealist narratives of history, hypostatization of instrumental labor, and economic and contemplative explanations of human motivation. The chapter demonstrates how Marxism does not entail a view of history as a preordained success story or an image of the human being as animal laborans or homo economicus. It provides a historical reconstruction of Heidegger's role in Marcuse's concrete philosophy, Adorno's natural history, and Horkheimer's materialism as critical rejoinders to Heidegger's Being and Time.