Max Horkheimer (1895-1973). In the 40th years since his death authoritarianism and injustice in the twentieth century. Tragedy or crisis of meaning in modernity.

Abstract

Max Horkheimer was one of the most important sociologists in the 20th century. Presently article is reconstructed on its notes of trips analytically from 1926 to 1931, published with the title of “Ocaso”. Written under the style of aphorisms, in them they can be the keys about the crisis and the decadence of the western culture at the beginning of the 20th century. The reflections that Horkheimer elaborates, in its first Marxism, refer to the catastrophe, to the deep transformations that derived in the preambles of the authoritarianism, the one that would found the social bases of the totalitarian regimes. The consequences of the modernity in their tragedy, they are detected by Horkheimer in their writing, therefore it is this a privileged registration they conformed to the injustice and the irrationality that took to the crisis of sense of the world and the humanity, to the war and the conflict in great scale of how.