John Abromeit is an assistant professor in the Department of History and Social Studies Education at the State University of New York, Buffalo. He is the co-editor of Herbert Marcuse: Heideggerian Marxism (2005) and Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader (2004), and his articles and book reviews have appeared in Theory and Society; Theory, Culture and Society; Radical Philosophy and Constellations. Professor Abromeit previously held a Harper-Schmidt postdoctoral position in the social sciences in the University of Chicago Society of Fellows.

Introduction; 1. Coming of age in Wilhelmine Germany; 2. Student years in Frankfurt; 3. A materialist interpretation of the history of modern philosophy; 4. The beginnings of a critical theory of contemporary society; 5. Horkheimer's integration of psychoanalysis into his theory of contemporary society; 6. Horkheimer's concept of materialism in the early 1930s; 7. The anthropology of the bourgeois epoch; 8. Reflections on dialectical logic in the mid 1930s; Excursus I. The theoretical foundations of Horkheimer's split with Erich Fromm in the late 1930s: Fromm's critique of Freud's drive theory; Excursus II. Divergence, estrangement, and gradual rapprochement: the evolution of Horkheimer and Adorno's theoretical relationship in the 1930s; 9. State capitalism - the end of Horkheimer's early critical theory; Epilogue: toward a historicization of Dialectic of Enlightenment and a reconsideration of Horkheimer's early critical theory.