ABSTRACT
Felix Weil was a son of the wealthy Jewish businessman who funded the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in 1924. This institute became the center for the development of critical theory. Weil was caught up in the socialist circles of Frankfurt (the German city with the highest percentage of Jews) and studied with the Hungarian communist scholar Georg Lukacs. Carl
Grunberg, an academic Marxist, was the institute's first director. He committed the institute to social research grounded in Marxist ideology. Grunberg became ill in 1928 and was replaced in 1930 by Max Horkheimer. Horkheimer was a major, if not the central, charismatic figure in the development of critical theory. He was surrounded with colleagues and students such as Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and later Adorno's student, Jurgen Habermas (Wiggershaus, 1994). We will return to Max Horkheimer after examining two of the main influences on him and his fellow critical theorists, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.
