test

For Horkheimer too, though, the point which was ultimately decisive was his indignation about the fact that, in bourgeois-capitalist society, rational action which was responsible towards the general public and whose consequences for the public could also be calculated beforehand was not possible, and that even particularly privileged individuals and society as a whole were alienated from one another.

Only Horkheimer's thinking drew its main force from indignation at the injustices being perpetrated on those who were exploited and humiliated.

tried to show that under capitalism all paths were blocked, that one came up everywhere against an invisible barrier, and that humanity could thus not achieve authentic existence

The Critical Theorists themselves had their origins neither in Marxism nor in the labour movement. In a way, they were repeating the experiences of the young Marx. For Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, the discovery of the young Marx decisively confirmed the correctness of their own efforts. The publication of Heidegger's Being and Time12 had prompted Marcuse to join Heidegger in Freiburg, because it seemed to him that the question of authentic human existence was being dealt with there concretely. It was when he read the `1844 Manuscripts'13 of the young Marx, however, that Marx became truly significant to Marcuse for the first time, even more significant than Heidegger or Dilthey.

He [the Jew] . . . accepts the society around him, he joins the game and he conforms to all the ceremonies, dancing with the others the dance of respectability. Besides, he is nobody's slave; he is a free citizen under a regime that allows free competition; he is forbidden no social dignity, no office of the state. He may be decorated with the ribbon of the Legion of Honor, he may become a great lawyer or a cabinet minister. But at the very moment when he reaches the summits of legal society, another societyamorphous, diffused, and omnipresentappears before him as if in brief flashes of lightning and refuses to take him in. How sharply he must feel the vanity of honors and of fortune, when the greatest success will never gain him entrance into that society which considers itself the `real' one. As a cabinet minister, he will be a Jewish cabinet minister, at once an `Excellency' and an untouchable.

sort of rational appeal hearing against rationality'