Critical Theory first develops during a period of extraordinarily complex intellectual activity in Germany. If one were to take the year 1930 as a benchmark - when Max Horkheimer becomes the director of the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt - and were to look back upon the decade preceding that date, one would encounter in their most vibrant forms many of the most important philosophical movements of the twentieth century: the hermeneutic phenomenology of Heidegger; the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle and the early Wittgenstein; various strands of neo- Kantianism; and the humanistic Marxism of Lukács. In political and social theory, psychology, historiography, and economics the situation is hardly less multifarious. Each of these views or schools, sometimes in combination with elements of others, vies for predominance in the Weimar period. Moreover, each of the contenders takes care to incorporate within it involved criticisms of the others.