I've ordered a number of books by the authors you've mentioned and will read them as time permits once they arrive. Thank you again for the recommendations!

In the meantime, I can answer your request for particular issues with a text. Sorry for the length--but it's rather hard to describe issues with a text as a whole without writing a great deal, as any individual flaw is forgivable.

I just found an online copy of Horkheimer's "Traditional and Critical Theory" (https://criticaltheoryworkshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/horkheimer_traditional-and-critical-theory.pdf) and read it. I'm not exactly sure of the date on which it was written, but the latest citation I found was 1949, which would suggest it was somewhere around 1950.

I found it, while somewhat better than the things I remember, still a descent into fallacious reasoning and wishful thinking, despite starting out very well-argued.

In his defense, I do realize that Horkheimer was probably arguing against the instrumentalist excesses of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; so he can be somewhat forgiven. And he probably didn't write this to satisfy me, a skeptical 21st century reader, so he can be forgiven somewhat more. Only somewhat, though. Good reasoning hasn't changed!

In the initial sections, Horkheimer demonstrates that he can do the analytic thing: reasonably clearly describing assumptions, alternative hypotheses, and providing reasoning for one hypothesis in contrast to the others. He doesn't go into any particularly great detail (mostly describing results rather than arguing strongly for them), and the evidence is sometimes sketchy (e.g. the reference to Copernican theory), but it looks like a decent attempt at analysis and argumentation.

The first significant blunder (there are some minor, forgivable ones earlier) is on page 199, where he describes the specialization of research projects and concludes that, because each person typically works within their specialty, you cannot develop further without "radical reconsideration, not of the scientist alone, but of the knowing individual as such". Well, hello! What about interdisciplinary research? There were ample examples already at that time--for instance, the burgeoning field of biochemistry linked the assumptions used in biology to the methodological details discovered in chemistry and produced a revolution, all entirely from within the fields of sciences. Thus, this justification falls totally flat, taking the form of an excluded-middle fallacy: it is not true that there can be only either complete specialization, or a radical reconsideration from "knowing individuals".

Then, on page 200, he asserts that "even the way [men] see and hear is inseparable from the social life-process as it has evolved over the millenia" which, if taken in a strong sense, at once renders inexplicable the massive scientific progress that he was just talking about earlier; and if taken in a weak sense is still false because we know quite well (and knew then) what modes of perception and thought we need to take exactly to separate our perceptions from social constraints: this is a large part of the role of the epistemology of science, and is explored in depth by the philosophy of science (notably including Popper).

Another serious false dichotomy appears on page 207, among other places; it is useful for illustrative purposes, but the realization that this is a (false) dichotomy rather undermines the value of critical theory as stated. Namely: "The individual as a rule must simply accept the basic conditions of his existence as given and strive to fulfill them [...but in contrast...] the critical attitude of which we are speaking is wholly distrustful of the rules of conduct with which society as presently constituted provides each of its members." And yet, how does this distinguish critical theory from any philosophy? And if it does, given the acknowledged lack of understanding of how human societies work, how does it avoid getting utterly lost in fantasy without retaining a firm foothold in existing rules of conduct? Within the (apparently) excluded middles may lie a productive path forward--or if they are not excluded, this is a vapid statement that simply advocates for the value of philosophy of society and sociology.

This is about where it goes off the deep end.

The consequences of inseparability and distrust (and the unintended machinations of society) are profound (p. 208): "Previous history cannot thus really be understood; only the individuals and specific groups in it are intelligible, and even these not toally, since their internal dependence on an inhuman society means that even in their conscious action such individuals and groups are still in good measure mechanical functions." This either states the obvious, or doesn't make sense (except in light of the previous errors). To the extent that it states the obvious: yes, we can never have complete understanding of history. To the extent that it doesn't: the difficulty does not preclude us from trying and sometimes succeeding at understanding key aspects of history (and anyway, there's no reason to think that the "inhuman" aspect of it would make it any harder to understand--the economics of capitalism yield a simplification not a mystifying of the full complexity of human behavior). However, I think the reasoning is correct--this would be the conclusion if you assumed the previous arguments were valid. Unfortunately, this argument renders us unnecessarily unable to learn from history.

And he describes a wholly unnecessary tension: "[Critical] thinkers interpret the economic categories of work, value, and productivity exactly as they are interpreted in the existing order...but at the same time they consider it rank dishonesty simply to accept the interpretation; the critical acceptance of the categories which rule social life contains simultaneously their condemnation." There is no reason to exclude the idea that the standard interpretations are actually wrong. Indeed, much productive insight has come from exactly that kind of effort (e.g. Marx's incorrect ideas about the source of value), exactly on topic for what Critical Theory is supposed to care about--no reason is given to reject this kind of incrementalism aside from a lot of character attacks on "blind interaction of individual activities".

The key advance of the sciences in using reductionism where possible to reduce complexity and allow problems to stay tractable, and in keeping personal motives away from scholarly inquiry, is re-framed as tension between personal and professional activities, which can be resolved by Critical Theory (p. 210): "Critical thinking, on the contrary, is motivated today by the effort really to transcend the tension and abolish the opposition between the individual's purposefulness, spontaneity, and rationality, and those work-process relationships on which society is built." But this discards, without argument, the purpose of the divisions in the first place.

There are echos of emotive impulse in place of reasoning (p. 210): "[to surrender to an extrinsic description of human nature] is a sign of contemptible weakness." That's not even an argument. If you're going to not even make an argument, you'd better at least write as evocatively as Nietzsche.

Horkheimer gives an account for why perhaps thought might fail to provide productive direction, but utterly misses the point which is that since we don't have an adequate theory of human society and behavior we must remain tightly empirically coupled (as anyone could tell, even then, by observing progress in, say biology as opposed to physics). Instead, he offers (p. 212): "In society as it is, the power of thought has never controlled itself but has always functioned as a nonindependent moment in the work process." This doesn't even address the actual point--it's not that theories are impotent to drive behavior, but rather that they become unhinged if divorced from empirical grounding.

And it then wanders off into musings about the proletariat and the bourgeois, pretty much abandoning any pretext of careful argumentation, and almost completely at odds with history past that point, wherein intellectuals have continued to challenge all aspects of society without adopting the methods described by Horkheimer, wherein the proletariat has not shown substantial creative strength as most developments came from elsewhere (unsurprisingly--the working classes are busy working and tending to immediate concerns), not anticipating the explosion in the United States of the middle class (neither proletariat nor bourgeois) with their own concerns; and failing to predict that the bourgeois order of free exchange and free competition has been shown to produce, when lightly tempered by social concerns mostly not derived of Critical Theory, the most satisfied societies on earth.

It's very weary going after that. Not entirely complete rubbish, but more dialog that derivation, more idealizing than (ironically) critical analysis of current (1950s) events and likely future outcomes.

If Horkheimer had not regarded the effort with such grave pompousness, but playfully--hey! Here's an idea! Let's give it a go and see what happens! Here are some ideas for why it seems promising!--then I would find the whole effort rather charming, and maybe worth a try. It's not that the approach doesn't have some potential, despite the obvious enormous drawbacks (less obvious then, but still obvious) with the potential reliability of the approach. But the air of superiority, without careful delineation of alternatives, makes the whole thing seem even more doubtful to me, because when trying a fraught approach, what one most needs is humility and awareness so that one can catch one's mistakes. This is especially true given that the framework rather explicitly rejects many of the normal methods to catch one's mistakes (for example, specialization, and separation of the personal and research).

Indeed, Horkheimer pretty much refutes in advance any attempt at falsification (p. 242): "There are no general criteria for judging the critical theory as a whole, for it is always based on the recurrence of events and thus on a self-reproducing totality." Great! Everything has n=1 and is unique.

So, anyway, Horkheimer is considerably better than whatever else I read. And it is clear--wonderfully clear; Horkheimer almost never leaves the reader wondering what he's meant due to excessive use of jargon or inordinately complex sentence structure.

Maybe in ca 1950 this was worth thinking about; I don't sufficiently understand thought at that time to know. (Not because it can't be understood, blah blah; I just haven't immersed myself in the historical literature and study of history deeply enough.)

But now, in 2021, I'm not impressed.