Racionalidad, autoridad, oligopolio y Estado: Pollock, Horkheimer y Neumann frente al Estado nacionalsocialista

Abstract

This article aims to reconstruct the details of the dispute that, between the late 1930s and the early 1940s, confronted the collaborators of the Institut für Sozialforschung, with respect to the intimate nature and functioning of the German National Socialist State. It also attempts to combat the usual interpretation of the episode and to place the contents and approaches of the various authors in context. The internal dispute between several of the contributors - Max Horkheimer, Friedrich Pollock and Franz Neumann were the main ones involved - is one of the highlights of the first generation of critical theory. The reception of the debate in academia has long crystallized in a dualistic interpretation, according to which the core of the debate - the question of the type of capitalism prevailing in Germany and its relation to the foundations of the liberalism it was to replace - would have pitted the pair of directors of the Institut, Pollock and Horkheimer, against a thinker peripheral to the institution, Franz Neumann. The article tries to defend a different interpretation, according to which each of these thinkers should be understood as a voice of his own, in agreement and disagreement with his collaborators depending on the issue at hand. The article tries to show closeness between the ideas of Horkheimer and Neumann, or disagreements between Pollock and Horkheimer, which have been overlooked by the usual interpretation of the de