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Struggling for Objectivity Theory And Struggling for Objectivity Theory and Empirical Research in the Early Frankfurt School Bas de Boer Supervisor: Dr. Jaap Bos Second Reader: Dr. Paul Ziche Master Thesis in History and Philosophy of Science Utrecht University, The Netherlands 1 Table of Contents Introduction: ............................................................................................................................. 4 History, Sociology and Contemporary Relevance……………………………………………12 Chapter I: An Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt ................................................. 17 1.1 The Dream of Felix Weil .............................................................................................. 17 1.2 Carl Grünberg and the Archive for the History of Socialism and the Labor Movement 20 1.3 Socialism, War and Revolution ..................................................................................... 23 1.4 Grünberg’s Archive after the War ................................................................................. 27 1.5 Carl Grünberg as Director of the Frankfurter Institut für Sozialforschung ................... 30 1.6 Grünberg’s Marxism ..................................................................................................... 34 Chapter II: Max Horkheimer and Interdisciplinary Research ......................................... 37 2.1 From Carl Grünberg to Max Horkheimer ..................................................................... 37 2.2 The Journal for Social Research and a Theory of Interdisciplinary Research ............. 39 2.3 From Frankfurt to New York ........................................................................................ 46 2.4 The Studies on Authority and Family ............................................................................ 50 2.5 The American Reception of the Institut’s First Empirical Publication ......................... 56 2 Chapter III: A Return to Philosophy? ................................................................................. 58 3.1 Horkheimer, Adorno and Financial Trouble ................................................................. 58 3.2 Conflicts ........................................................................................................................ 60 3.4 The Dialectic of Enlightenment ..................................................................................... 69 3.5 A Philosophical Theory of Anti-Semitism .................................................................... 74 3.6 The Eclipse of Reason and a Lack of American attention ............................................ 77 Chapter 4: A Second Wave of Empirical Research ........................................................... 80 4.1 Horkheimer’s Sociological Methodology ..................................................................... 80 4.2 Empirical Studies after Traditional and Critical Theory .............................................. 83 4.3 The Institut in Need of External Funding ...................................................................... 87 4.4 The Institut and the American Jewish Committee ........................................................ 89 4.5 The Authoritarian Personality ...................................................................................... 93 4.6 The Authoritarian Personality as Patient ....................................................................... 98 4.7 Success in America and Return to Germany ................................................................. 99 Conclusion: ........................................................................................................................... 103 References: ............................................................................................................................ 114 3 Introduction: Insistence on a concretely quantitative economics means the use of statistics of physical magnitudes, whose economic meaning and significance is uncertain and dubious. (Even wheat is approximately homogeneous only if measured in economic terms.) And a similar statement would even apply more to other social sciences. In this field, the Kelvin dictum very largely means in practice, ‘if you cannot measure, measure anyhow!1 In recent years, the validity research in the social sciences has extensively been challenged. Especially in the Netherlands, the public trust in the results of social scientific research has greatly decreased after the discovery that the conclusions of Diederik Stapel, a professor in social psychology at Tilburg University, were grounded in imaginative data sets. It is suggested that Stapel’s fraud is not an isolated case, but is the tip of the iceberg and more cases of fraud in the social sciences are likely to be discovered. Therefore, Stapel’s fraud crossed the Dutch borders and became a topic of discussion in the entire English-speaking world. On 26. April 2013, even in the New York Times an article on Stapel appeared from the hand of Yudhiyit Bhattacharjee. In The Mind of a Con Man, he traces the fraud back to Stapel’s individual ambitions and psychology.2 Other articles stress that the fraud is symptomatic for the institutional organization of universities. In a culture where publishing as many scientific articles as possible in high-noted journals is a necessary requisite for having a successful academic career, fraudulent research becomes an increasingly attractive possibility for researchers. While these kind of suggestions partly explain Stapel’s and future other scientific misconducts, they neglect that fraud can also be the consequence of a more general problem in the social sciences. As Janet D. Stemwedel pointed out in her series of articles The Quest for Underlying Order: Inside the Frauds of Diederik Stapel, Stapel’s fraud reveals a more fundamental problem in the research of the social sciences. She suggests that ‘it is probably worth thinking about the ways that commitments within scientific communities — especially methodological commitments that start to take on the strength of metaphysical commitments — could have made crossing it [the boundaries of scientific integrity] more tempting.3 Institutional and personal explanations cannot completely account for the occurrence of fraudulent research. According to Stemwedel, the problematic relation between metaphysics 4 and methodology in social science is the breeding ground for misconduct such as Stapel’s. This suggests that all social scientific researchers interpret their data from a set of personal or shared metaphysical commitments. It makes clear that social scientists failed to develop a coherent system capable of integrating empirical research into a theoretical framework. Therefore, the distinction between scientific misconduct and proper research in the social sciences is not as sharp as it seems to be at first sight. It is this problematic relation between theory and empirical research that is addressed in this thesis. While this relation has especially been highlighted in the context of recent scientific misconduct, it was already subject of discussion from the moment social research became scientific in the beginning of the 20th century. At the time, social scientists were either heavily influenced by Marx’ and Engels’ theories, or were trying to fulfill the needs of the political rulers. In both cases, research in the social sciences was heavily influenced by ideological preferences. Especially in early twentieth-century Germany, social science started from a set of metaphysical commitments they wanted to become reality. One group of social scientists tried to make Weimar Republic work and made a case for a German parliamentary democracy, while another group was convinced that the Weimar Republic had to be overthrown and a German socialist state had to be established. To avoid these kinds of ideological commitments in social research, Felix Weil, a German scholar and son of a wealthy businessman, wanted to establish an institute for social research in Frankfurt that remained politically neutral and could guarantee that social research was scientifically objective. In 1924, Weil realized his dream and the Frankfurter Institut für Sozialforschung was established. However, it was clear from the start that also in this institute, the relation between theory and empirical research was problematic. An affiliation with the Frankfurt University should make clear that the Institut’s research was not just grounded in Marxist theory, indicating that although Weil was aiming for scientific objectivity, others were questioning that this was indeed his primary goal. When Weil’s quest for scientific objectivity is taken seriously, an investigation into the Institut’s theories and empirical research shows how its aim for objectivity was still subject to several ideological commitments. The Institut’s research before 1950 is especially interesting for present purposes, because its methodology was presented as fundamentally different from other research in the social sciences. An enormous amount of literature on the history and research of the Frankfurter Institut für Sozialforschung has yet appeared, but its methodology and the relation between 5 their theories and empirical research has never been serious subject of inquiry. The Institut was hyped in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States when its theories gained wide attention by the American and German radical students under the header ‘Frankfurt School’. Especially the later works The One-Dimensional
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