What is theory for? In 1937, writing from exile in New York, Max Horkheimer posed this question to a world that thought it already knew the answer. Theory, according to the philosophical tradition running from Descartes through the logical positivists, is a system for organizing knowledge — what Horkheimer, borrowing from the mathematician Henri Poincaré, compares to a library: a storehouse of propositions, catalogued for retrieval, available for application. The theorist is the librarian. The facts are the books. The method is the catalogue. This picture of theory — neutral, systematic, self-enclosed — is what Horkheimer calls "traditional theory," and his essay sets out to show that it rests on a concealment. What traditional theory conceals, I will argue, is the role of concern — care for reasonable conditions of life — as the epistemological ground without which critical knowledge is impossible. Horkheimer's essay demonstrates that the Western philosophical tradition systematically separated care from knowing, that this separation is not a methodological achievement but an ideological act, and that the reunification of care and knowing is the central task of critical theory. The key to seeing this argument is the word Horkheimer uses for what the separation separates the theorist from: the matrix — a word whose Latin root, mater, means mother.
I. The Separation: Detachment from the Matrix
Horkheimer's critique of traditional theory begins not with an attack on its conclusions but with an examination of its form. Traditional theory, he argues, operates within an "enclosed system of propositions" in which the scientist works "alongside all the other activities of a society but in no immediately clear connection with them" (p. 197). The enclosure is not accidental. It is the form that theory takes when it has been detached from what Horkheimer calls its "matrix in the total activity of society" (p. 197). The word is precise. A matrix is not a context — something external you could add back. A matrix is a womb: the thing that holds the organism before it can hold itself, the condition of possibility for the organism's existence. When Horkheimer says that specialized work must not be "detached from its matrix," he is saying that theory was born from the social totality the way an infant is born from a mother. The traditional theorist who declares their work autonomous is, in this metaphor, a child who has forgotten they were carried.
The detachment produces a specific kind of knowing subject. Traditional theory, Horkheimer writes, treats the knowing individual as a "mathematical point" — dimensionless, locationless, without history or body (p. 210). This is the Cartesian cogito taken to its logical conclusion: a subject defined entirely by the act of thinking, stripped of all relations. The mathematical point has no mother. It has no community, no class position, no material conditions. It simply thinks, and its thinking is supposed to be valid precisely because it comes from nowhere. Horkheimer calls this "ideology in the strict sense, for in it the limited freedom of the bourgeois individual puts on the illusory form of perfect freedom and autonomy" (p. 210). The limited freedom is real — the bourgeois individual really can think, really can inquire, really does have a kind of autonomy. But the limited is presented as the absolute. The child who can walk is presented as having created the ground.
The separation expresses itself practically in what Horkheimer describes as the split between the scientist "as" scientist and the citizen "as" citizen. The scholarly specialist, he writes, "'as' scientist regards social reality and its products as extrinsic to him, and 'as' citizen exercises his interest in them through political articles, membership in political parties or social service organizations, and participation in elections. But he does not unify these two activities" (p. 209). The scare quotes on "as" are Horkheimer's way of marking the division as produced, not natural. The same person is divided into two roles that never meet. Knowledge lives in one room; care lives in another. The theory knows but does not care. The citizen cares but does not know. The unification of the two — a knowledge that cares, a care that knows — is precisely what the traditional framework makes impossible.
What is lost in this separation? Horkheimer's answer is that the enclosure externalizes three things: "the genesis of particular objective facts, the practical application of the conceptual systems by which it grasps the facts, and the role of such systems in action" (p. 208). Origin, destination, and consequence — everything that connects the theory to the world that produced it and the world it affects — are declared external, "and this alienation, which finds expression in philosophical terminology as the separation of value and research, knowledge and action, and other polarities, protects the savant from the tensions we have indicated and provides an assured framework for his activity" (p. 208). The word Horkheimer uses here is "alienation," not "method." The separation of value from research is not a methodological distinction. It is alienation — the estrangement of the knower from the conditions and consequences of their knowing. The assured framework is a shelter built from forgetting. And what has been forgotten is the matrix: the social totality from which the work emerged and to which it returns whether it knows it or not.
II. The Concealment: How the Separation Hides Itself
The separation of care from knowing would be unstable if it appeared as what it is — an ideological act. Its power depends on appearing as something else: as modesty, as rigor, as the very nature of knowledge. Horkheimer's essay traces several mechanisms by which this concealment operates.
The first is common sense. The world appears to the individual "as a sum-total of facts; it is there and must be accepted" (p. 200). But the world was made. The cities, the fields, the institutions — all bear the marks of human activity. Why does the made appear as the given? Because "the world of objects to be judged is in large measure produced by an activity that is itself determined by the very ideas which help the individual to recognize that world and to grasp it conceptually" (p. 201). The key fits the lock because the same hand made both. The concepts we use to understand the world were produced by the same social process that produced the world. The fit between mind and reality, which traditional philosophy treats as a problem to be solved or a miracle to be explained, is actually a tautology: the instrument of perception was calibrated by the factory it is asked to inspect. Common sense — "for which there are no mysteries," as Horkheimer drily notes — is the deepest social product, the point at which the concealment is most complete (p. 201).
The second mechanism is what we might call faithful obscurity. Horkheimer's reading of Kant is central here. Kant, he argues, saw the problem: something pre-forms experience before the individual encounters it. He called this the transcendental subject — a supra-individual consciousness that shapes perception. His answer was structurally correct: there really is something prior to individual experience that organizes it. But "he does not see reality as product of a society's work" (p. 203). Kant reached for the social process and grabbed an abstraction. The result is the famous obscurity of the Transcendental Deduction, which Horkheimer diagnoses not as philosophical failure but as "depth and honesty": "the internal difficulties in the supreme concepts of Kantian philosophy... show the depth and honesty of his thinking" (p. 203). A clearer philosophy would have been a less faithful one, because the reality Kant was describing — social labor operating beneath individual consciousness — is itself obscure. The fog in the Critique of Pure Reason is the philosophy faithfully reproducing the opacity of a social process that no one planned. The concealment hides itself even from the philosopher who almost uncovered it, and the almost-uncovering produces fog rather than clarity because clarity would be a lie.
The third mechanism is the naturalization of the produced. Horkheimer writes that the whole social process, "with all its waste of work-power and human life, and with its wars and all its senseless wretchedness, seems to be an unchangeable force of nature, a fate beyond man's control" (p. 203). The word "seems" carries the entire critical project. The wretchedness is real. The wars are real. But their appearance as fate — as nature, as the way things inevitably are — is produced by the same social process that produces the wretchedness. Calling the social "natural" is not a description but a surrender, one that Horkheimer later in the essay calls "contemptible weakness" (p. 209) and judges "nonhuman and irrational" (p. 209) — nonhuman and irrational by the very standards the system claims for itself.
III. The Recovery: Concern as Epistemological Ground
If the separation of care from knowing is the foundational ideological act, then the recovery of their unity is the foundational critical act. Horkheimer's name for this recovery is "concern," and the essay's most radical claim is that concern is not a feeling that motivates inquiry from outside but an epistemological condition without which certain truths cannot be perceived at all.
The word first appears at the essay's turning point, where Horkheimer defines critical theory as "a theory dominated at every turn by a concern for reasonable conditions of life" (p. 199). The phrase is deceptively simple. After sixteen paragraphs of Descartes, Husserl, Weyl, Weber, Poincaré, and the Marburg Neo-Kantians — after the full machinery of the Western philosophical tradition has been displayed and diagnosed — the definition of the alternative is: concern. Not a new method. Not a rival system. A disposition. The grandest tradition arrives at the simplest possible question: are conditions reasonable? Are people okay?
But concern is not merely a motivation. It is, for Horkheimer, a perceptual condition. The essay's most important epistemological claim comes in his discussion of the goals immanent in human work: "The viewpoints which the latter derives from historical analysis as the goals of human activity, especially the idea of a reasonable organization of society that will meet the needs of the whole community, are immanent in human work but are not correctly grasped by individuals or by the common mind. A certain concern is also required if these tendencies are to be perceived and expressed" (p. 213). The tendencies toward a reasonable organization of society are already there, inside the labor, inside the social process. They are not invented by the theorist. But they are invisible without concern. The unconcerned observer — the traditional theorist in the enclosure, the mathematician of social facts — looks at the same reality and cannot see what is immanent in it. Concern is the lens that makes the immanent visible. Without it, you have data. With it, you have knowledge of what the data means. The crucial point is that the goals are not imported from outside — they are not the theorist's private wishes projected onto reality. They are inside the work itself, inside the social process, waiting to be perceived. But the perception requires something the traditional framework excludes by definition: care about the outcome. The unconcerned observer sees facts. The concerned observer sees facts and what they are becoming.
This is why Horkheimer insists that understanding critical theory's concepts "demands activity and effort, an exercise of will power, in the knowing subject" (p. 229). The concepts will not open for the detached mind. The disagreement between traditional and critical theory "is not simply one of misunderstanding but of a real opposition of outlooks" (p. 229). No amount of logical clarification resolves a conflict that is fundamentally about whether the knowing subject is inside or outside what they know. The traditional theorist, standing in the enclosure, cannot see the immanent tendencies because the enclosure was built to exclude them. The critical theorist, standing in the matrix — embedded in the social totality, connected to its tensions, caring about its outcomes — can see what the enclosure hides. The difference is not intelligence. It is concern.
The argument reaches its deepest expression in Horkheimer's insistence that the critical theorist is inside the object they study. "A consciously critical attitude," he writes, "is part of the development of society" (p. 228). The biologist can stand outside the plant. The physicist can stand outside the electron. But the social theorist cannot stand outside society, because society includes the theorist. "If we think of the object of the theory in separation from the theory, we falsify it and fall into quietism or conformism" (p. 229). The separation produces not just ignorance but falsehood — and not just falsehood but paralysis. Quietism (nothing can be done) and conformism (accept what is) are the twin products of the separation. They are what happens when care is removed from knowing: you either give up or go along. The matrix, once forgotten, cannot be remembered from inside the enclosure. You have to step back into the social totality — back into the relations, the tensions, the concern — to see what the theory describes. This is Horkheimer's most radical claim: the epistemic status of a theory is not independent of the knower's relationship to what they know. Knowledge and concern are structurally related, not accidentally. The theorist who cares sees more, not because caring distorts their vision in a favorable direction, but because the reality itself — a reality made by human hands — can only be fully grasped by someone who has not separated themselves from the making.
The essay's final paragraph completes the argument. After stripping away every external support — no profession (p. 216), no social sanction (p. 217), no material accomplishments (p. 218), no seal of victory (p. 239) — Horkheimer arrives at what remains: "the critical theory has no specific influence on its side, except concern for the abolition of social injustice. This negative formulation, if we wish to express it abstractly, is the materialist content of the idealist concept of reason" (p. 241). This sentence is the essay's deepest claim. The idealist concept of reason — the tradition from Descartes through Kant through Hegel, the aspiration toward rationality, the Logos, the transcendental subject, the Absolute Spirit — had a content it could not name. That content, expressed negatively (not "what the world should look like" but "this injustice must stop"), is concern for the abolition of social injustice. The tradition called it reason. It was always care. The matrix that the tradition detached itself from — the social totality, the womb of knowledge, the mater — was always the ground of the rationality the tradition claimed for itself. The philosophers forgot the mother and called the forgetting autonomy. Horkheimer remembers.
Conclusion
Horkheimer's "Traditional and Critical Theory" is not, in the end, an argument against traditional science. The essay validates traditional theory's tools, concedes its accomplishments, and insists that its methods "will not become irrelevant but on the contrary are to be developed as fully as possible" (p. 216). What the essay argues against is the absolutization of one form of knowing into the only form — the elevation of the enclosure into the nature of knowledge itself. The separation of care from knowing, which appears inside the enclosure as methodological rigor, is revealed by Horkheimer as alienation: the estrangement of the knower from the matrix that produced them. The concealment of this alienation — through common sense, through Kant's honest fog, through the naturalization of the produced — is what makes the separation appear permanent and necessary. And the recovery of concern as the epistemological ground of critical knowledge is not the introduction of emotion into science but the refusal to accept that knowledge and care were ever truly separate.
The essay's final sentence — "conformism in thought and the insistence that thinking is a fixed vocation, a self-enclosed realm within society as a whole, betrays the very essence of thought" (p. 243) — names the stakes. The word is "betrays," not "limits" or "constrains." The enclosure is not a modest limitation on thought's ambitions. It is a betrayal of thought's essence. And that essence, as the essay has shown across its ninety-two paragraphs, is concern: the knowledge that brings its own obligations with it, the knowing that cannot be separated from caring about what it knows. The materialist content of reason is the mother the tradition forgot. Horkheimer's essay is the act of remembering.
Works Cited
Horkheimer, Max. "Traditional and Critical Theory." In Critical Theory: Selected Essays, translated by Matthew J. O'Connell, 188-243. New York: Continuum, 1982.
