to which they related themselves. If, however, that was the case, so the anti-
elitist Horkheimer argued, then any good observer and clever and sensible
human being had at least as much right concerning his or her imagination,
intuition, or speculation as the social researcher ’s conjectures. In Horkheimer ’s
view, to the contrary the professional researcher was in danger, not to see the
forest for the trees: not to identify the universal tendencies in the individual
and historical collective life over its particular formations, facts and figures.
Secondly, the empiricists were used to admit that feelings did not manifest
any differences in reference to the truth. The positivists asserted that it was
epistemologically equivalent if an individual reacted to an event with com-
fort or with uneasiness and discontent. Both were likewise facts. However,
the positivists liked to recommend their view and opinion as the cleanest
one, the most decent and proper one, and the most useful one for the gen-
eral welfare of civil society. They pretended to stand in closest connection
with the progress of humanity in the present industrial or late capitalist society
(Adorno 1979).
Totalitarianism
According to Horkheimer, toward the end of the 1950s the positivists liked
to point toward the masses, which had only recently been grasped by the
totalitarian intoxication and the following of national socialism and fascism
as examples for the consequences of religious, metaphysical and other kinds
of erroneous teachings and heresies. A positivist stood in the residuals of
Auschwitz and blamed Hegel’s notion of the absolute Spirit for the Shoa.
Only doing so, so Horkheimer explained, the positivists abstracted from the
fact, that the fascist tyrants themselves, e.g., the people’s enlightener Dr.
Joseph Goebbels, who put into motion the masses on behalf of the likewise
soberly thinking capitalist magnates and oligarchs, e.g., the master club in
Düsseldorf, including Krupp and Thyssen, etc., and many foreign industrialists,
like Henry Ford, and bankers who consented with Hitler and who traded
with fascist Germany, behaved philosophically correctly and perfectly in terms
of the positivistic doctrine, which is still valid and dominant in European
and American universities even today, in 2005, now under continually econ-
omizing neo-conservative or neo-liberal auspices (Taylor 1983; Adorno 1979;
Higham 1983; Baldwin 2001). In case Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister
had won the war, they could not have been scolded in the light of any pos-
itivistically conceived form of instrumental or functional rationality (Horkheimer
72 • Rudolf J. Siebert