Horkheimer was therefore the clear choice to succeed Grünberg. Although he had not been a dominating presence at the Institut during its first few years, his star clearly rose during the interim directorship of his friend Pollock. In 1929, with the support of Tillich and other members of the philosophy department, a new chair of “social philosophy” was established for Horkheimer, the first of its kind at a German university. Weil had convinced the Education Ministry to convert Grünberg’s chair in political science, which his father had endowed, to its new purpose. As part of the bargain he promised to contribute to another chair in economics, which Adolph Löwe, a childhood friend of Horkheimer, left Kiel to fill. The Origins of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History,72 a study of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Vico, and other early bourgeois philosophers of history, served as Horkheimer’s scholarly credentials for his new position. With the accession of Horkheimer, then only thirty-five, to its directorship in July, 1930, the Institut für Sozialforschung entered its period of greatest productivity, all the more impressive when seen in the context of the emigration and cultural disorientation that soon followed.
In January of 1931, Horkheimer was officially installed in his new post. At the opening ceremonies, he spoke on “The Current Condition of Social Philosophy and the Task of an Institute of Social Research.”73 The differences between his approach and that of his predecessor were immediately apparent. Instead of simply labeling himself a good Marxist, Horkheimer turned to the history of social philosophy to put its current situation in perspective. Beginning with the grounding of social theory in the individual, which had at first characterized classical German idealism, he traced its course through Hegel’s sacrifice of the individual to the state and the subsequent breakdown of the faith in an objective totality, which Schopenhauer expressed. He then turned to more recent social theorists, like the neo-Kantians of the Marburg school and the advocates of social totalism like Othmar Spann, all of whom, he argued, had attempted to overcome the sense of loss accompanying the breakdown of the classical synthesis. Scheler, Hartmann, and Heidegger, he added, shared this yearning for a return to the comfort of meaningful unities. Social philosophy, as Horkheimer saw it, would not be a single Wissenschaft (science) in search of immutable truth. Rather, it was to be understood as a materialist theory enriched and supplemented by empirical work, in the same way that natural philosophy was dialectically related to individual scientific disciplines. The Institut would therefore continue to diversify its energies without losing sight of its interdisciplinary, synthetic goals. To this end Horkheimer supported the retention of Grünberg’s noncollegial “dictatorship of the director.”
In concluding his remarks, Horkheimer outlined the first task of the Institut under his leadership: a study of workers’ and employees’ attitudes towards a variety of issues in Germany and the rest of developed Europe. Its methods were to include the use of public statistics and questionnaires backed up by sociological, psychological, and economic interpretation of the data. To help collect materials, he announced, the Institut had accepted the offer of Albert Thomas, the director of the International Labor Organization, to establish a branch office of the Institut in Geneva. This proved to be the first of several such branches established outside Germany in the ensuing years. The decision to act on Thomas’s offer was influenced by more than the desire to collect data, for the ominous political scene in Germany gave indications that exile might be a future necessity. Pollock was thus given the task of setting up a permanent office in Geneva; Kurt Mandelbaum, his assistant, went with him. Once the office was firmly established in 1931, the lion’s share of the Institut’s endowment was quietly transferred to a company in a neutral country, Holland.
Other changes followed Horkheimer’s elevation to the directorship. With its guiding spirit incapacitated, Grünbergs Archiv ceased publication, twenty years and fifteen volumes after its initial appearance in 1910. The Archiv had served as a vehicle for a variety of different viewpoints both within and outside the Institut, still reflecting in part Grünberg’s roots in the world of Austro-Marxism. The need for a journal more exclusively the voice of the Institut was felt to be pressing. Horkheimer, whose preference for conciseness was expressed in the large number of aphorisms he wrote during this period, disliked the mammoth tomes so characteristic of German scholarship. Although a third volume of the Institut’s publications series, Wittfogel’s Economy and Society in China,74 appeared in 1931, the emphasis was now shifted to the essay. It was through the essays that appeared in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, some almost monographic in length, that the Institut presented most of its work to the world in the next decade. Exhaustively evaluated and criticized by the other members of the Institut before they appeared, many articles were almost as much collective productions as individual works. The Zeitschrift, in Leo Lowenthal’s words, was “less a forum for different viewpoints than a platform for the Institut’s convictions,”75 even though other authors continued to contribute occasional articles. Editorial decisions were ultimately Horkheimer’s, although Lowenthal, drawing on his years of relevant experience, served as managing editor and was fully responsible for the extensive review section. One of Lowenthal’s first tasks was a trip by plane to Leopold von Wiese, the doyen of German sociologists, to assure him that the Zeitschrift would not compete with his own Kölner Viertelsjahrshefte für Soziologie (Cologne Quarterly of Sociology).
As Horkheimer explained in the foreword to the first issue,76 Sozialforschung was not the same as the sociology practiced by von Wiese and other more traditional German academicians. Following Gerlach and Grünberg, Horkheimer stressed the synoptic, interdisciplinary nature of the Institut’s work. He particularly stressed the role of social psychology in bridging the gap between individual and society. In the first article, which followed, “Observations on Science and Crisis,”77 he developed the connection between the current splintering of knowledge and the social conditions that helped produce it. A global economic structure both monopolistic and anarchic, he argued, had promoted a confused state of knowledge. Only by overcoming the fetishistic grounding of scientific knowledge in pure consciousness, and by recognizing the concrete historical circumstances that conditioned all thought, could the present crisis be surmounted. Science must not ignore its own social role, for only by becoming conscious of its function in the present critical situation could it contribute to the forces that would bring about the necessary changes.
The contributions to the Zeitschrift’s first issue reflected the diversity of Sozialforschung. Grossmann wrote once again on Marx and the problem of the collapse of capitalism.78 Pollock discussed the Depression and the possibilities for a planned economy within a capitalist framework.79 Lowenthal outlined the tasks of a sociology of literature, and Adorno did the same, in the first of two articles, for music.80 The remaining two essays dealt with the psychological dimension of social research: one by Horkheimer himself on “History and Psychology,”81 the second by a new member of the Institut, Erich Fromm.82 (A full treatment of the Institut’s integration of psychoanalysis and its Hegelianized Marxism appears in Chapter 3.) Lowenthal, who had been a friend of Fromm’s since 1918, introduced him as one of three psychoanalysts brought into the Institut’s circle in the early thirties. The others were Karl Landauer, the director of the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute, which was associated with the Institut, and Heinrich Meng. Landauer’s contributions to the Zeitschrift were restricted to the review section. (In the first issue he was in very good company: among the other reviewers were Alexandre Koyré, Kurt Lewin, Karl Korsch, and Wilhelm Reich.) Meng, although more interested in mental hygiene than social psychology, helped organize seminars and contributed reviews on topics related to the Institut’s interests.
With the introduction of psychoanalysis to the Institut, the Grünberg era was clearly over. In 1932 the publication of a Festschrift,83 collected on the occasion of Grünberg’s seventieth birthday the previous year, gave further evidence of the transition. Pollock, Horkheimer, Wittfogel, and Grossmann all contributed articles, but most of the pieces were by older friends from Grünberg’s Viennese days, such as Max Beer and Max Adler. The change this symbolized was given further impetus by the acceptance of a new member in late 1932,