Critical theorist Max Horkheimer, who co-authored Dialectic of Enlightenment with Theodor Adorno, would go on to repudiate the sexual revolution. In an interview in the late 1960s, he expressed support for the encyclical Humanae Vitae, arguing that contraception, and the sexual revolution it helped enable, destroyed love and thereby led to the objectification and instrumentalization of other people. Hegelian Marxists like Horkheimer were concerned about how capitalism turned people into things—Lukács’s “commodity form.” Stripping erotic love, commitment, and fertility from the sex act was one way to accomplish this transformation. Horkheimer was clear that he opposed the sexual revolution not because he was converting to Christianity, but because he was, at least in his own mind, a consistent critical theorist.

In this, he broke with others such as Herbert Marcuse, the guiding light of the sexual iconoclasm of 1968. Marcuse argued that gay sex, because it was intrinsically sterile and non-productive, was a fine example of revolutionary behavior that refused to conform to capitalist values. But Horkheimer was the deeper thinker. He was aware that things turn into their opposite. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, he and Adorno trace how the scientific revolution liberated people from religion but then became a new master, as authoritarian and dogmatic as the Christianity it had supplanted. By 1968, Horkheimer saw the sexual revolution following the same pattern: liberation curdling into a new, dogmatic ideology that was destructive of humanity. Read more»

Carl R. Trueman, “The Marxist Who Understood Sex Better than the UMC,” First Things (July 16, 2026)

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