The Institute for Social Research

The Frankfurt School has been mentioned several times already. It has its origins in the Institute for Social Research set up in 1924 under the patronage of Felix Weil. Weil, the son of a multimillionaire and a student of Robert Wildebrandt, a socialist professor of political economy at Tubingen, wanted to establish an institutional context for the discussion of Marxist ideas. He was aided in this project by Kurt Gerlach, a left- wing socialist who had taught at Leipzig before becoming professor of economic science at Aachen. In 1922 Gerlach was invited to take up a professorship at Frankfurt and to work with Weil in establishing the Institute.

As Wiggershaus documents (1994, pp. 17-18), the submission that Weil and Gerlach made to the Prussian Ministry of Science openly described the proposed institute as one that would ‘serve first and foremost for the study and broadening of scientific Marxism’. They were more guarded in their approach to the University authorities. Marxism was mentioned only in passing and not in relation to the aims of the Institute. At its official opening on 22 June 1924, however, the inaugural director of the Institute, Carl Griinberg, left no doubt in the minds of his listeners as to its orientation. ‘I, too’, he declared in his formal address for that occasion, ‘am one of the supporters of Marxism’. He went on:

Up till now Marxism, as an economic and sociological system, has been to a great extent neglected at German universities, in considerable contrast with those of other countries—indeed, in practice, it has been reluctandy tolerated at best. In the new research institute, Marxism will from now on have a home. (In Wiggershaus 1994, p. 27)

Even at the start the Marxism envisaged for the Institute was by no means orthodox and, as the Institute got underway, it brought together thinkers who diverged from one another in significant ways. The Institute for Social Research has manifested very markedly the eclecticism already referred to. This is even more true of the broader, vaguer entity which goes by the name of the Frankfurt School and for which the Institute served as the ‘organizational seedbed’ (Wolin 1992, p. 46). So much so that some commentators question whether the Institute or the School should be regarded as Marxist in any true sense of the word. Zoltan Tar writes of a ‘certain cloud of myth, ambiguity and confusion surrounding the Frankfurt School’ and argues that the ‘notion that the school represents a Marxist orientation in sociology rests only on a superficial acquaintance with the work of Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, and other thinkers of the Frankfurt School’ (1977, p. 2). Tar describes Horkheimer’s views in particular as ‘Marx turned upside down’ and ‘obviously based on a distortion of the Marxian vision’ (1977, p. 180). In the end, according to Martin Jay (1973, p. 296), the Institute ‘presented a revision of Marxism so substantial that it forfeited the right to be included among its many offshoots’. Meszaros, in fact, regards the School as Weberian rather than Marxist:

Significantly, however, the impact of the Weberian influence on the Frankfurt School makes itself felt in the complete reversal of this sociohistorical concretization of the alienating contradictions of twentieth century capitalism by Lukacs and others. Accordingly, not only is the Marxian social agency of the anticipated revolutionary transformation eliminated from the conceptual framework of ‘critical theory’ but, altogether, the problematic of ‘reification is deprived of its social ground and redrafted in the abstract and ahistorical Weberian sense of ‘rationalization. (1989, p. 22)

Such judgments notwithstanding, most analysts of Frankfurt School philosophy and social science are content to accept its broadly Marxist character, while recognising that the Marxism in question is no purist form but a neo-Marxism or post-Marxism containing a strong admixture of elements drawn from other sources. Thus, Outhwaite writes (1994, p. 5) of ‘the broad Marxist tradition’ that ‘inspired the original Frankfurt Institute for Social Research’. For all the criticisms of authors like Tar, Jay and Meszaros, Horkheimer himself, who succeeded Griinberg as director of the Institute in 1930, had no doubts about the authenticity of the Institute’s Marxism. ‘Marxism won its decisive meaning for our thought’, he was to write some 40 years later (1973, p. xi). The story he tells is the story of how ‘a group of men, interested in social theory and from different scholarly backgrounds, came together with the belief that formulating the negative in the epoch of transition was more meaningful than academic careers’ (1973, p. xi). ‘What united them’, he declares, ‘was the critical approach to existing society’ (1973, p. xi).

If the School’s relationship to Marx is a complex one, its history is complex also. The first members of the Institute for Social Research were either Jews or, as Wiggershaus puts it, ‘people who had largely been forced back into an affiliation with Judaism by the Nazis’ (1994, p. 4). Identified as both Jewish and Marxist, they had no chance of surviving once Nazism came to power in 1933. Hider was appointed Chancellor on 30 January 1933, elections for the Eighth Reichstag took place on 5 March, and on 13 March the Institute’s premises were searched by the police and closed down. A statement by the Gestapo dated 14 July declared that ‘the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt am Main is hereby seized and confiscated in favour of the Free State of Prussia, as the aforementioned Institute has encouraged activities hostile to the state’ (Wiggershaus 1994, p. 128).

Most of the members and associates of the Institute fled abroad. Besides Horkheimer, these included Erich Fromm, Friedrich Pollock, Leo Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse and Henryk Grossman. Horkheimer, Pollock and Lowenthal found refuge in Geneva in the first instance but this could only be temporary. Horkheimer went to the United States to investigate the prospects there and was offered accommodation for the Institute at Columbia University in New York. One by one, core members of the Institute joined Horkheimer in New York and the Institute resumed its work. Karl Wittfogel had delayed his departure and fell into Nazi hands. After time spent in various concentration camps, he was released and managed to travel, first to England, then to the United States. Theodor Adorno too had remained behind in Germany and was back and forth to England where he was studying at Oxford. Horkheimer finally convinced him to join the Institute in its exile in America and he came to New York in 1938. Walter Benjamin, never a formal member of the Institute, was engaged as a freelance researcher, beginning at the time of the Institute’s exile in Switzerland. He resisted all invitations to join the Institute in the United States, preferring to remain in Europe. Escaping Nazism became more and more difficult for him as time went on and in 1940, after being refused entry into Spain via the Pyrenees, he committed suicide in the border town of Port Bou.

This was clearly a time of great trauma for those involved with the Institute for Social Research. While this Institute-in-exile continued its research activities with enthusiasm, it did so in what Wiggershaus describes as ‘a kind of “splendid isolation” from its American environment’ (1994, p. 2). Connerton (1980, p. 4) agrees: They were marginal in exile’. Its seminars were rarely attended by American students and it was abundandy clear that the interests of Institute members and those of their American counterparts were far apart. During this period, as was pointed out in Chapter 3, Horkheimer launched an astonishing attack on American pragmatism in general and John Dewey in particular. Nor was his criticism limited to pragmatism. ‘Horkheimer,’ states Wiggershaus (1994, p. 248), ‘was increasingly impatient in his criticism of the various scientific disciplines, and increasingly severe in his labelling of every theoretical and philosophical tendency which was not critical of society, and which was successful in the USA, as a form of recognition and acceptance of existing conditions’.

Still, there were a number of people associated with Columbia University who purported to be of critical bent and might have been expected to establish ready rapport with the exiled members of the Institute. The so-called ‘New York intellectuals’ were there, for example —anti-Stalinists grouped around the journal Partisan Review and attempting to wed Marxism to a modernist critique of society. But rapport failed to emerge.

The common ground shared by the Partisan Review-Columbia circle and the Frankfurt intellectuals was substantial . . . Given these shared concerns, what is most remarkable about the relationship between the New York liberal intellectuals and the Frankfurt School is its virtual nonexistence. A lack of sympathetic interaction existed despite physical proximity. (Posnock 1991, p. 78)

Posnock is not alone in concluding that the critique instituted by Horkheimer and his colleagues offered too radical a challenge to structures and beliefs cherished by American thinkers at that time for any genuine dialogue to happen.¹⁴

In addition to that, relations between the Institute and New York’s New School for Social Research were awkward, to say the least. The New School had been founded by liberal thinkers in the wake of World War I but had become increasingly conservative. There were now anti-Marxist elements there and these reflected the anti-Communist mood of the times. McCarthyism was some time off, but suspicions were abroad in American society. In July 1940 police visited the Institute for Social Research, asking for information on its staff members and examining materials it had produced.

In 1941 most of the principal members of the Institute moved to Los Angeles, leaving Lowenthal in charge of what Wiggershaus calls a ‘rump’ of the Institute in New York, although the New York centre continued to function as the official headquarters. As if the conflicts from external factors were not enough, the Institute now experienced internal conflict ‘between Los Angeles and New York, between an interest in large-scale, long-term and theory-oriented research and an interest in quick results and methodologically well grounded research’ (Wiggershaus 1994, p. 397). The formal links with Columbia University were cut in 1946.

Despite an unpromising ambience and internal divergences, and with many of the members involved in government service in one way or another, the Institute remained productive through the war years and into the 1950s, even if Wiggershaus describes this period as one of ‘productive decay’. Certainly this period was marked by a most fruitful collaboration between Horkheimer and Adorno. They co-authored Dialectic of Enlightenment, which was published in 1947. Adorno ‘s Minima Moralia, first published in 1951, was written at a time when, as his Dedication acknowledges, circumstances caused his collaboration with Horkheimer to be interrupted. Nevertheless, he insists, a ‘dialogue interieur’ continued between them and, as far as the book is concerned, ‘there is not a motif in it that does not belong as much to Horkheimer as to him who found the time to formulate it’ (Adorno 1974, p. 18).

In the early 1950s the Institute returned to Germany. Horkheimer had visited Frankfurt in 1948 and 1949. After his second visit, an appeal calling for the Institute to be re-established at the University of Frankfurt and signed by many eminent scholars was published in the American Sociological Review. That same year Adorno went to Frankfurt as Horkheimer’s deputy. Horkheimer joined him in 1950. Pollock followed. Lowenthal and, significandy for its financial independence, the Institute’s patron Felix Weil remained in the United States. So too did Marcuse, who gained professorships at Brandeis (1954) and San Diego (1965) universities, as well as a surprising popularity in the 1960s, especially among activist students. Erich Fromm had moved away early on. This left Horkheimer, Adorno and Pollock. Few as they were, in the persons of these three figures so central to its history and activities, the Institute for Social Research had well and truly returned to life in Frankfurt. Its premises were officially declared open in November 1951. ‘Frankfurt School’, and ‘critical theory’ as a catch-all phrase for the social philosophy of the Frankfurt School, were terms still to be coined, but the stage was set for a resumption of the Institute’s work on German soil and, in due course, for ‘second generation’ Frankfurt theorists to arrive on the scene.

Source: Michael J Crotty (1998), The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process, SAGE Publications Ltd; First edition.