The Transatlantic Development of Social Science and Critical Theory, 1930-1950

Experiments in Theory: The Transatlantic Development of Social Science and Critical Theory, 1930-1950

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Citation Clavey, Charles H. 2019. Experiments in Theory: The Transatlantic Development of Social Science and Critical Theory, 1930-1950. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.

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Experiments in Theory: The Transatlantic Development of Social Science and Critical Theory, 1930-1950

A dissertation presented by Charles H. Clavey to The Department of History

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of History

Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts April 2019

Dissertation Advisor: Professor Peter E. Gordon Charles H. Clavey

EXPERIMENTS IN THEORY:

THE TRANSATLANTIC DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL SCIENCE & CRITICAL THEORY, 1930-1950

ABSTRACT

From its foundation in 1923, the Institute for Social Research conducted empirical studies of the social forms, cultural products, and psychological effects of advanced capitalism.

Adapting methods from social- and human-scientific fields as diverse as experimental psychology and industrial sociology, Institute affiliates fashioned a research methodology they termed “experiments in theory.” In this dissertation, I recover the history of these experiments.

To do so, I reconstruct the debates that led to the creation of the method and document its application in a variety of projects between 1930 and 1950. I argue that the Institute’s empirical social research formed a necessary corollary to its critical social theory.

The Institute is well known for its deep critiques of empirical techniques and paradigms.

In the postwar era, its most prominent members identified empirical research as a means of maintaining the “social totality” inimical to human freedom. I complicate this disciplinary memory and the historical narratives it subtends. Between the First and Second World Wars,

Institute affiliates subjected existing methods of empirical research to incisive critique, arguing that these approaches simultaneously promoted ideas of “individuality” and effaced subjectivity.

At the same time, Institute members forged methods and conducted studies they believed capable of unmasking this ideology and its consequences. Concepts central to the Institute’s critical theory—from alienation to authoritarianism—emerged in and through these empirical projects.

In the first chapters of the dissertation, I trace the origins of the Institute’s method to pioneering social-psychological studies conducted by a cohort of Austrian-Marxist researchers.

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Through the studies they conducted as Institute consultants, these researchers played an outsized role in shaping the organization’s nascent program of empirical social research. In the middle chapters of the dissertation, I focus on the Institute’s exile in the United States and explore its members’ critical dialogue with American and émigré researchers. I argue that the Institute conceived its experiments-in-theory method through the assertion of a conceptual disjunction between the “European” and “American” approaches to social research. Further, I demonstrate that the Institute refined this method through empirical studies of class consciousness and prejudice in an American context. In the final chapter, I reconstruct the Institute’s study of authoritarianism and argue that this project both brought to its conclusion the development of the experiments-in-theory method and returned the Institute to the problem of “individuality.”

Confronted with the realization that empirical research must assume the existence of individuals in order to critique the ideology of individuality, Institute researchers developed the dialectical argument that empirical studies must assume their own impossibility.

Across the dissertation, I call attention to the institutional and political forces that motivated the Institute’s development of its program of empirical research. By tracing the movement of social scientists around Europe and across the Atlantic, I suggest several new contexts in which to understand the Institute’s origins and development. I further reconsider the

Institute’s relationship with the social- and human-scientific disciplines its members encountered in the United States: behavioral psychology, cultural anthropology, market research, and public- opinion polling. One result of this reframing is that I call attention to the voices of social scientists whose contributions to the Institute and its critical theory have long been neglected.

More broadly, I aim to return attention to the Institute’s experiments in theory. Recovering these studies will enrich both historical understandings and contemporary practices of critical theory.

CONTENTS

Abstract / iii

Contents / v

Figures and Tables / vii

Acknowledgments / viii

Introduction Between Empirical Social Science and Critical Social Theory / 1

Experiments in Theory / 1 Histories of Critical Theory and Social Science / 9 Argument and Structure / 28

Chapter 1 Resiliency or Resignation: the Psychology of Unemployment, 1919-1933 / 42

The Prison without Bars / 42 Making the “New People” / 46 Socialist and Social Scientist / 55 Psychological Breakdown / 66 Capitalist Crises and Socialist Dilemmas / 78 Conclusion: A Style of Thinking / 85

Chapter 2 From Authority to Authoritarianism: Studying the Family, 1934-1936 / 90

A Publication Worse than Unscientific / 90 Authority between Culture and Family / 94 Authoritarian Mind and Authoritarian Society / 108 The Origins of Concepts / 127 The Proliferation of Types / 141 Conclusion / 151

Chapter 3 How to Ask “Why?”: Empirical Research Across the Atlantic, 1934-1941 / 155

This Role of Specialist / 155 Lazarsfeld’s Critique of American Research / 160 The Task of Substruction / 174 Concrete Evidence and Discerning Interpretations / 194 Conclusion / 213

Chapter 4 Experimenting with Theory: the Princeton Radio Research Project, 1938-1941 / 219

Extraordinary Possibilities and a Large Potential Audience / 219 An Opportunity for Relatively Free Experimentation / 224 Hunting for the European Approach / 236 Adorno’s Most Dangerous Thesis / 246 Individual as Mere Ideology / 267 Studying the New Type of Human Being / 281 Conclusion / 292

Chapter 5 A Highly Promising Method: Critical Theory and Empirical Research, 1941-1945 / 294

Methods European and American / 294 The Peril of Anti-Semitism & the Promise of Social Research / 298 The Stereotype Takes Care of Everything / 305 Outflanking the Research Racket / 323 Almost-Monadological Psychology / 331 Conclusion / 336

Chapter 6 European Concepts and American Methods: Studies of Authoritarianism, 1943-1950 / 342

Guided by a Theoretical Orientation / 342 Insights and Hunches / 346 Uncovering the Fascist Personality / 366 Psychology Presupposing its Own End / 395 Conclusion / 409

Conclusion Experiments in Theory / 413

Arguments and Interventions / 413 Contributions and Limitations / 419 Striking Affinities and Unlikely Connections / 427 Into the Cold War / 435

Works Cited / 442

Archival Sources & Oral Histories / 442 Newspapers, Periodicals, & Journals / 443 Published Primary Sources / 444 Secondary Literature / 459

FIGURES AND TABLES

Figure 2.1: Sale- and Consumption-Barometer / 130 Figure 2.2: Process of the Economic Satisfaction of Needs / 132 Figure 2.3: The “Orgnanon” Theory of Language /138 Figure 3.1: Procedure of Market Research / 169 Figure 3.2: Structure of Action / 170 Figure 3.3: Typology of a Marriage / 179 Figure 3.4: Conceptual Possibilities for the Exercise of Authority / 184 Figure 3.5: Conceptual Possibilities of the Acceptance of Authority / 184 Figure 3.6: Multidimensional Attribute Space of Authority / 184 Figure 3.7: Concepts of Authority Reduced from Typologies / 184 Figure 3.8: Outline of the Process of Interpretation / 187 Figure 4.1: Models of Communication Before and After the Radio / 232 Figure 4.2: Sample Data Produced by the Lazarsfeld-Stanton Program Analyzer / 252 Figure 6.1: TAT Image 12 F / 356 Figure 6.2: Reorganization of the Institute's Research into Anti-Semitism / 369 Figure 6.3: Ongoing Research Projects of the SRD, 1945 / 370 Figure 7.1: Participation according to Statistical Groups and the Seven Main Themes / 440

Table 6.1: Variables, Items, and Areas Tested by the F-Scale Questionnaire / 382 Table 6.2: Typology of “Stereopaths” / 392

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Over the past three years, I have been fortunate to receive generous institutional funding, expert guidance from mentors, insightful critiques from peers, and unceasing encouragement from friends and family. Without this support, I could not have developed, researched, or written this dissertation. It is my pleasure to acknowledge and thank these institutions and individuals.

First and foremost, my deepest thanks go to Peter E. Gordon. As an advisor, Peter was an expert guide through circuitous paths of graduate education. As a historian, Peter taught me how to be attentive to textual detail and sensitive to historical context while remaining open to philosophical questions. Patient and proactive in equal measure, Peter gave me the freedom to develop this project and the support to complete it. In his role as a member of my dissertation committee, Samuel Moyn encouraged me to think expansively about the substance and implications of my research. But Sam has played a much bigger part in my intellectual development: from the summer I spent as his research assistant more than ten years ago to the present day, he has never ceased to help and encourage me. With her candor and enthusiasm,

Elizabeth Lunbeck has buoyed my spirits more than once during this process. More important, she has continually inspired me to ask exciting, consequential questions of my sources and to think deeply about the answers I receive in return. As the external examiner of my dissertation,

Martin Jay offered invaluable suggestions and insights that will doubtless guide my future work.

I only hope that I can realize the promise he, Peter, Sam, and Liz see in this project.

Harvard University has been my intellectual and institutional home for seven years.

Within Harvard, I have been fortunate enough to be a member of two welcoming communities: the Department of History and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. Dan

Bertwell of the History Department and Aida Vidan, Elizabeth Johnson, and Anna Popiel of the

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Center for European Studies have my sincere thanks for sustaining these communities. My graduate education benefitted greatly from conversations with faculty in the History Department, especially Charles Maier, Mary D. Lewis, and David Armitage. Although they were not members of my dissertation committee, I hope that they recognize their influences on the project.

I learned a great deal from my peers—my friends—in the History Department and the Center for

European Studies: Sam Klug, John Gee, Charles Petersen, Mina Mitreva, Josh Ehrlich, Barnaby

Crowcroft, Liat Spiro, Leah Aronowsky, Tae-Yeoun Keum, Aphrodite Giovanopoulou, and

Brandon Bloch. Jamie McSpadden taught me much of what I know about being a German historian (and everything I know about playing German card games). Hannah Shepherd has been a constant friend, even across two different oceans. Jacob Abolafia has been there, to commiserate and to celebrate, for nearly a decade.

Several organizations provided the support to research and write this dissertation.

Preliminary research was conducted with multiple Department of History Travel and Research

Grants. Generous support from Krupp Foundation Dissertation Research Fellowship enabled me to conduct extensive archival research in Europe between September 2015 and November 2016.

During the past year, I have been supported by a Center for European Studies Dissertation

Completion Fellowship. I am grateful for these grants, which provided the time and freedom necessary to produce this dissertation. For assistance with the research itself, I would like to thank the staff of the Archivzentrum at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am

Main, the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Columbia University, the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archive at New York University, and the American Jewish Committee

Archives. Archivists at these collections helped me find my way through the thickets of material that constitute the evidence of this dissertation.

I have had multiple opportunities to present portions of this dissertation in various forms.

I delivered a paper containing arguments made in the introduction and conclusion at the 2016

Harvard European Philosophy Workshop. I presented material from a preliminary version of chapter 1 in a paper for the “Reading the Human Soul” seminar at the 2017 meeting of the

German Studies Association. I would like to thank the organizers of these forums: Jacob

Abolafia, Michael Rosen, Kelly Whitmer, and Simon Grote. At each event I gathered charitable critiques and thought-provoking suggestions that were invaluable as I worked on the dissertation.

Portions of chapters 4, 5, and 6 appear in my contribution to the forthcoming Blackwell

Companion to Adorno. By allowing me to contribute to their volume, Peter E. Gordon, Max

Pensky, and Espen Hammer provided a valuable opportunity for me to hone the central claims of the dissertation. A version of chapter 1 has been accepted for publication in Modern Intellectual

History; I am grateful to the journal’s anonymous reviewers, whose comments on my submission filtered back into the material from which it was drawn.

I have benefited from the support of so many people beyond the Harvard community.

The skills of textual analysis, critical thinking, and persuasive argumentation I learned from

Melissa Schwartzberg remain vital to my work. Ira Katznelson gave me my first taste of historical research. Emma Winter convinced me that “lumpers” can be as good at history as

“splitters.” Over the past year, this realization has been a source of both confidence and inspiration. Martin Ruehl showed me what it means to be an intellectual historian—and he helped me realize that I might want to become one. His expertise and enthusiasm were vital as I took my first steps in this field. Allon Brann helped me take it all a little less seriously, which helped me when things got serious. Although he never failed to take my point, Nishant Batsha encouraged me to reevaluate many of my assumptions. Samuel Cohen’s provocations left

indelible marks on my thinking; I hope that he does stop challenging me any time soon. Stuart

Middleton modeled the combination of intellectual rigor and human kindness to which I aspire.

None of this could have been accomplished without tremendous support from my family.

Although not family in a technical sense, Didi and Edward Gemdjian, Seta Nassif, and Armen

Artunian have given me encouragement—and sustenance—over the years. By always believing in me, Anna Martin and Jerry Lauer helped me believe in myself. Calm, cool, and collected, they have always given me strength. Through her combination of unalloyed honesty and unwavering confidence, Elizabeth Gemdjian made this project possible. She has debated every idea and read every word in this dissertation; her questions and critiques have strengthened it immeasurably.

She has my unending love and gratitude. Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank my parents. I have lost count of the number of times they have asked if they could help; I hope they know that, through their remarkable patience and inexhaustible love, they did far than anyone could have asked. They set me on the path that led to this point: my mother, Phyllis Martin, taught me to ask big questions; my father, Westley Clavey, showed me how to answer them.

INTRODUCTION BETWEEN EMPIRICAL SOCIAL SCIENCE AND CRITICAL SOCIAL THEORY

EXPERIMENTS IN THEORY

In June 1938, Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) presented Paul F. Lazarsfeld (1901-1976) with a 200-page memorandum on the subject of “Music in Radio.”1 Lazarsfeld, the director of an expansive, interdisciplinary study of radio broadcasting in the United States, had turned to

Adorno to provide a “European approach” to social research that would counterbalance the

American paradigm of social psychology. The Princeton Radio Research Project, as the study was known, was underwritten by the Rockefeller Foundation and aimed to discover the

“essential value” of the radio “for all types of listeners.”2 Lazarsfeld believed that Adorno’s

European approach could improve “the fact-finding […] by extensive preliminary theoretical thinking.”3 Moreover, Lazarsfeld hoped, Adorno’s theoretical insights would inject a much- needed “pessimistic attitude toward an instrument of technical progress.”4 Adorno accepted

Lazarsfeld’s offer, largely in order to relocate to the United States and to pursue work with his fellow émigré, Max Horkheimer (1895-1973). Adorno arrived at the Princeton Radio Research

Project in the spring of 1938 and set to work articulating his “European approach.”

1 Theodor W. Adorno, “Music in Radio,” June 28, 1938, Series I, Box 25, Folder 4, PFL Papers. Except where otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

2 See the original memorandum proposing what would become the Radio Project: Hadley Cantril, “The Essential Value of Radio to All Types of Listeners,” 1937, PFL Papers Series I, Box 26, Folder 7.

3 Quoted in Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 238.

4 Quoted in ibid.

The history of Adorno’s brief, tumultuous tenure at Lazarsfeld’s Princeton Radio

Research Project is well documented. Adorno, wary about Lazarsfeld and predisposed against his empirical methods, subjected the Radio Project to incisive critiques in a series of methodological memoranda, “Music in Radio” foremost among them. Efforts to reform radio-listening through social and human science, Adorno wrote, amounted to nothing less than “cheap Utopianism

[sic].”5 Unwilling or unable to comprehend Adorno’s incisive analysis of the philosophical dubiousness and ideological implications of positivist, empiricist social psychology, Lazarsfeld dismissed his colleague’s views out of hand. Lazarsfeld scrawled his objections in the margins of his copy of Adorno’s memorandum: “Idiotic!!!” “Culture Fetisch [sic]!” “How does he know this?” “This has nothing at all to do with the empirical situation.”6 Convinced that Adorno’s

“European approach” was incompatible with the Radio Project, Lazarsfeld and his supporters terminated Adorno’s employment in 1939. According to the officer of the Rockefeller

Foundation overseeing the Radio Project, it seemed that Adorno had “an axiom to grind.”7

Adorno did not bemoan his dismissal from the Radio Project. In fact, in 1940 he wrote to his close friend and longtime interlocutor, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), that he was “finally free of the Radio Project.”8

5 Adorno, “Music in Radio,” 136.

6 Ibid., 100, 103, 107, 108, et passim.

7 John Marshall, director of the Humanities Division at the Rockefeller Foundation, reportedly voiced this complaint to Lazarsfeld. Quoted in David Jenemann, Adorno in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 49.

8 See Adorno’s letter of February 29, 1940 in Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 322.

So strong was the emotional and intellectual charge of this encounter that it marked both

Adorno and Lazarsfeld for the remainder of their lives. In his 1969 memoirs, Lazarsfeld bemoaned the fact that “efforts to bring Adorno’s type of critical research into the communications field were a failure.”9 Adorno, in his contribution to the same collection, recalled feeling as alienated as a character in a Kafka novel by his experiences at the Radio

Project. When “confronted with the demand to ‘measure culture,’” Adorno wrote, “I reflected that culture might be precisely the condition that excludes a mentality capable of measurement.”

“I felt a strong inner resistance to meeting this demand by turning myself inside out.”10

This disjunction was more than merely personal. Late in his career, Adorno became an inveterate critic of “empirical research” in all its forms. In 1957, Adorno asserted that the empirical approach “is likely to both fetishize the object [of social research] and to degenerate into a fetish.”11 A decade later, during the intellectual and political upheavals of 1968, Adorno emphasized the normative implications of empirical research. Empirical research, he told students in his introductory course on sociology, elevated instrumental reason and subtended technocratic administration. Students “trying to discover a new form for their autonomy in a reified world, and are rebelling against the reification of the world and of consciousness ought also to direct their rebellion intellectually against the reified forms of consciousness which are

9 Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir,” in The Intellectual Migration. Europe and America, 1930-1960, ed. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), 324.

10 Theodor W. Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” in The Intellectual Migration. Europe and America, 1930-1960, ed. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, trans. Donald Fleming (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), 344, 347.

11 Theodor W. Adorno, “Sociology and Empirical Research,” in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor, trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 179.

imposed on them by current scholarship, especially by the social sciences.”12 Lazarsfeld’s attenuated response to his encounter with Adorno took a different form. From the mid-1940s onwards, Lazarsfeld joined a cohort of American social thinkers who castigated “European” theories of “mass society” as fundamentally incorrect and needlessly pessimistic. As revealed in his groundbreaking study Personal Influence (1955), Lazarsfeld came to reject the very paradigm he had hired Adorno to create.13

On the back of one page of “Music in Radio,” Lazarsfeld scribbled a sarcastic note to himself: “Never visit Institut.”14 The Institut of which Lazarsfeld spoke was the Institute for

Social Research, sometimes referred to as the “Frankfurt School.”15 Under the decades-long leadership of Horkheimer, affiliates of the Institute elaborated an inimitable “critical theory” of

12 Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, ed. Christoph Gödde, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 77.

13 Elihu Katz and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communication (New York: Free Press, 1955), chap. 1. Other thinkers involved in this transformation, who influenced Lazarsfeld, were Edward Shils and Daniel Bell. For the outsized role of Lazarsfeld’s study in shaping the disciplinary memory of communications research, see Jefferson Pooley, “Fifteen Pages That Shook the Field: Personal Influence, Edward Shils, and the Remembered History of Mass Communication Research,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 608, no. 1 (2006): 130–56, https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716206292460; cf. Gertrude J. Robinson, “The Katz/Lowenthal Encounter: An Episode in the Creation of Personal Influence,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 608 (2006): 76–96.

14 Adorno, “Music in Radio,” 113a.

15 On the creation of a “Frankfurt School” from the Institute itself, see Clemens Albrecht, “Wie die IfS zur Frankfurter Schule wurde,” in Die intellektuelle Gründung der Bundesrepublik: eine Wirkungsgeschichte der Frankfurter Schule, ed. Clemens Albrecht (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus Verlag, 1999), 169–88. It should be noted that, although many of the figures I discuss in this dissertation were either members or affiliates of the Institute for Social Research, they could not, properly speaking, be referred to as participants in the Frankfurt School. Exceptions to this general point include Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Franz Neumann, Friedrich Pollock, and Leo Lowenthal. Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse occupy a more nebulous status—although they were central to the Institute for much of the period under discussion in this dissertation and contributed to the development of the critical theory associated with the Frankfurt School, they ultimately separated from it. I am grateful to Marin Jay for pointing out my lack of precision in this matter; I hope to remedy it in future iterations of this research. Moreover, I aim to trace how the emergence of the “Frankfurt School” interacted with the Institute’s reconsideration of its empirical-research program.

late-stage capitalism and its attendant cultural artifacts and social institutions. Although difficult to define in advance, critical theory might be understood as a social-theoretical discourse and practice that arose in response to the revival of Hegelianized Marxism and irrationalist

Lebensphilosophie in the first decades of the twentieth century. Critical theory examined social- scientific knowledge and philosophical arguments through a rigorously dialectical method of immanent critique in which conceptions of truth, morality, and rationality were examined according to their own criteria and standards—not in order to crudely relativize or nihilistically debunk them but to better pursue the goal of human emancipation.16

Lazarsfeld’s self-imposed injunction to avoid the Institute has resonated in the disciplinary memory and historiography of twentieth-century European intellectual history.

Although few scholars have cited it directly, Lazarsfeld’s declaration echoes a widespread perception of a conceptual discomfiture between empirical social research and critical social theory. According to the prevailing understanding, the Institute was highly critical of “modern empirical methods” that embodied the “instrumental reason” in the social sciences in opposition to which critical theory established itself and against which it struggled. In the words of David

Jenemann, critical theory “embraced and celebrated” a modernist subjectivity that “utterly resists” the “logic of a social science that reduces human qualities to data points.”17 Scholars readily acknowledge that the Institute conducted empirical research projects from its founding in

1923 onwards, especially during its members’ decade-and-a-half-long exile in the United States between 1933 and 1949. According to the dominant narrative, a narrative encapsulated in the

16 Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973), chap. 2; David C. Hoy and Thomas McCarthy, Critical Theory (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1994), chap. 1.

17 Jenemann, Adorno in America, 6.

story of the Lazarsfeld-Adorno dispute, Institute members undertook these somewhat reluctantly and largely for ulterior motives.18

But the historical record is more complicated than this narrative suggests. Across his career after his encounter with Lazarsfeld, Adorno returned again and again to empirical social research. During the 1940s, he contributed to and oversaw innovative projects on the psychological origins and social consequences of anti-Semitic prejudice and authoritarian ideology. In the early-1950s, Adorno participated in the Institute’s ambitious study of lingering affinities for National Socialism among the German populace. Through these studies, Adorno helped to develop conceptual tools for the quantification, measurement, and categorization of social forces, psychological disposition, and cultural artifacts.19 Moreover, archival evidence and correspondence suggest that Adorno was no grudging participant in this work but rather an enthusiastic contributor to it: in 1944, he went so far as to call the “work of translating” a theory of anti-Semitism into a questionnaire for an empirical study of prejudice “a lot of fun.”20 More important, Adorno acknowledged the technocratic and administrative role of such research, arguing, for example, that empirical studies of public opinion would be of signal importance to the creation of a democratic Germany in the wake of the Second World War.21

18 I discuss this scholarship further in the second section of this introduction.

19 I have drawn my understanding of “tools” in this sense from Joel Isaac, “Tool Shock: Technique and Epistemology in the Postwar Social Sciences,” History of Political Economy 42, no. 1 (January 1, 2010): 133–64, https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-2009-075.

20 Adorno to Horkheimer, 11 November 1944, in Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer; Briefwechsel 1927-1969, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 345–49, at 347. For ease of reference, I have, when possible, cited correspondence in its published form.

21 Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2009), 337– 38; cf. Anna Parkinson, “Adorno on the Airwaves: Feeling Reason, Educating Emotions,” German Politics & Society 32, no. 1 (2014): 43–59.

The same can be said about Horkheimer. In the essays comprising his seminal works

Dawn and Decline (1934) and Eclipse of Reason (1947), Horkheimer warned against the instrumental rationality embedded in empirical research. But in unpublished fragments and notes from the same period, Horkheimer struck a more elegiac tone, lamenting empirical researchers’ neglect of the philosophical dimension of social science.22 Indeed, Horkheimer formulated this emphasis on empirical research in his earliest methodological and programmatic writings.

Although contemporary social research had gone too far in its reliance upon empirical methods, he held, critical theory must not respond by abandoning such techniques altogether, for

“[d]ialectic, too, notes empirical material with the greatest care.”23 As he explained in his inaugural address as Director of the Institute in January 1931:

[T]he question today is to organize investigations stimulated by contemporary philosophical problems in which philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians, and psychologists are brought together in permanent collaboration to undertake in common that which can be carried out individually in the laboratory in other fields. In short, the task is to do what all true researchers have always done: Namely, to pursue their larger philosophical questions on the basis of the most precise scientific methods, to revise and refine their questions in the course of their substantive work, and to develop new methods without losing sight of the larger context. With this approach, no yes-or-no answers arise to the philosophical questions. Instead, these questions themselves become integrated into the empirical research process; their answers lie in the advance of objective knowledge, which itself affects the form of the questions.24

22 See, e.g., Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), chap. 2. For Horkheimer’s more subdued view, see Max Horkheimer, “Debatte über Methoden der Sozialwissenschaften, besonders die Auffassung der Methode der Sozialwissenschaften, welche das Institut vertritt,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 12 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1985), viz., 552.

23 Max Horkheimer, “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics,” in Critical Theory. Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (New York: Continuum, 1972), 161; cf. “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory. Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (New York: Continuum, 1972), 188–243.

24 Max Horkheimer, “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research,” in Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings, trans. G. Frederick Hunter, Matthew S. Kramer, and John Torpey (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993), 9–10.

Horkheimer soon put this method into practice. In 1930, Erich Fromm (1900-1980) and Hilde

Weiss (1900-1980) had begun a study of the psychological foundations of Germans’ political views using data gathered from more than 3,300 surveys.25 Later in the decade, Horkheimer and

Friedrich Pollock (1894-1970) oversaw a team of international researchers in the sprawling study of the nuclear family that would become Authority and the Family (1936). In the 1940s,

Horkheimer commissioned a study that asked similar questions about the effect of the Great

Depression on patriarchal authority in the United States.26 Over the course of the next decade,

Horkheimer oversaw the multiple studies that comprised the Institute’s numerous studies of anti-

Semitism and authoritarianism. Like Adorno, Horkheimer both conducted and critiqued empirical social science across his career.

Thinkers need not be either consistent or coherent.27 Historians would err in assuming that Horkheimer, Adorno, and their colleagues ought to have had a settled view of the relationship between empirical research and critical theory over their long careers. Yet, the discrepancy between the Institute researchers’ frequent criticisms of empirical methods and their manifest use of these techniques suggests that empirical social science and critical social theory were not anathema to one another but were bound together. Indeed, as will become clear, the

Institute’s empirical social science and critical social theory were connected dialectically. In miniature, this dialectic mirrored that embraced and pursued by Marxists across interwar Europe:

25 For an introduction to Fromm and Weiss’ study, see Wolfgang Bonss, “Critical Theory and Empirical Social Research: Some Observations,” in The Working Class in Weimar Germany: A Psychological and Sociological Study, by Erich Fromm, ed. Wolfgang Bonss (Leamington Spa: Berg Publishers, 1984), 1–38.

26 Mirra Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family: The Effect of Unemployment Upon the Status of the Man in Fifty-Nine Families. (New York: The Dryden Press for the Institute of Social Research, 1940).

27 For a description of this error and a discussion of its implications, see Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1969): 3–53, https://doi.org/10.2307/2504188.

the dialectic between theory and practice. To be sure, the Institute neither attempted nor accomplished a positive reconciliation of theory and practice in this sense—a sublation of critical thought and empirical research. Rather, the dialectic between social theory and science remained unfinished, open, and, perhaps, negative; it was a fragile constellation maintained through and for the purposes of the critique of the given.28

Signs of the mutual imbrication of critical social theory and empirical social research appear even in episodes that seem to embody their insuperable disjunction. In “Music in Radio,”

Adorno trained the full power of his critical thought on the target of empirical social psychology.

And yet, Adorno did not countenance the abandonment of this methodology. Instead, Adorno called for the creation of a new paradigm, an approach that would design and conduct

“experiment[s] in theory” that interwove theoretical critique and empirical research.29 In this dissertation, I describe the origins, evolution, and implementation of these experiments in theory.

HISTORIES OF CRITICAL THEORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE

The Institute for Social Research and its critical theory have attracted scholarly interest for nearly fifty years. During these decades, scholars of history, political science, sociology, and literary and media studies have amply documented the Institute’s combination of Marxist political economy, Hegelian philosophy, and Freudian psychoanalysis into an inimitable account of the structures, forces, and subjectivities of late-modern capitalism. But these same scholars have paid comparatively less attention to the origins, development, and implications of empirical

28 I am grateful to Peter E. Gordon for suggesting that I frame the broader connection between the Institute’s empirical social research and critical social theory in these terms. As I note in the conclusion, more work is required in order to explore the many implications of this framework fully. 29 Adorno, “Music in Radio,” 2, 139, 146–48.

research projects within the developing discourse of critical theory. No comprehensive study of the social-psychological experiments, quantitative public-opinion surveys, and cultural- anthropological observations the Institute conducted in its first decade has been undertaken.

This is not to say that the Institute’s empirical projects have been entirely neglected.

Rather, scholars have tended to focus on individual studies in isolation, excluding other projects and overlooking the ideas and practices that bound them together. In his study of the epistemological practices and social organization of knowledge-production in the Institute, for example, Helmut Dubiel developed a perspicacious interpretation of the Institute’s earliest empirical project—a social-psychological study of working-class Germans’ political views—but neglected later instances of similar research.30 In his canonical history of the Institute, Martin Jay has devoted considerable attention to the researchers’ study of the “fascist character” and

“authoritarian personality” but not to their equally ambitious empirical research into the anti-

Semitic prejudices of American labor.31

Although penetrating in their analysis, these accounts are narrow in their focus. As a result, they sometimes misconstrue the relation among the empirical projects themselves and between the Institute’s social research and social theory. Empirical research was not an

30 Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). One notable exception to this approach is Wolfgang Bonss. Although Bonss did not, in his introduction to one of the Institute’s first empirical studies, draw connections between pre- and post-emigration projects, he took a more comprehensive view in a later monograph. Bonss’ intention is to situate the Institute’s empirical studies within—and without—the framework of “monographical sociology” dominant during the Weimar Republic. See Wolfgang Bonss, Die Einübung des Tatsachenblicks: zur Struktur und Veränderung empirischer Sozialforschung (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1982), chap. 5; cf. Bonss’ introduction in Erich Fromm, Arbeiter und Angestellte am Vorabend des Dritten Reiches: eine sozialpsychologische Untersuchung (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980), 1–46.

31 According to Jay, the anti-Semitism study was “an important testing ground” for the authoritarianism project. See Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 226; cf. “The Frankfurt School in Exile,” in Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 28–61.

occasional undertaking, pursued only infrequently and under external pressure, but an ongoing continuous undertaking pursued alongside critical theory. Conversely, scholars seeking correct the neglect of these studies they perceive sometimes overcompensate. For example, in his analysis of the Institute’s anti-Semitism study Mark Worell claims that the project was the most important work of twentieth-century Marxist sociology.32 Although remarkable in many ways, the Institute’s study of anti-Semitism was hardly the most significant work of Marxist sociology.

Indeed, the study can only be understood in comparison with other such studies and in conversation with the theory that developed with and through it. Simply put,

I aim to restore the balance between empirical social research and critical social theory in the history of the Institute by taking as expansive a view as possible.

Much existing scholarship on the Institute attempts to explain the Institute’s pursuit of empirical methods and studies as a result of external necessity or influence. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, such explanations have the effect of diminishing the importance of the Institute’s studies. In his sweeping history of the Frankfurt School, for example, Rolf

Wiggershaus argues that the Institute undertook its empirical study of anti-Semitism to bolster its

32 Mark Worrell, Dialectic of Solidarity: Labor, Antisemitism, and the Frankfurt School (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 11; cf “Signifying the Jew: Antisemitic Workers and Jewish Stereotypes During World War II,” in No Social Science without Critical Theory, ed. Harry Dahms, Current Perspectives in Social Theory 25 (Bingley: Emerald, 2008), 193– 231, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0278-1204(08)00006-6; “Es Kommt Die Nacht: Paul Massing, the Frankfurt School, and the Question of Labor Authoritarianism during World War II,” Critical Sociology 35, no. 5 (September 2009): 629–35; Kevin S. Amidon and Mark P. Worrell, “A. R. L. Gurland, the Frankfurt School, and the Critical Theory of Antisemitism,” Telos, no. 144 (Fall 2008): 129–47. It is worth noting that Worrell is not a historian but a sociologist. Other sociologists have also attempted to revive the Institute’s last major empirical study—of postwar German public opinion—in order to apply its methods to contemporary research. Like Worrell, these scholars have been selective in their presentation and contextualization of the study—albeit without such dramatic conclusions about the overall value of the Institute’s work. See Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin, “Introduction. Guilt and Defense: Theodor Adorno and the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar German Society,” in Guilt and Defense: On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar Germany, ed. Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 3–44; “Translators’ Introduction,” in Group Experiment and Other Writings. The Frankfurt School on Public Opinion in Postwar Germany, ed. Andrew J. Perrin and Jeffrey K. Olick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), xv–xli; Jack Jacobs, The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), chaps. 1, 2.

scholarly reputation and to satisfy its material needs.33 Likewise, Thomas Wheatland has argued that, during its exile in the United States, the Institute modified its views on and uses of empirical research methods in order to secure financial support.34 To be sure, it is salutary to recall the importance of status and monies to institutional production of knowledge. But such interpretations can become misprisions. Susan Buck-Morss, for instance, has argued that the empirical methods of the Institute’s study of the “authoritarian personality” was nothing more than a feint, “allowing qualitative, philosophical speculation to get past the quantitative, positivistic censorship of the social science establishment.”35 Other scholars share aspects of this view, according to which the Institute’s empirical research was either a cover for or a distraction from critical theory. Wiggershaus, for example, has described the Institute’s empirical work as a

“protective screen” behind which the Institute secreted its “formal theory.”36 Likewise, although less polemically, Stefan Müller-Doohm has claimed that the Institute’s study of the

“authoritarian personality” is correctly understood as a “continuation” of critical theory “by other means.”37

While I do not deny the importance of material concerns and reputational pressures on the Institute’s research program, I complicate these interpretations. To be fully convincing, claims like those made by Wheatland require evidence of change. In this case, the Institute had to

33 Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, chaps. 4–5.

34 Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), chaps. 1, 5–6.

35 Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno’s Debt to Walter Benjamin (New York: Free Press, 1977), 178.

36 Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 151.

37 Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 310.

turn to empirical research from other activities. By documenting the consistency of the Institute’s empirical research program, I question the existence of such a change. More broadly, I interrogate the logic at work in this scholarship by showing that critical theory and empirical research were not clearly defined alternatives pursued independently but elements of a single, coherent-but-variegated program of research into the forces and forms of capitalist modernity.38

To be sure, my account is preliminary and provisional. My chief aim is to motivate my fellow historians to examine the Institute’s empirical projects with the same rigor and tenacity that they have studied its critical theory.

Why have the Institute’s empirical methods and projects attracted comparatively little attention? Detlev Claussen has argued that Adorno’s late-in-life critique of empirical research was an explicit attempt to obscure his repeated “failures” to resolve the “tension between theory and empirical knowledge.”39 If Claussen is correct, Adorno succeeded in crafting a misdirection that has affected generations of intellectual historians. Adapting an interpretation developed by

Jefferson Pooley in a related context, it might be suggested that Adorno’s efforts affected the disciplinary memory of critical theory.40 Indeed, Wheatland has suggested that the relative neglect of the Institute’s empirical research follows from the initial reception, interpretation, and

38 In this sense, my dissertation accords with Oskar Negt’s interpretation of Adorno’s understanding of “experience” and the connection of this concept to Adorno’s empirical sociology—an interpretation that enables Negt to argue that empirical research formed the linchpin of Adorno’s philosophical program. Negt’s essay on this subject is significant exception to the preponderance of existing scholarship. See Oskar Negt, “Geboren aus der Not des philosophischen Begreifens. Zum Empiriebegriff Adornos,” in Keine Kritische Theorie ohne Amerika, ed. Detlev Claussen, Oskar Negt, and Michael Werz (Frankfurt a. M.: Neue Kritik, 1999), 12–39.

39 Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 183–85; cf. “Intellectual Transfer: Theodor W. Adorno’s American Experience,” New German Critique, no. 97 (2006): 5–14.

40 Pooley, “Fifteen Pages That Shook the Field: Personal Influence, Edward Shils, and the Remembered History of Mass Communication Research.”

dissemination of critical theory among the intellectuals and academics of the New Left.

According to Wheatland, the members of the “disintegrating student movement” attracted to critical theory in the late-1960s and early-1970s found in Adorno’s excoriation of empirical social science “nourishment” for their own struggles against the academic institutions and technocratic bureaucracies in which “functionalist” and “empiricist” research took place.41

Although this claim seems intuitively persuasive, it requires systematic survey of journals such as Telos, New German Critique, and New Left Review to be endorsed fully.42 It is clear, however, that many scholars of the Institute have adopted Adorno’s late characterizations of empirical research uncritically, despite the fact—as Claussen has warned—that this reliance runs counter to the critique of biographical material developed in critical theory.43 Although it makes use of the wealth of autobiographical evidence arising from interviews, essays, and oral histories, this dissertation remains attentive to the motives and intentions embodied in this material.

Adorno wove a dark view of the United States into his late critique of social science. In

America, Adorno wrote, he had been relegated to the status of “technical worker” in the factory

41 Thomas Wheatland, “Not-Such-Odd Couples: Paul Lazarsfeld and the Horkheimer Circle on Morningside Heights,” in Exile, Science, and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of German Emigre Intellectuals, ed. David Kettler and Gerhard Lauer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 170; The Frankfurt School in Exile, chap. 8. For an overview of the developments to which Wheatland refers, see Joel Isaac, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), chap. 5.

42 A cursory examination of publications in Telos, for example, suggests that, in the late-1960s, its authors were more interested in the phenomenological Marxism developed by Enzo Paci, Antonio Banfi, and Paul Piccone than in Marcuse, Adorno, and Horkheimer. Engagement with Paci led the young American academics writing in Telos to investigate the dialectical relationship between empirical research and theory in the philosophy of science rather than in sociology.

43 Claussen, One Last Genius, 8–9, 178, 181, 187, et passim. See Leo Lowenthal, “The Biographical Passion” in Literature, Popular Culture, and Society (Palo Alto: Pacific Books, 1968), chap. 5; but cf. Leo Lowenthal and Martin Jay, An Unmastered Past: The Autobiographical Reflections of Leo Lowenthal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). For a further discussion of this tendency and its implications, see the introduction to chapter 3 of this dissertation.

of social-scientific knowledge-production.44 According to Adorno, American researchers’ commitment to quantification and measurement was inextricable from the standardization pervading American society, where “everywhere looks the same.”45 For the late Adorno, empirical social science was an eminently “American” discipline in contradistinction to the thoroughly “European” body of social theory. Recent scholarship has persuasively argued, however, that these often-asserted distinctions between “American” and “European” thought must be analyzed as historical constructions.46 I document the creation of one iteration of this distinction. Further, I describe its theoretical and rhetorical uses by members of the Institute.

These studies, in turn, build upon an established literature documenting the period of

“Atlantic crossings” that began in the 1870s and lasted through the 1940s. During these decades,

America and Europe drew closer to one another structurally and intellectually; thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic came to understand themselves as engaged in the pursuit of common political and philosophical goals.47 I explicitly follow this line of argument by demonstrating that the Institute’s experiments in theory arose from and contributed to the “via media” created by

44 Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” 344. Adorno’s description alludes to the figure of Karl Roßmann, the hero of Franz Kafka’s Amerika, who finds himself alienated and degraded while searching for work in the United States. See the fragment entitled, “On a street corner Karl saw…” in Franz Kafka, Amerika: The Missing Person, trans. Mark Harman (New York: Schocken Books, 2008), 267–87.

45 Quoted in Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 243.

46 See, inter alia, Joel Isaac, “Donald Davidson and the Analytic Revolution in American Philosophy, 1940–1970,” The Historical Journal 56, no. 03 (September 2013): 757–79, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X13000095; Gabriel R. Ricci, “Importing Phenomenology: The Early Editorial Life of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,” History of European Ideas 42, no. 3 (April 2, 2016): 399–411, https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2015.1118330; Jonathan Strassfeld, “American Divide: The Making of ‘Continental’ Philosophy,” Modern Intellectual History, December 2018, 1–34, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244318000513.

47 See, inter alia, James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998); Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

transatlantic thinkers. Recovering the Institute’s combination of empirical social research and critical social theory demonstrates the increasing intellectual proximity of European and

American intellectuals. Moreover, it reconstructs an intellectual process through which this alignment arose.48

While my focus is not the American reception of the Institute, recent scholarship on the adaptation of European thought by American scholars, intellectuals, policymakers, and readers has demonstrated the tremendous value of reception histories.49 Studies of the American interpretation of critical theory by American thinkers are as old as the Institute itself.50 In his recent history of the Institute in America, Wheatland illuminated the previously opaque reception of critical theory by the Deweyan pragmatists, the “New York Intellectuals,” and the 1960s counterculture. But Wheatland’s study of the “reception, assimilation, and contestation” of critical theory rests on the logic of opposition characteristic of much scholarship on the Institute.

According to Wheatland:

Thanks to the efforts of the Horkheimer Circle and many other European sociologists that also participated in this transatlantic effort, American sociology generally became more accepting of social theory and more specifically embraced Freudian psychoanalysis and other theoretical tools that had been fashioned on the Continent. German sociology, however, was even more profoundly changed.

48 Earlier attempts to write such a transatlantic history of intellectual migration—and of the Institute in particular— have inadvertently reinforced the view of the United States as a radical shock to European émigrés’ sensibilities and thought. See, e.g., the essays in Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, eds., The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969); H. Stuart Hughes, The Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought, 1930-1965, McGraw-Hill Paperback (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), chap. 4; Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America, from the 1930s to the Present (New York: Viking Press, 1983).

49 See, inter alia, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Udi Greenberg, The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014); Johannes von Moltke, The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016).

50 For a survey of such efforts, see the texts discussed in Martin Jay, “Adorno in America,” New German Critique, no. 31 (1984): 157–82, https://doi.org/10.2307/487894.

Although the Horkheimer Circle remained deeply committed to social philosophy, one of the chief tasks that it accomplished in postwar Germany was the introduction of American research methods.51

For Wheatland, the history of the Frankfurt School in the United States is the story of the encounter between “American research methods” and European “social theory.”52 Put differently, Wheatland deploys interpretive categories which must themselves be submitted to historical analysis. By so doing, he circumscribes the possibilities for American social theory and

European social research. To be sure, neither Wheatland nor those making similar arguments would deny perforce the existence of American theory and European research, but their accounts are so configured as to imply the exceptionality of these instances.

Historians of European social science and American social theory might object to this characterization.53 I go further, attempting to demonstrate the existence of a unitary, but multifaceted, discourse of social-scientific arguments, theories, evidence, and methodologies shared by researchers on both sides of the Atlantic. By so doing, I document the inception and reinforcement of midcentury intellectuals’ distinction between “American” social science and

51 Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile, xx.

52 Anthony Heilbut, albeit with a distinctly negative appraisal, concurred. “[A]s social research became an émigré specialty,” he wrote of the Institute affiliates, “the refugees found themselves employing methods developed in Europe to interpret uniquely American phenomena." Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 120.

53 The best introduction to early twentieth-century German social science remains Susanne P. Schad-Somers, Empirical Social Research in Weimar-Germany (The Hague: Mouton, 1972). For more comprehensive treatments of the rise of social-scientific thinking in Europe see Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), chap. 6; “Lawless Society: Social Science and the Reinterpretation of Statistics in Germany, 1850-1880,” in The Probabilistic Revolution: Ideas in the Sciences, ed. Lorenz Krüger, Gerd Gigerenzer, and Mary S. Morgan, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), 350–75; Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), chap. 6; Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance, Ideas in Context (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chap. 21; Alain Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning, trans. Camille Naish (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), chap. 6; Jason D. Hansen, Mapping the Germans: Statistical Science, Cartography, and the Visualization of the German Nation, 1848-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), chap. 1.

“European” social theory and—counterintuitively—the genesis of the argument that these opposites must be reconciled.

Writing a history of the Institute that reconsiders the its empirical methods and studies will complicate existing conceptions of the origin and development of critical theory. Although this dissertation is but a preliminary effort to write this larger history, several of these as-yet- unrealized complications can be discerned. First, this history shifts the relative balance among the many texts the Institute produced between 1930 and 1950. As Jay and Claussen have correctly noted, Adorno was known to his postwar interlocutors not as the coauthor of the highly speculative mediation on Western rationality, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), but as a collaborator to the thoroughly empirical social-psychological study, The Authoritarian

Personality (1950).54 Focusing on the Institute’s empirical studies, I necessarily reemphasize The

Authoritarian Personality in relation to Dialectic of Enlightenment. Concomitantly I elevate the importance of other empirical studies—and, in the case of texts such as Authority and the

Family, the significance of empirical portions within projects—vis-à-vis theoretical writings. By so doing, I approximate the conception of the Institute held by its contemporaries.

Second, I bring to the fore members, affiliates, and fellow-travelers of the Institute who have received less attention that Horkheimer, Marcuse, Benjamin, and Adorno. The relative neglect of the Institute’s empirical studies has contributed to the gradual disappearance from scholarship of those researchers—including Arcadius (A.R.L.) Gurland (1904-1979), Paul

Massing (1902-1979), and Franz Neumann (1900-1954)—whose studies in political economy,

54 Jay, “Positive and Negative Totalities,” 1985, 41; Claussen, One Last Genius, 201, 212–13. On the popularity of The Authoritarian Personality among social scientists, see Franz Samelson, “The Authoritarian Character from Berlin to Berkeley and Beyond: The Odyssey of a Problem,” in Strength and Weakness: The Authoritarian Personality Today, ed. William F. Stone, Gerda Lederer, and Richard Christie (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1993), 22–43.

law, and social psychology were eccentric to the work of critical theory as it is now understood.

Massing himself referred to this group as the “dispersed forces” of the Institute; Worrell has named them the “other Frankfurt School.”55 I call attention to figures peripheral even to these accounts: Lazarsfeld, Weiss, Käthe Leichter (1895-1942), and Mirra Komarovsky (1905-1999).

Described in the Institute archives and publications as “research assistants,” many of these figures have yet to attract scholarly attention. Bonss, for example, has claimed that Weiss was almost entirely responsible for conducing the Institute’s early-1930s study of German workers but did not venture beyond describing her as Fromm’s “assistant.”56 Across the following chapters, I foreground the innovative methods Weiss, Leichter, Komarovsky, and others contributed to the Institute’s empirical studies.

Returning attention to these thinkers in the Institute’s orbit contributes to a more complete and nuanced understanding of the history of the Institute. Moreover, it invites scholars to consider the work of contemporary critical theorists—such as Oskar Negt (b. 1934), whose empirical studies have been obscured by Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929), whose works more directly continue the tradition of Horkheimer and Adorno.57 Concomitantly, I turn scholarly attention to a number of thinkers, who contributed, directly and indirectly, to the construction of critical theory through their participation in or contestation of the Institute’s empirical studies: Karl Bühler

55 Mark P. Worrell, “The Other Frankfurt School,” Fast Capitalism 2, no. 1 (2006), http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/2_1/worrell.html. Worrell quotes Massing in his conclusion. On Gurland, see Amidon and Worrell, “A. R. L. Gurland, the Frankfurt School, and the Critical Theory of Antisemitism.”

56 Bonss, “Critical Theory and Empirical Social Research,” 1.

57 See, inter alia, Oskar Negt, Lebendige Arbeit, enteignete Zeit: politische und kulturelle Dimensionen des Kampfes um die Arbeitszeit (Campus, 1984); Die Herausforderung der Gewerkschaften: Plädoyers für die Erweiterung ihres politischen und kulturellen Mandats (Campus, 1989). Negt has also written on the manifestations of empirical research in Adorno’s corpus. See Negt, “Geboren aus der Not des philosophischen Begreifens. Zum Empiriebegriff Adornos.”

(1879-1963), Charlotte Bühler (1893-1974), L. L. Thurstone (1887-1955), Henry A. Murray

(1893-1988), Paul F. Lazarsfeld (1901-1976), Harold Lasswell (1902-1978), Heinz Hartmann

(1894-1970), Margaret Mead (1901-1978), Edward Shils (1910-1995), Rudolf Arnheim (1904-

2007), Erik Erikson (1902-1994), Ernst Simmel (1882-1947), Else Frenkel-Brunswik (1908-

1958), R. Nevitt Sanford (1909-1996), and Daniel Bell (1919-2011), among others.58 By so doing, I aim to expand the variety of figures populating histories of twentieth-century Germany.

To make progress towards this goal, I devote much of the dissertation to reconstructing

Lazarsfeld’s career and engagement with the Institute. This reliance on Lazarsfeld is both a strength and, as I describe in the conclusion of the dissertation, a shortcoming of the dissertation.

On the one hand, tracing the history of the Institute’s experiments in theory through the figure of

Lazarsfeld structures the narrative I tell. As other historians of interwar social research have noted, “[i]n a region and period marked by dramatic ruptures and discontinuities, biography can be a particularly useful tool for uncovering scientific histories against the grain.”59 Indeed,

Lazarsfeld described himself, with evident pride, as a “connection cog” between the worlds of

European and American social research.60 As I will make clear in subsequent chapters,

Lazarsfeld brought together key thinkers and ideas across these midcentury decades.

Additionally, Lazarsfeld has attracted more scholarly attention than many of the other figures in

58 Of these thinkers, Lazarsfeld has attracted the most attention from scholars of critical theory. In the main, this attention has been negative: Lazarsfeld has been characterized—not least by Adorno himself—as a technocratic, positivistic researcher who compelled the Institute to conform to the standards of American social science. This scholarship is discussed more fully below and in the introduction to chapters 1 and 3 of the dissertation. Wheatland, however, has recently tried to restore Lazarsfeld to his proper place as an interlocutor of the Frankfurt School. See Wheatland, “Lazarsfeld and the Horkheimer Circle on Morningside Heights.”

59 Katherine Lebow, Małgorzata Mazurek, and Joanna Wawrzyniak, “Making Modern Social Science: The Global Imagination in East Central and Southeastern Europe after Versailles,” Contemporary European History 27, no. 4 (January 2019): 4, https://doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0960777318000474.

60 Lazarsfeld, “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir,” 271.

this dissertation—no doubt because of his long-running dispute with Adorno. Through my account of the history of midcentury social research “against the grain,” I complicate much of this literature, which is largely concerned with Lazarsfeld’s role as an “institution man” who created jobs and secured funding for émigré scholars.61 Throughout the chapters of the dissertation, I recover the incisive quality and striking variety of Lazarsfeld’s methodological thought. On the other hand, concentrating on Lazarsfeld sometimes obscures the same voices and ideas I seek to introduce to the history of the Institute. If the dissertation is a promissory note in any sense, then it is this one. In future iterations of the project, I hope to amplify the voices that remain far too faint in this manuscript.

Third, and relatedly, I join recent scholarship that discerns new connections between critical theory and other discourses and practices often considered antithetical to the Frankfurt

School, including positivism, empiricism, Austro-Marxism, behaviorism, anthropology, and even existentialism.62 As Adorno’s unpublished remarks on The Authoritarian Personality suggest, evidence of these connections surprised members of the Institute.63 Critical theory has long been a cornerstone—as a set of arguments, a collection of techniques, and a conceptual paradigm—for

61 See, especially, David E. Morrison, “Kultur and Culture: The Case of Theodor W. Adorno and Paul F. Lazarsfeld,” Social Research 45, no. 2 (1978): 331–55; Wheatland, “Lazarsfeld and the Horkheimer Circle on Morningside Heights”; Claussen, One Last Genius, 176–219; Christian Fleck, A Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences: Robber Barons, the Third Reich and the Invention of Empirical Social Research (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011), 165–220. For Lazarsfeld’s description of himself as an “institution man,” see Lazarsfeld, “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir,” 302.

62 See, e.g., Thomas Wheatland, “Critical Theory on Morningside Heights: From Frankfurt Mandarins to Columbia Sociologists,” German Politics & Society 22, no. 4 (2004): 57–87; J. Jesse Ramírez, “Marcuse Among the Technocrats: America, Automation, and Postcapitalist Utopias, 1900-1941,” Amerikastudien/American Studies, 2012, 31–50; Thomas Uebel, Empiricism at the Crossroads: The Vienna Circle’s Protocol-Sentence Debate Revisited (Open Court, 2015); Nick Dorzweiler, “Frankfurt Meets Chicago: Collaborations between the Institute for Social Research and Harold Lasswell, 1933–1941,” Polity 47, no. 3 (2015): 352–75; Peter E. Gordon, Adorno and Existence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

63 Theodor W. Adorno, “Remarks on ‘The Authoritarian Personality’ by Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, Sanford.,” 1948, 22, MHA, Box VI, File 1D.

disciplines across the humanities and “soft” social sciences. Scholars in fields as diverse as human geography and literary studies have deployed the insights and methods of critical theory in their respective fields.64 What opportunities for interdisciplinary research might a reconsideration of the Institute’s empirical studies reveal?65

Ultimately, evaluations of the utility of the empirical methods developed by the Institute lie beyond the scope of this study. With increasing frequency, however, sociologists have turned to the Institute’s empirical studies to find methodological and argumentative resources for the study of contemporary social problems. For example, Worrell contends that the method developed in the Institute’s study of anti-Semitism among American workers has the potential to overturn century-old views about the extent and depth of proletarian revolutionary consciousness.66 Andrew Perrin and Jeffrey Olick likewise maintain that the Institute’s method of studying public opinion provides an important corrective to the pervasive assumption that surveys are neutral tools for surveying existing attitudes.67 Müller-Doohm—although not a sociologist—suggests that Adorno’s empirical research “anticipated” the inductive-empirical method of Anselm L. Strauss.68 Such arguments likely appear eccentric to scholars accustomed

64 For an overview of these uses, see Joe L. Kincheloe and Peter McLaren, “Rethinking Critical Theory and Qualitative Research,” in Ethnography and Schools: Qualitative Approaches to the Study of Education, ed. Yali Zou and Enrique T. Trueba (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002), 87–138; Jennifer Sumner, “Relations of Suspicion: Critical Theory and Interdisciplinary Research,” History of Intellectual Culture 3, no. 1 (2003): 1–12.

65 For a recent reconsideration of this use of critical theory, see Sumner, “Relations of Suspicion: Critical Theory and Interdisciplinary Research.”

66 Worrell, Dialectic of Solidarity, 12–15.

67 Olick and Perrin, “Introduction. Guilt and Defense: Theodor Adorno and the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar German Society”; “Translators’ Introduction.”

68 Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 338, fn. 43; cf. Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research (New Brunswick: Routledge, 2000).

to understanding critical theory divorced from empirical research. But, by reconstructing the

Institute’s long-developing program of empirical research, I hope to pave the way for a fuller consideration of these and other possibilities.

The Institute represented one branch of the “Western Marxism” that arose in interwar

Europe. Responding to the intellectual shortcomings of the Second International and the manifest failures of class uprising in the wake of the First World War, Western Marxists raised anew questions about the creation and dissemination of proletarian consciousness.69 Why had the

European proletariat failed to recognize its role as the universal class? What structural and intellectual obstacles were monopoly capital and bourgeois ideology erecting to stymie revolutionary consciousness? Western Marxists such as Karl Korsch (1886-1961) and György

Lukács (1885-1971) returned to Hegelian metaphysics in order to reestablish the working class as the “subject-object” of world history. Others, including Anna Siemsen, Otto Jenssen, Siegfried

Bernfeld, and Wilhelm Reich, used then-new psychoanalytic theory to conceptualize the recent failures and future prospects of the European proletariat.70 As Lazarsfeld later put it, “a fighting revolution requires economics (Marx); a victorious revolution requires engineers (Russia); a defeated revolution calls for psychology (Vienna).”71

69 For an overview of these events and their outcomes, see Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

70 Bonss, “Critical Theory and Empirical Social Research,” 5–9. Bonss usefully distinguishes between “eclectic adaptations” of psychoanalysis to Marxism (Siemsen, Jenssen) and “mediating positions” between the two (Bernfeld, Reich).

71 Lazarsfeld, “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir,” 272. Lazarsfeld, it should be noted, claimed to have formulated this bon mot in interwar Austria.

Scholars such as Worrell are correct to claim that the Institute’s empirical projects serve to illuminate the role of psychology in Western Marxists’ conception of the proletariat.72 Going further, I describe the roles of psychology beyond psychoanalysis and of other empirical social sciences in shaping Marxists’ understanding of the proletariat. I draw attention to developmental, social, economic, and behavioral psychology and to communications research, public-opinion polling, and “sociography” (Soziographie). Moreover, I complicate Worrell’s claim that the

Institute was “nearly alone” in conducting such research.73 Instead, I show that the Institute’s empirical studies of ideology, the working class, and authoritarianism existed in a tradition of

Marxist social science that began with Marx’s “Enquête ouvrière” in Revue socialiste (1880).74

By recovering the Institute’s empirical studies, I help reconnect it to a longer history of Marxist studies of work and workers.

By showing that the Institute worked with its American counterparts on empirical research projects, I add nuance to histories of both European ideas and American thought. In her otherwise-exhaustive survey of the discipline, for example, Jennifer Platt neglects the contributions of the Institute to the methods and substance of American social science. This omission is made all the more striking by Platt’s broad overview of the roles played by

72 Worrell, Dialectic of Solidarity, 9–11; cf. “Authoritarianism, Critical theory, and Political Psychology: Past, Present, Future,” Social Thought & Research 21, no. 1/2 (1998): 3–33.

73 Worrell, Dialectic of Solidarity, 11.

74 Karl Marx, “Questionnaire for Workers,” in Werke, Artikel, Entwürfe, Mai 1875 bis Mai 1883, ed. Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Zentralkomitee der Kommunistischen Partei der Sowjetunion, Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe 25 (Berlin: Dietz, 1975), 795–98. For an explicit connection between the Institute and this tradition, see Hilde Weiss, “Die Enquête ouvrière von Karl Marx,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5 (1936): 76–98 and chap. 2 of the dissertation. For an overview of the trajectory of studies of the working class, see John A. Garraty, Unemployment in History: Economic Thought and Public Policy (New York: Harper & Row, 1978). On Marxist studies in this tradition, see Rob B. Beamish, Marx, Method, and the Division of Labor (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), chap. 1.

Lazarsfeld and other émigré social scientists with whom the Institute collaborated.75 One reason for this widespread neglect of the Institute is scholars’ focus on the era of disciplinary specialization and professionalization between, roughly, 1880 and 1930.76 To be sure, historians have recognized that the questions and preoccupations of American social science—debates about political advocacy and scientific neutrality, exceptionalism and universality, and more— migrated across the Atlantic, shaping the nascent European social sciences.77 I show that, through the influence of American social science on the Institute’s experiments in theory, the concerns and methods historians identify with the late-nineteenth century and early twentieth- century discipline persisted into the mid-twentieth century.

Consider the rise of “scientism” in American social research and its contribution to the

American ideology of “exceptionalism” charted by Dorothy Ross. A “set of quantitative techniques for information gathering and analysis that are used to manipulate such things as the money supply, consumer choices, votes, and remedial social therapies,” scientism excluded history from social science and propagated an “idealized view of self-propelling individuals and interest groups, imbedded in nature, dynamically recreating on American soil a progressive

75 Jennifer Platt, A History of Sociological Research Methods in America: 1920-1960 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 13–16, 257–60 et passim.

76 See, inter alia, Alexandra Oleson and John Voss, eds., The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860- 1920 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860-1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); Edward A. Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory; Scientific Naturalism & the Problem of Value (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973); Thomas L. Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Mary Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865-1905 (New Brunswick: Routledge, 2010).

77 See Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory.

liberal society.”78 Yet, I demonstrate in the chapters of this dissertation, the Institute developed social-scientific research methods—including both quantitative tools and historical analysis— that argued for the non-exceptionality of the United States. Instead, the Institute held, sociological and psychological research showed that America was enmeshed in a process of modernization that afflicted all capitalist nations. Put simply, expanding the temporal and conceptual horizons of existing scholarship on nineteenth- and twentieth-century social science illuminates both the marked continuities and dramatic reversals of the disciplines’ concepts, questions, and methods. As the example of the ideology of exceptionalism aptly shows, the history of the Institute’s empirical research challenges arguments in existing histories of transatlantic social thought that these exchanges contributed to a discourse of international liberalism. The Institute, for its part, oriented its studies towards the global phenomenon of authoritarianism.79

The Institute is likewise absent from much recent scholarship on Cold War social science.

Yet the empirical studies conducted by Horkheimer, Adorno, their colleagues, and their

American collaborators were doubtless part of this paradigm. Explorations of the psychological etiology and social consequences of the “fascist character” in The Authoritarian Personality, for example, contributed to the creation of the “open mind”—the rational, creative, and autonomous

“self”—in Cold War behavioral science and policy.80 Yet, Jamie Cohen-Cole’s recent study of

78 Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 472–73.

79 Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings.

80 In this sense, I deploy, and seek to elaborate, the Warren Susman’s important distinction between “character” and “personality” in American social, cultural, and economic life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More work needs to be done in order to determine how the Institute’s conceptions of “character” and “personality” related to those identified by Susman. See Warren I. Susman, “‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture,” in New Directions in American Intellectual History, ed. John Higham and Paul K. Conkin (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 212–26.

this construction of a scientific and normative subject takes little notice of the Institute’s project.81 Although Marga Vicedo’s incisive analysis of the connections among maternal love, democratic politics, and emotional development in Cold War social science rightly locates The

Authoritarian Personality in this discourse, it does not explore the role of the Institute’s study in detail.82 The absence of the Institute’s empirical studies from this literature corroborates—and strengthens—Joel Isaac’s argument that historical scholarship must engage in “middle-range contextualizations,” linking the Cold War social and behavioral sciences to the innovations, preoccupations, and methods of the pre- and interwar disciplines.83 Reintroducing the Institute’s empirical studies to these contexts opens new pathways for studying the mutual imbrication of social-scientific practices and political discourses in the construction of Cold War ideology.84

To summarize: I do not assert that the Institute was something other than has been recognized. Horkheimer, Adorno, and their colleagues were neither quantitative sociologists manqués or behavioral psychologists in spite of themselves. Critical theory was not created by

Gurland, Massing, Weiss, Leichter, and Komarovsky. Neither was it a theoretical veil for a fundamentally empirical practice. Instead, I argue, the Institute’s critical social theory must be

81 Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 40, 48–49.

82 Marga Vicedo, “Cold War Emotions: Mother Love and the War over Human Nature,” in Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature, ed. Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 234–49.

83 Joel Isaac, “The Human Sciences in Cold War America,” The Historical Journal 50, no. 3 (September 2007): 725–46, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X07006334.

84 For an interesting argument describing Adorno’s use of the radio—one particularly important subject of his empirical research—to spread democratic values that might well be described as reflecting the Cold War liberal consensus, see Parkinson, “Adorno on the Airwaves.” Parkinson’s essay suggests the possibility for a wider reconsideration of the Institute’s role as educators and democrats in postwar Germany—and the intersection of this role with their ongoing empirical research. See, e.g., Olick and Perrin, “Translators’ Introduction.”

understood as interwoven with its empirical social research. Doing so, I suggest, revitalizes longstanding debates and initiates new conversations. Indeed, the dissertation is something of a promissory note, an exercise in recovery and exposition that seeks to initiate a broader conversation within European intellectual history. To invoke a distinction formulated by

Lazarsfeld, I do not aim to “debunk” existing scholarship. Rather, I seek to “unfreeze,” in

Lazarsfeld’s words, the categories that have shaped understandings of the Institute and to draw

“striking connections” within critical theory and among contemporary thought.85

ARGUMENT AND STRUCTURE

It may seem apposite to begin my history of the Institute’s empirical studies by defining its members’ conceptions of “empirical” methods and techniques. I do not propose such a definition, for delimiting the meaning of “empirical” in advance of the historical recovery and without contextual details would violate the spirit and method of critical theory.86 Doing so would, in fact, confirm the critique of empirical research as a mode of hypostatization Adorno developed in his late writings on sociology. Instead I will track the evolution of the Institute’s empirical research program, conceived broadly to include the methods, techniques, insights, arguments, and conclusions used and methodological and theoretical debates about the same, as it evolved over a three-decade period. In fact, as will become clear, debates about empirical

85 Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Reminisces of Paul Felix Lazarsfeld: Oral History, 1962, interview by Joan Gordon and Daniel Bell, November 1961, 264, Columbia Center for Oral History. The origins and implications of Lazarsfeld’s distinction are discussed below, in chapter 1.

86 As Wolfgang Bonss has noted, there are strikingly few attempts to define the meaning of “empirical” precisely in the centuries-old philosophical discourses and theoretical literatures that deploy the term. See Bonss, Die Einübung des Tatsachenblicks, chap. 2 viz., 18-19.

research within the Institute and among those affiliated with it were, as often as not, disagreements about what, exactly, empirical social research was—and what it might be.

Anticipations of the Institute’s empirical research might be found in the works of Max

(1864-1920) and Alfred (1868-1958) Weber, Georg Simmel (1858-1918), and Siegfried

Kracauer (1889-1966), thinkers whose scientific studies and social theories were interwoven to form patterns of inquiry that shaped twentieth-century thought. The Webers’ research into the effects of industrial labor on the “personal characteristics, occupational destiny, and private style of life of its workers,” (1907-1909), Simmel’s investigation of the psychical consequences of life in the modern metropolis (1903), and Kracauer’s study of the new class of white-collar workers

(Angestellten) limned the contours of the program the Institute members would develop in subsequent decades.87 Not infrequently, this line of influence was obvious, direct, and explicit.88

At other times, the existence of this influence itself became a topic of debate among Institute members and affiliates.89

The Institute’s empirical program was broad and varied; it included works as different as

Karl Wittfogel’s research into agrarian production in China, Lazarsfeld and Leichter’s study of reactions to authority among European youth, Franz Neumann’s examination of the political

87 Max Weber, “Methodologische Einleitung für die Erhebungen des Vereins für Sozialpolitik über Auslese und Anpassung (Berufswahl und Berufsschicksal) der Arbeiterschaft der geschlossenen Großindustrie,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1924), 1–60; Max Weber, “Zur Psychophysik der industriellen Arbeit,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1924), 51–255; Georg Simmel, Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben (Dresden: Zahn & Jaensch, 1903); Seigfried Kracauer, Die Angestellten. Aus dem neuesten Deutschland (Frankfurt a. M.: Frankfurter Societäts-Druckerei, 1930). 88 See, e.g., Hans Zeisel, “Zur Geschichte der Soziographie,” in Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal, by Marie Jahoda, Hans Zeisel, and Paul F. Lazarsfeld (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1933), 89–123. 89 I discuss this contestation below, especially in chapter 3. For a discussion of the critical orientation of the Institute towards Max Weber’s research, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, chap. 4.

economy of National Socialism, and Adorno’s investigation into the “fascist personality.”90 I examine only a subset of these empirical studies: those marked by consistent, although not uniform, intentions and topics. From the studies it carried out during the Weimar Republic to the investigations conducted in the postwar United States, the Institute often made the working class the subject of its research; it concentrated on the social-psychological phenomenon of prejudice; and it aimed to generate knowledge that would not merely describe but actively transform the status quo.91 At the same time, the methods the Institute developed for and deployed in these studies differed dramatically. For its earliest studies, the Institute articulated a psychoanalytically inflected technique of “interpretation”; in later projects, the Institute relied on methods drawn from sources as diverse as behavioral psychology, cultural anthropology, and consumer research.

But this was no mere eclecticism. Here, too, I will argue, there was a kind of consistency. From its first projects to its last studies, the Institute developed an immanent critique of existing empirical paradigms and, further, used these insights to construct its own, distinctive methodology. The Institute’s ultimate aim was the creation of an empirical method able to document the decline and reveal the ideological function of “individuality” in the modern era. In what follows, I will document the variations and consistencies in the Institute’s empirical- research program.

I begin not with the Institute but with the Austrian Economic-Psychological Research

Center (ÖWF), an interdisciplinary organization that pioneered techniques of social psychology.

90 I discuss the works of Lazarsfeld and Leichter, Neumann, and Adorno below, in chapters 2, 5, and 6, respectively. For Wittfogel’s research, see Karl August Wittfogel, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Chinas, Schriften des Instituts für Sozialforschung an der Universität Frankfurt a. M. 3 (Leipzig: C.L. Hirschfeld, 1931). 91 As will become clear in chapters 3 and 4, many of those studied did not consider themselves to be part of the working class—a view that was, in fact, highly consequential to the Institute’s arguments. Further, the Institute, as will be argued below, conceived of “prejudice” in a distinctive way that, while aligned with the common-sense understanding of the term, also exceeded it.

Why start a study of the Institute for Social Research with a description of the Economic-

Psychological Research Center? It is not my intention to discount the lineage, described above, of the Institute’s empirical-research program—a chain of influences connecting the Webers,

Simmel, and Kracauer to Adorno, Horkheimer, and Fromm. Rather, I aim to describe another, complementary-but-less-recognized, etiology for the Institute’s empirical studies. Under

Lazarsfeld’s directorship, the ÖWF formulated methods and identified goals that would orient the Institute’s research program in subsequent decades. Lazarsfeld led the ÖWF researchers in combining statistical sociology, positivist philosophy, and developmental psychology into a methodological and research program: “economic psychology” or “sociography.” Comprised of young socialists, the ÖWF used this method to study the Austrian proletariat. Inspired by the

Austro-Marxist philosophers who shaped the theory and practice of interwar Austrian socialism, the ÖWF intended this method to be used in the transformation of the existing working class they perceived as apathetic, disorganized, unsolidaristic, and premodern into the “new people” of the socialist future.

At the heart of chapter 1 is a reconstruction and analysis of the ÖWF’s most ambitious and enduring project, The Unemployed of Marienthal (1933)—a sweeping study of the social and psychological effects of the endemic unemployment caused by the Great Depression. I show that

Marienthal used economic-psychological methods to demonstrate that unemployed workers were losing the progress they had made towards developing the disciplined behaviors and solidaristic attitudes of the “new people.” Marienthal, I argue, authorized and amplified Austro-

Marxist intellectuals’ suspicions that the unemployed were unreliable political actors—that they were potential reactionaries rather than incipient revolutionaries. In subsequent chapters, I will argue that elements of the ÖWF’s research program became integral to the Institute’s own

empirical studies. Specifically, I will demonstrate that the Institute redeployed the ÖWF’s focus on the proletariat, conviction that this class required transformation, use of social psychology to effectuate and measure this transformation, and anxiety that workers were potential counterrevolutionaries in its empirical projects in Europe and the United States.

The connection between the ÖWF and the Institute was both organizational and intellectual. In chapter 2, I reconsider the Institute’s mid-1930s study of shifting patterns of authority within the modern, nuclear family in order to uncover and interpret these connections.

Begun in 1934 and completed in 1936, when it was published as Studies in Authority and the

Family, this capacious project contained a variety of theoretical essays and empirical studies contributed by researchers in Europe and the United States. Scholars have tended, however, to focus on the highly theoretical texts by Horkheimer and Fromm, essays engaged in recondite dialogues with Hegel, Marx, Weber, and Freud. I recognize the salience of Horkheimer’s and

Fromm’s essays, but I also argue that these texts identified the experience of authority as central to the proletariat’s seeming inability to transform itself into a revolutionary class. Otherwise put,

Horkheimer and Fromm refined the suspicion of the proletariat pervasive among Austro-

Marxists and enhanced by the ÖWF.

Authority and the Family has also received attention as the first of the Institute’s published empirical studies: a social-psychological investigation of the etiology and function of authority in the mind of the modern individual.92 In this chapter, I reconstruct the methodology of this study, elucidating its two constituent components—the method of “structural statistics”

92 As will be discussed in chapter 2, the empirical study Fromm contributed to Authority and the Family was a preliminary report on an ongoing study of German workers. This study, which went by multiple names within the Institute but is now commonly identified as The Working Class in Weimar Germany, was repeatedly delayed and not published until Fromm’s death in 1980.

and the technique of “interpretation”—and arguing that the latter obscured shortcomings in the former. Although this project has long been identified as the work of Fromm, I call attention to the role of another researcher, Hilde Weiss, in conceptualizing and motivating the study.

Specifically, I argue that Weiss’ emphasis on the distinctiveness of a Marxist tradition of social research and, further, her insistence that such studies be, in the first instance, tools for inducing the transformation of the proletariat into a revolutionary class oriented the empirical studies the

Institute carried out in the 1940s.

But I go further. Situating the Institute’s project in the context of its creation, interwar

Geneva, where many other international organizations conducted studies of authority within the family. I foreground the role of a cohort of researchers who conducted studies for multiple projects simultaneously. Specifically, I emphasize the contributions of Lazarsfeld and Leichter to

Authority and the Family. Reconstructing their study, I show how Lazarsfeld and Leichter used the ÖWF’s recent methodological writings and economic-psychological studies to contest

Fromm’s structural-statistical method. By outlining their own structural-statistical method,

Leichter and Lazarsfeld raised questions about the role of concepts, the origin of categories, the process of interpretation, and the place of theory in social research. To anticipate: in subsequent chapters I show that the Institute integrated these questions and their answers into its own empirical research. Moreover, it ultimately deployed aspects of Leichter and Lazarsfeld’s critique of Fromm against its erstwhile colleague.

Authority and the Family has often been characterized as the end of an intellectual path, the final manifestation of the interdisciplinary program of social research Horkheimer identified as the Institute’s objective.93 In chapter 2, I locate the origins of this path, showing that the

93 See, e.g., Bonss, “Critical Theory and Empirical Social Research”; Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, chap. 3. Scholars of Fromm make a similar argument: his contribution to Authority and the Family was the culmination of 33

Institute’s text followed from and contributed to a number of social-scientific projects and paradigms. In chapter 3, I extend the length of this path. Authority and the Family, as

Horkheimer and his colleagues frequently insisted, was a preliminary report of ongoing work. I demonstrate that, although conceived in 1934 and published in 1936, the topics of Authority and the Family remained integral to the Institute’s program until the mid-1940s.

After relocating to the United States between 1933 and 1934, Horkheimer, Fromm, and

Lazarsfeld continued the methodological debates and empirical studies begun in Geneva. I show that, soon after his arrival in the United States, Lazarsfeld articulated a trenchant critique of

American social research, preying upon anxieties about cultural and social-scientific “lag.” In so doing, Lazarsfeld developed an incipient distinction between “American” social science and

“European” social theory or methodology—a contrast the Institute would later amplify.

Simultaneously, however, Lazarsfeld continued and refined the critique of Fromm’s social- psychological method he had developed with Leichter. Rereading Lazarsfeld’s methodological essays in the light of his contributions to Authority and the Family, I elucidate Lazarsfeld’s techniques: the use of typological classification (“reduction” and “substruction”) to create hypotheses and the application of interpretation (“discerning”) to test them.

At the center of the chapter is a reconstruction of The Unemployed Man and his Family

(1940), a study of the effects of joblessness upon the psychology and authority of American workers. Commissioned by the Institute, Unemployed Man was carried out by Mirra

Komarovsky, a doctoral candidate under Lazarsfeld’s supervision and research assistant at the

Institute. I show that Komarovsky drew from Marienthal and Authority and the Family to

his decade-long break with Freud and formulation of his own, radical social psychology. See, e.g., Lawrence J. Friedman, The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), chap. 2. These interpretations are treated further in chapter 3.

interpret her findings and complete her study. Komarovsky used the techniques of substruction, reduction, and discerning to further question the theories, methods, and findings of Fromm’s social psychology. I argue that Komarovsky’s use of these methods had two significant effects.

First, Komarovsky reoriented the Institute’s social-scientific research into authority away from childhood development and towards mature personality. Provocatively put, she turned the

Institute from Fromm’s psychoanalysis towards Lazarsfeld’s behaviorism. Second, Komarovsky called attention to aspects of the personality—ranging from the lack of class consciousness to the existence of paranoia—that would become integral to the Institute’s research program.

The Institute’s development of a methodology and program of empirical research was by no means inevitable. Nor was it without contestation and complication. In chapter 4, I describe the substantive challenge to the Institute’s early empirical program created by Adorno’s participation in the Princeton Radio Research Program. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, directed by Lazarsfeld, and influenced by enthusiasts of technocracy and propaganda, the Radio

Project aimed to develop methods for the quantification of attitudes, opinions, and tastes in order to improve tools of popular persuasion and mechanisms of social control. As described earlier in this introduction, Lazarsfeld recruited Adorno to the Radio Project in 1938, hoping that the

Institute affiliate would provide the “European approach” he believed to be lacking in the study.

According to the prevailing narrative, Adorno was, at best, a reluctant participant in the Radio

Project: self-consciously and resolutely opposed to its empirical techniques, he wrote vituperative memoranda denouncing the aims and methods of the study. I argue that intellectual and personal tension between the two men arose from competing understandings of what, exactly, such a “European” approach might be. Adorno charged that the Radio Project hid its ideological origins and implications behind a veil of social-scientific neutrality. Specifically,

Adorno argued that methods grounded in behaviorist psychology and motivated by the propaganda paradigm reinforced the ideology of “individuality” in an era when this experience was impossible.94

But Adorno did not, on these grounds, countenance the rejection of empirical research.

Instead, I demonstrate, he argued for the creation of new empirical methods through the immanent critique of existing techniques. Applying the same logic Horkheimer had used to distinguish “critical theory” from “traditional theory,” Adorno insisted that fully empirical research would comprehend abstraction, quantification, and categorization as the products of historical developments and social forces. Adorno argued that such critical awareness must be integrated into the empirical methods themselves. But this was no mere theoretical proposition.

Reconstructing Adorno’s memoranda for the Radio Project, I recover the qualitative and quantitative methods Adorno developed to meet this requirement: the “experiments in theory” that Adorno believed could document the transformed character and status of the subject under the conditions of industrial capitalism and its “culture industry.” Describing the similarity of

Adorno’s methods to those of his colleagues, I argue that the Institute members and the Radio

Project researchers were more intellectually aligned than has been realized.

It is worth pausing to reflect on the divergent uses of the term “European approach” by

Lazarsfeld and Adorno. Both men used the same locution—and may have done so with the same, or at least, similar, intention: describing, and thereby laying claim to, a framework of social- scientific research that stood over and against its “American” counterpart. And yet, Lazarsfeld

94 Eric Oberle’s perspicacious account of Adorno’s critical perspectives on individuality meet the suggestions I have outlined here but arrive at a strikingly different conclusion about Adorno’s relationship to empirical social science. Nevertheless, Oberle has taken a fuller view of Adorno’s role as both a critical theorist and social scientist than others. See Eric Oberle, Theodor Adorno and the Century of Negative Identity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), chaps. 3–4.

understood this “European approach”—the conceptual contents of their shared locution in quite different ways. This discursive situation represents in miniature a pattern that recurs in the history of the Institute’s program of empirical research. Not infrequently, Horkheimer, Adorno,

Fromm, and their colleagues would deploy terms—from “experience” and “culture” to

“interpretation” and “anthropology”—that, although superficially the same as those used by their

European and American interlocutors, differed in intellectual substance.95 Simply put, such terms often allowed members of the Institute to appear to be speaking directly to other theorists and empirical researchers—even when they were, in fact, talking past one another. Throughout the dissertation, I will remain attentive to these problematic locutions and their implications. In fact,

I suggest, these moments, in which similarity masked divergence, were intellectually felicitous, for they enabled productive misunderstanding and creative appropriation. Adorno’s tacit contestation of Lazarsfeld’s understanding of the “European approach” to social research, for example, subtended the Institute’s further development of its program of empirical research.96

Between 1944 and 1945, the Institute conducted an ambitious empirical study: an investigation of anti-Semitic prejudices among American workers. The “Labor Study,” as the

Institute referred to it, was conducted by Massing, Gurland, and Lowenthal with the assistance of

Adorno and guidance from Horkheimer. The Labor Study was, in Horkheimer’s words, a

95 The concept of “experience” is one of the most striking moments of superficial similarity masking deeper disagreement. On Adorno’s concept of “experience,” see Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), chap. 8. Jay’s interpretation suggests that Adorno’s understanding of “experience” could not align with the conception held by Lazarsfeld and other social scientists. And yet, as I show below, Adorno, Lazarsfeld, and others used this term as if they shared a common understanding—a situation that doubtless created confusion and, perhaps, led to innovation. Oskar Negt argues, conversely, that the centrality of the concept of “experience” in Adorno’s thought can only be understood in and through his empirical social-scientific studies. See Negt, “Geboren aus der Not des philosophischen Begreifens. Zum Empiriebegriff Adornos.” 96 I am grateful to Martin Jay for encouraging me to consider these discursive situations and, further, to approach them as moments of potential intellectual production. As I note in the conclusion, more work remains to be done on this front.

“combination of the highly developed American empirical methods with the more established

European methods” into an approach “which many scholars regard as highly promising.”97 I recover this study in chapter 5, examining both its findings and methods. Finding existing techniques of survey-based research insufficient or misleading, Lowenthal led his colleagues in the design of an experimental method that induced subjects to voice their unconscious desires and repressed attitudes by replacing the “interview situation” with the “psychoanalytical situation.” Relying on an army of volunteers, the Institute collected and quantified material from thousands of “screened” or “indirect” interviews—in which subjects had no idea that their responses were being recorded—in order to draw conclusions about the social “texture” and psychological etiology of prejudice.

Lowenthal and his colleagues insisted on the novelty of these methods. But, I show, key elements of this approach were present in many of the decades-old studies conducted by the

ÖWF and the Institute. Lowenthal, Gurland, and Massing deployed methods drawn from

Marienthal, deployed arguments put forward in Authority and the Family, elaborated insights made in Unemployed Man, and refined critiques made in the Radio Project. In fact, I argue, the project is best understood as a continuation of the Marxist tradition of social research identified by Weiss—studies of work and workers intended to understand the present state and contribute to the future development of class consciousness. Although scholars have not recognized it, the

Institute explicitly aimed to determine whether the American proletariat had the capacity to resist the “disease” of fascist propaganda and whether consciousness-raising through “political education” would “inoculate” them against it.

97 IfS, “The Political Function of Anti-Semitism. Supplementary Statement to the Research Project on Anti- Semitism,” December 15, 1942, 30–32, MHA, Box IX, File 92.7.

On what grounds did the Institute assert its originality? Examining both the Labor Study itself and Adorno’s memoranda on its methods, I suggest that the Institute redeployed the distinction between the “European” and “American” approaches first suggested by Lazarsfeld.

Adorno hardened this distinction, but he did not use it uncritically. I show that, in his memoranda

Adorno articulated a new framework in which “American” methods and “European” ideas could be brought together in a virtuous circle of empirical research and critical theory—a methodology that would illuminate the demise of the individual. Importantly, Adorno used this framework to argue for the disaggregation of social psychology into sociology and psychology. I shed new light on the Institute’s break with Fromm through this connection of Adorno’s arguments to

Leichter and Lazarsfeld’s earlier methodological critiques.98

In chapter 6, I examine the Institute’s best-known empirical research project: its four- year-long study of the psychological structures and social presentations of the “fascist character” between 1943 and 1947. The Institute members and their collaborators referred to this group of studies as the “Berkeley Project;” it was later published as The Authoritarian Personality (1950).

As I noted above, many scholars characterize Authoritarian Personality as a complement to

Dialectic of Enlightenment. Without disputing the connection between these texts, I take a different approach. Resituating the Berkeley Project in the arc of the Institute’s evolving conception and practice of empirical research, I identify the study as an application of Adorno’s experiments-in-theory methodology. Represented by Adorno and Lowenthal, the Institute proposed a number of new empirical methods explicitly derived from and intended to contribute

98 As Jay has described this process, “[t]he goal, therefore, was not to sever psychology from sociology, but rather to recognize that their methodological integration was dependent on the social integration, in a future society without contradictions, of the two dimensions of what was now a nonidentical personality.” This chapter adds a further dimension to the Institute’s eminently methodological dispute with Fromm. See Jay, “Positive and Negative Totalities,” 1985, 37.

to critical theory. Even as the Institute worked to refine and implement these “European” methods they sought to link them to “American” techniques. This is to say that the assertion of continental differences in social research was bound up with the hope for transnational collaboration.

At the center of this chapter is an examination of Adorno’s work with the Berkeley

Public Opinion Study Group in their study of right-wing “characterology.” Importantly, key members of the Berkeley Group were alumni of the ÖWF. Through this reconstruction, I demonstrate that Adorno and the Berkeley Group implemented the dialectical relationship between theory and research Adorno had outlined in his writings on the Labor Study. But this is not to say that “American” social psychology was remade into “European” social theory. Instead, as I show, Adorno deployed the techniques of abstraction, categorization, and quantification developed by Lazarsfeld, Leichter, and Komarovsky. Adorno maintained that these empirical methods were apposite to the modern condition, in which true “individuals” had been replaced with standardized “types” of persons. Otherwise put, in Authoritarian Personality Adorno concluded the methodological arc he had initiated in the Radio Project: the creation of experiments in theory.

As Adorno had hoped, these experiments seemed to demonstrate the disappearance of individuality. But these findings put Adorno and the Berkley Group into a difficult theoretical position. If the experiments-in-theory methodology took the individual as their subject and illuminated the disappearance of individuality, did they not undermine their own foundations?

As I show, Adorno struggled with this paradox for three years, attempting to reconcile the necessity and the impossibility of the individual in empirical social research. Adorno ultimately resolved this paradox with a dialectical gesture: both individuality itself and the psychological

research that rested upon it could only exist by presuming their own impossibility. As Adorno put it, the social psychology of the modern subject “presupposes the end of psychology itself.”99

I conclude this chapter by considering how this apparently paradoxical research method led to some of the Institute’s most striking insights into the structure and experience of late capitalism.100

As I noted above, I intend this study of the Institute’s program of empirical research to be the first contribution to a larger historical project. Eventually, this larger project will go beyond filling gaps in the historical literature. By recovering the Institute’s empirical studies, it will deepen existing understandings of critical theory. In the conclusion to the dissertation, I gesture at this larger project by showing how the Institute itself seemed to recognize the potential implications of its empirical studies. As Adorno wrote in his reflections on Authoritarian

Personality, the Institute’s empirical findings echoed those of other empirical studies conducted in an array of fields from American behavioral psychology to French existentialism. Adorno concluded that this connection emerged from the “kind of details which, as a rule, can be expected only from empirical investigations.”101 Exploring the connections arising from the

Institute’s empirical research, I indicate a path forward for future contributions to the history of experiments in theory.

99 Adorno, “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality,” 28.

100 Otherwise put, the chapter adds another dimension to Jay’s argument that Adorno pursued the elaboration of a “negative totality” that effectively disallowed interdisciplinary research by insisting that empirical methods would have to be practiced in a way that foregrounds their irreconcilability. For Adorno, the chapter suggests, this contradiction was productive and, further, bound to empirical research. Psychology—and, further, all empirical research—was to be undertaken not only despite but also because of its own impossibility. See Martin Jay, “Positive and Negative Totalities: Implicit Tensions in Critical Theory’s Vision of Interdisciplinary Research,” in Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 114–17.

101 Adorno, “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality,” 21.

CHAPTER 1

RESILIENCY OR RESIGNATION: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF UNEMPLOYMENT, 1919-1933

THE PRISON WITHOUT BARS

When unemployment caused by the Great Depression reached its apex in 1933, approximately twenty-five percent of Americans were without work.1 But in January of that year, The Nation introduced its American readers to a place where the crisis was almost unimaginably worse: the central Austrian village of Marienthal.2 According to Robert N.

McMurry, the collapse of the Austrian textile industry reduced Marienthal—a town centered around wool-spinning and cloth-dyeing—to a shadow of its former self. Marienthalers received unemployment relief and welfare payments, but this support maintained only the lowest level of subsistence. When the biweekly funds arrived, McMurry wrote, the village erupted in a kind of

“macabre festival.” On these days Marienthalers purchased meat from the butcher; on other days they ate what they could find—it was a time “when men eat dogs.”3

Such lurid details notwithstanding, Marienthal interested McMurry for its demonstration of his view that “[u]nemployment begets psychological as well as economic problems.”4 In his article, McMurry emphasized that jobless Marienthalers lost interest in the activities—reading newspapers, walking in the part, meeting in pubs, and attending political meetings—that had

1 On period debates about the difficulty of defining and measuring unemployment in Europe and the United States, see Garraty, Unemployment in History, chap. 9.

2 Robert N. McMurry, “When Men Eat Dogs,” The Nation 136, no. 3522 (January 4, 1933): 15–18.

3 Ibid., 16.

4 Ibid., 15.

formerly held their interest. Although “literally drowned in time,” unemployed villagers suffered from torpor and boredom.5 Eventually, the jobless succumbed to despair and fatalism. McMurry conceded that “[i]f Marienthal were a single instance in an otherwise prosperous country, its plight would be pitiable but not profoundly significant. But Marienthal is not an isolated case.”

Already, McMurry warned, there were “literally thousands of Marienthals in Central Europe alone”—and more appeared with every economic setback.6 Worse still, he concluded, any place beset by endemic unemployment could become another Marienthal.7

McMurry had not visited Marienthal. Nor had he read descriptions of the village in newspapers. Instead, his account of the Austrian hamlet followed from an innovative psychological study: The Unemployed of Marienthal: A Sociographical Investigation of the

Effects of Long-Term Unemployment (1933).8 “Much emphasis” in recent studies, McMurry complained, “has been placed on [unemployment’s] economic aspects; very little on its psychological effects.” But the authors of Marienthal—Paul Lazarsfeld, Marie Jahoda, and Hans

Zeisel—broke this pattern, completing what McMurry regarded as the “first comprehensive study of the effect of continued unemployment on the worker himself.”9 Through their innovative combination of social psychology and statistical analysis—a method they termed

5 Ibid., 16.

6 Ibid., 17.

7 As Katherine Lebow, Małgorzata Mazurek, and Joanna Wawrzyniak have recently observed, this conception of a “locality” like Marienthal as, simultaneously “a particular geographical area” and a “universal plane” was a characteristic feature of the social sciences of interwar central Europe. See Lebow, Mazurek, and Wawrzyniak, “Making Modern Social Science,” 2.

8 Marie Jahoda, Hans Zeisel, and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal: ein soziographischer Versuch über die Wirkungen langdauernder Arbeitslosigkeit (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1933).

9 McMurry, “When Men Eat Dogs,” 15.

“sociography” (Soziographie)—Lazarsfeld and his colleagues discovered how unemployment constrained the human mind. By fomenting despair, creating desperation, and inducing resignation, it locked the unemployed in “a prison without bars.”10

Although enthusiastic, McMurry’s introduction of Marienthal in The Nation was incomplete. Absent from his review was any recognition of the political context in which the study was produced, read, and debated. To be sure, McMurry likely did not know that the study’s researchers were active members of the Austrian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP) and that Lazarsfeld, in particular, was the intellectual protégé of leading Austro-Marxist thinkers.

Likewise, the extent to which Marienthal was entangled with the Marxist theory and socialist politics of interwar Austria was likely invisible to McMurry and his American readers.

Scholars—historians, sociologists, and critics—have reinforced McMurry’s oversight. Analyzing

Marienthal as a methodological achievement of the social and human sciences, they have depoliticized an eminently political project.11 This chapter corrects this mischaracterization by showing that Austro-Marxist theory—and, concomitantly, SDAP politics—shaped the distinctive method and remarkable findings of Marienthal. Further, it demonstrates that Marienthal recursively acted upon the theory and politics of interwar Austrian Marxism.

In this chapter, I begin by demonstrating how social- and human-scientific research embodied the theories and implemented the aims of interwar socialists’ “politics of pedagogy”— their efforts to transform the existing working class into a revolutionary proletariat through

10 Ibid., 17.

11 A notable exception to this characterization of Marienthal is Paul Neurath, “Sixty Years Since Marienthal,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 20, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 91–105.

social, cultural, and psychological reform.12 Although I seek to describe a cohort of interwar social and human scientists, I am largely concerned with Paul Lazarsfeld. Intellectual biography, historians of the Central European social sciences have shown, “can be particularly useful tool for uncovering scientific histories against the grain” in “a region and a period marked by dramatic ruptures and discontinuities.”13 I show that Lazarsfeld came of intellectual age among the Austro-Marxists and became an active member of its social-scientific community. No passive participant, Lazarsfeld developed a research methodology—combining psychology and statistics—intended to extend the reach of socialist-aligned social science. In the third section of the chapter, I reconstruct Marienthal in order to trace the effects of Lazarsfeld’s method, arguing that the statistical techniques served to reflect, reinforce, and amplify socialists’ views of the working class. Unemployment, Zeisel, Jahoda, and Lazarsfeld claimed to demonstrate, undid the politics of pedagogy by discouraging properly proletarian behavior, stripping away class consciousness, and muting political agency. In the fourth section of the chapter, I argue that

Marienthal acted upon the theoretical discourse and political calculus that shaped it by encouraging the SDAP’s growing suspicion of the unemployed—that they were neither true proletarians nor reliable political actors. By way of conclusion, I briefly describe Lazarsfeld’s later recognition of the degree to which Austro-Marxism saturated Marienthal.

Situating Marienthal in its political and intellectual contexts, I identify the deep roots of the Institute’s program and method of empirical social research. As I will argue in subsequent

12 I have adapted this phrase from Anson Rabinbach, “Politics and Pedagogy: The Austrian Social Democratic Youth Movement 1931-32,” Journal of Contemporary History 13, no. 2 (April 1, 1978): 337–56, https://doi.org/10.1177/002200947801300209; The Crisis of Austrian Socialism: From Red Vienna to Civil War, 1927-1934 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), chap. 3.

13 Lebow, Mazurek, and Wawrzyniak, “Making Modern Social Science,” 4; cf. Gareth Dale, Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 9.

chapters, the questions, techniques, and concerns Lazarsfeld and his colleagues developed in

“Red Vienna” endured in and through the empirical studies Institute members and affiliates conducted in Germany, Switzerland, and the United States. Otherwise put, many of the Austro-

Marxists’ views—about the current state, future prospects, and innate problems of the proletariat and, further, about the role of social-psychological research in transforming the proletariat— became central elements of the Institute’s research program. This continuation was due, in no small part, to the fact that the Institute relied upon Lazarsfeld and his colleagues as research assistants—social scientists who aided in the design and execution of their empirical projects.

But the connection was not simple or straightforward. Democratic-socialist movements in

Austria and Germany were separated by both philosophical and political differences—a separation that made the connections between the ÖWF and the Institute all the more remarkable and significant. Haltingly, partially, and critically, the members and affiliates of these two organizations would go on to conduct a decades-long methodological debate.

MAKING THE “NEW PEOPLE”

Austro-Marxism—long characterized as a singular fusion of Marxist theory and practice—emerged at the turn of the twentieth century and evolved rapidly in the years prior to the First World War. Leading Austro-Marxists—Rudolf Hilferding, Karl Renner, Max Adler, and Otto Bauer—maintained that industrialization had so thoroughly changed the nature and organization of productive forces that theorists and politicians must reexamine the key concepts of Marxist political economy and revolutionary action. Hilferding, Renner, Bauer, and their followers did just that, forging a unified-but-variegated theoretical paradigm made distinctive through its synthesis of neo-Kantian philosophy, revisionist economics, and personality

psychology. Central to the Austro-Marxist program was Bauer’s theory of the “slow revolution” and the practice of “anticipatory socialism” it entailed. According to Bauer, the thoroughgoing organization of the modern economy meant that the proletariat would not overthrow capitalism violently but would reform it out of existence. This “slow revolution,” could, however, only be accomplished if the proletariat could retain its unique position as the universal class—if it could resist, this is to say, the material and ideological temptations of capitalism. Austrian labor, he declared, must undertake engage in “anticipatory socialism,” living not as the downtrodden workers exploited by capitalism, but as if they were subject-objects of world history.14 Bauer dubbed this task the “revolution of the soul” while his counterpart, Max Adler, described it as the creation of “new people” (neue Menschen) fit for a socialist future.15

The theoretical development of Austro-Marxism slowed in the wake of the First World

War.16 Strikingly, this same period saw the rise to national power of the SDAP, which governed the Austrian Republic in coalition from 1919 to 1920 and which controlled Vienna through 1934.

Despite the decline of its theoretical fecundity, Austro-Marxism persisted in and through the

SDAP. As the dominant political power in “Red Vienna,” the SDAP initiated a wide-ranging program of cultural, social, and educational reform intended prepare the existing working class to become the new people of the socialist future—a politics of pedagogy. Embedded within this program was the ambivalent view about the working class held by SDAP leadership—often

14 On the Austro-Marxists’ conception of anticipatory socialism, see Wolfgang Maderthaner, “Austro-Marxism: Mass Culture and Anticipatory Socialism,” Austrian Studies 14 (2006): 21–36.

15 Bauer quoted in Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919-1934 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 6. Max Adler, Neue Menschen. Gedanken über sozialistische Erziehung (Berlin: E. Laub, 1924).

16 “It is true,” Otto Bauer wrote as early as 1927, “that war and revolution dissolved the ‘Austro-Marxist’ school.” Otto Bauer, “Was ist Austro-Marxismus?,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, November 3, 1927, 1.

comprised of bourgeois intellectuals, reformers, and politicians. Was the working class capable, they asked, of fomenting revolution and ushering in socialism by itself—or must it be directed by far-seeing guides?17 Although endemic to European Marxism since the 1850s, such concerns were animated by interwar debates about the depth of “reification” and the extent of “cultural hegemony” in capitalism, by recent studies of “masses” and “crowds” in social theory, and by new conceptions of the self as inherently “plastic” in all branches of psychology.18 These anxieties and ideas shaped the SDAP’s efforts to solve the riddle, as Lazarsfeld later put it, of fostering “real socialist feeling” and “develop[ing] real socialist personalities” in the working class.19

Historians have amply documented the realization of this politics of pedagogy.20 Austro-

Marxist theorists and SDAP reformers held that, to create a truly proletarian culture, the party must reach rank-and-file members in every aspect of their lives. To achieve this immersion, socialists created a web of overlapping activities, organizations, and publications; SDAP members and fellow travelers could attend socialist hiking clubs, read socialist magazines, and play on socialist sports teams. Oftentimes, these efforts disrupted preexisting elements of

17 The most comprehensive development of this argument can be found in Gruber, Red Vienna. A similar claim is developed in Jill Lewis, Fascism and the Working Class in Austria, 1918-1934 : The Failure of Labour in the First Republic (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 67–88. On the historical origins of this practical and theoretical problem, see Stanley Pierson, Marxist Intellectuals and the Working-Class Mentality in Germany, 1887-1912 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

18 See Stefanos Geroulanos, “The Plastic Self and the Prescription of Psychology: Ethnopsychology, Crowd Psychology, and Psychotechnics, 1890–1920,” Republics of Letters, no. 2 (January 15, 2014): 1–31.

19 Lazarsfeld, Oral History (1962), 46; cf. “Die sozialistische Erziehung und das Gemeinschaftsleben der Jugend,” Die sozialistische Erziehung 3 (1923): 191–94; “Der Zusammenhang der körperlichen und geistigen Entwicklung von Schülern,” Die Quelle, 1929.

20 In addition to the literature cited above, see Dieter Langewiesche, Zur Freizeit des Arbeiters: Bildungsbestrebungen und Freizeitgestaltung österreichische Arbeiter im Kaiserreich und in der ersten Republik (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980); Josef Weidenholzer, Auf dem Weg zum “neuen Menschen” : Bildungs- und Kulturarbeit der österreichischen Sozialdemokratie in der Ersten Republik (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1981).

working-class life—from sites of social interaction to modes of self-expression. Far from accidental, such disruption was intentional. Only by clearing their backward attitudes and undisciplined behaviors, the SDAP held, could the Austrian working class be transformed into the modern, disciplined proletariat—the “new people” of the socialist future.21 For example, workers fortunate enough to obtain units in the new Gemeindebauten—the massive housing blocks replete with modern amenities, built by the municipal government of Vienna to house proletarians from the miasmatic tenements—were expected to embrace ideals deemed properly proletarian behaviors: punctuality, sobriety, cleanliness, and orderliness.22 SDAP apparatchiks— the feared and loathed Wohnungsinspektorat—enforced these norms with sharp reprimands, official sanctions, and, in the case of children, physical punishment.23

As important to—but often overlooked in histories of—the politics of pedagogy were the nascent social and human sciences. Although less spectacular than the Gemeindebauten, these disciplines constituted technologies of transformation by which the SDAP sought to remake the proletariat.24 In the early 1920s, studies of work, workers, and working-class life began to proliferate in Austria. Under what material conditions did the working class live? What were the effects of endemic poverty on physical health and mental well-being? How did workers feel

21 See J. Robert Wegs, “Working Class Respectability: The Viennese Experience,” Journal of Social History 15, no. 4 (July 1, 1982): 621–35.

22 For an overview of this dynamic, see Alfred Georg Frei, Rotes Wien: Austromarxismus und Arbeiterkultur: sozialdemokratische Wohnungs- und Kommunalpolitik, 1919-1934 (Berlin: DVK-Verlag, 1984); Gruber, Red Vienna, 46–65.

23 Striking details about life in the “people’s palaces” can be found in Reinhard Sieder, “Housing Policy, Social Welfare, and Family Life in ‘Red Vienna’, 1919-34,” Oral History 13, no. 2 (1985): 35–48.

24 One exception to this general neglect is Gerald Mozetič, Die Gesellschaftstheorie des Austromarxismus: geistesgeschichtliche Voraussetzungen, Methodologie und soziologisches Programm (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987).

about themselves, their families, and their compatriots? Many of these studies were quantitative in method, wide-ranging in scope, and precise in detail. Emblematic of this approach were the studies conducted by Käthe Leichter, a dedicated socialist who would shape the Institute’s study of modern family life—and the empirical methodology by which such studies were conducted.25

Yet, like other social-scientific projects from the period, the studies aimed to go further, charting the “spiritual development” (geistige Entwicklung) and grasping the “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) of the working class.26 By the 1930s, a robust literature had developed—and had come to center around questions of family life, childhood, sexuality, and education. Using the latest techniques in sociological observation, social-work intervention, and psychological testing, researchers— both SDAP members and fellow travelers—painted a grim portrait of working-class life: workers lived in miasmic tenements; parents were less affectionate; children were malnourished and uneducated; adolescents were over-sexed.27 Margarete Rada spoke for her colleagues more

25 See, e.g., Käthe Leichter, Wie leben die Wiener Heimarbeiter? eine Erhebung über die Arbeits- und Lebensverhältnisse von tausend Wiener Heimarbeitern (Vienna: Verlag Arbeit und Wirtschaft, 1923); Mein Arbeitstag, mein Wochenende: 150 Berichte von Textilarbeiterinnen (Berlin: Verlag Textilpraxis, 1930); So leben Wir ... 1320 Industriearbeiterinnen berichten ihr Leben (Vienna: Verlag Arbeit und Wirtschaft, 1932). For an overview of Leicther’s life in the context of interwar Austrian socialism, see Ingrun Lafleur, “Five Socialist Women: Traditionalist Conflicts and Socialist Visions in Austria, 1893-1934,” in Socialist Women: European Socialist Feminism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quataert (New York: Elsevier, 1978), 215–48; Herbert Steiner, “Biographische Anmerkungen,” in Käthe Leichter. Leben, Werk, und Sterben einer österreichischen Sozialdemokratin, ed. Herbert Steiner (Vienna: Ibera and Molden, 1997), 11–210; Walter Göhring, “Käthe Leichter und die Freie Gewerkschaftsbewegung,” in “Man ist ja schon zufrieden, wenn man arbeiten kann.” Käthe Leichter und ihre politische Aktualität, ed. Institut für Gewerkschafts- und AK-Geschichte (Vienna: Mandelbaum, 2003), 15–94; Eleonoe Lappin-Eppel, “Käthe Leichter: The Making of a Jewish Intellectual, Socialist, and Fighter for Working Women,” in Jewish Intellectual Women in Central Europe, 1860-2000: Twelve Biographical Essays, ed. Judith Szapor et al. (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2012), 227–60. On Leicther’s contributions to the Institute’s study of authority in the modern family, see below, chap. 2.

26 See, e.g., Otto Rühle, Die Seele des proletarischen Kindes (Vienna: Verlag am andern Ufer, 1925); R Woldt, Die Lebenswelt des Industriearbeiters (Leipzig, 1926); A Argelander, “Der Einfluss des sozialen Milieus auf die geistige Entwicklung,” Jenaer Beiträge zur Erziehungs- und Jugendpsychologie, 1928.

27 Representative works of this literature include Therese Schlesinger-Eckstein, Wie will und wie soll das Proletariat seine Kinder erziehen? (Vienna: Verlag des Frauen-Reichskomitees, 1921); Charlotte Bühler, Das Seelenleben des Jugendlichen: Versuch einer Analyse und Theorie der psychischen Pubertät (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1929); Margarete Rada, Das reifende Proletariermädchen: ein Beitrag zur Umweltforschung (Vienna: Verlag für Jugend 50

generally when she concluded that, in its current state, the Austrian working class was unable to raise the new people of the socialist future.28

Interwar socialists by no means invented such studies. As Zeisel explained in the methodological appendix to Marienthal, sociologists from Frédéric Le Play, and Alfredo

Niceforo to Ernst Engel and Charles Booth had gathered data on physical attributes, family budgets, household inventories, and individual consumption not only to answer the “worker question” but also to gain a “complete overview” of society in its totality.29 Max Weber and his colleagues at the Verein für Sozialpolitik had turned social-scientific research into the worker question in a specific direction, asking, according to Zeisel, “‘What kind of individual does modern industry create by virtue of its particular structure and what kind of occupational (and hence, indirectly: non-occupational) fate does it offer him?’”30 Moreover, as other interwar socialists recognized, there existed distinctively socialist tradition of enquêtes ouvrières initiated by Marx and intended to bring the workers to self-consciousness.31 Austrian socialists’ studies of the working class were, however, distinct in two significant ways. First, the researchers did not describe downtrodden workers in order to elicit sympathy but as a means of diagnosing the personal and social ills that must be rectified in the creation of the new people. Second, these

und Volk, 1931); Hildegard Hetzer, Mütterlichkeit: psychologische Untersuchung der Grundformen mütterlicher Haltung (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1937).

28 Rada, Das reifende Proletariermädchen.

29 Zeisel, “Zur Geschichte der Soziographie” viz., 110. For an analysis of such scalar thinking the very different, but certainly related, context of Central European climate science, see Deborah R. Coen, Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

30 Zeisel, “Zur Geschichte der Soziographie,” 109.

31 See, e.g., Weiss, “Die Enquête ouvrière von Karl Marx”; Les enquêtes ouvrières en France entre 1830 et 1848 (Paris: Alcan, 1936). For the study to which Weiss and others referred, see Marx, “Questionnaire for Workers.”

social scientists were near to and aligned with the political power needed to effectuate the changes for which they called. “Our whole lives,” remembered Jahoda, “were based around this fundamental idea”—that social research could initiate this transformation.32

The career of Charlotte Bühler aptly illustrates the intertwinement of social science and socialism. As a pioneering psychologist, Bühler’s interests lay in the development of a coherent personality through the stages of life—from childhood through adolescence to adulthood.33 How, she asked, did biological needs, social expectations, and conscious desires combine to produce a foundation for intentional goals?34 At the beginning of her career—early in the 1920s—Bühler researched this pattern using evidence gleaned from children’s diaries; later in the decade, she studied the personalities of some 400 individuals preserved in biographies and memoirs.35 After spending 1926-1927 at Yale University as Rockefeller Foundation Fellow—where she worked with the renowned child psychologist Arnold Gesell—Bühler began integrating experimental testing and empirical observation into her research.36 Data furnished by these methods

32 Quoted in Gruber, Red Vienna, 6.

33 For Bühler’s own characterization of her life and career, see Charlotte Bühler, “Charlotte Bühler,” in Psychologie in Selbstdarstellungen, ed. Karl-Heinz Renner and Helmut E. Lück (Stuttgart and Vienna: Hans Hubert Bern, 1972), 9–41.

34 Bühler presented her fully developed theory in Charlotte Bühler, Kindheit und Jugend: Genese des Bewusstseins (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1931).

35 For Bühler’s analyses of diaries, see Charlotte Bühler, Tagebuch eines jungen Mädchens (Jena: G. Fischer, 1922); Rosemarie Buhlmann and Charlotte Bühler, Zwei Knabentagebücher: mit einer Einleitung über die Bedeutung des Tagebuchs für die Jugendpsychologie. (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1925); Charlotte Bühler, Zwei Mädchentagebücher (Jena: G. Fischer, 1927). For her study of psychobiography, written with Else Frenkel, see Else Frenkel and Charlotte Bühler, Wunsch und Pflicht im Aufbau des menschlichen Lebens (Vienna: Gerold, 1937).

36 On the Rockefeller Foundation’s support for research into social psychology and scientific pedagogy, see Franz Samelson, “Organizing for the Kingdom of Behavior: Academic Battles and Organizational Policies in the Twenties,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 21, no. 1 (January 1985): 33–47.

established benchmarks of ‘normal’ childhood development from birth through adolescence.37

Upon her return to Vienna, Bühler began to gather such evidence through the Child Observation

Center, a research institute that sought to establish scientific conditions for observation and measurement. As S. J. Beck, an American visitor, described it to his colleagues, children were kept in glass-and-tile cubicles that enabled specialists to observe them around the clock. During the three-week-long period of observation, Bühler and her colleagues used both Binet-Simon

Intelligence Scales and custom-designed psychological tests to evaluate subjects’ deviation from the standards of ‘normal’ development.38 “This is the newest thing I have yet seen in Vienna,”

Beck wrote, “and for that matter in Europe.” The Center, he summarized, was the “ultra of modernity.”39

But the Center was no apolitical enterprise.40 Rather, it was a powerful partner of the municipal government of Red Vienna, working in concert with the Public Health Office to enforce the SDAP’s politics of pedagogy.41 Its experimental subjects were not willing volunteers but wards of the state; they were children taken from working-class homes by social workers

37 See, inter alia, Hildegard Hetzer, Käthe Wolf, and Charlotte Bühler, Babytests: eine Testserie für das erste Lebensjahr (Leipzig: Barth, 1928); Charlotte Bühler, Zur Psychologie des Kleinkindes experimentell-psychologische Arbeiten (Leipzig: Barth, 1928); Charlotte Bühler and Hildegard Hetzer, Kleinkindertests : Entwicklungstests vom 1. bis 6. Lebensjahr (Leipzig: Barth, 1932).

38 S. J. Beck, “Notes and Comments,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 4, no. 3 (July 1934): 422.

39 Ibid., 423.

40 For an overview of the political connections and implications of the Center, see Mitchell G. Ash, “Die Entwicklung des Wiener Psychologischen Instituts 1922-1938,” in Karl Bühler’s Theory of Language, ed. Achim Eschbach (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 1988), 310–14. A dissenting opinion can be found in Sheldon Gardner and Gwendolyn Stevens, Red Vienna and the Golden Age of Psychology, 1918-1938 (New York: Praeger, 1992), 150–54, 202–3.

41 On the role of the Public Health Office and its director, Julius Tandler, in the SDAP’s new-people program, see Britta I. McEwen, “Welfare and Eugenics: Julius Tandler’s Rassenhygienische Vision for Interwar Vienna,” Austrian History Yearbook 41, no. 4 (2010): 170–90.

who observed extreme poverty, “endangered morals,” “delinquency,” or “parental conflict.” If tests showed that a child was significantly behind the ‘normal’ stage of development, Bühler could petition for her relocation to foster care or a correctional institution.42 Although Beck insisted that Bühler and her team recorded “[o]nly objective phenomena,” those affected described an altogether different set of criteria—one centered on the norms, attitudes, and habits the SDAP sought to cultivate in the working class.43 As one Viennese mother recalled, a social worker alternated between threatening and patronizing her:

Now you listen to me! I’ll have to take your child away if you carry on living in a pig-sty and if your husband doesn’t get out and work. Do we understand each other? If, on the other hand, you can keep your flat clean, I see no reason why I should take your child into community care. If you keep that in mind, you’ll be able to keep your child.44

Bühler’s Center was among the most effective means of policing proletarian behavior in Red

Vienna: between June 1925 and December 1927 alone, it removed nearly 7,000 children from their families.45 The strength of the connection between research, politics, and reform was both obvious—even to a foreigner like Beck. As Beck described it, “all waters of psychological search and research [at the Center] ultimately flow back to the Gemeinde.”46

42 For a description of this process, see Hildegard Hetzer, Kindheit und Armut. Psychologische Methoden in Armutsforschung und Armutsbekämpfung (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1929); Hermann Hartmann, Die Wohlfahrtspflege Wiens (Vienna: Gelsenkirchen, 1929); Hans Paradeiser, “Ausschnitte aus dem System der Wiener offenen Jugendfürsorge,” Blätter für das Wohlfahrtsweser 28, no. 271 (1929); Beck, “Notes and Comments,” 423–25.

43 Quoted in Sieder, “Housing Policy in Red Vienna,” 44.

44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 43–48.

46 Beck, “Notes and Comments,” 423. Beck’s use of the German “Gemeinde,” which literally referred to the “municipality” of Vienna but, more evocatively, referenced the “community” of its inhabitants, is itself striking.

Bühler was aided by a veritable “army” of graduate students and research assistants.47

Indeed, former members of the Center later recalled that Bühler effectively forced her interests and approaches on the doctoral students overseen by her husband, Karl, and the postdoctoral researchers based at his Vienna Psychological Institute. Members of this cohort—including Else

Frenkel, Hildegard Hetzer, Helene Löw-Beer, and Lotte Danziger—used evidence gathered in the Center as the foundation for their own studies of working-class life.48 Doing so further strengthened the intellectual-political connection between Bühler’s psychological research program and the Austro-Marxists’ politics of pedagogy. But one of these assistants—Paul

Lazarsfeld—went further. After joining the intellectual circle around Bühler in the mid-1920s and rising to prominence within it by the end of the decade, Lazarsfeld began to rebuild the foundations and transform the methods of her research program. To describe Lazarsfeld’s methodological intervention and to explain its application in Marienthal, it is necessary to retrace the path that led him to Bühler—the path from socialist to social scientist.

SOCIALIST AND SOCIAL SCIENTIST

Lazarsfeld was immersed in the theoretical debates of Austro-Marxism and the political activities of the SDAP from a young age. In 1915, when Lazarsfeld was fourteen years old, his parents—Robert and Sophie—became active members of the Austrian part; soon thereafter, the

47 Gardner and Stevens, Red Vienna and the Golden Age of Psychology, 1918-1938, chap. 12.

48 For a summary of this research program by its leaders, see Hildegard Hetzer, “Kinder- und jugendpsychologische Forschung im Wiener Psychologischen Institut von 1922-1938,” Zeitschrift für Entwicklungspsychologie und Pädagogische Psychologie 14 (1982): 175–244; Lotte Schenk-Danziger, “Zur Geschichte der Kinderpsychologie: Das Wiener Institut,” Zeitschrift für Entwicklungspsychologie und Pädagogische Psychologie 16, no. 2 (1984): 85– 101; Hans Zeisel, “The Austromarxists in ‘Red’ Vienna: Reflections and Recollections,” in The Austrian Socialist Experiment. Social Democracy and Austromarxism, 1918-1934, ed. Anson Rabinbach (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985), 119–34.

Lazarsfelds’ home became something of a “socialist salon” to which Bauer, Hilferding, Victor

Adler, and Friedrich Adler payed regular visits.49 These visits left an indelible impression on

Lazarsfeld, endowing him, as he later recalled, with an ethical and emotional commitment to socialism:

I see myself with a schoolmate. I would have been 16, not 17. I see myself with this friend at the window of a room in my parents’ house, and there is a beggarwoman on the street. I turned to my friend and said, “If it would help to bring Socialism so that there wouldn’t be such beggars, I would gladly jump out of the window and be dead.50

In 1915, at the age of sixteen, Lazarsfeld proclaimed his allegiance to democratic socialism and joined the youth wing of the SDAP.51 For the next eight years, Lazarsfeld participated actively in activities for young comrades—leading a troop of Red Falcons, editing a socialist newsletter, and organizing charity drives for soldiers returning from the First World War.52 As Marie Jahoda,

Lazarsfeld’s colleague and first wife, recalled that “[i]n spite of Austria’s extreme economic misery at that time, the atmosphere was invigorating. Everything was new. The decadent

Hapsburgs had been blown away; the republic was new; socialists in government were new; and

Paul, like other young people had actively participated in the revolutionary activities at the end of the war. He was full of creative energy.”53

49 Lazarsfeld, Oral History (1962), 42, 183, 211; cf. Reminiscences of Paul Felix Lazarsfeld, 1975, interview by Ann K. Pasanella, February 1975, 11, Columbia Center for Oral History.

50 Lazarsfeld, Oral History (1962), 239.

51 Ibid., 239–40, 249.

52 Ibid., 53.

53 Jacques Lautman and Bernard-Pierre Lécuyer, eds., “Interview with Marie Jahoda,” in Paul Lazarsfeld (1901- 1976): La sociologie de Vienne à New York (Paris: Harmattan, 1998), 136.

But Lazarsfeld was no ordinary Red Falcon. Because of his family’s involvement with

Austro-Marxist ideologues and SDAP politicians, Lazarsfeld developed an incomparable connection to the movement—especially with Friedrich Adler. When Adler was convicted, in

1917, for the assassination of Minister-President Count Karl von Stürgkh, Lazarsfeld was arrested for disrupting the courtroom. During Adler’s subsequent imprisonment, Lazarsfeld payed regular visits—and smuggled pages from Adler’s new monograph to the outside world.

Lazarsfeld even arranged a clandestine meeting between Adler—freed in 1919—and the communist Kurt Eisler.54 According to Lazarsfeld, his connection with Adler was so deep that when his mentor, appointed Secretary-General of the Labor and Socialist International in 1923, declined to hire Lazarsfeld as his secretary, the young man quit democratic-socialist politics.55

Lazarsfeld’s close personal relationships with Austria’s leading socialists provided more than opportunities for picaresque adventures. When, in 1916, Sophie left Lazarsfeld in

Hilfdering’s care for an entire summer, the two took long hikes, during which they discussed socialist theory and politics.56 Max Winter, whom Lazarsfeld remembered as “the Emile Zola of

Austrian socialism,” took Lazarsfeld along to a conference in Marseilles; instead of attending the meetings, the two wandered the city, observing the conditions of the French lumpenproletariat.57

Such interactions—amounting to a kind of apprenticeship—transformed Lazarsfeld’s socialist commitments from affective to intellectual.58 In concrete terms, this shift appeared in

54 Lazarsfeld, Oral History (1962), 185, 191–94, 210–11, 233–35.

55 Ibid., 199–200.

56 Ibid., 185.

57 Ibid., 249, 211 respectively.

58 Lazarsfeld, “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir,” 273.

Lazarsfeld’s use of his Red Falcon cell to distribute questionnaires among the working class.

More abstractly, it manifested itself in Lazarsfeld’s insight the SDAP propagandists should not simply mine these surveys for sordid details of proletarian life but analyze the collected responses quantitatively to gain an overview of the working class.59 Across his activities for the

SDAP—from teaching courses at a labor college to meeting with proletarian artists—Lazarsfeld began to understand and interpret the struggle as the conflict between antagonistic social forces.60 Lazarsfeld later described awakening to “the theme of connections between various sectors of society, which is now the first undergraduate lecture at college. But it was then so new and fascinating.”61

As important for Lazarsfeld’s intellectual development was psychological theory and practice. Alfred Adler, the theoretician and clinician who developed “individual psychology,” was young Lazarsfeld’s pediatrician.62 Moreover, concurrent with her involvement in the SDAP,

Sofie Lazarsfeld began training analysis with Adler; she became a practitioner in the mid-

1920s.63 Marxist intellectuals across interwar Europe believed psychology to be the key to socialist revolution. Austro-Marxists, in particular, saw Adler’s theory of drive-subordination as central to the task of creating “new people” out of the existing working class. Lazarsfeld shared this view: as an up-and-coming socialist intellectual, he wrote a series of essays arguing that

59 Lazarsfeld, Oral History (1962), 219–21.

60 Ibid., 211–12, 242–43.

61 Ibid., 243.

62 Hans Zeisel, “The Vienna Years,” in Qualitative and Quantitative Social Research. Papers in Honor of Paul F. Lazarsfeld, ed. Robert K. Merton, James S. Coleman, and Peter H. Rossi (New York: The Free Press, 1979), 11.

63 In the late-1920s, Sofie Lazarsfeld wrote two books—in an Adlerian vein—on marriage. See Sofie Lazarsfeld, Die Ehe von Heute und Morgen (Munich: J.F. Bergmann-Verlag, 1927); Erziehung zur Ehe (Vienna: Perles, 1928).

Marx’s critique of capitalism and Adler’s critique of neurosis presupposed and complemented one another.64 By so arguing, Lazarsfeld echoed the position of another family friend: Siegfried

Bernfeld. Like Otto Fenichel and Wilhelm Reich, Bernfeld maintained that Marx and Freud were linked by an “inner affinity” following from their mutual use of the dialectic to develop

“materialist” accounts of individual life and social organization.65 Lazarsfeld was no Freudian, but he concurred, claiming that psychology would provide the means “to develop Socialist [sic] personalities […] instead of individualistic personalities.”66

Sometime around 1925, Lazarsfeld—perhaps on Bernfeld’s recommendation—began attending the research seminar convened by Karl and Charlotte Bühler at the Viennese

Psychological Institute.67 Much to Adler’s disappointment, Lazarsfeld readily adopted the

Bühlers’ behaviorist paradigm. Moreover, Lazarsfeld saw in the Bühlers’ research program an opportunity to apply the mathematical skills he had developed as an undergraduate and graduate student. At Charlotte Bühler’s request, Lazarsfeld delivered a presentation on the potential contribution of statistics in psychological research.68 Bühler was sufficiently impressed—with the report and with Lazarsfeld—that she hired him to teach statistical techniques to graduate

64 Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Marxismus und Individualpsychologie,” Die sozialistische Erziehung 7 (1927): 98–101. For a similar argument developed by one of Lazarsfeld’s interlocutors, see Felix Kanitz, “Individualpsychologie in der Arbeiterbewegung,” Bildungsarbeit 14, no. 10 (October 1927).

65 See Siegfried Bernfeld, “Sozialismus und Psychoanalyse,” Der sozialistische Arzt 2, no. 2–3 (1926): 15–22; “Zur Frage: Psychoanalyse und Marxismus,” Der Klassenkampf 2, no. 3 (1928): 93. On Lazarsfeld’s friendship with Bernfeld, see Lazarsfeld, Oral History (1975), 12.

66 Lazarsfeld, Oral History (1962), 46; cf. “Die sozialistische Erziehung und das Gemeinschaftsleben der Jugend”; “Der Zusammenhang der körperlichen und geistigen Entwicklung von Schülern.”

67 On Bernfeld’s encouragement of Lazarsfeld to attend the Bühlers’ seminar, see Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 166.

68 Lazarsfeld had earned his doctorate in mathematics in 1925 and subsequently taught the subject at a prestigious Gymnasium in Vienna. See Lazarsfeld, Oral History (1962), 50–51; Lazarsfeld, Oral History (1975), 44.

students and researchers at the Institute.69 In 1927, Karl Bühler helped Lazarsfeld establish the

Austrian Economic-Psychological Research Center (ÖWF), an institute that would apply cutting- edge techniques to projects for private clients.70 By the early 1930s, Lazarsfeld had become an active member of Charlotte Bühler’s team of researchers, serving, for example, as the “statistical consultant” to methodological text using studies conducted in the Child Observation Center.71

In1931 Lazarsfeld oversaw his own collaborative study, Youth and Employment, in this genre.72

But Lazarsfeld did not uncritically accept this approach and straightforwardly apply its techniques. Rather, across a series of methodological and technical writings from the late 1920s and early 1930s, Lazarsfeld argued that social research must go beyond the presentation of aggregates, averages, and rates; the discipline, he insisted, must analyze findings statistically and interpret them probabilistically. Why did Lazarsfeld believe the introduction of probabilistic statistics to the discipline to be necessary? In Statistical Practicum (1929), a workbook written to accompany university-level instruction in statistical methods—including, perhaps, his own courses at the Bühlers’ Institute—Lazarsfeld couched the importance of these techniques in eminently practical terms. First, these methods were already in extensive use—both within and beyond the social and human sciences—but they were little understood in the psychological field.73 Lazarsfeld, worried that the uninformed use of statistics could lead to grave

69 Lazarsfeld, Oral History (1962), 219–20.

70 There is some discrepancy about the date of the ÖWF’s founding stemming from divergent recollections of the organization’s members. I concur with Mitchell Ash in placing the date in 1927. See Ash, “Die Entwicklung des Wiener Psychologischen Instituts 1922-1938,” 314–15.

71 See the title page of Bühler and Hetzer, Kleinkindertests.

72 Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Charlotte Bühler, Jugend und Beruf: Kritik und Material (Jena: Fischer, 1931).

73 Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Statistisches Praktikum für Psychologen und Lehrer (Jena: G. Fischer, 1929), iii–iv. For an overview of the technical developments in statistics and political implications of probabilistic thinking in turn-of- 60

misinterpretations, intended to teach his readers the methods in their “pure” form. Once mastered, he assured his readers, the techniques—such as the calculation of standard deviation— would enable researchers to corrector errors and expedite the research process.74 But, as

Statistical Practicum progressed to more complex theories and more difficult exercises,

Lazarsfeld developed a complementary—but more radical—argument for the importance of these techniques to psychological research. Probabilistic statistics, he claimed, would enable researchers to escape previous methodological limitations; they would enable psychologists to apperceive mental states and sociologists to make predictive statements.75 Lazarsfeld promised, in short, that the methods he taught would revolutionize socialist-aligned research.

Lazarsfeld spent much of Statistical Practicum introducing the Gauss Curve—the normal or binomial distribution—that was integral to the statistical standardization and probabilistic interpretation of data. Although knowledge about and use of the normal distribution was widespread in western and central Europe, Lazarsfeld proceeded as if his readers had no knowledge of its origins, attributes, and implications. In its first sections, Statistical Practicum underscored the practical function of the normal distribution. Comparing observed data with the normal distribution, for example, would enable researchers to identify outlying cases, identify categorization errors, and standardize scales.76 More conceptually, approaching evidence through

the-century Austria, see Deborah R. Coen, Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), chap. 8.

74 Lazarsfeld, Statistisches Praktikum, iv.

75 See Lazarsfeld’s arguments in ibid., 43–56, 104–5, 121–27; cf. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Die Bedeutung der normalen Verteilungskurve für die Leistungsmessung,” Psychotechnische Zeitschrift 4 (1929): 104–7; Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Die Kontingenzmethode in der Psychologie—zur Erinnerung an Wilhelm Betz,” Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie 41 (1932): 160–66.

76 Lazarsfeld, Statistisches Praktikum, 26–43.

the framework of the Gauss Curve would enable researchers to see the correlative relationship between variables.77 But Lazarsfeld’s emphasis on the normal distribution was not entirely utilitarian. Using statistical methods, he claimed, would initiate far-reaching changes in the research process and its implications.78

To make this argument, Lazarsfeld turned to Adolphe Quetelet, the nineteenth-century mathematician and statistician whose studies of regularity and deviation made him, in

Lazarsfeld’s view, the direct-if-unrecognized predecessor to modern social science.79 As

Lazarsfeld explained, Quetelet had been the first to observe the regularity of physical attributes among members of a population—most famously of the dimensions of French soldiers—and to demonstrate that this pattern approximated the normal distribution. Especially important to

Lazarsfeld was Quetelet’s evolution from “social physics” to more “moral statistics”—his extension of the study of statistical regularities from physical to psychical attributes. Quetelet held that, like their physical counterparts, moral traits and mental characteristics would accord with the normal distribution and, further, that variation from this norm could be calculated probabilistically. Ultimately, Lazarsfeld acknowledged, Quetelet did not succeed in this endeavor. Yet, Lazarsfeld insisted repeatedly in methodological writings across his career,

Quetelet’s failure was not conceptual but empirical: he simply could not obtain enough data with

77 Ibid., chaps. 5–6.

78 Ibid., 43.

79 Lazarsfeld’s interest in Quetelet endured—indeed, perhaps strengthened—during his career. Lazarsfeld remained committed to the view that Quetelet was the unrecognized progenitor of contemporary social psychology. At the same time, he did later subject Quetelet to more critique for some of the same reasons—e.g., determinism—that he neglected in the 1930s. See Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Notes on the History of Quantification in Sociology--Trends, Sources and Problems,” Isis 52, no. 2 (1961): 277–333, https://doi.org/10.2307/228683; David Landau and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Quetelet, Adolphe,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Crowell Collier and Macmillan, 1968).

which to calculate these regularities. Lazarsfeld charged Quetelet’s contemporaries and successors with erroneously ignoring the Belgian’s innovations. Quetelet, Lazarsfeld wrote, had set on the “path to [natural] lawfulness [Gesetzmäßigkeit]”—a path he fully intended to follow.80

Lazarsfeld devoted an entire chapter of Statistical Practicum to the problem raised by moral statistics. Contemporary psychological researchers—especially the psychometricians L. L.

Thurstone and Edward Thorndike—Lazarsfeld argued, provided the evidence necessary to validate Quetelet’s method. As part of the overall growth in intelligence testing in the wake of the First World War, these American researchers had developed tests that generated quantitative data on memory, acuity, and attention. Lazarsfeld believed that such data would enable

Quetelet’s successors—namely himself—to apply and thereby validate the methods of moral statistics. But psychometry did not provide a foolproof solution. As the discipline’s leading voices, readily acknowledged, “[j]ust what they [the tests] measure is not known; how far it is proper to add, subtract, multiple, divide, and compute ratios with the measures obtained is not known; just what the measures obtained signify concerning intellect is unknown.” Quantitative results might show that Subject A scored higher on a test than Subject B, but what did this difference—and its margin—signify? As Thorndike wrote in 1927, psychometric tests suffered from “ambiguity in content, arbitrariness in units, and ambiguity in significance.”81

As Lazarsfeld argued in Statistical Practicum and a series of more technical articles published in specialist journals, Quetelet’s statistical methods would provide a solution to this

80 Lazarsfeld, Statistisches Praktikum, 43.

81 Edward L. Thorndike, The Measurement of Intelligence (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1927), 1.

seemingly intractable problem.82 In Statistical Practicum, he showed that calculating the standard deviation within the psychometrical data would create series of intervals that were, in and of themselves, meaningful—even if their exact nature was not known. Were the margin separating Subjects A and B greater than one standard deviation, this is to say, Subject A could correctly be described as having a distinctly better memory than Subject B, despite the fact that no widely accepted unit—in the vein of milliliters or degrees—existed for measurements of memory.83 Lazarsfeld informed his readers that, whether focused on intelligence, anxiety, mood, or opinion, this procedure “leads [the researcher] directly to a superior metric through the implementation of the normal distribution of psychical phenomena.”84 According to Lazarsfeld, this statistical technique fulfilled and modernized Quetelet’s program of moral statistics. Further, the method would allow researchers “to capture the expressions of individuals (in the broadest sense) immediately.”85 This unmediated access to psychical states, in turn, would enable researchers to make informed generalizations. Quetelet, Lazarsfeld explained, had understood these generalizations as the discovery the “average man” and the “types” arrayed around him.

Conversely, knowledge of these types would allow the researcher to work backwards—using knowledge of the general to develop insight into particular cases. The statistical method, this is to say, pointed beyond itself, laying the foundation for “a future analysis of the phenomenon

[under investigation] that will not be statistical but unique [individuelle].”86 Although Lazarsfeld

82 Lazarsfeld, “Bedeutung der normalen Verteilungskurve”; “Kontingenzmethode in der Psychologie.”

83 Lazarsfeld, Statistisches Praktikum, chap. 4.

84 Ibid., 51–52, emphasis original.

85 Ibid., 47.

86 Ibid., 51–52.

did not develop these positions through forthright argument, any reader of Statistical Practicum might well have been convinced that moral statistics and psychometrics combined in a virtuous circle of statistical-psychological research.

For Lazarsfeld to position himself as Quetelet’s immediate and true successor was audacious. Through the mid-nineteenth century, Quetelet’s thought aroused the suspicion of

German statisticians, philosophers, and theologians worried by the challenge his account of statistical regularity posed to human autonomy, cultural diversity, and historical specificity.87

Subsequently, statisticians such as Étienne Laspeyres and Georg Mayr, reframed Quetelet’s techniques as a method of mass observation suited to populations and processes—but not applicable to any single event or individual. Concomitantly, these researchers categorically disallowed the use of statistics to infer psychological states and predict specific outcomes.88 In

Statistical Practicum, Lazarsfeld did not argue against any past or contemporary interpreters of

Quetelet, such as Gustav Rümelin, Georg Mayr, Georg Friedrich Knapp, or Wilhelm Lexis.89

Instead, Lazarsfeld ignored them entirely, bypassing nearly a century of methodological and philosophical debate, to present Quetelet’s statistical techniques in new—or, rather, old—terms.

By insisting that the moral-statistical method could be modified with psychometrical techniques, applied to individuals, and used to make causal claims, Lazarsfeld revived a view of Quetelet as that which his German interpreters most feared.90

87 See Porter, Statistical Thinking, chap. 6; Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers, chaps. 3–4.

88 For a detailed discussion of this interpretation, see Porter, “Lawless Society: Social Science and the Reinterpretation of Statistics in Germany, 1850-1880.”

89 On German critiques and rehabilitations of Quetelet, see Porter, Statistical Thinking, 176–92.

90 Quetelet’s statistical methods remained central to Lazarsfeld’s research and methodology until the latter’s retirement in the 1970s. In his later methodological writings, Lazarsfeld took a somewhat more equivocal position on Quetelet, celebrating him as the founder of modern social research but critiquing him for being overly 65

But Statistical Practicum was no contribution to mathematical—or even methodological—debates. Instead, it was an eminently practical text, replete with explanations and exercises intended to lead even novice students from basic calculations of averages to complex determinations of standard deviations. Otherwise put, Statistical Practicum intended that the methods it taught—of statistical analysis and inference—be used in the social- and human-scientific research program of which Lazarsfeld was a part. Every researcher could accomplish Lazarsfeld’s proposed reconciliation of psychometrical data and moral-statistical analysis, thereby gaining the ability to observe, measure, and typologize mental states.

Researchers could, moreover, use Quetelet’s methods to apply these generalizations to particular cases and to make valid claims about their potential causes. Lazarsfeld himself used these methods in the text that became synonymous with his early career: The Unemployed Marienthal.

By so doing, Lazarsfeld showed that, while ostensibly neutral, his statistical-psychological methods served the Austro-Marxists’ philosophical aims of bending natural laws to human needs and the SDAP’s practical goals of reforming the existing working class into model proletariat.

Both these methods—and, crucially, the methodological debates they inspired—would become key elements of the Institute’s program of empirical research.

PSYCHOLOGICAL BREAKDOWN

In the late-1920s, Lazarsfeld began searching for a project in which to apply his methods of empirical research and statistical analysis.91 Lazarsfeld and his closest collaborators—Hans

deterministic. See Lazarsfeld, “Notes on the History of Quantification in Sociology--Trends, Sources and Problems,” 306.

91 Lazarsfeld, “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir,” 279.

Zeisel and Marie Jahoda—approached Otto Bauer in 1930, asking for funds to study how workers spent their free time.92 After Bauer reproached Lazarsfeld for his obtuse neglect of the effects of the Great Depression on Austrian workers, the ÖWF proposed a different project: “a community [Gemeinschaft] that was unemployed in its totality.”93 Bauer approved the project. In

November 1931, a fifteen-person team arrived in the village of Marienthal; by May 1932, they had concluded their fieldwork. A year later, in 1933, the ÖWF’s final report, The Unemployed of

Marienthal, was published to acclaim in the academic and political press.94 In an era when the proper metric—indeed, the correct definition—of unemployment was hotly contested,

Marienthal supplied both precise analysis and startling conclusions.95 Among Austrian socialists, the ÖWF’s study had the effect of reinforcing pessimism about the present state and political future of the working class.

Although chosen almost at random—chiefly for its proximity to Vienna—the village of

Marienthal was an ideal candidate for the ÖWF’s study. At the height of the Great Depression, approximately eighty percent of Marienthalers were unemployed.96 The ÖWF attributed this staggering figure to the fact that the village developed from the textile factory at its center “[a]s

92 Lazarsfeld, Oral History (1962), 143–44.

93 Jahoda, Zeisel, and Lazarsfeld, Marienthal, 1–3.

94 See, inter alia, “Das Leben in Marienthal. Forschungsreise in ein Arbeitsdorf,” Der Kuckuck, July 2, 1933; Andreas Sternheim, “Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 2, no. 3 (1933): 416–17; Ernst Friedmann, “Marienthal, die müde Gemeinschaft,” Der Morgen, June 12, 1933; Vittorio D’Agostino, “Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal,” Archivio italiano di psicologia 13, no. 1 (1935): 62–63.

95 On the debates about the difficulty of defining and measuring unemployment in this period, see Garraty, Unemployment in History, chap. 9.

96Jahoda, Zeisel, and Lazarsfeld, Marienthal, 14–17.

other communities developed around a market, a church, or a castle.”97 From its foundation in

1830, a high proportion of Marienthalers had worked spinning, weaving, and dying cotton and, later, producing rayon; those not directly employed in production worked in a service economy dependent upon it. Although the factory suffered setbacks in 1926, it recovered and even expanded in 1927 and 1928. Its final closure in 1930 left no Marienthaler untouched.98 The wealthy left Marienthal early; those who remained relied on the government for subsistence.

These villagers were desperately poor: forty-five percent ate only bread and coffee for their evening meals; fifty-four percent of families ate meat only once per week.99

In 1933, the ÖWF described its aim as the situation of these “smallest details of daily life” into a “framework for the whole” experience of unemployment.100 To do so, the researchers turned to the discipline of sociography (Sozigraphie): a combination of sociology, geography, anthropology, racial science, and political economy into, as the field’s founder, S. R. Steinmetz put it, the “history of becoming” that “describes the being of all peoples according to the course of their lives.”101 At the time research for Marienthal was being planned and undertaken, leading

German sociologists—including Ferdinand Tönnies and Otto Jahn—were debating the feasibility and desirability of using statistics in sociography.102 Lazarsfeld, Zeisel, and Jahoda intended to

97 Ibid., 11.

98 For an overview of the history of Marienthal, see Reinhard Müller, Marienthal: das Dorf, die Arbeitslosen, die Studie (Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2008).

99 Jahoda, Zeisel, and Lazarsfeld, Marienthal, 16–17.

100 Ibid., 1–3.

101 S. R. Steinmetz, “Die Stellung der Soziographie in der Reihe der Geisteswissenschaften,” Archiv für Rechts- und Wirtschaftsphilosophie 6, no. 3 (1912): 493–95.

102 See Ladislaus Bortkiewicz et al., “Diskussion über ‘Soziographie,’” in Verhandlungen des 7. deutschen Soziologentages vom 28. September bis 1. Oktober 1930 in Berlin: Vorträge und Diskussionen in der 68

join this debate. In a memorandum used to brief its researchers prior to beginning their fieldwork, the ÖWF described its research into unemployment as inextricably bound to its development of the sociographic method. Its goals were:

A) To characterize the phenomenon of unemployment as precisely as possible, whether from the individual or collective perspective.

2) If possible, to reveal the effects of unemployment by comparison with earlier times and other places or by dividing it [unemployment] into phases.

3) To concentrate all the available resources of social psychology on a collective in order to determine the extent to which a sociography is possible today.103

As a methodological appendix to Marienthal made clear, the ÖWF believed that their text provided a conclusive, affirmative answer to their contemporaries’ questions about the role of statistics in sociography. The study showed, in their view, how the methods Lazarsfeld had described in Statistical Practicum could be used to synthesize individual observations and measurements into a comprehensive view of the integral whole.104

The ÖWF identified a number of sources that might yield such information and a variety of approaches for obtaining it. Emulating earlier researchers—including Quetelet, Frédéric Le

Play, and Ernst Engel—they plumbed governmental records, interviewed local leaders, and calculated household budgets.105 Quantitative and qualitative evidence came from diverse sources: lists of books borrowed from libraries, reports of daily routines, and observations of

Hauptversammlung und in den Sitzungen der Untergruppen, ed. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziographie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1931), 207–32.

103 ÖWF, “Anweisung für Marienthal,” n.d., 2, PFL Papers Series I, Box 34, Folder 17. The shift from “A” to “2” is original to the text.

104 Jahoda, Zeisel, and Lazarsfeld, Marienthal, 1–2; cf. Hans Zeisel, “Zur Soziographie der Arbeitslosigkeit,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 69, no. 1 (1933): 96–105.

105 For the ÖWF’s implicit comparison of its own approach to these older methods, see Jahoda, Zeisel, and Lazarsfeld, Marienthal, 89–123.

movements of the villagers through public spaces.106 Although they seem not to have recognized it, the ÖWF researchers emulated their Central European and American counterparts by using letters, diaries, writings, and, especially, autobiographies as evidence of the subjective experience of unemployment.107

But it was Bühler who exerted the most significant and consistent influence over the

ÖWF. Like Bühler, the ÖWF obtained crucial evidence through interviews—often disguised— with Marienthalers. Interviewers were required to understand the purpose of the study and to familiarize themselves with the questions prior to going into the field in order to appear natural and relaxed when engaging with subjects.108 Interviews served a trifold purpose. First, the ÖWF used interviews to gather answers to specific questions about the size, composition, history, and condition of village families. Second, the researchers hoped that these questions would initiate unstructured conversations in which the subjects inadvertently revealed important psychological

106 Marienthalers recorded how they passed their days on timesheets prepared and distributed by the researchers. See ÖWF, “Freizeit-Erhebung. Fragebogen der Österreichischen Wirtschaftspsychologischen Forschungsstelle,” n.d., PFL Papers Series I, Box 34, Folder 16. For a description of the ÖWF’s observations of Marienthalers’ movements, see Jahoda, Zeisel, and Lazarsfeld, Marienthal, 59–61.

107 On the use of these methods in other Central European nations, see Franciszek Jakubczak, “The Development of Collecting and Researching Methods of Autobiographical Documents in Polish Sociology (1918-1994),” Polish Sociological Review, no. 110 (1995): 159–72; Antoni Sułek, “The Marienthal 1931/1932 Study and Contemporary Studies on Unemployment in Poland,” Polish Sociological Review, no. 157 (2007): 3–25; Katherine Lebow, “Autobiography as Complaint: Polish Social Memoir between the World Wars,” Laboratorium 6, no. 3 (2014): 13– 26. Through Polish researchers such as Florian Znaniecki, this method of using autobiographical testimony arrived in the United States. See, e.g., William Isaac Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America: Monograph of an Immigrant Group (Boston: G. Badger, 1918). After relocating to the United States, Lazarsfeld made this link between the two methods apparent when he collaborated with Bohan Zawadzki. See Bohan Zawadzki and Paul Lazarsfeld, “The Psychological Consequences of Unemployment,” The Journal of Social Psychology 6, no. 2 (1935): 224–251. Charlotte Bühler, it will be recalled, had mined dairies for psychological evidence as early as 1927. See Bühler, Zwei Mädchentagebücher.

108 ÖWF, “Instruktion,” n.d., 1–2, PFL Papers Series I, Box 34, Folder 17.

evidence—information about their experiences, attitudes, and reasoning.109 Third, following the procedures Bühler developed at the Child Observation Center, the ÖWF utilized interviews to make discrete observations about the physical presentation, material condition, and psychological disposition of their subjects.110 The ÖWF’s emulation of Bühler was hardly unexpected: the fifteen-person team consisted almost entirely of young socialists who were students of Bühler or researchers at the Center—or, not infrequently, both.

One context in which these interviews were conducted—a charity providing used clothing to the poorest villagers—warrants particular attention. Overseen by Lotte Danziger, a former assistant to Bühler, the charity project used relief efforts as a pretext to interview and observe the unemployed. Danziger and her associates visited Marienthalers’ homes, ostensibly to ask what clothes the family needed most. Like the social workers attached to the Child

Observation Center, however, the ÖWF researchers used these visits to assess the material condition and psychical state of their subjects. Excerpts from Danziger’s reports in The

Unemployed of Marienthal reveal this objective:

The apartment gave an extremely neat and tidy impression; the children’s and wife’s clothing were meticulously clean. The husband had, to be sure, a completely ripped shirt and entirely patched pants. In making the inventory we were informed that this was all that he owned. […] The youngest child attracted our attention. His face was feverishly puffy and the area around the nose was swollen. The child breathed loudly with an open mouth. […] The husband told us that things had been going very poorly over the last several days. They had only been able to buy bread and only an insufficient amount. But the children came in every few minutes to ask for more; they had not had enough. The wife sat in the kitchen and cried.111

109 One site in which the ÖWF conducted such interviews was the medical clinic they established upon arriving in the village. As the researchers explained, “Our medical service was, like all our activities [in Marienthal] not an end in itself but means of collecting psychological materials.” Jahoda, Zeisel, and Lazarsfeld, Marienthal, 30–31.

110 ÖWF, “Instruktion,” 2–4.

111 Jahoda, Zeisel, and Lazarsfeld, Marienthal, 78.

Danziger and her ÖWF colleagues considered such observations to be neutral, social-scientific data. Lazarsfeld drew a sharp distinction between the evidence presented in Marienthal and the sordid details conveyed by “social reportage.”112 Closer attention shows, however, the extent to which these observations mimicked the criteria Bühler and her colleagues—both social scientists and social workers—used to assess proletarian homes and families. Danziger’s description and

Marienthal itself, this is to say, echoed the behaviors, attitudes, and norms the SDAP inculcate in the working class as part of its new-people program.

Other evidence uncovered in the fieldwork likely amplified socialists’ suspicions about the proletariat. Records showed, for instance, that participation in social organizations, arts activities, and political parties declined as a function of long-term unemployment.113 While the

ÖWF recognized that many Marienthalers were unable to pay the membership fees and party dues such activities required, they also argued that this situation signaled a more general retreat from public life and social activity. Indeed, despite the reduction of subscription prices, circulation of the SDAP newspaper, Arbeiter-Zeitung, declined some sixty percent between 1927 and 1930; borrowing from the workingmen’s library dropped by nearly half between 1929 and

1930.114 SDAP politicians, reformers, and theorists were doubtless troubled by such findings, for the politics of pedagogy—the creation of Adler’s “new people”—depended on workers’ continual immersion in socialist ideas, culture, and activities. Dirty, downtrodden, starving—the

112 Marienthal 1.

113 Jahoda, Zeisel, and Lazarsfeld, Marienthal, 8, fn. 1.

114 Ibid., 34–36.

unemployed workers were far from the disciplined proletariat reformers anticipating the socialist revolution had sought to create.

The ÖWF spent six months in 1932 “working through” (Verarbeitung) the material— totaling more than thirty kilograms of paper—generated by the fieldwork.115 First, the lead researchers gathered at the Bühlers’ Institute to collaboratively reconstruct evidence from often- incomplete fieldnotes and to categorize the resulting material.116 Second, assistants standardized, normalized, and tabulated data, combining metrics about family size, income, and consumption into a single, multidimensional index: income per consumption unit per day.117 Following the procedure outlined in Statistical Practicum, they located each household on a continuum of consumption per unit per day and established a typology, classifying families’ material status as minimal, average, or maximal according to their distance from the mean.118 Third, Lazarsfeld transformed these “statistical types”—as he termed them in 1936—into “interpretive types,” thereby fulfilling the promise of Quetelet’s method. To do so, his colleagues later recalled,

115 Ibid., 8. It should be noted that “Verarbeitung” or “working through” is the same term deployed, in a decidedly different context, by Freud to describe the process of “psychical working out (or over).” According to J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, “[u]nderstood very broadly, psychical working out might be said to cover all the operations of the psychical apparatus. Freud's sense of it, however, would seem to be a more specific one: psychical working out is the transformation of the quantity of energy so that it may be mastered by means of diversion or binding.” See J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, “Psychical Working Out (or Over),” in The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1975), 366. I am grateful to Elizabeth Lunbeck for pointing out this connection. As will be discussed further in chapter 3, many members of the Bühlers’ Institute the ÖWF were interested in psychoanalysis and were analysands themselves— despite Charlotte Bühler’s dislike for Freud’s paradigm.

116 Hans Zeisel, “Market Research in Austria,” Human Factor 8 (1934): 29–32.

117 Jahoda, Zeisel, and Lazarsfeld, Marienthal, 26. See Lazarsfeld’s description of this division of labor in Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Typology of Cooperative Research,” February 27, 1945, 6, PFL Papers Series I, Box 38.

118 Jahoda, Zeisel, and Lazarsfeld, Marienthal, 16–22.

Lazarsfeld “conceptual formulations from a mass of concrete details,” distilling the multifarious experience of unemployment to its “central components.”119

This process of codification, quantification, analysis, and interpretation, yielded three distinct types of unemployed Marienthalers: the “unbroken,” the “broken,” and the “resigned.”

Unbroken Marienthalers were, in the ÖWF’s view, on par with those villagers lucky enough to be employed: they participated in the economic, social, and political life of the village; they applied for new jobs, attended political party meetings, and, most important, maintained their faith in the future.120 Broken villagers, by contrast, no longer maintained their homes, themselves, or their faith in the future; they lost all sense of time and failed to plan for the future.121 As Lazarsfeld described them, broken Marienthalers suffered from a reduced “horizon of experience.”122 On the surface, resigned villagers emulated their unbroken counterparts, maintain their homes and appearances and sending their children to school. Indeed, they seemed to exhibit a feeling of “equanimity” (Gelassenheit).123 But this superficial attitude masked a pernicious dynamic: for the resigned, “expectations from life are continually further reduced; the circle of events and institutions in which they still participate continually shrinks; the energy

[Energie] that remains is concentrated on the maintenance of an ever-smaller sphere of life

119 On Lazarsfeld’s role see Zeisel, “Market Research in Austria,” 8; Lautman and Lécuyer, “Interview with Marie Jahoda,” 139; cf. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Some Remarks on the Typological Procedures in Social Research,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 6 (1937): 119–39; “A Job Analysis of Empirical Research,” 1945, PFL Papers Series I, Box 36, Folder 3. For the concept of “central components,” see Jahoda, Zeisel, and Lazarsfeld, Marienthal, 1.

120 Jahoda, Zeisel, and Lazarsfeld, Marienthal, 47–48; Karl Bühler, Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache (Jena: G. Fischer, 1934), 16.

121 Jahoda, Zeisel, and Lazarsfeld, Marienthal, 48.

122 Ibid.

123 Ibid., 43.

[Lebensraumes].”124 The resigned did not appear to be as desperate as the broken—but only because their experiential horizons had collapsed entirely.

Much like Danziger’s observations of Marienthalers, Lazarsfeld’s typology of the unemployed recast the categories of the SDAP’s new-people program as criteria of the ÖWF’s social-scientific research. Like Bühler and her associates, this is to say, the ÖWF researchers put social psychology in the service of the politics of pedagogy. Although Marienthal followed this established pattern, however, it did not perform the same function. Rather than bolster the

SDAP’s efforts to reform the working class—whether by charting its successes or indicating its future course—Marienthal implicitly critiqued the party’s program by showing that it was failing to create the model proletariat. Lazarsfeld did not merely affirm Danziger’s claims that many unemployed workers no longer followed the behaviors, embraced the norms, and cultivated the attitudes of the new people—he raised these claims to the level of social-scientific concepts.

Lazarsfeld’s concept of resignation embodied the pessimism of Marienthal. Using statistical techniques developed by Quetelet and refined by Lazarsfeld, the ÖWF found that, as unemployment persisted, the resigned “gradually lost their tradition of occupation and work” and came to think of unemployment as their calling (Beruf).125 Eventually, the resigned no longer felt themselves to be out-of-work proletarians but to be members of a new and distinct economic class—no longer unemployed workers but the unemployed.126 Man 467—one of the most-cited subjects in Marienthal—illustrated this slide into resignation: in the first year of his

124 Ibid., 78.

125 Ibid., 48–49.

126 Desrosières has termed this conceptualization of supra-individual, social phenomena, which he attributes to Quetelet, the creation of “macrosocial objects.” Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers, 68 et passim.

unemployment he sent out 130 applications for work; by the time Danziger interviewed him, he had become “entirely despairing,” convinced that “‘It will never get better, only worse.’ He wishes that it would all fall down.”127 Resignation replaced the solidaristic class consciousness the SDAP had sought to create with a shallow sense of apolitical “common destiny”(Schicksalsverbundenheit). But unemployment would ultimately dissolve even this sense of fellow-feeling, Lazarsfeld and his colleagues argued. Pushing bourgeois individualism to its logical conclusion, unemployment would atomize individuals—inducing every Marienthaler to

“undertake his own rescue” at the expense of others.128 Such a sudden shock might induce some jobless workers to turn to suicide.129 More broadly, the ÖWF speculated that unemployment would lead to mass migration and political revolution.130

The ÖWF’s pessimism about the fate of the unemployed was more than merely ideological; its foundations lay in a material analysis of economic conditions and standards of living in Marienthal. Combining moral-statistical techniques developed by Quetelet with social- scientific approaches used by Le Play and Engel, the ÖWF claimed to show that unemployed workers measuring lower on the income-consumption index were more likely to be broken or resigned than workers with higher rates of consumption.131 Individuals forced by poverty to drink ersatz coffee and scrounge cigarette butts in the street, for example, were more likely to be broken than unbroken.132 Deploying those

127 Jahoda, Zeisel, and Lazarsfeld, Marienthal, 46.

128 Ibid., 79.

129 Ibid., 84, 87.

130 Ibid., 79.

131 Ibid., 72.

132 Ibid., 73.

aspects of Quetelet’s methodology Lazarsfeld had emphasized in Statistical Practicum—elements, it was argued above, that

Lazarsfeld’s predecessors and contemporaries mistrusted—the ÖWF claimed that this relationship was not merely correlative but actually causal. According to this argument, a worker habituated to buying pork from the butcher reduced to hunting cats would likely descend from an unbroken to a broken psychological state.133 Further, the ÖWF relied on the predictive powers and granular focus Lazarsfeld found in Quetelet’s statistics to identify the specific points at which Marienthalers would pass from one mental state to another. As few as five Austrian schillings per month meant the difference between a family’s ability to purchase real or ersatz products—between, that is, being unbroken or broken.134

Quetelet’s statistical logic, as interpreted by Lazarsfeld, subtended the dire prognosis of

Marienthal: as unemployment benefits and governmental relief declined over time, more and more villagers would—necessarily and inevitably—slide down the “stages of a psychical breakdown [Hinabgleiten].”135 At the time of its research in the village, the ÖWF calculated that twenty-three percent of Marienthalers were unbroken, sixty-nine percent were resigned, and eight percent were broken.136 Although the unemployed might remain unbroken for some months, they would inevitably break under the strain of privation; the horizon that limned the possibilities of their lives would shrink until it vanished.137 “Every less schilling of support,” the reviewer of Marienthal for the Arbeiter-Zeitung exclaimed, “would inevitably mean further descent into apathy!”138

133 Ibid., 22–24, 82.

134 Ibid., 48, 73.

135 Ibid., 72.

136 Ibid., 47–50.

137 Ibid., 69–88.

138 “Die Schrumpfung der Seele,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, June 4, 1933; cf. “Das Leben in Marienthal. Forschungsreise in ein Arbeitsdorf”; Käthe Leichter, “Die Frau des Arbeitslosen,” Die Frau, October 1933.

CAPITALIST CRISES AND SOCIALIST DILEMMAS

Lazarsfeld and his colleagues developed a powerful indictment of capitalism.

Unemployment, they showed, caused physical, mental, and even, as one reviewer noted, spiritual privations.139 Declining material conditions muted experience, eroded individuality, and undercut class consciousness. What—if any—solutions did the ÖWF propose? At first blush, the researchers seem to have demurred. A substantive analysis of unemployment “in all its meanings and complexities,” they wrote in Marienthal, must await “calmer times” after the crisis.140 “The only real source of help,” in the present, “would be, naturally, to return [the unemployed] to work.”141 Closer examination shows, however, that these statements formed distinctive contributions to theoretical and political debates about persistent, endemic unemployment in the working class.

Unemployment—as a concept and condition—had long attracted the attention of

Marxists. From the mid-1840s through the late-1860s, Marx and Engels theorized that the

“reserve army of labor” in evidence was a result of the falling-rate-of-profit dynamic in capitalism. According to this account, the ineluctable tendency to drive down the cost of production mandated that capitalists replace human labor with machine production—a dynamic that generated a continually increasing group of permanently unemployed, immiserated workers.142 Marxists sometimes argued that the unemployed had revolutionary potential: as both

139 “Die Schrumpfung der Seele.”

140 Jahoda, Zeisel, and Lazarsfeld, Marienthal, 69, 74.

141 Ibid., 22.

142 As D. Furth, A. Heertje, and R. J. van der Veen explain in their highly technical article on Marx’s theory of unemployment, “Book I of Das Kapital is rather obscure on this important point.” According to their summary: “Marx assumes that the growth of both constant and variable capital exerts a positive effect on the demand for labour and that technical change exerts a negative effect. The demand for labour will then depend on the opposite effects of capital accumulation and technical change over a period of time. Marx starts initially from unemployment 78

the number and poverty of jobless workers grew in proportion to capitalists’ profits, the working class would rise up to expropriate the expropriators.143 Marienthal developed an altogether different argument. Across its empirical findings and interpretive conclusions, the ÖWF claimed that unemployment worked against the revolution by undoing the transformation of the working class into the “new people” of the socialist future. Without employment, they argued, workers became idle, disengaged, short-sighted, and selfish—in a word, resigned. Only by returning the jobless to work, Lazarsfeld and his ÖWF colleagues held, could their resignation be reversed.

Employment within industrial capitalism, this is to say, was a precondition for the “slow revolution.”

By so arguing, the ÖWF joined an ongoing, vital debate about the causes—and, especially, the consequences—of unemployment begun by Lazarsfeld’s fellow Austro-Marxists.

In a two-part essay published the movement’s theoretical journal, Der Kampf, in 1933, Max

Adler demonstrated that Austro-Marxists were chiefly concerned with the effects of the unemployment crisis on class consciousness. Jobless workers, he argued, lacked the “energy of the class struggle” because they had not received the “Marxist workers’ education” that would

born of the scarcity of means of production. He argues that the growth of both capital and production will be accompanied by rising unemployment; that real wages of the worker will remain at a subsistence level; and that the unemployed will become poorer and poorer.” D. Furth, A. Heertje, and R. J. Van Der Veen, “On Marx’s Theory of Unemployment,” Oxford Economic Papers 30, no. 2 (1978): 264.

143 Acceptance or rejection of this view depends, in part, on the understanding of the proximate causes (if not the long-developing trends) of the revolutionary transformation from capitalism to communism. As Jon Elster, for example, has argued, the revolutionary impulse must, in the final sense, be political or psychological. Elster makes the eminently reasonable point that the states must be high indeed, for it the inertia to be overcome in initiating the revolution is great. According to Elster, Marx identified at least three possible motivations for revolution: alienation, justice, and inefficiency. Unemployment appears as within the framework of inefficiency: “It does not seem justified to ask them [the workers] to sacrifice themselves and their children for the sake of their grandchildren, when they could all live a reasonably good life under capitalist conditions. Hence the inefficiency of capitalism will provide motivating power only when accompanied by absolute hardship and misery, so that the workers have nothing to lose but their chains.” In sort, according to Elster, the misery caused by late-stage capitalism—whether relative or absolute—was perhaps the most likely source of revolutionary zeal. See Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 528–31 viz., 530.

have enabled them to see themselves as part of the proletariat.144 Organizing in the workplace

Adler held, enabled the laborer to become “a proud, self-aware, future-oriented man” able to proclaim to the bourgeoisie and capitalists that “‘[y]our world is not mine—the world of the future.”145 Although Adler developed the theory behind the SDAP’s new-people program, he nevertheless held that the initiation of class consciousness—the Marxist education—began in the workplace. Absent employment, no program of anticipatory socialism could be successful.

Marienthal informed Adler’s claims, shaped his arguments, and validated his insights about unemployment.146 Specifically, evidence the ÖWF presented and analyzed convinced

Adler that mass unemployment had created “quite a new type of proletariat” entirely unknown to

Marx and his successors.147 Unlike earlier proletarians—who might be temporarily unemployed as a result of the boom-bust-cycle—modern workers might never have experienced long-term employment. As a result, the Marxist education attained through the day-to-day class struggle was “quite alien” to them.148 Adler agreed with the ÖWF that unemployment put workers beyond the reach of the SDAP’s politics of pedagogy. But Adler went further than his fellow socialists, worrying that “the effects of need and embitterment” would “destroy the psychological willingness to participate in such an education” at all. 149 For Adler, long-term

144 Max Adler, “Wandlung der Arbeiterklasse?,” Der Kampf 26, no. 8/9 (September 1933): 378; “Wandlung der Arbeiterklasse?,” Der Kampf 26, no. 10 (October 1933): 408.

145 Adler, “Wandlung Part I,” 379.

146 Adler’s explicit citation of Marienthal can be found in “Wandlung Part II,” 410.

147 Ibid., 407.

148 Ibid., 408.

149 Ibid.

unemployment would mark some worker with a “spiritual distinction” (seelische

Geschiedenheit) that would inhibit their membership in the proletariat.150

Even those who had received the all-important Marxist education were not immune.

Building on the ÖWF’s demonstration that long periods without work induced Marienthalers to identify their occupations—and, thus, themselves—as “unemployed,” Adler argued that extended joblessness would cause proletarians to “lose the sense of belonging to the working class and see themselves as declassed.”151 Echoing Marienthal, Adler described these declassed workers as “exhausted” and ascribed to them a feeling of “resignation.”152 Generalizing from the

ÖWF’s description of Man 467—who “wished it would all fall down”—Adler claimed that the unemployed developed a vengeful “desire to smash everything to pieces.”153

But Adler went further than the ÖWF in speculating about the consequences of this desire. Lazarsfeld and his colleagues had argued that unemployment would culminate in atomized individualism, but they acknowledged that social upheaval—such as a migration or revolution—was possible. Adler, however, drew a direct connection between unemployment and fascism. Without the Marxist education necessary to carry out the class struggle, the unemployed, he argued, would see no value in the SDAP; they would gravitate to the more radical and confrontational Communist Party of German Austria. Moreover, those who were not motivated to join the communists were likely deep in depressed resignation.154 And apathy born

150 Adler, “Wandlung Part I,” 375, emphasis original.

151 Adler, “Wandlung Part II,” 409–10, emphasis original.

152 Ibid., 410.

153 Ibid., 411; cf. Jahoda, Zeisel, and Lazarsfeld, Marienthal, 46.

154 Adler, “Wandlung Part II,” 411.

of resignation, Adler claimed, would soon become the toleration of reaction.155 Declassed workers and fractured movements could not serve as the “dam” needed to hold back the fascist tide. Worse still were those workers who were so desperate they might change their allegiance entirely: unemployment, according to Adler, could become the most fertile “field of recruitment” for fascist movements.156

Although less obvious, Adler’s use of the economic-psychological methods and statistical logic developed by Lazarsfeld and used in Marienthal was no less important than his adaption of the text’s evidence and arguments. Like the ÖWF, Adler linked material conditions to psychological states—to “social and mental attitudes” unproblematically.157 In his view, it was the poverty resulting from unemployment that initiated the ideological and psychological decline from resiliency to resignation. Further, like the ÖWF, Adler moved seamlessly between levels of analysis—between the general and the particular, the descriptive and the predictive. As was argued above, these aspects of Marienthal followed from the distinctive method Lazarsfeld developed in Statistical Practicum—a method that set him apart from his scientific contemporaries. Quetelet’s statistical methods, Lazarsfeld’s predecessors and counterparts warned, might culminate in deterministic reasoning about individuals and society. The ÖWF tended towards a certain determinism—above all about the breakdown from resiliency to resignation—but Adler turned this logic into an ineluctable pessimism about the future of the proletariat. Such conclusions were remarkable not least because the means by which he reached them—the methodology Lazarsfeld had developed in Statistical Practicum—had been intended

155 Ibid.

156 Ibid., 410.

157 Ibid., 409.

to expand and refine the SDAP’s pedagogical politics. Although created to further the progression of workers into new people, the methodology ultimately served to document their regression—their descent into apathetic, declassed, atomized subjects who stood apart from the proletariat and outside the class struggle.

Questions about the nature and consequences unemployment were more than merely theoretical. Indeed, they were rife with political—and existential—implications for interwar

Austrian socialists. Whom did the SDAP represent and form whom did it struggle—employed or unemployed workers? SDAP deputies raised this question in a variety of forms at the party conferences of the early 1930s. Compromises between the more moderate SDAP executive and the more militant youth wing were struck—most obviously at the Linz Congress in October

1933.158 But behind this agreement to protect the unemployed lurked an insidious divide. As

Wilhelm Reich, an unorthodox psychoanalyst and fellow traveler, later described it, the distance between the employed and unemployed was palpable. The SDAP executive, he recalled, “laid claim to the leadership of society” in the name of the unemployed, but, “during their demonstrations ‘against hunger and the system,’” the unemployed “felt like the outcasts they really were.”159 This disjunction was most evident in massive SDAP protests:

Employed workers did not participate in these demonstrations. Those who had work were fearful of being identified with those already unemployed. […] Hundreds of thousands of industrial workers marched along the Ring. The unemployed workers hailed their “Social Democratic comrades” with “Three loud cheers for the Red Front,” but the Social Democrats did not even look up. It was a tragedy.160

158 See the discussion in Rabinbach, The Crisis of Austrian Socialism, 141–48.

159 Wilhelm Reich, People in Trouble (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 94.

160 Ibid., 94–95.

Just as Adler feared, the unemployed ceased to identify with the SDAP. During May Day marches, Reich recalled hearing the unemployed decry the “social fascists”—a characteristically communist denunciation of democratic socialists—before breaking into communist songs.

According to Reich, the jobless shouted “Give us our unemployment benefits” as “[t]hey shook their fists threateningly.”

Did Marienthal encourage or shape this reciprocal mistrust between the unemployed and the SDAP? Any attempt draw a direct connection would be tenuous. Neither the centrist nor the radical participants at the Linz Congress, for example, referenced Marienthal. Yet, as Adler’s unqualified embrace of Marienthal in his essays on unemployment shows, the study resonated with Austro-Marxist intellectuals and SDAP ideologues. It did so through its presentation of empirical evidence of conditions among the unemployed, which preyed upon socialists’ conviction that the working class must be transformed—and their anxiety that the needed reform was not occurring. Marienthal simultaneously amplified these concerns. According to the ÖWF, the regression of the unemployed from resiliency to resignation—with all the attendant psychological, social, and political consequences—was not an anxiety born of pessimism, but a conclusion reached through statistical, material, psychological research. Adler, this is to say, drew conclusions about the present state and future prospects of the Austrian proletariat based on what he believed to be scientific findings. In 1933, Adler went so far as to critique the SDAP for its acquiescence to pessimism and fatalism, reminding his fellows socialists that Marxism was no

Weltanschauung but a social science. He did not recognize how the Austro-Marxist worldview— reconceived as a politics of pedagogy, translated into a psychological research program, rebuilt through statistical methodology, and applied in a study of unemployment—could persist in and through a social science.

CONCLUSION: A STYLE OF THINKING

Adler was not the only Central European thinker concerned with the link between science and worldview. In 1935, Ludwik Fleck, the Polish biologist and philosopher of science, argued that scientific researchers were ineluctably bound to a “thought style”—an epistemological framework buried so deep within and exerting such power over the mind that it determined which scientific problems were seen and which were overlooked.161 In this chapter, I argued that

Austro-Marxism constituted just such a Fleckian style of thinking. Focusing on Lazarsfeld, I illuminated the process by which Austro-Marxism impressed itself deeply on a cohort of researchers, shaping their conceptions of, research into, and conclusions about social phenomena and psychological states. Documenting Lazarsfeld’s revival of Quetelet’s statistical methodology, I showed how the development empirical methods and quantitative techniques might serve to extend and refine the SDAP’s politics of pedagogy—a program based on the

Austro-Marxists’ theory of making “new people” from the existing proletariat. But the relationship between science and style was neither unidirectional nor static; social- and human- scientific research acted on the worldview that birthed it. Through my reconstruction of

Marienthal, I demonstrated that Lazarsfeld’s methodology did not simply reflect Austro-Marxist concepts and SDAP policies—it amplified and elevated them. As the role of Marienthal in framing debates about the place of the unemployed in the class struggle suggested, the effect of scientific research on Austro-Marxist style carried very real—indeed, existential—consequences for Austrian socialism.

161 Ludwik Fleck, Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache. Einführung in die Lehre vom Denkstil und Denkkollektiv (Basel: Schwabe und Co., 1935).

What became of the Austro-Marxist style after the fall of the Austrian Republic in 1934?

Many of the ÖWF researchers joined their Central and Western European counterparts in emigrating to the United States, where some—especially Lazarsfeld—found professional success.162 Did they retain their distinctive Austrian sensibility in New Deal and, later, Cold War

America? Lazarsfeld often insisted that, after his arrival in the United States as a Rockefeller

Foundation Fellow, he had foresworn his earlier commitments and become a “Marxist on leave.”163 But some among Lazarsfeld’s colleagues—most notably Daniel Bell—remained unconvinced. During a 1961 interview with Lazarsfeld, Bell pressed his friend to reconsider his intellectual development and reassess its impact on his professional career. Upon reflection,

Lazarsfeld conceded that Austro-Marxist intellectuals had impressed upon him the method of

“making striking connections” between lived experience, economic forces, historical developments in social research.164 Bell built on Lazarsfeld’s insight with obvious enthusiasm.

Marxism, he suggested, “shows in your work. It’s a style, really for you. The content is less important than the style—it’s the way you connect things and analyze them.”165 Bell concurred with Fleck in conceiving style—even Austro-Marxist style—as independent of both “political

162 For Lazarsfeld’s characterization of his own experience of emigration as paradigmatic, see Lazarsfeld, “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir.” Notably less successful were Karl and Charlotte Bühler, who found neither intellectual welcome nor permanent employment in the United States. For an overview, see Jean Matter Mandler and George Mandler, “The Diaspora of Experimental Psychology: The Gestaltists and Others,” in The Intellectual Migration. Europe and America, 1930-1960, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Donald Fleming (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), 371–419.

163 According to David Morrison, the statistician Daniel Cuthbertson once responded to Lazarsfeld’s joke during a public presentation by shouting, “And who gave you permission?” See David Morrison, “The Transference of Experience and the Impact of Ideas: Paul Lazarsfeld and Mass Communication Research,” Communication 10, no. 2 (1988): 191–92.

164 Lazarsfeld, Oral History (1962), 264.

165 Ibid., 262.

content” and “personal aspect.” Style was, in his view, nothing less than “the way a man is trained to look at the world.”166

It is unclear whether and to what extent Lazarsfeld adhered to the Austro-Marxist style of thinking—as conceived of by Bell and underpinned by Fleck—into the late-1960s.167 What is clear, however, is that Lazarsfeld remained enmeshed in this thought-style from the middle of the

1930s through the beginning of the 1950s.168 The Austro-Marxist-inspired and -aligned program he developed in texts such as Statistical Practicum and applied in works such as Marienthal persisted long after his relocation to the United States. Many of these projects were implicitly or explicitly political. What, Lazarsfeld asked, was the present state of the working class? Could it be transformed into a revolutionary proletariat—or would it become a reactionary mob?

Importantly, Lazarsfeld not only raised such questions but also sought to answer them with the research techniques and empirical methods he had designed and applied in interwar

Austria: evidence collected through indirect interviews, clandestine observations, official statistics, and questionnaires was aggregated, conceptualized, and interpreted. At the same time,

166 Ibid., 265. It should be noted that Bell doubtless had his own reasons to emphasize a kind of de-politicized Marxism. See Howard Brick, Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism: Social Theory and Political Reconciliation in the 1940s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), chap. 3.

167 For a cutting critique of Lazarsfeld’s depoliticization, see Todd Gitlin, “Media Sociology: The Dominant Paradigm,” Theory and Society 6, no. 2 (1978): 205–53. For a defense—an argument that he remained not only politically engaged but also theoretically original, see Elihu Katz, “Lazarsfeld’s Map of Media Effects,” International Journal of Public Opinion Research 13, no. 3 (September 1, 2001): 270–79.

168 It is at this point that Lazarsfeld, along with Elihu Katz, Edward Shils, and others, became highly critical of the “pessimistic” nature of “European” social theory, especially as manifested in European social theorists’ dim view of “mass society.” See Katz and Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence, chap. 1. For an astute analysis of the role this text played in shaping the disciplinary memory of communications research, see Pooley, “Fifteen Pages That Shook the Field: Personal Influence, Edward Shils, and the Remembered History of Mass Communication Research.”

Lazarsfeld did not merely repeat the same procedure he and his colleagues had applied in

Marienthal. Rather, Lazarsfeld began, as early as 1934, to question this approach. In a memorandum for his new colleagues at Columbia University, for instance, he concluded that the concept of resignation had political resonances far beyond its scientific remit; it called new modes of experience into being and subjected them to social control.169 Across a number of research projects and methodological writings, Lazarsfeld began to raise methodological questions—about the relation between “statistical” and “interpretive” types, the process of

“discerning” causality within and among phenomena, and the role of “concepts” in the research process—following from this reexamination of Marienthal.170 Such questioning suggests that

Lazarsfeld may have begun to realize that Marienthal was inextricably bound to the Austro-

Marxist style of thinking from which it originated and to which it contributed—that the study was, as one reviewer described it, a work of “spiritual research” central to the Austro-Marxist

“revolution of the soul.”171

Lazarsfeld did not undertake or accomplish these tasks on his own. From his earliest days at the ÖWF to his late work at the Bureau of Applied Social Research, Lazarsfeld worked often—and well—with other researchers and theorists. Indeed, all of the methodological thinking

169 Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Principles of Sociography,” trans. Thelma Herman 1944, 33, PFL Papers Series I, Box 38, Folder 10. Handwritten notes by Paul Neurath prepended to this document suggest that Lazarsfeld may have drafted it as early as 1934 as a complement to the appendix of Marienthal and that the “torso” of the essay was misplaced by Lazarsfeld’s friend and colleague, Robert Merton.

170 See, inter alia, Käthe Leichter and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Erhebung bei Jugendlichen über Autorität und Familie,” in Studien über Autorität und Familie, Forschungsberichte aus dem Institut für Sozialforschung, ed. Max Horkheimer (Paris: Libraire Félix Alcan, 1936), 353–457; Lazarsfeld, “Typological Procedures in Social Research”; Mirra Komarovsky, “Description of Discerning,” in The Unemployed Man and His Family: The Effect of Unemployment Upon the Status of the Man in Fifty-Nine Families (New York: The Dryden Press for the Institute of Social Research, 1940), 135–45.

171 Friedmann, “Marienthal, die müde Gemeinschaft,” 10; cf. “Die Schrumpfung der Seele.”

and empirical research he undertook in the Austro-Marxist paradigm was conducted in collaboration with others. Especially relevant for this dissertation were Lazarsfeld’s frequent interactions with the Institute. From the mid-1930s onwards, Lazarsfeld and those he worked with contributed to the Institute’s emerging practice of social-psychological research. Although they were, so to speak, contractors, Lazarsfeld and his colleagues shaped the Institute’s incipient empirical methods through both contributions and critiques. Moreover—and more deeply—

Lazarsfeld and the ÖWF researchers interpolated elements of the Austro-Marxist paradigm into the Institute’s nascent critical theory. Like Lazarsfeld, Adler, and their interlocutors this is to say, the Institute members became concerned by the present condition of and future prospects for the proletariat; they hoped that the working class might become revolutionary actors but worried that they might become reactionary agents. This is not to say, however, that the Institute adopted the

ÖWF’s approach as applied in Marienthal. Instead, its members adapted elements of

Lazarsfeld’s approach in and through the ÖWF’s self-reflection and -critique.

CHAPTER 2

FROM AUTHORITY TO AUTHORITARIANISM: STUDYING THE FAMILY, 1934-1936

A PUBLICATION WORSE THAN UNSCIENTIFIC

Friedrich Pollock decided, in the summer of 1934, that the Institute for Social Research should undertake an ambitious project: a study of the present state of and future prospects for the nuclear family.1 Although no longer director of the Institute, Pollock exerted considerable influence over its affiliates, and, without informing Max Horkheimer—the Institute’s intellectual and organizational leader—he directed Leo Lowenthal to begin gathering materials for the study.

Like the Institute members themselves—scattered by their emigration from Germany—the study was to be international in nature and scope; it would, in Pollock’s vision, consist of surveys and reports by sociologists, psychologists, and social workers from across Europe and the United

States. Upon learning of Pollock’s plans, Horkheimer was somewhat less than enthusiastic. “I believe I have discovered at the very last minute” he wrote to Lowenthal in July, “that the plan for the publication here [in Geneva] has been incorrectly concerned with the family as such instead of with the question of authority in the family.” “Such a publication,” Horkheimer worried, “would be worse than unscientific.”2

Horkheimer’s reservations notwithstanding, Pollock’s project came to fruition two years later with the publication of Studies on Authority and the Family: Research Reports from the

1 For an overview of these circumstances, see Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 149–50.

2 Max Horkheimer to Leo Lowenthal, July 6, 1934, quoted in ibid., 150.

Institute for Social Research.3 As Pollock had planned, the project combined an array of materials—theoretical essays, historical accounts, sociological surveys, psychological interpretations, literature reviews, and research bibliographies—compiled by a cohort of international scholars. Yet something of Horkheimer’s unease about the project persisted in the published text. Indeed, Horkheimer’s reservation appeared in the very first sentence of his foreword to the text: “The publication of these studies serves the purpose of providing insight into the progress of a joint project, although the results are incomplete in more ways than one.”

As Horkheimer went on to explain, this was the case in two senses: both because “the range of questions [Fragenkreis] to which the studies refer can be grasped only through the comprehensive theory of society, with which it is interwoven” and because the “research was still ongoing—indeed in its infancy.” Authority and the Family, he proclaimed, “intends, above all else, to delimit the field that our social-scientific research organization will delve into in the coming years.”4

It was not only Horkheimer who felt this way about Authority and the Family: many of the researchers who contributed theoretical essays and empirical studies identified their works as preliminary, provisional, experimental, incomplete, or fragmentary. Moreover, some of the leading contributors to Authority and the Family—not only Horkheimer but also Erich Fromm and Paul Lazarsfeld—identified the United States of America as the site where this merely anticipatory research would be continued and completed.5 In its summary of the text for English-

3 Max Horkheimer, ed., Studien über Autorität und Familie. Forschungsberichte aus dem Institut für Sozialforschung (Paris: Libraire Félix Alcan, 1936).

4 Max Horkheimer, “Vorwart,” in Studien über Autorität und Familie, Forschungsberichte aus dem Institut für Sozialforschung, ed. Max Horkheimer (Paris: Libraire Félix Alcan, 1936), vii.

5 See, e.g., ibid., x–xi; Erich Fromm, “Geschichte und Methoden der Erhebungen,” in Studien über Autorität und Familie, Forschungsberichte aus dem Institut für Sozialforschung, ed. Max Horkheimer (Paris: Libraire Félix Alcan, 1936), 233–35. Especially significant in this regard is the bibliography of American research into authority and the 91

language readers, doubtless aimed at an American audience, the researchers claimed that: “[t]he branch office [of the Institute] in New York will, in the future, try to apply the American methods of empirical work” to the questions raised in Authority and the Family.6

Scholars have characterized Authority and the Family as the end of an intellectual trajectory. According to this view, Horkheimer’s long introduction to the study was the culmination of his earliest articulation of critical theory.7 Likewise, Fromm’s theoretical essay demonstrated his final break with Freud.8 Moreover, the collaboration between Horkheimer and

Fromm, as demonstrated in the social-psychological study of German workers Fromm contributed to the book, represented the final—or, perhaps, the only—instance of the interdisciplinary research program for which Horkheimer had called when he assumed leadership of the Institute in 1930.9 Other scholars have considered Authority and the Family as the beginning of a research program, one the Institute would follow during its decade-and-a-half- long exile in the United States.10 These scholars take Horkheimer, Fromm, and the other

family presented in the text. See Arthur W. Calhoun, “Autorität und Familie in der amerikanischen Soziologie der Gegenwart,” in Studien über Autorität und Familie, Forschungsberichte aus dem Institut für Sozialforschung, ed. Max Horkheimer (Paris: Libraire Félix Alcan, 1936), vii–xii.

6 Max Horkheimer, ed., “English Abstracts,” in Studien über Autorität und Familie, Forschungsberichte aus dem Institut für Sozialforschung (Paris: Libraire Félix Alcan, 1936), 901.

7 See, e.g., Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 151.

8 See, e.g., Friedman, The Lives of Erich Fromm, chap. 2.

9 See, e.g., Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, chap. 3 viz., 165-177; Bonss, “Critical Theory and Empirical Social Research.” This view seems prevalent among those scholars from other disciplines who attach special significance to Fromm’s contributions to Authority and the Family. See, e.g., José Brunner, “Looking into the Hearts of the Workers, or: How Erich Fromm Turned Critical Theory into Empirical Research,” Political Psychology 15, no. 4 (1994): 631–54, https://doi.org/10.2307/3791624; Neil McLaughlin, “Origin Myths in the Social Sciences: Fromm, the Frankfurt School and the Emergence of Critical Theory,” The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers Canadiens de Sociologie 24, no. 1 (1999): 109–39, https://doi.org/10.2307/3341480.

10 See, e.g., Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, chap. 4; John Abromeit, Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 211–26.

researchers who participated in the Institute’s text at their word, reading Authority and the

Family as the first example of the Institute’s interest in—and study of—authoritarianism.11

In this chapter, I add nuance to these interpretations by examining Authority and the

Family as neither the beginning nor an ending of an intellectual trajectory but as a waypoint within this arc. I argue that the Institute’s project served as a site of intellectual encounter, exchange, and dispute for researchers of many nationalities and disciplines. I focus on two paradigms within the discipline of psychology, in particular: the social psychology represented by Fromm and the economic psychology represented by Lazarsfeld. Fromm’s role in Authority and the Family—as part of his larger social-psychological study of German workers—has received considerable scholarly attention; Lazarsfeld’s contributions to the text have not.12

Reconstructing the role Lazarsfeld—and, with him, Käthe Leichter—played in the project calls attention to the unsettled relationship between economic and social psychology in Authority and the Family. I elucidate this discomfiture, as evident in the two paradigms’ competing conceptions of and claims to the method of “structural statistics.” I argue that this dispute laid the foundation for the methodology the Institute would pursue in the United States—an approach in which concepts and evidence were bound together in a mutually informative dialectical relationship between theory and research.

11 Thomas Wheatland examines the American continuation of Authority and the Family without, however, recognizing its European antecedents. See Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile, chap. 5.

12 Bonss, for instance, writes that “an advisory working party composed of Anna Hartoch, Herta Herzog, Ernst Schachtel, Erich Fromm, and Paul F. Lazarsfeld undertook the translation and expansion of the original German analysis” of the empirical evidence collected in Fromm’s study of German workers for publication in Authority and the Family. Bonss, “Critical Theory and Empirical Social Research,” 2. As Lazarsfeld himself later recalled, “[o]ne of the studies by Erich Fromm required the filling in of questionnaires by young workers, and we were asked to organize the part of the field work done in Austria.” The material adduced in this chapter suggests that in this matter, as in others, Lazarsfeld downplayed his connection to the Institute. Lazarsfeld, “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir,” 274 fn. 7.

I begin by examining Horkheimer’s introduction to Authority and the Family. I next resituate this essay in the context of its creation and, by so doing, recover the project’s institutional and intellectual connections to the socialist-aligned researchers of the ÖWF described in chapter 1. Subsequently, I turn to Fromm’s social psychology, describing the paradigm’s foundation in theory and documenting its application in empirical research. In

Authority and the Family, I will show, Fromm outlined a method of “structural statistics” that would bridge the gap between psychological theory and empirical research. I will argue that

Fromm’s method fell far short of its objective; theory and research were connected by an inscrutable act of “interpretation.” In the third section of the chapter, I take a brief excursus into the methodological and research program the ÖWF had pursued during and after its study of

Austrian unemployment. Over the past decade, the ÖWF had begun to interrogate concepts and methods similar to those of Fromm’s social psychology. I explore explores how Leichter and

Lazarsfeld’s deployment of the ÖWF’s economic-psychological method against Fromm’s social- psychological techniques in the fourth section of the chapter. Leichter and Lazarsfeld laid out an alternative definition and practice of “structural statistics”—one that sought to avoid the trap of

“interpretation” by deriving theoretical concepts from empirical evidence. This critique anticipated—and, perhaps, influenced—the Institute’s late-1930s critique of Fromm. This critique helped the Institute describe what empirical research must not be and, conversely, what it might become.

AUTHORITY BETWEEN CULTURE AND FAMILY

In its final form, Authority and the Family—some 950 pages in length—was subdivided into three parts: a set of three theoretical essays introducing the Institute’s research program; a

presentation of five extensive empirical studies conducted by Institute members and associates; and a recapitulation of more than a dozen subsidiary studies of the nature of authority and the institution of the family.13 Bringing conceptual clarity and thematic coherence—although not methodological unity—to these disparate essays, studies, and bibliographies was Max

Horkheimer’s sweeping, 70-page introduction.14 The essay was not a new work but a continuation—perhaps the culmination—of his recent writings. Across these essays, which appeared in the Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung and its successor, the Zeitschrift, Horkheimer had argued for the necessity of an immanent critique of modern economic processes, ideological constructs, and social institutions—and of the academic philosophies, social theories, and scientific research used to study and appraise them.

Horkheimer maintained that a new combination of indefatigable social science and perspicacious social theory could reveal the contingencies of the relationship between individuals and institutions and might prompt recognition of the need for—and the possibility of—radical social transformation.15 Horkheimer rearticulated and reemphasized these positions across the three subsections of his introduction: “Culture,” “Authority,” and “Family.”

13 For Horkheimer’s first articulation of this organization, see his letter to Pollock of August 3, 1934 in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, vol. 15 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1985), 195–203, viz.201.

14 Max Horkheimer, “Allgemeiner Teil,” in Studien über Autorität und Familie, Forschungsberichte aus dem Institut für Sozialforschung, ed. Max Horkheimer (Paris: Libraire Félix Alcan, 1936), 3–76.

15 See, inter alia, Max Horkheimer, “Ein neuer Ideologiebegriff,” Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung 15, no. 1 (1930); “Geschichte und Psychologie,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 1 (1932); “Egoismus und Freiheitsbewegung: Zur Anthropologie des bürgerlichen Zeitalters,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5 (1936). The Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung is sometimes called by the simpler title, Grünbergs Archiv, after its founder—and Horkheimer’s predecessor as director of the Institute—Carl Grünberg. For an overview of Horkheimer’s work in this period, see Abromeit, Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School, chap. 4.

For Horkheimer, culture named the variegated structure in which material processes and ideological tendencies reproduced themselves and, simultaneously, generated antagonistic tensions.16 Studying culture, as a result, required knowledge of the discrete “cultural spheres” within this framework and their “shifting structural interrelationships in the support or dissolution of given forms of society.”17 Dubbing this research program “materialism,”

Horkheimer argued that it would recognize that cultural spheres and social forms were not the product of economic processes alone but of the dynamic interplay between economy and ideology—base and superstructure. “To understand why a society functions in a certain way,” he wrote, “why it coheres or dissolves, requires, therefore, a knowledge of existing psychical conditions of people in various social groups—knowledge, in turn, which requires knowing how their character has been shaped in connection with all cultural forces [Bildungsmächten] of the era.”18

Horkheimer held that the materialist study of culture would reveal the mediated processes by which material conditions shaped social institutions and individual minds. He anticipated that such research would uncover the tensions in the present configuration of this relationship: the almost-unbearable disjunction between “the needs and powers of men” and their modern “way of life.”19 Specifically, he believed that materialist study of culture would demonstrate the real

16 Horkheimer, “Allgemeiner Teil.” On the variety of political, scientific, and literary debates about culture in this period, see Susan Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Marc Manganaro, Culture, 1922: The Emergence of a Concept. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

17 Horkheimer, “Allgemeiner Teil,” 9.

18 Ibid., 9–10.

19 Ibid., 21.

possibility of reconfiguring this relationship—of aligning the means of reproducing material life with the needs of those who must reproduce it. Would this revelation inspire a revolutionary change? Horkheimer was not sanguine. Materialist research into culture would show, he wrote, that the chief impediment to revolution was “the great mental effort” needed to “leave the old way of life and to adopt a new one.”20 Indeed, he argued, “one function of the entire cultural apparatus in every epoch is to lodge the ideas of the necessary domination [Herrschaft] of some men over others in the hearts of those who are ruled.”21

In the second section of his essay, Horkheimer sought out the historical origins and contemporary manifestations of this apparently inexorable dynamic of domination and subordination—which he termed, simply, “authority.” Horkheimer declined to formulate an abstract definition of authority, insisting that an attempt to define the concept would necessarily hypostatize it.22 Hypostatization must be carefully avoided, for, in the historical etiology he offered in place of a definition, Horkheimer argued that, although bourgeois thinking had begun as a powerful protest against “traditional authority,” it had become nothing less than the

“glorification of naked authority.”23 Tracing this development through the intellectual history of early modern and modern Europe—from René Descartes to John Stuart Mill to Karl Jaspers—

Horkheimer argued that bourgeois thinking tore away the ideological constraints of metaphysical philosophy, freeing the subject from the irrational authority of essences just as liberalism freed

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid., 22.

22 Ibid., 23–24.

23 Ibid., 40.

the worker from the stultifying control of the guild.24 Anticipating an insight that would become a cornerstone of critical theory, Horkheimer argued that bourgeois thinking reinstated, in a changed form, elements of the same constraints it had expiated. Although the modern worker imagined himself to be an independent producer free from the constraints of the medieval artisan, he was, in fact, as beholden to the system of “social needs” as his predecessor. Indeed, for Horkheimer, the only difference was that the worker failed to understand his servitude.25 This unrecognized bondage—with the relations of production and exchange crystalized in the institution of the market—became as inscrutable, all-powerful, and immutable as any metaphysical essence bourgeois thinking had eliminated.26

Reiterating a position developed in his other writings from this period, Horkheimer recognized that this form of hidden authority had served a purpose but argued that it had since lost any claim to necessity.27 In the earliest stages of capitalism, “undeveloped masses,”

“underdeveloped systems of communication,” and “methods for guiding and ordering industry” that were “insufficiently rationalized” required men to “adapt to the hierarchy” in order to spur self-development, rationalize production, and raise the standard of living.28 “Consequently,”

Horkheimer wrote, “the occluded and mediated authority, though consistently merciless, was,

24 Ibid., 26–33; cf. “Egoismus und Freiheitsbewegung.”

25 Horkheimer, “Allgemeiner Teil,” 33.

26 Ibid., 34–35.

27 See, e.g., Max Horkheimer, Dawn & Decline: Notes 1926-1931 and 1950-1969 (Seabury Press, 1978), 60–65.

28 Horkheimer, “Allgemeiner Teil,” 40–41. The concept of the “standard of living” was developed by Otto Neurath in this period—under the influence not only of logical positivism but also of Austro-Marxist socialism—and was presented in the Zeitschrift. See Otto Neurath, “Inventory of the Standard of Living,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 6 (1937): 140–51. On Neurath’s development of the concept, see Nancy Cartwright et al., Otto Neurath: Philosophy Between Science and Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 29–32.

however, historically rational.”29 But, Horkheimer argued, because this unrelenting exercise of authority had effectuated changes to material conditions and individual minds—creating the prerequisites for the truly rational exercise of authority—it had become irrational. Humanity had reached the stage at which the reproduction of material life could be accomplished by the

“collaborative work of concrete men” who exercised authority in the “interests of the totality.”30

Why, Horkheimer asked, did this masked authority persist despite its irrationality and purposelessness? Horkheimer placed responsibility in the social institutions and cultural forms created by the bourgeoisie. So successful were these mechanisms for instilling the framework of hierarchy that the domination-subordination dynamic endured despite the fact that it had become a “fetter” on development. Horkheimer held that the prevailing assumption that “‘[s]ome kind’ of authority must exist” served as nothing less than the “cement” that “holds up a social construct with deep cracks” in it.31

Horkheimer turned, in the final section of his introduction, to an examination of the family. His analysis was guided by three interconnected questions: What was the historical role of the family in inculcating the sense of authority required for capitalism? Why did the family continue to propagate the domination-subordination dynamic? What alternatives—patterns of thought and behavior—might the family, freed from its imbrication with capitalism, spread? To answer these questions, Horkheimer focused specifically on the genesis, development, and decline of patriarchal authority in the nuclear family—the rule of fathers over their wives and, especially, children. His historical outline of patriarchy followed, as the materialist program

29 Horkheimer, “Allgemeiner Teil,” 41.

30 Ibid., 48.

31 Ibid., 47.

required, his account of the interrelated development of capitalist production and bourgeois thought. According to Horkheimer:

At the beginning of the bourgeois era, the father’s control of the household was certainly a necessary condition for progress. The self-discipline of individuals, the inclination for work and discipline, the ability to hold tightly to certain ideas, consistency in practical life, application of reason, perseverance and pleasure in constructive activity could be developed in the present circumstances only under the direction and guidance of the father whose own education had been won in the school of life. However, if the suitability of such a course of action is not examined in its true social circumstances but is disguised as religious or metaphysical ideologies and remains necessarily unclarified, it can continue to seem a valid ideal even in an age when, in comparison with the pedagogical possibilities in society, the nuclear family in the majority of cases offers poor conditions for human education. The same goes for the other functions of the family.32

Horkheimer criticized the family not by contrasting it with an exogenous norm but by subjecting it to an immanent critique—comparing its purported purpose with its empirical reality. Recent

“sociological literature,” he wrote, “is now full of evidence that the family has become a problematic mode for carrying out the functions” identified by social and human scientists in

Europe and America.33 Pressured by the economic forces engendered by industrial capitalism, the material foundations for patriarchs’ predominance within the family eroded. Concomitantly, families gradually lost their grip on the control of reproduction, education of children, care for the elderly and infirm, development of sociability, determination of occupation, and transmission of inherited property.34

32 Ibid., 52.

33 Ibid.

34 Horkheimer’s chief references for contemporary scholarship on the family were Franz Carl Müller-Lyer, Die Familie (München, J.F. Lehmann, 1912); Edward Byron Reuter and Jessie Ridgway Runner, eds., The Family: Source Materials for the Study of Family and Personality (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931).

100

Horkheimer looked to the psychological characters of individuals produced within and by the family for evidence of this disjunction between claimed power and actual authority.

Specifically, he argued that as the actual authority of the father declined, the patriarchal family increasingly produced children with “authority-oriented characters.” Such “human types,”

Horkheimer wrote, “are not educated to get to the roots of things and they mistake appearance for substance. They are unable to think theoretically and to move independently beyond the simple registering of facts.”35 These types exhibited an “‘impulse to submission’”—the ready acceptance of current conditions as natural and the concomitant redirection of every critique of the status quo back onto the individual.36 Individuals formed in these families, Horkheimer argued, willingly accepted the “reified concept of authority” central to the “modern, authoritarian theory of the state.”37

Despite its role in creating “authority-oriented characters,” the nuclear family was not to be abandoned. Doubtless influenced by the fact that positivist social theorists and researchers— from Auguste Comte to Frédéric Le Play—had raised bourgeois anxiety about the decline of the family into a scientific problem, Horkheimer analyzed the present state and future prospects of the family dialectically. Otherwise put, Horkheimer asked how the family—severed from its connection to capitalism—might be transformed. Examining the history of the bourgeois family,

Horkheimer observed that, in it, “where relationships were not mediated through the market and the individuals did not oppose one another as rivals, there was the possibility of living not as a

35 Horkheimer, “Allgemeiner Teil,” 59.

36 Ibid., 60. Horkheimer borrowed the phrase “impulse to submission” from the English psychologist William McDougall. See William McDougall, An Introduction to Social Psychology (London: Methuen, 1913), 199.

37 Horkheimer, “Allgemeiner Teil,” 55.

101

mere function but as a human being.”38 According to Horkheimer, this potential was bound up with the maternal dimensions of family life. Combining evidence and arguments from thinkers as diverse as Hegel, Engels, and Lewis Henry Morgan, Horkheimer insisted that “[t]o the extent that any principle besides that of subordination prevails within the modern family, the woman’s maternal and sisterly love is keeping alive a principle dating back before historical antiquity […] that is, of prehistory.”39 By fostering “growth and happiness,” Horkheimer held, maternal love

“cultivates the dream of a better condition for mankind.” In other words, the maternal impulse ensured that the family contained “a moment of antiauthoritarianism” that was a “reservoir of resistance against the dehumanization [Entseelung] of the world.”40

Although eroded by the material and ideological forces of capitalism, could this moment be recovered? In “this last stage of the family,” could the obscured maternal impulse replace the patriarchal structure? Once again, Horkheimer was hardly optimistic. Men who became unemployed, he conceded, were likely to lose “social position” and “prestige within the family” as a result. Yet, he argued, the patriarchal authority structure may still endure—whether because patriarchal structures were so entrenched or because the matriarchal counterparts were, as a result of centuries of distortion, essentially parasitic upon them.41 Endemic and persistent

38 Ibid., 63.

39 Ibid., 67; cf. Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society, or, Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery, Through Barbarism to Civilization (New York: H. Holt, 1877); Friedrich Engels, Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats (Berlin: I. H. W. Dietz, 1908); Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1911). As will be discussed further below, Horkheimer was also in conversation with Erich Fromm and, through Fromm, Johann Jakob Bachofen.

40 Horkheimer, “Allgemeiner Teil,” 67.

41 Ibid., 67–69.

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unemployment, in particular, stymied the development of the “future-oriented family” by causing “total demoralization” and “submission to every master.”42

Nevertheless, Horkheimer refused to give up hope. If the maternal elements of family life—which Horkheimer identified as eminently proletarian—could be revived, a “new community of spouses and children” animated by the spirit of solidarity might emerge. Children raised in these families would learn “that the knowledge of facts is to be clearly distinguished from their acceptance.” Shaped by this fundamentally antiauthoritarian education, these children would undertake the “historical task” of creating a society without poverty or injustice—a

“world in which they and others have it better.”43 Just as the patriarchal structure of the family constituted the “‘germ cell’ of bourgeois culture” and led to the creation of authority-oriented types, so might the maternal element become the seed for a proletarian culture and lead to the emergence of antiauthoritarian subjects.44

Horkheimer’s introductory essay in Authority and the Family carried on an open dialogue with Hegel. Much like Adorno after him, Horkheimer held that Hegel had produced remarkable insights into the origins of bourgeois society and structure of its ideology—but that he had erred in reifying the present.45 Less obvious—but no less important—were Horkheimer’s implied exchanges with Weber and Freud. Unlike Weber, Horkheimer concluded that no truly rational

42 Ibid., 72.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid., 75.

45 See, e.g., ibid., 64–67; cf. Theodor W. Adorno, “Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy,” in Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 1–52.

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authority could exist in capitalist society; unlike Freud, he argued that the domination- subordination dynamic was historical—not instinctual.46

But Horkheimer’s essay had resonances beyond the fields of sociology and psychology.

Specifically, it was interwoven with the context in which the empirical research for Authority and the Family had been conducted: interwar Geneva. Horkheimer had announced the creation of a Genevan branch of the Institute in his inaugural address of 1931. Its role, Horkheimer informed his audience, was “to facilitate the scholarly evaluation of sociologically important material contained within the rich archives of the International Labor Office.”47

Geneva was an auspicious site for a study of the family. There, trans- and international organizations had studied the family as a nexus formed by economic forces, political ideologies, and social developments since the early 1920s. Although motivated by a common framework of reform and rationalization inspired by and concomitant with transatlantic progressivism and

Wilsonian idealism, these organizations spanned the political spectrum—from ILO to the

International Committee of the Red Cross.48 Research commissioned, funded, and published by these organizations often linked together the political economy of the depression, the sociology of the family unit, and the developmental psychology of children and adolescents.

46 On Horkheimer’s critique of Weber, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 120–24. For Horkheimer’s most explicit refutation of Freud, see “Allgemeiner Teil,” 61.

47 Horkheimer, “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research,” 14.

48 For an overview of scholarship on this subject, see Dominique Marshall, “The Construction of Children as an Object of International Relations: The Declaration of Children’s Rights and the Child Welfare Committee of League of Nations, 1900-1924,” The International Journal of Children’s Rights 7, no. 2 (January 1, 1999): 103–48, https://doi.org/10.1163/15718189920494309.

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One report—made by the Save the Children International Union (SCIU) in 1933— captured the motivations and conclusions of this paradigm.49 “To what extent,” the SCIU asked,

“has parental unemployment and the consequent diminution of family incomes reacted on the health of the child,—on its mental development, its character, its attitude towards parents, brothers, sisters, companions and society at large?”50 To answer this question, the SCIU turned to the resources of member organizations, the administrative apparatuses of national governments, and the talents of individual researchers. Empirical evidence and expert testimony led the SCIU to a remarkable conclusion:

It is a striking fact that unemployment is more disruptive of family life than its poverty resulting from insufficient wages; for unemployment disturbs the normal rhythm of life itself. When the father works he plays his part as breadwinner, even if his wage is small, and he feels that he can demand respect from his offspring. But when his job is gone and he passes the greater part of his day in the street, about the house, or in vain endeavours to find work, he gradually grows convinced that he is a useless load and loses his self-respect. His position changes even more when the mother, or one of the children, earns the bread that is necessary for all, and thus becomes the real head of the family.51

According to the SCIU, unemployment shook the family not because it deprived members of material comforts but because it denied the customary leader—the father—of self-esteem.

Diminishing the role of the father and, consequently, elevating the position of the mother (and, in some cases, the children) did more than disrupt the “normal rhythm of life” in the family. “This loss of parental authority,” the SCIU warned, “is perhaps one of the most disastrous elements in

49 On the origins and aims of the SCIU, see Dominique Marshall, “Humanitarian Sympathy for Children in Times of War and the History of Children’s Rights, 1919–1959,” in Children and War: A Historical Anthology, ed. Robert Coles and James Marten (New York: New York University Press, 2002), viz., 186-190.

50 Save the Children International Union, Children, Young People, and Unemployment: A Series of Enquiries into the Effects of Unemployment on Children and Young People (Geneva: The Save the Children International Union, 1933), 3.

51 Ibid.

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the situation [of European society], since its influence on the moral development of growing children can have far-reaching consequences.”52 Quite possibly, the deterioration of family authority would lead to the “total destruction of that constructive force which every generation is called upon to contribute to human society.”53 Other international organizations shared the

SCIU’s concerns, methods, and conclusions.54 Indeed, its study of the effect of unemployment on authority in the family embodied the broad-but-variegated consensus that linked researchers in fields from across the social and human sciences and in nations stretching from Central

Europe to the United States.55

Authority and the Family was not completed in Geneva. Many of the Institute’s researchers were spread across Europe and the United States; Horkheimer completed his introduction in New York City. Nevertheless, the project was deeply bound to the Genevan context—itself eminently international. These links were interpersonal, institutional, and, especially, intellectual. In Authority and the Family, Horkheimer acknowledged the Institute’s debts not only to the ILO but also to the International Bureau of Education, the Jean-Jacques

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid., 310. Quite possibly, these arguments were part of a larger interwar anxiety about the decline of some forms of authority and the concomitant rise of authoritarianism. Further research is required to address this question fully. See, e.g., R. Demos, “On the Decline of Authority,” International Journal of Ethics 36, no. 3 (1926): 247–62.

54 Ruth Weiland, for instance, presented the findings of the German Central Organization of Private Child Welfare Agencies in a monograph in 1933. Weiland referenced not only the work of the SCIU but also the studies conducted by welfare agencies from Belgium and Switzerland to the United States. See Ruth Weiland, Die Kinder der Arbeitslosen (Berlin: R. Müller, 1933).

55 Researchers, policymakers, and social workers described the effects of unemployment—including the psychological effects on children—as an international phenomenon or problem. See, inter alia, Marion Elderton, “Unemployment Consequences on the Home,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 154 (1931): 62–64; “Unemployment an International Issue,” The Compass 18, no. 1 (1936): 14–19; Kingsley Davis, “The Child and the Social Structure,” The Journal of Educational Sociology 14, no. 4 (1940): 223–25, https://doi.org/10.2307/2262160; Evelyn C. Selley, “Uprooted People,” Social Work 2, no. 6 (1942): 264–65.

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Rousseau Institute, and the International Institute of Social Christianity. These international organizations assisted the Institute in the organization and coordination of studies in Austria,

Switzerland, France, Belgium, England, and the United States.56 Individual researchers— including Paul Lazarsfeld, Marie Jahoda, and Käthe Leichter—contributed to multiple studies— directed by different organizations—simultaneously.57 Given their organizational coordination and overlapping personnel, it is hardly surprising that the Institute, SCIU, ILO, and ICRC undertook similar projects—studies intended to discern changes within the family unit, link these changes to recent economic conditions, and theorize their effects on individuals.

This is not to say that the Institute slavishly joined the Genevan consensus represented by the SCIU. Authority and the Family differed from its counterparts on theoretical, methodological, and empirical grounds. Emphasizing these commonalities calls attention, in particular, to the role of a cohort of international researchers—Jahoda, Leichter, and, especially,

Lazarsfeld—in shaping the Institute’s study. These social psychologists contested the Institute’s methods of studying authority and, consequently, influenced its theory of authoritarianism. This influence can be discerned in the researchers’ contributions to Authority and the Family.

Importantly, it can also be detected in their continued, but less direct, engagement with the project well after the Institute had left Geneva for New York City.

56 See, e.g., Horkheimer, Autorität und Familie, 293–94.

57 See Käthe Leichter, “Switzerland: The Effects of Unemployment on Children and Young Persons,” in A Report of Twenty Years’ Activity, 1920-1940. Translated from the French, by Save the Children International Union (New York: International Child Service Committee of the Save the Children Federation, 1940), 107–14; Marie Jahoda- Lazarsfeld, “Austria: The Influence of Unemployment on Children and Young People,” in A Report of Twenty Years’ Activity, 1920-1940. Translated from the French, by Save the Children International Union (New York: International Child Service Committee of the Save the Children Federation, 1940), 115–38; cf. Marie Jahoda- Lazarsfeld, “Austria. The Influence of Unemployment on Children and Young People in Austria,” in Children, Young People, and Unemployment: A Series of Enquiries into the Effects of Unemployment on Children and Young People (Geneva: The Save the Children International Union, 1933), 112–37.

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AUTHORITARIAN MIND AND AUTHORITARIAN SOCIETY

Horkheimer’s concern with the fate of the individual as a result of changes in the nature of authority and the structure of the family was matched—if not exceeded—by that of Erich

Fromm. Like Horkheimer, Fromm approached the individual-family-authority nexus from multiple perspectives: in the early 1920s, Fromm had earned a doctorate in sociology under the guidance of Alfred Weber; later in the decade, he developed an interest in psychology, received analytical training from Theodor Reik, and, in 1927 opened a clinical practice.58 In 1929, Fromm was introduced to Horkheimer and became a formal member of the Institute in 1930. For most of the next decade—until his departure from the Institute in 1939—Fromm strove to combine social and psychodynamic theory, sociological research, and psychoanalytical interpretation.59

Fromm’s contributions to Authority and the Family distilled this ongoing work. In his essays and studies, Fromm described the theory and practice of a social psychology of the authoritarian individual in the authoritarian society. But Fromm’s social psychology was not without critics— even among his Institute colleagues. In their view, Fromm never succeeded in fully closing the gap between social and psychodynamic theory or between sociological research and psychoanalytic interpretation.60

58 On Fromm’s training, see Friedman, The Lives of Erich Fromm, chap. 1.

59 See, inter alia, Erich Fromm, “Psychoanalyse und Soziologie,” Zeitschrift für Psychoanalytische Pädagogik 3 (1929 1928): 268; “Der Staat als Erzieher. Zur Psychologie der Starfjustiz,” Zeitschrift für Psycho-analystischen Pädagogik 4 (1930): 5–9; “Zur Psychologie des Verbrechers und der strafenden Gesellschaft,” Imago: Zeitschrift für Anwendung der Psychoanalyse und auf die Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften 17 (1931): 226–51; “Politik und Psychoanalyse,” Psychoanalytische Bewegung 3 (1931): 440–47.

60 Horkheimer and Adorno’s critiques of Fromm will be described further in chapters 5 and 6 of the dissertation. According to Friedman, Fromm’s separation from key ideas and members of the Institute began as early as 1934. See Friedman, The Lives of Erich Fromm, 54–61.

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Motivating Fromm’s social-psychological program were his dual commitments to Marx and Freud. Fromm was hardly the only researcher in interwar Europe to discern links between the two thinkers. Like Siegfried Bernfeld, Otto Fenichel, Wilhelm Reich, and Alfred Adler,

Fromm aimed to elucidate the connections between Marx and Freud and to apply their combined insights to the proletarian struggle.61 In the first writings he published as a member of the

Institute, Fromm maintained that Marx and Freud pursued distinct, but nonetheless complementary, lines of inquiry into the material and mental aspects of capitalism.62 Unlike those socialists—such as the young Lazarsfeld—who took the treatment of psychological neuroses and the seizure of the means of production to be one and the same, Fromm argued that the revolution in material conditions was a necessary antecedent of mental transformation.63

Between 1930 and 1932—when he began to publish in the Zeitschrift—Fromm modified his position.64 Marx and Freud, he argued, shared the common goal of developing a scientific— dialectical and material—method for studying human needs. According to Fromm, Freudian psychoanalysis provided the techniques for tracing the libidinal expressions of biological needs and instinctual drives; Marxist political economy supplied the means for linking felt instincts to economic and social institutions. Simultaneously, Fromm questioned Freud’s theory of the

61 Bonss, “Critical Theory and Empirical Social Research,” 4–9.

62 See, e.g., Fromm, “Psychoanalyse und Soziologie”; “Der Staat als Erzieher. Zur Psychologie der Starfjustiz”; “Zur Psychologie des Verbrechers und der strafenden Gesellschaft.”

63 Fromm, “Politik und Psychoanalyse”; cf. Lazarsfeld, “Marxismus und Individualpsychologie.”

64 See Erich Fromm, “Über Methode und Aufgabe einer Analytischen Sozialpsychologie: Bemerkungen über Psychoanalyse und historischen Materialismus,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 1 (1932): 28–54; “Die psychoanalytische Charakterologie und ihre Bedeutung für die Sozialpsychologie,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 1 (1932): 253–77.

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immutability of instincts and drives. When viewed through dialectical social psychology, he argued, the individual’s character would be seen as the product not of atavistic drives or repressed desires but of social institutions and economic imperatives. But this formation of individuals was not unmediated. Anticipating Horkheimer, Fromm identified the family as the nexus in which social institutions found expression in individual characters.

Across these early essays for the Zeitschrift, Fromm drew closer to the views of some of his contemporaries. Fromm’s identification of the family as the nexus for individual character- formation, for example, echoed Wilhelm Reich’s synthesis of Marx and Freud while his call for a psychological “characterology” followed Karl Abraham’s psychoanalytic studies of character.65 Moreover, the implication of Fromm’s argument about the mutability of individual character through social institutions put his social psychology into indirect conversation with empirical studies of the proletariat conducted by researchers in Germany and Austria. Although many of these researchers—including Charlotte Bühler and Paul Lazarsfeld—expressed strong misgivings about Freud’s theory of psychodynamics, they concurred with Fromm in believing that social psychology was vitally important to efforts, as Lazarsfeld would later describe it, “to develop Socialist [sic] personalities […] instead of individualistic personalities” among the proletariat.66

Fromm was doubtless familiar with the ÖWF’s research program or, at the very least, its paradigm. Lazarsfeld and Fromm were connected by a dense web of interpersonal and

65 Wilhelm Reich, Dialektischer Materialismus und Pscyhoanalyse (Copenhagen: Verlag für Sexualpolitik, 1929); Karl Abraham, Psychoanalytische Studien zur Charakterbildung (Vienna: Internationale Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1925); cf. Wilhelm Reich, Charakteranalyse. Tehcnik und Grundlagen (Vienna: Internationale Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1933). On these links, see Bonss, “Critical Theory and Empirical Social Research,” 21–23.

66 Lazarsfeld, Oral History (1962), 146. Charlotte Bühler forbade her graduate students and assistants from using Freudian terminology in her seminars—although this prohibition did not prevent these same students from entering analysis. See Gardner and Stevens, Red Vienna and the Golden Age of Psychology, 1918-1938, 143.

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intellectual connections—from Bernfeld, who was one of Lazarsfeld’s childhood mentors and one of Fromm’s psychoanalytic interlocutors, to Weber, from whom Fromm learned sociology and whose work the ÖWF cited as an example of sociography.67 Especially important was Hilde

Weiss, a German sociologist then living in France. Weiss had been recruited to the Institute by

Carl Grünberg in 1924. Still a graduate student, Weiss received funding from the Institute for her comparative study of the rationalization of production in the Ford automotive plants and the

Zeiss optical factories. Upon receiving her doctorate in 1926, Weiss departed Frankfurt for

Berlin, where she worked in the Federal Statistical Office.68 At some point, she may have conducted research or analysis for the ÖWF.69 Weiss returned to Frankfurt in 1930 but fled

Germany in 1933.

Weiss settled in France and began to pursue a second doctorate under the direction of

Célestin Bouglé. In her thesis, Weiss had combined her sociological profession with her socialist commitments, arguing for the existence of a distinctively Marxist tradition of social research— one beginning with Marx’s survey of French industrial workers, published in La Revue socialiste in 1880.70 The resulting text was published as a monograph and, in abbreviated form, in the

67 On Fromm’s training with Weber, see Friedman, The Lives of Erich Fromm, 12–18. For the ÖWF’s positive treatment of Alfred Weber’s work, see Zeisel, “Zur Geschichte der Soziographie,” 120–23.

68 For Weiss’ biography, see Hilda Weiss, “My Life in Germany Before and After January 30, 1933,” in Hilda Weiss: Soziologin, Sozialistin, Emigrantin: Ihre Autobiographie aus dem Jahr 1940, ed. Detlef Garz (Hamburg: Kovac Verlag, 2006), viz., 60-63.

69 See Illa Weiss, “Referat: Verkäufer und Kunde. Wie der Kunde die Sache sieht” n.d., PFL Papers Series I, Box 33, Folder 1. Further research is needed in order to determine whether the author may have been “Hilde” rather than “Illa” Weiss. No other reference to “Illa Weiss” is to be found in the ÖWF archives.

70 Marx, “Questionnaire for Workers.” None of the three recent biographies of Marx reference this project. Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013); Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016); Sven-Eric Liedman, A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx (London: Verso Books, 2018).

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Zeitschrift.71 According to Weiss, Marx had designed a survey that was nothing less than a

“socialist textbook” that would lead the worker—who “enters his experience” into the survey’s blanks and thereby “fills it with living contents”—to class consciousness.72 At Bouglé’s urging,

Horkheimer found work for Weiss as Fromm’s research assistant.73 But she was no mere amanuensis. In her role as advisor to Fromm, Weiss not only encouraged him to reread classic works in this tradition of Marxist social research but also pulled him towards this activist conception of social science.74 No doubt, Weiss played an important role in Fromm’s decision to conduct his own empirical study. Indeed, in a letter to Friedrich Pollock in 1934, Horkheimer suggested that Weiss contribute an empirical study to the project apart from Fromm’s study.75

When Horkheimer declared, in his inaugural address, that the Institute would pursue “the most varied methods of investigation” including “surveying all kinds of associations, from the family to economic groups and political associations to the state and humanity,” Fromm was ready to answer the call.76 Aided by Weiss and four other research associates—Herta Herzog,

71 Weiss, Les enquêtes ouvrières en France entre 1830 et 1848; “Die Enquête ouvrière von Karl Marx.”

72 Weiss, “Die Enquête ouvrière von Karl Marx,” 86.

73 For Bouglé’s urging, see his letter to Horkheimer of January 29, 1935 and Horkheimer’s reply of February 15, 1939 in Horkheimer, Horkheimer GS, 1985, 15:307–9, 316–18.

74 According to Wolfgang Bonss, it was Weiss who “largely carried out” this project. Further research would be necessary to confirm or refute Bonss’ view. See Bonss, “Critical Theory and Empirical Social Research,” 1.

75 See Max Horkheimer to Friedrich Pollock, August 3, 1934 in Horkheimer, Horkheimer GS, 1985, 15:195–203 viz., 199. Further research is needed to determine whether this project was abandoned, was completed but not included, or was integrated into Fromm’s study. Horkheimer’s letter does not name or describe Weiss’ potential contribution. Moreover, his proposed description names the components that would become part of Fromm’s contribution, suggesting that Weiss was at work on another project.

76 Horkheimer, “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research,” 8, 13 respectively.

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Anna Hartock, Ernst Shachtel, and Lazarsfeld—Fromm designed a social-psychological study that would elucidate the systematic links between the personal characters and political ideologies of blue- and white-collar German workers. Questions covered matters factual and personal: respondents were asked both “[w]hat serious illnesses have you had?” and, subsequently, “[a]re you afraid of illness?” Subjects were also asked about matters far more abstract: “[d]o you think that the individual has only himself to blame for his fate?” In many cases, these broad questions were followed by opportunities for open-ended responses.77 Unsurprisingly, given the role of

Weiss, Herzog, and Lazarsfeld in the study, many of the questions echoed those from projects carried out by the ÖWF and other socialist-aligned researchers in Austria.78

As Fromm’s introduction to the last iteration of the text made clear, he intended the study to be in conversation with Lazarsfeld and, further, the sociologists Siegfried Kracauer, Hendrik de Man, and Adolf Levenstein.79 Simultaneously, however, Fromm maintained that the study had an eminently psychoanalytical aspect: he intended to submit the open-ended questions—which constituted more than half of the survey—to an analytic interpretation familiar to any student of

Freud. “Here,” Fromm wrote, “individual nuances of expression, disregarded in explanations of surface meanings, play a significant role.” Researchers would pay close attention to images,

77 A complete list of the survey questions can be found in Appendix 2 in Erich Fromm, The Working Class in Weimar Germany: A Psychological and Sociological Study, ed. Wolfgang Bonss, trans. Barbara Weinberger (Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, UK: Berg Publishers, 1984), 267–74. Questions above are numbers 401, 415, and 422, respectively. An abbreviated version of the questionnaire can be found in Erich Fromm, “Sozialpsychologischer Teil,” in Studien über Autorität und Familie, Forschungsberichte aus dem Institut für Sozialforschung, ed. Max Horkheimer (Paris: Libraire Félix Alcan, 1936), 240–48.

78 See, e.g., the questions asked in Leichter, Wie leben die Wiener Heimarbeiter?; Mein Arbeitstag, mein Wochenende; So leben Wir; Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Hörerbefragung der RAVAG,” in Paul Lazarsfelds Wiener RAVAG-Studie 1932: der Beginn der modernen Rundfunkforschung, ed. Desmond Mark (Vienna: Guthmann Peterson, 1996), 27–66.

79 Fromm, The Working Class in Weimar Germany, 41–42. De Man, it will be recalled from chapter 1, was an influence on the young Lazarsfeld.

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phrases, and explanations in order to uncover the “objective” meaning that stood behind the

“rationalizations” discernable in subjects’ responses.80 Moreover, Fromm held that responses must be located within an overarching theoretical matrix. Fromm explained this task with reference to the questions on belief in and responsibility for fate:

In Marxist theory, which has developed explicit statements regarding this problem, the individual’s fate is presented as socially determined, but at the same time, it is stressed that through political action the individual can change the position of his class and, with this, his own situation. We often came across the reply: “No, the individual can do nothing about his fate, since it is determined by his social conditions.” Although one can see the influence of Marxist theory here, it was selectively perceived since its positive behavioral aspect was ignored. Only by reference to the totality of the theory was it possible to grasp the exact significance of this answer and to classify it accordingly.81

Fromm’s commitment to the careful interpretation—both Marxist and psychoanalytic—of the survey results meant that he, Weiss, and their colleagues faced the prospect of a slow and laborious research process.

In the event, the study took far longer to complete than any of its members could have expected. Questionnaires were sent to 3,300 workers in 1930; 1,100 completed surveys were returned by 1931.82 Fromm and Weiss set to work sorting, classifying, tabulating, and interpreting these responses. Disruptions—including Fromm’s persistent tuberculosis and the

Institute’s relocation, first to Geneva and subsequently to the United States—hampered their progress. Worse still, almost half of the already-small number of completed responses were lost

80 Ibid., 51–57.

81 Ibid., 56–57.

82 Fromm briefly described the research process in his introduction to the empirical section of Authority and the Family. See Fromm, “Sozialpsychologischer Teil,” 239–40.

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in the Institute’s transit to New York in 1933.83 While some members of the Institute believed that the project should be terminated, Fromm persisted. In 1936—the year Authority and the

Family was published—Fromm was still at work on the study. Indeed, his major contribution to the text was a preliminary report on his research into Weimar workers.

Before examining the methods and findings of Fromm’s empirical study as presented in

Authority and the Family, it is necessary to consider the accompanying theoretical essay. Placed immediately after Horkheimer’s introduction to the text, Fromm’s essay mimicked the Institute director’s in offering a sweeping overview of the theoretical foundations of the project.84 And, like Horkheimer’s introduction, Fromm’s essay has been considered to be the culmination of his recent work—specifically, his development of a distinctive social psychology that questioned

Freud’s drive theory and embraced Marx’s dialectical materialism.85 In the essay, Fromm worked to answer a question that added a new, distinctly psychological, dimension to

Horkheimer’s investigations into authority: why did so many people seem to find pleasure in the submission to authority?86 Fromm planned to pursue this question through a “pure psychological investigation,” but his path led him from psychological to social theory—from a diagnosis of the authoritarian mind to a description of the authoritarian society.87

83 On the events after Fromm carried out the initial survey, see Friedman, The Lives of Erich Fromm, 39–45.

84 Fromm, “Sozialpsychologischer Teil.”

85 According to Wiggershaus, “Fromm’s essay was the best he ever wrote, although its importance lay not so much in developing new ideas as in finding succinct ways of expressing existing ones.” Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 151; cf. Friedman, The Lives of Erich Fromm, 51.

86 Fromm, “Sozialpsychologischer Teil,” 77.

87 Ibid., 80.

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Fromm began by locating the origin of authority in the intertwined development of ego and superego. To do so, he recapitulated arguments Freud made in Mass Psychology and Ego

Analysis (1921), The Ego and the Id (1923), and, to a lesser extent, The Problem of Anxiety

(1926) and The Future of an Illusion (1927): fear of an external power prevented the child from acting on certain basic impulses; eventually the child introjected authority as a superego and undertook the task of repression himself, replacing pursuit of immediate gratification (the

“pleasure principle”) with action tempered by knowledge of the given world (the “reality principle”). Freud’s famed “Oedipus complex” played a central role in this process, for it was the male child’s love for his mother and the father’s forbidding of it that formed the impulse- repression dynamic of psychological authority.88 Fromm criticized Freud for his lack of clarity about aspects of this argument—both the concept of the superego and the process of

“identification”—but maintained that Freud had nevertheless identified the deep-seated, psychological nature of authority and, further, to the role of the patriarchal family in creating and perpetuating authority.89

As in his other writings from this period, Fromm introduced Marxist themes to this

Freudian theory. Fromm put his claim bluntly: in the “relationship between superego and authority is dialectical.”90 “Authority and the superego are inseparable from one another,”

88 Ibid., 80–83.

89 Ibid., 83–84.

90 Ibid., 85.

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Fromm continued.91 The superego is nothing other than internalized social authority “disguised” by the ascription of moral authority.92 Thus:

The superego is the internalized form of external force; the external force becomes so effective because it is endowed with superego qualities. The superego, then, is by no means an entity that is formed once in childhood and, from then on, is effective in man no matter the society in which he lives. Rather, the superego would, in most cases, more or less disappear, or completely change its character and contents, unless the socially controlled authorities continually perpetuate—or, more correctly put, renew—the process of superego formation begun in childhood.93

Psychological authority created in the family, this is to say, sustained and was sustained by institutions of social authority. Psychosexual relations and psychodynamic forces had parallels,

Fromm argued, in economic relations and forces; patriarchal authority resided in the father’s control of money—and his consequent ability to forbid certain activities and to control others.94

For Fromm, these connections were more than mere analogies. Psychological phenomena—from instincts to illnesses—were products of “the human way of life and, ultimately, the mode of production and the resulting social structure.”95

In the second section of his essay, Fromm presented an explanation of psychological development that bore structural similarities to Horkheimer’s account of historical development.

Just as Horkheimer had argued that interpersonal authority had been integral to the development of early capitalism and, consequently, had served humankind by raising the standard of living, so

91 Ibid.

92 Ibid., 84.

93 Ibid., 85.

94 Ibid., 88–91.

95 Ibid., 92.

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Fromm claimed that psychological authority was central to the emergence of the ego and, therefore, integral to the development of human reason. Fromm was no partisan of the pleasure principle. Rather, he held that the ego’s control over the id’s impulses was needed to emancipate humanity from slavery to nature.96 Authority, as embodied in the superego, was integral to this process. As the Institute put it in the summary of Fromm’s argument:

Figuratively speaking, the weak Ego [sic] seeks the shelter of the Super-Ego [sic], until its growing strength permits it to dominate its impulses independently and without help from its emotional relationship to Super-Ego and authority. Control by the Ego itself now becomes a substitute for repression in the checking impulse. Rational thought renders the same assistance in control which the emotional relationship to Super-Ego and authority renders in repression. Reason replaces retrospective rationalization.97

Fromm emphasized that the authority accomplished this tutelage of the ego in two distinct ways.

First, as an embodiment of social authority, the superego relied on the ego’s fear of punishment—as evident, most basically, in the child’s very real fear of punishment by a vastly stronger father. Second—and conversely—the superego effectuated repression by mobilizing the ego’s desire for love and approval. The child, this is to say, not only fears the father but also loves and respects him; he invests the father with estimable qualities and craves his approval. “It is precisely this double aspect that forms a prerequisite for its operation,” the Institute summarized. “To overstep the prohibition of authority means to risk not only the danger of punishment but also the loss of the love of that censor who is the embodiment of one’s own ideal.”98

96 Ibid., 94.

97 Horkheimer, “English Abstracts,” 909.

98 Ibid.

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Although elegant and incisive, this theory of psychological development did not answer

Fromm’s motivating question. Fromm himself acknowledged this shortcoming: his account, he wrote, “does not yet explain that pleasure in obedience and subordination which is so great and so widespread that many social-psychologists believe they can postulate an inherent instinct of subordination.”99 In a move that his Institute colleagues—Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Adorno— would later decry, Fromm began to answer this question by changing theoretical discourses, shifting from psychological to social theory.100 Like Horkheimer, Fromm held that the domination-subordination relationship central to authority took on different forms in different historical eras and social structures.101 In modern society, he argued, the relation was so configured as to inhibit—if not prevent outright—the emancipation of the ego from the tutelage of the superego and the consequent translation of irrational repression into rational control. So long as the ego remained in thrall to the superego, the full individual could not develop; subjects would become, according to Fromm, sadomasochists. Fromm named this perverse condition the

“authoritarian form of society.”102

There was, to be sure, plenty of psychoanalytic content in Fromm’s argument. His descriptions of the sadistic and masochistic perversions, for example, followed the accounts

Freud had developed in texts such as Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) and, much

99 Ibid.

100 Both his critique and its ramifications will be discussed below, in chapter 4 of the dissertation.

101 Fromm, “Sozialpsychologischer Teil,” 111. In his essay, Horkheimer described an “authoritarian political system [Staatswesen].” See Horkheimer, “Allgemeiner Teil,” 75.

102 Fromm, “Sozialpsychologischer Teil,” 117.

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later, “‘A Child is Being Beaten’: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual

Perversions” (1924). Moreover, Fromm, like Freud, argued that sadistic and masochistic tendencies accompanied one another, forming, in Fromm’s words, a “sadomasochistic impulse structure.” Most basically, the sadomasochist’s poorly developed ego required him to submit both in order to gain a reprieve from the threat posed by the dominator and, conversely, to partake in the power of the dominator over others. As Fromm put it, “stronger persons arouse love and admiration” in the sadomasochist “as easily as weaker ones arouse hate and contempt.”103

Beneath the psychoanalytic surface, however, Fromm’s theory was an eminently social one. He argued, for example, that the modern sadomasochist submitted to many forms of domination: not only physical and sexual but also political, economic, and ideological. The sadomasochist submitted to the authority in morality, duty, worldview, God, nature, luck, destiny

(Schicksal) and, especially, fate (Fatum).104 As Fromm explained:

For the soldier, the will or whim of his superior is his destiny, which determines his life and to which he submits gladly. For the petty bourgeois, it is the laws of the economy which he throws himself under as his fate. For him, crisis and prosperity are not societal phenomena that could be changed by human intervention, but an expression of a higher level of governance to which one must surrender and submit. For the man at the top of the pyramid it is basically no different. The difference lies only in the greatness and generality of the one to whom one feels subject, not in the feeling of inevitable dependence on fate per se.105

These social manifestations of the sadomasochistic impulse, Fromm argued, were codified in contemporary philosophy, which identified the courageous embrace of fate as the highest virtue.

103 Horkheimer, “English Abstracts,” 910.

104 Fromm, “Sozialpsychologischer Teil,” 118–21.

105 Ibid., 118.

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Fromm referenced Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, the philosopher who popularized the concept of the “Third Reich.”106

How did Fromm explain the pervasiveness of sadomasochism in modern society? Most basically, he linked it to the “system of dependencies” created by the capitalist organization of the means of production. “The lower the individual stands in the social hierarchy, the greater is the opportunity to find pleasure in subjection, yet he too has opportunity to gratify his sadistic impulse” by exerting his own authority over weaker men, women, children, and animals.107 Such hierarchies had existed, in different gradations, throughout history. What, in Fromm’s view, distinguished modern capitalism? Once again Fromm turned to Marxism, arguing that the play of blind forces induced sadomasochism:

The more conversely the contradictions within society grow and the more insoluble they become, the more blind and uncontrolled the social forces are, the more disasters such as war and unemployment overshadow the life of the individual as inevitable fateful powers, the stronger and more pervasive becomes the sadomasochistic instinct structure and, with it, the authoritarian character structure, the more devotion to destiny becomes the highest virtue and desire.108

Fromm further argued that economic stratification within capitalism generated differential outcomes. Those fortunate enough to be among the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century, for instance, enjoyed greater knowledge and control over economic forces than those unlucky enough to be among the proletariat; consequently, they were less likely to develop sadomasochistic personalities.109 Monopoly capitalism steadily reduced the number of

106 See Fromm’s lengthy footnote on van den Bruck, in ibid., 118–19 fn. 1.

107 Horkheimer, “English Abstracts,” 910; cf. Fromm, “Sozialpsychologischer Teil,” 117.

108 Fromm, “Sozialpsychologischer Teil,” 121–22.

109 Ibid., 121. Horkheimer and Adorno would later take an altogether different view. See “Excursus II: Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality” in Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: 121

individuals able to grasp economic forces and social conditions, individuals, this is to say, able to develop strong egos. Conversely, monopoly capitalism inexorably increased the number of proletarians unable to comprehend the world around them and, as a result, develop strong egos.

For these masses, alignment with the dominant powers was their only chance for security; their sadomasochistic personalities were an unintended consequence of the will to survive.110

Like other socialist-aligned researchers—including Bühler, Hetzer, Leichter, and

Lazarsfeld—Fromm spoke for the immiserated masses but also harbored a deep anxiety about them. Fromm and the Austrian cohort worried that modern workers were not—and, perhaps, could not become—full individuals. As a result of this psychological deficiency, the proletariat seemed an unreliable political agent. Worse still, the working class seemed especially prone to social movements—namely fascism—that preyed upon their psychological weaknesses. For

Fromm as for Lazarsfeld individuality served as an index for resistance against authoritarianism.

By way of conclusion, Fromm identified multiple psychological “types” in the authoritarian society. There was, most obviously, the “sadomasochistic type.” But there were others: the “anal” type, the “matriarchal” type, the “revolutionary” type, and the “rebellious” type.111 Aspects of this typology echoed Austro-Marxist-aligned social psychology—above all, the ÖWF’s study of unemployment. Fromm’s revolutionary type, for instance, recalled the

ÖWF’s concept of the “unbroken” Marienthaler: both had egos strong enough to withstand assaults from the deleterious effects of capitalism—whether those effects were conceived as the

Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 63–93.

110 Fromm elaborated this theory in a subsequent article for the Zeitschrift. See Erich Fromm, “Zum Gefühl der Ohnmacht,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 6 (1937): 95–118.

111 Fromm, “Sozialpsychologischer Teil,” 130–35.

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lure of sadomasochistic impulses or the deindividualization of unemployment.112 Fromm’s typology would later reappear in the Institute’s social-psychological studies of American workers.113 More immediately, this typology served as the foundation for the empirical research

Fromm presented in Authority and the Family.

In his role as editor of the empirical studies published in Authority and the Family,

Fromm wrote a short methodological introduction outlining a technique he termed “structural statistics.” Gesturing at the methodological program Horkheimer had presented upon becoming director of the Institute—a program, it will be recalled, connected to Fromm’s social- psychological study of German workers—Fromm insisted that this approach was altogether different from the “mechanistic” techniques of calculating averages, percentages, and rates found in other social-scientific projects.114 In fact, despite its name, structural statistics was largely uninterested in numbers; its primary tool was interpretation. Guided by social and, especially, psychological theory, researchers would “clarify” the “sense” of each response in relation to the

“whole,” Fromm explained. In this way, structural statistics would illuminate the “structural types” of authority at work in modern society.115

Fromm’s emphasis on interpretation was consonant with his insistence that survey- responses in his study of German workers be submitted to rigorous, psychoanalytically-inspired analysis. As he described it in Authority and the Family, this method would elucidate the “mental

112 Ibid., 131.

113 The Institute’s revision of Fromm’s typology is analyzed in chapters 5 and 6 of the dissertation.

114 As Horkheimer put it in his inaugural address, the Institute must avoid both “dogmatic rigidity” of undialectical Marxism and the “empirical-technical minutiae” of positivism. Horkheimer, “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research,” 13.

115 Fromm, “Geschichte und Methoden der Erhebungen,” 235–37.

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structures” of working-class ideology and “confront” these structures with objective data.116

Such information, Fromm believed, would paint two pictures: a “true image of [workers’] living conditions” and an “intensive image” of their “psychical structures.”117 Importantly, however,

Fromm’s identification of interpretation as the key tool of structural statistics did not preclude the use of quantitative methods. In his contribution to Authority and the Family and, subsequently, in the last iteration of the German-workers study, Fromm and Weiss presented a wide variety of calculations, comparisons, and charts. But by denigrating quantification as merely “mechanistic,” Fromm effectively excluded perforce any systematic or sophisticated use of such information. Readers of Fromm’s study would have been presented with this information and, simultaneously, told that it was of no real value.

It is not entirely clear how and to what extent Fromm applied structural statistics in his contribution to Authority and the Family. Unsurprisingly, Fromm emphasized the role of psychological theory, claiming that it underpinned the interpretation at the heart of his structural- statistical method.118 Specifically, Fromm argued that this process of interpretation led him to discover three character-types among German workers: the “authoritarian character,” the

“revolutionary character,” and the “ambivalent character.”119 But it is unclear how, if it all, these three types related to or differed from the types (“anal,” “revolutionary,” “rebellious,” and

“sadomasochistic”) Fromm had described in his specifically theoretical essay. Simply put, in his

116 Erich Fromm, “Arbeiter- und Angestelltenerhebung,” in Studien über Autorität und Familie, Forschungsberichte aus dem Institut für Sozialforschung, ed. Max Horkheimer (Paris: Libraire Félix Alcan, 1936), 239.

117 Ibid., 248–49.

118 Ibid., 249.

119 Ibid.

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two contributions to Authority and the Family, Fromm outlined two distinct typologies of

German workers and argued that they were linked by the method of structural statistics—but he never clarified the origin, meaning, or implications of this link. Presumably, the differences— both in the number and the nature of the categories—was attributable to the process of interpretation itself.120 But, instead of explaining the interpretive process that connected the two modes of inquiry, Fromm opined that even the most cursory examination of representative results would reveal the obvious, plentiful, and profound distinctions between responses of the revolutionary and authoritarian types—and, to a lesser extent, the similarity of responses among responses within each type. Moreover, despite having rejected probabilistic statistics, Fromm noted that researchers used responses to questions in the first half of the survey to guess answers given in the second half of the questionnaire.121 Further, Fromm brushed aside the potential problem of mixed character-types by suggesting that ambivalent responses tended to resolve through further interpretation.122

To summarize: Fromm articulated a program of “structural statistics” in which researchers would eschew merely “mechanistic” calculations for truly insightful interpretation derived from a continuous connection to theory—social, psychological, or, in Fromm’s case, social-psychological. Interpretation, guided by the supporting theory and applied to empirical evidence, was to connect these levels of analysis. But Fromm neglected to describe this interpretive link, creating a situation in which readers of Authority and the Family would be

120 In his social-psychological essay, Fromm had described “types;” in his empirical study, he named “characters.” This latter term recalled Fromm’s earlier writings for the Institute as well as the arguments of Wilhelm Reich. See Fromm, “Charakterologie und ihre Bedeutung”; Reich, Charakteranalyse. Tehcnik und Grundlagen.

121 Fromm, “Arbeiter- und Angestelltenerhebung,” 270–71.

122 Ibid., 271.

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presented with two—apparently, but unclearly—connected typologies. The Institute itself aptly characterized Fromm’s approach in its summary of Authority and the Family for English- language readers: “[t]he questionnaires were not considered ample enough to be statistically conclusive. They were intended only to keep us in contact with the facts of daily life and were destined to serve primarily as material for typological conclusions.”123

Such a view lends credence to the conclusion that the “primitive” empirical methods the

Institute used in its project were a means of creating a “protective screen” for its “formal theory.”124 It suggests, moreover, that an epistemological disjunction lurked at the core of

Fromm’s structural statistics. Fromm pursued two lines of inquiry simultaneously—one theoretical and one empirical—and insisted that they were related through the practice of interpretation, yet he could not explain how elements of the two approaches related to one another or account for their manifest differences. Instead, Fromm moved between approaches, using the strengths of one to supplement the weaknesses of the other.

In later years, Fromm’s Institute colleagues would identify a similar problem in his social psychology itself. As was already apparent in his theoretical contribution to Authority and the

Family, Fromm asserted, but could not explain, the essential unity of sociology and psychology.

Moreover, when he reached a theoretical impasse in one discourse, he compensated by switching to the other—he could explain the authoritarian mind only by theorizing the authoritarian society. This critique, which would become the foundation of the Institute’s own, distinctive empirical method, originated in a dispute over the meaning and implications of structural statistics in Authority and the Family.

123 Horkheimer, “English Abstracts,” 901.

124 Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 132; Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 151.

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THE ORIGINS OF CONCEPTS

In its final, published form in 1936, Authority and the Family contained five empirical studies of the European proletariat: first—both chronologically and argumentatively—was

Fromm’s study of character and ideology among German workers; second and third were surveys of experts—physicians, social workers, judges, and youth leaders—about workers’ changing attitudes towards sexuality and authority; fourth was an empirical study of shifting patterns of authority among working-class youth; fifth was an examination of the effects of extended unemployment on the function of authority in workers’ families.125 Fromm, in his role as editor of the empirical section of the text, insisted that these studies were related to one another conceptually, procedurally, and, most important, methodologically. According to

Fromm, the empirical incompleteness or conceptual insufficiency of each study generated the need for and set the direction of its immediate successor.126 This is to say that, like Horkheimer,

Fromm characterized Authority and the Family as provisional, experimental, or

“fragmentary.”127 Fromm suggested that the individual studies were also united by a common

125 See Erich Fromm, “Erhebung über Sexualmoral,” Andreas Sternheim and Ernst Schachtel, “Sachverständigenerhebung über Autorität und Familie,” Käthe Leichter and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Erhebung bei Jugendlichen über Autorität und Familie,” and Erich Fromm, “Erhebung bei Arbeitslosen über Autorität und Familie” in Studien über Autorität und die Familie, ed. Max Horkheimer (Paris: Libraire Félix Alcan, 1936), 272- 284, 292-253, 353-456, 457-468, respectively.

126 Thus, Fromm’s study of ideology among German workers suggested the need for a survey of changes in the sexual morality of this group; this survey revealed the importance of assessing shifts in the character and manifestations of authority within the family; this investigation uncovered the need to study the profound impact of unemployment on the family, its institutions, and its members. For the clearest articulation of this trajectory, see the summary of the empirical studies in Horkheimer, “English Abstracts,” 916–18.

127 Ibid., 917.

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“scientific” method: the “structural statistics” he had deployed in his own study of German workers.128

Was Fromm correct in his assertion that the studies in Authority and the Family used this method? While other studies within the Institute’s project—such as the social-psychological research into the experience of unemployment among European youths conducted by Käthe

Leichter and Paul Lazarsfeld—proclaimed their allegiance to structural statistics, their approach shared little in common with Fromm’s method. Although they had participated in the design and execution of Fromm’s 1930 survey of German workers, Leichter and Lazarsfeld did not seem bound, in 1936, to his method of determining “structural types.” Rather, they proposed an altogether different way of elaborating “statistical” and “interpretive types.” Leichter and

Lazarsfeld’s decision to call this approach “structural statistics” suggests that they may have intended to claim—or, perhaps in their view, to reclaim—it from Fromm. Despite its eminently methodological origins, the dispute between Leichter, Lazarsfeld, and Fromm was hardly academic. Leichter and Lazarsfeld’s demonstration that it was possible to derive conceptual categories from empirical material itself—rather than from interpolated theories—anticipated the

Institute’s eventual critique of Fromm’s social psychology and their consequent revision of empirical research methods.

Leichter and Lazarsfeld’s dispute with Fromm over structural statistics appeared with the publication of Authority and the Family in 1936, but it originated in the research methodology the ÖWF had been developing since 1927. Before an examination of Leichter and Lazarsfeld’s critique, it is necessary to reconstruct this methodological program. In and through this decade- long process of methodological thinking and economic-psychological research, the ÖWF had

128 Fromm, “Geschichte und Methoden der Erhebungen,” 235.

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raised several questions that bore directly on Leichter and Lazarsfeld’s dispute with Fromm.

What role, they asked, should concepts play in social and psychological research? Where and how did these concepts originate?

As noted in chapter 1, the ÖWF was in fact a corporation—a consulting firm of sorts that offered academic institutions and businesses its members’ expertise in economic psychology grounded in statistical methods.129 As one early memorandum made clear, the organization aimed to persuade businesses that economic-psychological research was both viable and necessary. The hard sciences had progressed by leaps and bounds, they wrote, but human science lagged far behind, despite the fact that knowledge of the social and, above all, economic world was recognized as eminently important.130 Charlotte Bühler—who was much more closely involved with the projects and studies of the ÖWF than her husband—lent her voice to this claim, writing in one paper that scientific research into advertising and product design would soon displace studies of the business cycle and financial policy as the leading realm of economic inquiry.131 As the ÖWF put it in one internal memorandum, economic psychology worked “in the service of all interests” by helping to satisfy needs more rationally, more quickly, and with less waste.132

129 Lautman and Lécuyer, “Interview with Marie Jahoda”; Zeisel, “The Vienna Years.”

130 Many of the surviving documents have no attributed names or dates. I have tried to supply such information when it is possible to deduce it with some certainty from the document in question. (NB: Although these texts were preserved in the Lazarsfeld archive, many of them are clearly not his creation.) This text’s mention of the worldwide economic crisis suggests it was written sometime in or after 1929. ÖWF, “Neue Wege der Verkaufspsychologie,” n.d., 1–2, PFL Papers Series I, Box 33, Folder 3.

131 Charlotte Bühler, “Verkaufen als Reklame. Ergebnis psychologischer Erhebungen,” n.d., 4, PFL Papers Series I, Box 33, Folder 1, CRBML.

132 ÖWF, “Neue Wege,” 15.

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The ÖWF’s success in marketing these services was limited. Between 1928 and 1937, the organization conducted studies for local businesses (laundries, shoe stores), national firms

(breweries), and governmental agencies (RAVAG, Austria’s public-private broadcasting agency); the organization also sold a monthly subscription service—the “retail barometer”

(figure 2.1)—that claimed to offer subscribers advance notice of changes in the business cycle.133

Yet, as Zeisel later recalled, the ÖWF “sustained itself mainly on ideas, all of them more or less

Paul’s, on the unabated enthusiasm of its members, and on no money worth talking about.”134

Figure 2.1: Sale- and Consumption-Barometer. Source: PFL Papers, CRBML Archives, Series I, Box 1, Folder 4.

133 ÖWF, “Verkaufs-und Absatzbarometer,” n.d., PFL Papers Series I, Box 33, Folder 4. Lazarsfeld and the ÖWF were not alone in developing this conceptual tool. See Henry C. Link and Irving Lorge, “The Psychological Sales Barometer,” Harvard Business Review 13, no. 2 (January 1935): 193. More research is needed in order to determine the etiology of the “sales barometer” concept.

134 Quoted in David L. Sills, Paul F. Lazarsfeld 1901-1976. A Biographical Memoir (Washington, D. C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1987), 239.

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One aspect of the ÖWF’s mission that was successful, however, was the use of commercial projects for academic purposes. This “cute” activity, as Lazarsfeld would later term it, consisted in using commercial research to gather data and refine methods. Put simply, given the ÖWF’s tenuous existence—outside the university and at the margins of the social sciences—commercial work allowed them to conduct research that otherwise would not have been possible.135

Much of this work was methodological in nature. Inspired by their counterparts in fields from philosophy and mathematics to sociology and political economy—philosophers and social scientists such as Philipp Frank and Franz Oppenheimer—the ÖWF sought to elaborate rigorous, iterative, scientific methods of psychological research.136 Importantly, the ÖWF researchers did not understand themselves to be inventing a new science. Instead, they described their task as the elucidation and codification of a set of interrelated methods centered around a common set of goals, questions, and presuppositions.137 Through this work, four key concepts emerged: needs

(Bedürfnisse), motivations or drives (Trieben), reasons (Begründungen), and activity

(Handlung).138 Drawing from Oppenheimer’s The State (1907), in particular, the ÖWF

135 Lazarsfeld, Oral History (1962), 162–63. This was one of two senses in which Lazarsfeld used the word “cute” (which he did quite often). By “cute” Lazarsfeld also meant research that attracted immediate interest, the insight that grabbed the reader’s attention and held it through the less exciting portions of exposition and analysis. For an example of this usage, see Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Additional Examples from Community Studies,” 1955, 3, PFL Papers Series I, Box 115, Folder 9.

136 On the role of the logical-positivist philosopher and mathematician Philipp Frank in this process, see ÖWF, “Untitled Manuscript [Description of Methods],” n.d., 3–4, 6, et passim, PFL Papers Series I, Box 33, Folder 1.

137 ÖWF, “Der Gegenstand der Wirtschaftspsychologie. Theoretische Überlegungen für ihre Praktiker,” n.d., 1–3, PFL Papers Series I, Box 35, Folder 27. For an example of the (frequently repeated) claim about the codification of existing practices, see Bühler, “Verkaufen als Reklame,” 1. I believe this text to have been written by Bühler based on the speaker’s description of time spent in New York City around 1924—precisely the time at which Bühler visited the United States as a Rockefeller Fellow.

138 ÖWF, “Gegenstand der Wirtschaftspsychologie,” 10.

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characterized economic psychology as the science that would reveal the patterns of motivation and action by which individuals satisfied needs through economic transactions (figure 2.2).139

Figure 2.2: Process of the Economic Satisfaction of Needs. Source: ÖWF, “Gegenstand der Wirtschaftspsychologie,” 22.

Although Oppenheimer, Frank, and other Austrian thinkers influenced the content of the

ÖWF’s methodological program, Karl Bühler supplied its basic impulse: clarification and codification. Bühler’s emphasis on the necessity of this task, in turn, followed from his remarkable intellectual training and academic career. As a student, Bühler had studied the phenomenological approach to psychology developed by Carl Stumpf; he then became an assistant to Oswald Külpe and a practitioner of Külpe’s technique of “systematic introspection,” a method that, as Kurt Danziger has argued, effectuated a positivist and behaviorist critique of

Wilhelm Wundt.140 In his early work, The Mental Development of Children (1918-1919), Bühler, like Külpe, set aside abstract universals in favor of observation, arguing that the genesis of

139 See Franz Oppenheimer, Der Staat (Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening, 1907), chap. 2. For a succinct restatement of these views, see Franz Oppenheimer, “Tendencies in Recent German Sociology,” Sociological Review 24 (1932): 249–51.

140 Kurt Danziger, “The Positivist Repudiation of Wundt,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 15, no. 3 (July 1, 1979): 205–30. On Bühler’s training and career, see

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judgment could be discerned through the linguistic activity (Handlung) of children. But Bühler retained an abiding interest in philosophical questions: Mental Development framed its findings as correctives to the thought of David Hume, Wilhelm Dilthey, Heinrich Rickert, and Wilhelm

Windelband; it claimed to furnish evidence for a critique of Aristotle’s theory of judgment and a partial validation of Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl’s accounts of intentionality. After moving to Vienna in 1922, Bühler widened his philosophical ambitions. In The Crisis of

Psychology (1926), he argued that distorted views of the human mind originating with Aristotle and Descartes had too long tainted experimental psychology. Consequently, Bühler insisted that psychologists must undertake new a transcendental deduction, returning the discipline to its fundamental axioms in order to ensure its systematic coherence and epistemological validity.141

How did Bühler’s ideas shape the ÖWF’s conception of economic psychology? First,

Bühler’s writings introduced doubt about the epistemological grounds for psychology. If the discipline were, as Bühler had it, in “crisis,” what concepts and methods could be used to conduct research? As the ÖWF members put it in one memorandum, economic psychologists

“must have courage” because they stood directly over “gaps” in psychological research, over an

“abyss” created by the antifoundational character of social-scientific reasoning.142 Second,

Bühler, following Külpe, turned the ÖWF toward a kind of pragmatic approach to psychological research, one focused on the activity of observed subjects. As records of a debate among the

ÖWF members show, researchers were advised to hew close to the facts, to avoid preconceptions, and to avoid, to the extent possible, axioms and concepts. Rather than ask

141 Karl Bühler, “Die Krise der Psychologie,” Kant-Studien 31 (1926): 496–502.

142 ÖWF, “Diskussionsbemerkung zur Wirtschaftspsychologischen Arbeitsgemeinschaft,” n.d., 6, PFL Papers Series I, Box 35, Folder 28.

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theoretical questions, researchers were to focus on improving techniques (e.g., the clarity of questionnaires) and finding new, practical topics to which economic-psychological research could be applied.143 Otherwise put, the ÖWF foreswore the most challenging philosophical questions about the grounds of economic psychology—for eminently philosophical reasons.

The ÖWF implemented these Bühlerian guidelines by interrogating a central question of psychological research: why? Other researchers, Lazarsfeld and his ÖWF colleagues held, lacked sophistication in the asking and answering of why-questions. It was insufficient, this is to say, to simply ask consumers, “What products to do you use? Why?” Most basically—and in the same vein as Bühler—the ÖWF was deeply skeptical about evidence gathered by subjects’ own introspection.144 To be sure, consumers could explain why they purchased a particular good at a particular store, but were these reasons trustworthy? Could subjects be counted on to identify, understand, remember, and recall their motivations and decisions? But the researchers also mistrusted subjects’ own reasons because they viewed the very concept of reasons and the act of reason-giving as imprecise.145 They illustrated these dangers by comparing three seemingly simple why-statements:

1) I bought myself an oven because I urgently needed one… 2) I bought a lace doily because I was already in the store… 3) I bought myself shoes because they seem to be of excellent quality…146

143 ÖWF, “Untitled Manuscript [Report on Recent Work in Economic Psychology],” 1933, 12, PFL Papers Series I, Box 35, Folder 26; ÖWF, “Diskussionsbemerkung,” 6.

144 Ash, “Die Entwicklung des Wiener Psychologischen Instituts 1922-1938”; Danziger, “The Positivist Repudiation of Wundt.”

145 For later developments of this same skepticism, see Hans Zeisel, Say It with Figures (New York: Harper, 1947), chaps. 8, 9.

146 ÖWF, “Report on Recent Work in Economic Psychology,” 9.

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The ÖWF researcher characterized the first of these responses as an “experiential reason,” the second as a “procedural reason,” and the third as an “objective reason.” But, they argued, these distinctions were apt to break down upon further examination. Reasons, this is to say, shifted form and function when different perspectives or frames were adopted. For example, giving the fact of already being present in the store as a reason for purchasing the lace doily simply implies another question: what brought the consumer to the store in the first place?147 Such a chain of why-questions might extend quite far—if not indefinitely. Reasons were further troublesome because the same words had different meanings—and expressed different psychological states— for different people. One consumer might “need” an oven because hers had ceased to function altogether; another might “need” an oven because her neighbors had installed a superior model in their homes.148

One possible solution to the dilemma of why-questions could be found in the application of theoretical concepts to empirical evidence. As argued in chapter 1, the ÖWF’s most accomplished study, The Unemployed of Marienthal, for example, applied concepts taken from

Austro-Marxist theories of the working class. Moreover, the chapter argued, the ÖWF was not entirely forthcoming about the process by which these concepts were derived and applied. Marie

Jahoda, it will be recalled, went so far as to claim that Lazarsfeld’s ability to conceive of meaningful concepts was an innate ability: his “uncanny gift for sorting the wheat from the chaff,

147 The authors spent considerable time on this point. For them, philosophers and psychologists did themselves a significant disservice by casting out reasons—like the one contained in the cliché, “I never would have gone to Rome if I hadn’t met my friend on the street.”—as paradoxical. The ÖWF members maintained that this claim was a kind of procedural explanation that required reframing; it expressed the beginning (meeting a friend on the street) and result (going to Rome) of a chain of reasons. Ibid., 13–16.

148 Lazarsfeld and his colleagues spent an extraordinary amount of time parsing the idea of “need,” exploring as many valences of the word (indeed, words), corresponding psychological states, and linguistic utterances as possible. Need had to be characterized in terms of intensity, rationality, emotion, reality and so on. Some fifty pages were given over to the topic. See Ibid., 7–65.

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for arriving at conceptual formulations from a mass of concrete details, came to the fore” in the researchers’ discussions of the material gathered in the field.149 As late as 1945, Lazarsfeld voiced this same, almost-mystical view of the role of concepts in social research. In a memorandum addressed to his American colleagues at Columbia University concerning the training of graduate students in sociology, Lazarsfeld noted the centrality of concepts to fieldwork:

Here the researcher must be able to “find his way about” in what may be a mass of mere descriptive detail. […] The student [learning to be a researcher] must be able to use concepts which will make these cases comparable on certain dimensions which are relevant to his problem. […] If the student is able to place the details of this account [i.e., of a single case] into an appropriate conceptual framework he may later be able to use it in a generalization […].150

Although Lazarsfeld emphasized the importance of concepts to social research and, further, argued that Columbia must train its students in conceptual thinking, he offered no account of where such concepts originated and how, exactly, they might be applied. Otherwise put,

Lazarsfeld confronted the same epistemological disjunction—between theoretical concepts and empirical research—evident in Fromm’s structural statistics.

The ÖWF had, however, begun to recognize and interrogate the use of concepts nearly a decade earlier. In 1934, Lazarsfeld drafted an essay on the “Principles of Sociography”—a theoretical supplement to the “History of Sociography” appended to Marienthal.151 The concept of “resignation,” Lazarsfeld wrote, followed from the researchers’ observations yet contained

149 Lautman and Lécuyer, “Interview with Marie Jahoda,” 139.

150 Lazarsfeld, “Job Analysis,” 6.

151 Lazarsfeld, “Principles of Sociography,” 33. Handwritten notes by Paul Neurath prepended to this document suggest that Lazarsfeld drafted it in 1934. It is unclear when Herman completed her translation of the text, which was intended for Lazarsfeld’s colleagues at Columbia University. According to Neurath, the “torso” of the essay was misplaced by one of these colleagues—Robert Merton—and was partially recovered in 1944.

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meanings, associations, and valences far beyond those of the data itself. As Lazarsfeld put it:

“The word ‘resignation’ arouses for the hearer additional associations. He can visualize the life of these tired Marienthalers with details which are beyond our results.”152 To describe the atmosphere of Marienthal as resigned was at once to undercut the specificity of the social- research data—the percentage of unemployed people, the number of men who spent their days listlessly, etc.—and to surpass it, calling forth a social phenomenon, psychological state, and interpretive concept that had not previously existed. Lazarsfeld’s argument led him to a remarkable conclusion: sociography names new concepts and thus makes them “accessible” for experience; sociography calls the social world into being “and thereby contributes to bringing it under social control.”153 According to Lazarsfeld, “we take the position that the ultimate objective of the sociograph is to yield such concepts.”154

This argument—that the sociograph (or sociographer) aimed to “yield” concepts—was also connected to Bühler’s philosophical thinking and psychological research. In the years after

Crisis—in the period, this is to say, when Lazarsfeld knew him—Bühler heeded his own advice and sought to reestablish psychology on psycholinguistic grounds. A decade of research culminated in The Theory of Language (1934), a monumental work of philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. According to Bühler, language was a means for subjects to exchange signs and meanings between one another, a tool, as he famously put it, “for the one to inform the other of something about the things” (figure 2.3).155

152 Ibid., 19.

153 Ibid., 22–23.

154 Ibid., 20.

155 Bühler, Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache, 24.

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Figure 2.3: The "Orgnanon" Theory of Language. Source: Karl Bühler, Sprachtheorie, 25.

According to this “organon” (or “tool”) model of communication, linguistic structures facilitated communication by creating intersubjectively, trans-temporally consistent meanings and functions. A web of common structures bound speakers together, ensuring that one subject recognized the meaning and illocutionary force contained in the other’s statements. This same pattern, Bühler argued, formed the foundation of epistemology: concepts were not Platonic forms imposed from without, but temporary structures created within intersubjective exchange; over time, these structures attained ideality, objectivity, and permanence.156 Both Karl and Charlotte

Bühler’s developmental-psychological research arrived at a similar conclusion: judgment originated—both in the evolution of the human species and in the development of the human

156 Ibid., 217–36. For an interpretation of Bühler’s theory of language and its connection to epistemology, see Robert E. Innis, “The Thread of Subjectivity: Philosophical Remarks on Bühler’s Language Theory,” in Karl Bühler’s Theory of Language, ed. Achim Eschbach, Wiener Erbe 2 (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 1988), 77–106.

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child—not through the application of abstract concepts but through the cognitive process of generalizing from particulars.157

Lazarsfeld and his ÖWF colleagues applied this abstruse argument in a far more prosaic way: they used Bühler’s account of the genesis of linguistic, philosophical, and psychological concepts to validate their own efforts to derive sociographical categories from the empirical material itself. Despite the dual challenges inherent in the discipline—introspection and conceptualization—economic psychology was not to be abandoned.158 Rather, the ÖWF made its goal the creation of a coherent, consistent, and insightful research process.

The ÖWF illustrated how such a procedure might working by way of an example: the idea of “confidence.”159 What did it mean, the researchers asked, for a consumer to say she decided to purchase a particular good at a specific store because she was “confident” in the quality of the product and of the establishment? Skeptical of reasons—answers to why- questions—given by subjects themselves as a result of introspection, the ÖWF would treat the shopper’s invocation of this term critically. As the multiple meanings of the word “why” elucidated in another memorandum suggested, the very idea of “confidence” was likely to fragment under sustained examination. Indeed, the ÖWF’s adaption of Bühler’s view of conceptual thinking would suggest that no exogenous concepts should be introduced into the empirical data. Rather, as Lazarsfeld explained in his thoughts on sociography, the researchers

157 Karl Bühler, Die geistige Entwicklung des Kindes (Jena: Fischer, 1922), 52–64, 177–96, 277–331, 395–402, 434–50. On the link between Karl and Charlotte Bühler’s research programs, see Hildegard Hetzer, “Karl Bühlers Anteil an der kinder- und jugendpsychologischen Forschung im Wiener Institut,” in Karl Bühler’s Theory of Language, ed. Achim Eschbach (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 1987), 17–32.

158 ÖWF, “Report on Recent Work in Economic Psychology,” 13–16.

159 See ÖWF, “Diskussionsbemerkung.”

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should make this data “yield” the relevant concepts. Such a “constructed concept,” the ÖWF researchers wrote, “is, in a manner of speaking, the logical point of convergence of the multiple groups of data,” and, moreover “it is, whenever possible, so constructed as to anticipate new data.”160

Following its mandate to pursue both scholarly and commercial research, the ÖWF applied this procedure in several studies—most notably in a study of shoe-shopping among

Viennese women.161 Many women, the ÖWF found, detested the experience of shopping for shoes. Why? Preliminary research—combining both interviews with and observations of shoppers—suggested that women especially disliked the process of having their feet measured and then waiting, shoeless, for the retrieval of items from the stockroom. Quotations selected by the study’s authors foregrounded this discomfort: “‘He always looked at my mother instead of me.’ ‘He seemed to question my purchasing power.’ ‘He glanced disrespectfully at my feet.’”162

Guided by their methodology, the ÖWF researchers mistrusted these stated reasons, including the ideas of disrespect and purchasing power that lay at their core. But, by abstracting and typologizing the responses, transforming the subjectively-given evidence into objective empirical evidence—the ÖWF claimed to have constructed a concept unifying the shoppers’ experiences.

Specifically, Lazarsfeld and his colleagues concluded that shoppers felt exposed to the salesmen and subject to their judgments; they developed, in short, an “inferiority complex” during the

160 Ibid., 1–2.

161 The ÖWF conducted several studies of shoe-shopping in the early 1930s. In addition to the one discussed here, see ÖWF, “Schuhkauf in Zürich,” n.d., PFL Papers Series I, Box 33, Folder 5; Lotte Bademacher, “Zur Psychologie der Schuhmode,” November 10, 1932, PFL Papers Series I, Box 34, Folder 18.

162 ÖWF, “Die psychologischen Situation auf dem Wiener Schuchmarkt,” n.d., PFL Papers Series I, Box 34, Folder 22.

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moments spent waiting in their stocking feet.163 Again, the concept of inferiority would have been distrusted had it come from the subjects’ own accounts. Likewise, had the concept, which originated in the work of Lazarsfeld’s mentor, Alfred Adler, been directly imported and uncritically applied to the analysis of shoe shopping, it would have, instead of being useful, had deleterious effects on the researchers’ ability to understand the situation.164 Yet, because this concept developed within and through the interpretation of evidence, the ÖWF believed, it was both epistemologically valid and practically useful.

THE PROLIFERATION OF TYPES

By 1936, the ÖWF was a shadow of its former self. Lazarsfeld had left in 1933 for the

United States, where he had been awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship; he extended his grant into 1934 and, as a result of the ever-worsening political situation in Austria, decided to remain in America indefinitely.165 At the same time, the Rockefeller Foundation’s ten-year grant to the Bühlers’ Institute expired in 1936 and was not renewed.166 Worse still, Marie Jahoda, who

163 In both the original case documents and Lazarsfeld’s later use of them, it is unclear whether the ÖWF believed that the inferiority complex arose in the subjects during these moments or whether the complex was latent in them and emerged through this experience.

164 The ÖWF clearly had Adler’s idea of the inferiority complex in mind—not least because of the Lazarsfeld family’s association with him—but rarely mentioned him explicitly as the progenitor of this idea. See, for example, Bühler, “Verkaufen als Reklame,” 9–11; Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Principles of Sociography” 1934, 7–8, PFL Papers Series I, Box 38, Folder 10; Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “The Psychological Aspect of Market Research,” Harvard Business Review 13, no. 1 (October 1934): 62. More research is necessary to determine the extent to which this idea was common among psychological researchers in interwar Vienna and whether it was, in that period, closely associated with Adler.

165 Lazarsfeld’s emigration to the United States will be discussed further in chapter 3.

166 On the decline of the Bühlers’ Institute, see Ash, “Die Entwicklung des Wiener Psychologischen Instituts 1922- 1938,” 316–18.

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was by then the de facto leader of the ÖWF, was imprisoned by the fascist regime in Austria for her affiliation with the SDAP and Austro-Marxism.167

Despite these dual challenges—the decline of the ÖWF and the scattering of its core staff—researchers kept its mission alive into the late-1930s. Leichter and, especially, Lazarsfeld built upon the ÖWF’s methodological trajectory, extending the organization’s interrogation of the origin and place of concepts in social, psychological, and social-psychological research. This continuation was most evident in their joint contribution to Authority and the Family. Through this contribution—which was equal parts methodological and social-psychological—Leichter and Lazarsfeld entered into a dispute with Fromm about the meaning and function of structural statistics.

Evidence for Leichter and Lazarsfeld’s study did not come from the shoe-shopping women of Vienna. Nor did it concern the concepts of “confidence” or “inferiority.” Rather, their study was based on surveys of young people in Switzerland. Questionnaires were distributed to

1,000 children and adolescents; 508 were completed and returned. Because neither Leichter nor

Lazarsfeld, it seems, spent time at the Institute’s headquarters in Geneva, it is likely that their role in the study was confined to the analysis and interpretation of the empirical material.168 As the ÖWF’s methodological writings might suggest, this work aimed at the elucidation of a

“constructed concept”: authority.

167 On Jahoda’s arrest and release, see Theo Venus, “Sozialforschung im Gefängnis - Marie Jahoda und das Ende der Wirtschaftspsychologischen Forschungsstelle in Wien 1936,” Medien & Zeit 1 (1987): 29–33.

168 Although Lazarsfeld returned to Europe several times in the mid-1930s, there is not sufficient evidence to suggest that he spent time at the Institute’s Genevan branch. Moreover, other parts of Authority and the Family—including Fromm’s own study—were completed through the transatlantic exchange of information between Institute affiliates. Leichter, for her part, wrote to an acquaintance of her ongoing work for the Institute from Vienna, suggesting that she, too, was not present in Geneva. See Herbert Steiner, ed., Käthe Leichter. Leben, Werk, und Sterben einer österreichischen Sozialdemokratin (Vienna: Ibera and Molden, 1997), 170–71; cf. Lazarsfeld, “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir,” 275.+ KL

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Grounding this work were five “methodological rules” to which the researchers promised to adhere: first, the researchers must use material from both case studies and statistics; second, they must collect both subjective and objective evidence; third, they must find material on present and, to the extent possible, past conditions; fourth, they must gather “natural” and

“experimental” data; fifth, they must collect both “simple” and “complex” data.169 To abide by and fulfill these rules, Leichter and Lazarsfeld outlined a multi-step research process that drew on the procedure codified in the ÖWF’s methodological writings. Researchers would first propose a “meaning” of the concept in question and then sketch situations in which the concept would present itself; they would next create an index of manifestations of the concept in these situations, and, finally, revise the originally proposed meaning.170 This procedure—the provisional definition of a concept, the concretization and operationalization of the concept, and the refinement of the definition—culminated in the creation of questionnaires.

Leichter and Lazarsfeld applied this procedure precisely in their study of authority among

Swiss youth. They suggested that familial authority had two distinct-but-interrelated aspects— exercise and reception—and proposed that these aspects could be discerned in two complementary situations: parents’ influence over their children’s lives and, conversely, children’s acceptance of this influence.171 Leichter and Lazarsfeld proceeded to elaborate the means of studying each aspect of authority in its given situation.

To study the exercise of authority through parental influence, Leichter and Lazarsfeld argued, it was necessary to consider three subsidiary questions: Over what “zone” (Gebiet) did

169 Leichter and Lazarsfeld, “Erhebung bei Jugendlichen über Autorität und Familie,” 355–56.

170 Ibid., 358–59.

171 Ibid., 357.

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parents have influence? How did parents implement this influence? To what extent was the use of authority successful?172 Answering these questions, the researchers held, would enable them to create an index of authority. Doing so, they continued, required use of the “remarkable tool” of social-scientific research: the inventory.173 As elaborated in Marienthal, the inventory consisted in gathering information about subjects’ actions and choices.174 It would be illuminating to determine, for instance, whether parents took an interest in children’s games, whether children told parents about their worries, and whether parents used corporal punishment.175

Turning to the second aspect of authority—its acceptance, as shown in children’s reception of parental influence—Leichter and Lazarsfeld identified two subsidiary elements: the

“purely outward function of the authority-relation” and the “mental disposition in which the child receives” authority.176 The first of these—the external manifestation of authority in the parent-child relationship—was relatively simple to study, Leichter and Lazarsfeld wrote; it could be ascertained through a simple inventory of parent-child conflict. But the second—the internal attitude in which children received authority—presented something of a problem. Leichter and

Lazarsfeld suggested that optimal information would be provided by gathering and interpreting

172 Ibid., 358.

173 Ibid.

174 See Jahoda, Zeisel, and Lazarsfeld, Marienthal, chap. 2. Two reviewers mentioned the role of inventories in Marienthal. See Leopold von Wiese, review of Review of The Unemployed of Marienthal, by Marie Jahoda, Hans Zeisel, and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Kölner Vierteljahrshefte für Soziologie 12, no. 1 (1933): 96–98; D’Agostino, “Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal.” For other ÖWF texts discussing the role of inventories, see ÖWF, “Instruktion,” 4; ÖWF, “Neue Wege”; Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Vortrag Des Herrn Dr. Lazarsfeld Im Handelsmuseum,” February 17, 1933, Series I, Box 20, Folder 1, PFL Papers.

175 Leichter and Lazarsfeld, “Erhebung bei Jugendlichen über Autorität und Familie,” 359.

176 Ibid.

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“episodes” in which children expressed anger, love, and other emotions. Without such evidence, it would be possible to create an inventory of situations in which children revealed “trust”

(Vertrauen) in their parents.177

Leichter and Lazarsfeld designed their questionnaire using this preparatory, conceptual method.178 Like the ÖWF’s research projects and commercial studies, Leichter and Lazarsfeld’s inventory-based survey was short and straightforward. In marked contrast to Fromm, who, over the course of 245 questions, surveyed subjects about their personal beliefs and political views

(“Do you believe in God?” “Who, in your opinion, was responsible for the inflation crisis?”),

Leichter and Lazarsfeld asked participants only a dozen questions concerning family habits and interpersonal interactions (“Do you go to church regularly? With whom do you discuss your problems—your father or your mother? Why?”).179 But these questions were not as candid as they might initially seem. As in the ÖWF’s projects—from the sociography of Marienthal to the consumer research into shoe-shopping—Leichter and Lazarsfeld’s study paid particular attention to the structure and phrasing of items on the questionnaire. As they explained with reference to their eighth question (“What is your favorite way to spend your free time? And are both your parents in agreement with [your choice]?”), even a slight change in the wording (e.g., “Do your

177 Ibid.

178 Although, as mentioned above, Leichter and Lazarsfeld were probably not present in Switzerland for the distribution and collection of these questionnaires, it seems likely that they had a hand in designing them. As will be discussed further below, the surveys adhered closely to the methodological rules and research procedure the two scientists described.

179 Erich Fromm, “Erhebung bei Arbeitslosen über Autorität und Familie,” in Studien über Autorität und Familie, Forschungsberichte aus dem Institut für Sozialforschung, ed. Max Horkheimer (Paris: Libraire Félix Alcan, 1936), 240-248, viz., 244-245; Leichter and Lazarsfeld, “Erhebung bei Jugendlichen über Autorität und Familie,” 360–61.

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parents influence the way you spend your free time?”) would destroy the question’s ability to serve as “an index for conflict and this for the acceptance of authority.”180

In the years after the publication of Marienthal, it was argued above, the ÖWF first became aware of and subsequently began to grapple with the roles of concepts and constructs in social psychology. How, Lazarsfeld and his colleagues began to ask, should researchers take the step from the collection of material and quantification of evidence to the creation of concepts and description of types?181 Indeed, Jahoda and Lazarsfeld endowed this process with an almost mystical opacity.182 In their contribution to Authority and the Family, Leichter and Lazarsfeld developed the clearest demonstration yet of the intermediate steps in this sequence. By so doing, they went beyond the vague gesture at interpretation Fromm had made in his description of structural statistics.

Leichter and Lazarsfeld began by quantifying and categorizing the results of their questionnaire according to various categories. By so doing, they sorted responses according to gender, age, economic class, social stratification, and employment status.183 This process followed the procedures Lazarsfeld had first described in Statistical Practicum and invoked, both implicitly and explicitly, the socialist-aligned research of interwar Austria.184 Next, the

180 Leichter and Lazarsfeld, “Erhebung bei Jugendlichen über Autorität und Familie,” 362.

181 See Lazarsfeld, “Principles of Sociography.”

182 As Jahoda later put it, Lazarsfeld had an “uncanny gift for sorting the wheat from the chaff, for arriving at conceptual formulations from a mass of concrete details,” which “came to the fore” in processing empirical data. Lautman and Lécuyer, “Interview with Marie Jahoda,” 132.

183 Leichter and Lazarsfeld, “Erhebung bei Jugendlichen über Autorität und Familie,” 378–97. As Leichter and Lazarsfeld noted, the majority of responses they received were completed by males. Consequently, their analysis of the survey results according to gender could be nothing more than suggestive.

184 For example, Leichter and Lazarsfeld invoked Charlotte Bühler to argued for the superiority of one analytical category (developmental stage) over another (age). See ibid., 385; cf. Charlotte Bühler, “Der menschliche 146

researchers undertook the task of developing “complex” data—both in order to fulfill the fifth of their methodological rules and to determine the connections among the “components of authority.”185 As Leichter and Lazarsfeld wrote:

In the previous chapter, these complex units were used only to validate results that we already obtained for the analysis of simple units. But now we want to ask a question that can only be answered clearly with the help of these complex units. What is the relationship of the components of authority to one another? Does more intense exercise of authority lead to more- or less-willing external acceptance of authority? Does physical punishment endanger the mental acceptance in the form of trust?186

The complex data required to answer these questions could not be found; it must, as the ÖWF had argued, be created. Specifically, Leichter and Lazarsfeld calculated coefficients and determined correlations using the indices and categories developed in their initial analysis. They reckoned, for example, the number of children who went to their parents with their worries as a function of the number of times parents interfered in their children’s lives and the number of parent-child conflicts as a function of the use of corporal punishment.187

These and other calculations resolved into two significant correlations. First, Leichter and

Lazarsfeld found that the strength of parental influence correlated positively with the acceptance of authority. This is to say that, as parents’ influence over their children increased, so did their children’s acceptance of their authority.188 Second, Leichter and Lazarsfeld found that the use of

Lebenslauf als psychologisches Problem,” Acta Psycholgica, Papers Read to the X. International Congress of Psychology at Copenhagen, 1932, 1, no. 1 (1935): 45–49.

185 Leichter and Lazarsfeld, “Erhebung bei Jugendlichen über Autorität und Familie,” 398.

186 Ibid.

187 Ibid., 399–401 viz., tables 20 and 23.

188 Ibid., 399.

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corporal punishment correlated positively with the “outward function” of the acceptance of authority but correlated negatively with the “mental acceptance” of authority. Otherwise put, parents who used physical punishment were likely to induce their children to acknowledge their authority superficially and, even while it did so, to dissuade their children from really trusting them.189

Leichter and Lazarsfeld insisted that this approach did not end with the calculation of correlations. It was possible, they held, “to push this unified representation further still.”190

Specifically, they held that the “statistical types” that emerged through correlations could be named, described, and, in a sense, “made living.”191 Combining their two correlations, for example, would yield a type that might be identified as the “wise-authority type” and described as type of parent who influences his child’s education and choice of career without the threat of punishment and, in so doing, gains the child’s trust. An entire range of statistical types, Leichter and Lazarsfeld wrote, could be developed and described in this way. The spectrum would be complete only when every completed questionnaire could be assigned to one—and only to one— statistical type.192

Importantly, this procedure for determining statistical types differed from both the

ÖWF’s economic-psychological approach and Fromm’s structural statistics. As revealed in

Marienthal and described in subsequent methodological writings, the ÖWF calculated statistical categories but identified and described them with normatively laden, theoretically inflected

189 Ibid., 401.

190 Ibid., 402.

191 Ibid., 402–3, emphasis original.

192 Ibid., 402.

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names. In their study of authority in the family, by contrast, Leichter and Lazarsfeld brought their statistical categories to life with information contained in the categories themselves. As

Lazarsfeld had argued in his 1934 reflections on Marienthal, “Principles of Sociography,” the category of “resignation” created resonances far beyond its remit.193 Conversely, the wise- authority type developed in 1936 was illustrated by the material it contained. Leichter and

Lazarsfeld named this new approach “structural statistics,” but it bore little resemblance to

Fromm’s method of the same name. Fromm—much like the ÖWF—imposed a typology derived from theory on evidence gathered empirically; Leichter and Lazarsfeld, by contrast, derived types from the statistical data itself. In both cases, Leichter and Lazarsfeld used a structural- statistical method that was more formal and, consequently, less obviously bound to theory.

But Leichter and Lazarsfeld recognized that the creation of statistical types was a laborious process. Indeed, their own study illustrated the lengthy conceptual and computational procedure required to determine one such type—the wise-authority parent.194 As an alternative, they suggested that researchers ought to consider the creation of “interpretive types.” In this process, researchers would, in a sense, repeat the procedure used in the initial creation of indices.

Researchers would “vividly imagine” a type of “comprehensive authority” and then “pass [the type] over a neutral point”—represented by the “absence-of-authority type”—until they conceptualized its antithesis, the “rebellious type.” More prosaically, the researchers would identify particular questionnaires that corresponded to the extreme types—the comprehensive-

193 Lazarsfeld, “Principles of Sociography,” 33.

194 Leichter and Lazarsfeld, “Erhebung bei Jugendlichen über Autorität und Familie,” 403.

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authority and the rebellious type—and then group other questionnaires into groups according to their similarities.195

Leichter and Lazarsfeld identified two strengths of this approach. First, the interpretive type strengthened the researcher’s ability to bring the categories to life by revealing finer gradations of experience. Second, they asserted that this type was more proximate to the analytical methods of the natural sciences.196 What, exactly, Leichter and Lazarsfeld meant by such claims remained somewhat unclear in their essay. What was clear, however, was that they believed that the interpretive typology might be simpler, more expedient, and, therefore, superior. Indeed, they decided to use this approach themselves, concluding, with its help, that familial authority depends less on the relationship between a particular parent and child than on the “authority atmosphere” that belonged to external circumstances and appeared in the interpretive types.197

This conclusion—that the exercise and impact of patriarchal authority depended not on the personality of the father or even upon the collective attitude of the family but upon a broad

“atmosphere of authority”—may have disappointed readers of Authority and the Family, for it lacked the force of Horkheimer’s social theory and the panache of Fromm’s psychological account. Leichter and Lazarsfeld summarized their argument succinctly, if dryly: “where authority is practiced, it becomes accepted.”198 Like Marienthal—which, as will be recalled from chapter 1, ended with the suggestion that the only solution to the social and psychological crisis

195 Ibid.

196 Ibid., 404.

197 Ibid., 405–12.

198 Ibid., 415.

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of unemployment was to return the jobless to work—the essay concluded with a seeming affirmation of the status quo. But Leichter and Lazarsfeld’s structural-statistical study of patriarchal authority was more radical than it at first seemed. Using this method, Lazarsfeld and his colleagues proceeded to empirically test Horkheimer’s theoretical arguments about the sources of and changes in authority. Extending the ÖWF’s critique of concepts and interpretation, they pushed towards a formal method for studying the exercise and reception of patriarchal authority. And, although they rejected his specific commitment to the empirical verification of theoretical claims, Institute researchers eventually integrated aspects of

Lazarsfeld’s structural statistics into their own empirical method—a procedure they used to study the authoritarian mind and society.

CONCLUSION

In June1936, Leichter initiated a correspondence with an Austrian colleague—a Dr.

Steinbach.199 Leichter explained through her letters that, although she was presently engaged conducting research for the Institute, the project would soon be complete, and she would find herself without a job. At Lazarsfeld’s suggestion, she explained she was writing to see whether

Steinbach might be able to help her and her husband, Otto Leichter, secure a contract for another social-research project. “Therefore,” she wrote to Steinbach, “if you think that one institute or another with which you have connections were to contract a project on general or specific topics

[Spezialfragen] of Austrian social policy or on questions of related topics, we would be very

199 Further research would be required in order to learn more about Dr. Steinbach’s work and relation to Leichter.

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grateful if you would think of me or my husband.”200 Of particular importance in Leichter’s letters to Steinbach was her description of her work for the Institute—her contribution, with

Lazarsfeld, to Authority and the Family—and her research for the ILO. Leichter spoke of both projects in the same breath and drew no real distinction between them; both were evidence of her interest in and facility for social-psychological research into unemployment.201

In this chapter I documented some of the reasons for Leichter’s view of an essential concordance between the projects of the Institute and the ILO. Both organizations—and other international centers of research and advocacy—were interested in the causes and consequences of shifting structures of life in the modern family and the changing exercise of parental, especially patriarchal, authority. To study these phenomena, the Institute, the ILO, the SCIU, and others commissioned sociological and psychological studies of patriarchal authority in the nuclear family. I showed that these studies bound the Institute to its Genevan counterparts, for they often drew from the same pool of social researchers—and, concomitantly, the same empirical methods and findings. Researchers like Leichter—and Lazarsfeld, Jahoda, and others—ensured that Authority and the Family remained connected to the Genevan context in which it was undertaken long after the Institute had shifted its operations to its office in New

York City.

Conversely, I identified key points of contrast between the projects of the Institute and the ILO—differences that Leichter either overlooked or failed to raise in her correspondence with Steinbach. Whereas the ILO, the SCIU, and their counterparts feared the decline of parental

200 Käthe Leichter to Dr. Steinbach, June 9, 1936, in Steiner, Käthe Leichter. Leben, Werk, und Sterben einer österreichischen Sozialdemokratin, 170–71.

201 Ibid., 171.

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authority, the Institute welcomed it. For Horkheimer, Fromm, and their colleagues, patriarchal authority—in its social, economic, and psychological manifestations—was an eminently bourgeois phenomenon that had outlived its usefulness. Authority structures in the nuclear family, they argued, served only to form authoritarian subjects. In the Institute’s view, any decline in patriarchal authority had at least the potential to initiate a transformation of these authoritarian subjects into full individuals. Fromm, in particular, held that emancipation from distorted authority structures might inhibit the creation of sadomasochists and revive the formation of strong egos within the European proletariat.

Although for altogether different reasons, the Institute, the ILO, and the SCIU shared a common, and thoroughly, empirical question: was the theorized and anticipated decline of patriarchal authority in the nuclear family actually occurring? The Institute commissioned multiple social-psychological studies—presented in Authority and the Family—arguing in the affirmative. In this chapter, I showed that Fromm articulated a method of “structural statistics” that he believed could shed scientific light on the emergence of authoritarian types in the twentieth-century working class. Yet, I argued, Fromm’s method fell short of its goals. Fromm could not reconcile his social-psychological theory and his empirical research. The two remained separated by an epistemological gap—a disjunction Fromm sought to cover by invoking the technique of “interpretation.” I demonstrated that Leichter and Lazarsfeld put forward a quite different account of structural statistics. Building on the methodological program of their colleagues in the ÖWF, these researchers described a process in which concepts would not be formulated in theory and applied to research through interpretation but elucidated from the empirical findings themselves.

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Perhaps the most striking moment in Leichter’s correspondence with Steinbach was her announcement that Lazarsfeld had recently written her to inform her that, “currently, in the USA, there is interest in Austrian expertise in the field of social policy.”202 To Leichter, Lazarsfeld’s letter indicated the popularity of Austrian-style economic psychology in the United States.

Leichter was quite correct: Lazarsfeld was well-received by and active among his new American colleagues. But Lazarsfeld was still deeply engaged in conversations with his former European colleagues, many of whom also emigrated to the United States. Specifically, Lazarsfeld continued to refine the critique of Fromm’s structural statistics he and Leichter had developed in their contributions to Authority and the Family. To this critique Lazarsfeld and his associates adduced a revised method of interpretation—one that did not fall prey to the same errors as

Fromm’s technique. Ultimately, the methods Lazarsfeld and his colleagues, both in Europe and the United States, developed became key components of the Institute’s empirical method and its eventual critique of Fromm.

Leichter was not able to take part in this continued development of the methodological program inspired by Austro-Marxism and developed by the ÖWF. A socialist of longstanding and deep commitment, Leichter responded to the banning of the SDAP in 1934 by joining the

Revolutionary Socialists, an underground political organization. Alongside her social research,

Leichter would write numerous subversive articles and pamphlets under a pseudonym. In the wake of the 1938 Anschluss, Leichter was arrested by the Gestapo. Two years later, Leichter, a secular Jew, was deported to the concentration camp at Ravensbrück; in 1942 she was murdered at the Bernburg Euthanasia Center.203

202 Ibid., 170.

203 On Leichter’s death, see Steiner, “Biographische Anmerkungen,” 199–210.

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CHAPTER 3

HOW TO ASK “WHY?”: EMPIRICAL RESEARCH ACROSS THE ATLANTIC, 1934-1941

THIS ROLE OF SPECIALIST

Lazarsfeld was enamored of American social science well before he arrived in the United

States. As I showed in chapter 1, Lazarsfeld came of intellectual age during the politically turbulent but intellectually vibrant years of the First Austrian Republic; as a committed Austro-

Marxist, Lazarsfeld sought to create a socialist social science that would advance the “slow revolution” by documenting the present state of the industrial working class and projecting the future development of the revolutionary proletariat.1 Encumbered as it was by the corporatist ideology of Othmar Spann, Austrian social research provided few normative or methodological resources for the creation of such a program.2 As Lazarsfeld put it in 1932, the absence of developed methods “in Europe compelled us to invent and test for ourselves methods of collecting material.”3 For the foundations of this new method, Lazarsfeld turned to American techniques and studies—including statistical analysis, community studies, and, later psychometric measurement. As Lazarsfeld later recalled:

I remember, for instance, while here [i.e., as a young man in Vienna circa 1923], I knew mathematics and so on, but I still can remember (let’s say I was 22 or something of this sort), I came to a bookstore, and I saw a correlation, a diagram in a book. I had no idea what it was, I hadn’t heard of correlation, you see, there

1 See Max Adler, “Zur Kritik der Soziologie Othmar Spanns,” Der Kampf 20 (1927): 265–70.

2 On Spann’s dominance of Austrian sociology, see John Torrance, “The Emergence of Sociology in Austria 1885– 1935,” European Journal of Sociology 17, no. 2 (1976): viz., 211-213, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003975600007359. On Lazarsfeld’s contestation of this paradigm, see Anton Pelinka, “Paul F. Lazarsfeld as a Pioneer of Social Sciences in Austria,” in Paul Lazarsfeld (1901-1976): La sociologie de Vienne à New York, ed. Jacques Lautman and Bernard-Pierre Lécuyer (Paris: Harmattan, 1998), 23–32.

3 Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “An Unemployed Village,” Character and Personality 1, no. 2 (December 1932): 147.

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was none. I found that immediately terribly interesting, and immediately got myself books and found out that for weeks and months I was looking for correlation analysis.4

But Lazarsfeld’s real moment of conversion—to American methods—took place some years later. In 1928, Lazarsfeld met Andreas Walther in his hotel room during a conference. Pinned to

Walther’s wall, Lazarsfeld saw an ecological map—a tool created by the storied Chicago School of sociology. “Just again,” Lazarsfeld later recalled, “I had the feeling: well this is for me.”5

When he arrived in the United States as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, however,

Lazarsfeld’s enthusiasm turned to criticism. Between 1933 and 1934, Lazarsfeld toured the country, meeting leading American sociologists and psychologists: Robert and Helen Lynd,

Luther Fry, and George Lundberg.6 Although impressed by these researchers’ methods and findings, Lazarsfeld was, in the main, disappointed with the status of American social science.

Researchers working in the Federal Emergency Relief Administration were unfamiliar,

Lazarsfeld found, with even the basic statistical procedure of cross-tabulation and, worse, with the fundamental distinction between correlation and causation.7 Market research—then interwoven with academic social science—was little better. Often, interviews consisted of a

4 Lazarsfeld, Oral History (1962), 142.

5 Ibid., 143. In his interview, Lazarsfeld claimed to have met Walther during the International Congress of Psychology in 1928 in Hamburg. However, there was no such conference in that year (conferences were held in 1926 and 1929). Nor was there ever a meeting of the association in Hamburg. Mark R. Rozenzweig, ed., History of the International Union of Psychological Science (Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press, 2000), 275. Walther was an early and vocal proponent of brining American methods to European social science. See Andreas Walther, Soziologie und Sozialwissenschaften in Amerika und ihre Bedeutung für die Pädagogik (Berlin: G. Braun, 1927).

6 Lazarsfeld, “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir,” 289–90, 294. Interestingly, Lazarsfeld recalled having nothing more than a “respectful lunch” with L. L. Thurstone, the psychologist who was perhaps his most important interlocutor in this period.

7 Ibid., 293–94; Lazarsfeld, Oral History (1962), 22–23.

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single question: “What brand do you use?”8 Lazarsfeld condemned these “nose-counting” techniques as simplistic and inaccurate.9 In an interview with Daniel Bell in the early 1960s,

Lazarsfeld retrospectively summarized his early disappointment with American methods: “I just knew more, because I had thought about methodology, than 99 percent [of American social scientists]. […] So, I got immediately into this role of the specialist, which I still have, as you know.”10

Drawing on his experience in economic-psychological research with the ÖWF and in debates about social-psychological methods with the Institute, Lazarsfeld cultivated this role of specialist. Simply put, Lazarsfeld used his position as a “European” scholar to critique

“American” research. But Lazarsfeld’s invocations of European theories and techniques was not purely instrumental. During his first years in the United States, Lazarsfeld remained connected— both intellectually and institutionally—to European social research. Lazarsfeld, like Max

Horkheimer and Erich Fromm, wrote his contribution to the Institute’s Studies in Authority and the Family from his new base of operations in New York City. Indeed, Lazarsfeld’s career in this period exemplified the “via media” that connected European and American thinkers, researchers, and politicians through networks of intellectual exchange.11

Existing scholarship largely neglects this period in Lazarsfeld’s career and this aspect of his work. For historians of media and communications, Lazarsfeld’s postwar work that is more

8 Lazarsfeld, Oral History (1962), 25.

9 Lazarsfeld, “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir,” 295.

10 Lazarsfeld, Oral History (1962), 22–23.

11 On the “via media,” see Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, chap. 1.

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significant.12 When these historians do examine Lazarsfeld’s early American career, it is often to denounce his perceived retreat from democratic socialism and embrace of consumer capitalism.13

Further, as I discussed in the introduction to the dissertation, scholars of European intellectual history focus on Lazarsfeld’s interaction with the Institute researchers from 1938 onwards, overlooking his early career almost entirely. In this chapter, I document the crucial role

Lazarsfeld and his colleagues played in helping to shape the insights, arguments, and methods of critical theory.

I will begin to correct this historical lacuna by describing both sides of the via media. To do so, I will document his invocation of the theories, findings, and, especially, methods developed in European social research to critique the present state of American social science and to demarcate a path for its revitalization. Conversely, I will describe Lazarsfeld’s application of insights derived from this encounter with American social research to his ongoing work in its

European counterpart. Specifically, Lazarsfeld applied the arguments he developed in America to the methodological questions raised in and through Authority and the Family. I will argue that, through the via media, Lazarsfeld further refined his critiques of structural statistics, thereby contributing to the methodology that the Institute would ultimately adopt in its empirical research. In chapter 2, I read Authority and the Family as an initial contribution to a project that was continued in the United States. In this chapter, I will show how Lazarsfeld helped the

Institute keep that promise.

12 On the role this narrative and periodization have played in the historiography of media and communications, see Pooley, “Fifteen Pages That Shook the Field: Personal Influence, Edward Shils, and the Remembered History of Mass Communication Research.”

13 See, e.g., Gitlin, “Media Sociology”; cf. Katz, “Lazarsfeld’s Map of Media Effects.” For a more nuanced view of Lazarsfeld’s bridging of these two worldviews, see Joseph Malherek, “Émigré Scientists of the Quotidian: Market Research and the American Consumer Unconscious, 1933–1976” (The George Washington University, 2015), chap. 2.

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I begin by recovering the critique of American research Lazarsfeld developed in the years after his arrival in the United States. At the center of this critique lay a theme first articulated in the ÖWF’s early-1930s methodological program: the interrogation and clarification of the question, “Why?” American researchers, Lazarsfeld charged, had abandoned this question prematurely; they could—and should—return to the posing of why-questions using the techniques he and his ÖWF colleagues had developed. In the second section, I will reconstruct

Lazarsfeld’s concomitant critique of European social research—his inversion of the via media.

Lazarsfeld continued to refine the methods he and Leichter had proposed in their contribution to

Authority and the Family for deriving concepts directly from empirical evidence, thereby avoiding the opaque practice of “interpretation” upon which Fromm had relied. Specifically, I will document the techniques of “reduction” and “substruction” that Lazarsfeld proposed and will describe his retrospective application of it to the findings of Authority and the Family. Using this technique, Lazarsfeld elevated the significance of his methodological critique of Fromm by arguing that the latter’s interpolation of social-psychological concepts into empirical research obscured other modalities of authority. In the third section of the chapter, I will recover the work of Lazarsfeld’s protégé and fellow émigré, Mirra Komarovsky, in continuing the critique of

Fromm’s practice of “interpretation.” What, Komarovsky asked, was interpretation? How did it work? What could be discovered through it? Importantly, Komarovsky pursued such questions through not only methodological critique but also substantive research. I will argue that her seminal study, The Unemployed Man and His Family (1940), was an attempt to put claims from

Authority and the Family to the test using their own empirical methods.

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LAZARSFELD’S CRITIQUE OF AMERICAN RESEARCH

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, European and American social and human science were closely connected. Within the larger circulation of philosophical and political ideas around the Atlantic, a process that created an intellectual “via media” between European and American thinkers, sociologists and psychologists creating multiple, overlapping networks in which methods, arguments, and theories were exchanged.14 Institutions—such as the Laura Spelman

Rockefeller Memorial—played a central role in this process, funding researchers in the burgeoning fields of political science, sociology, and communications research through a combination of institutional and individual grants.15 As mentioned in chapter 1, Lazarsfeld’s mentor, Charlotte Bühler, had traveled to the United States as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in 1924-1925, studying with the renowned child psychologist Arnold Gesell. But the exchange went in both directions.16 Prominent American psychologists such as Gordon Allport, Edward

Tolman, and Otto Klineberg came to Vienna to meet with the Bühlers. Lazarsfeld later recalled having taught the American graduate students who followed their advisors and mentors.17

Alongside—and as important as—funding organizations were conferences and symposia.

Meetings of the International Union of the Psychological Sciences, for example, both facilitated

14 On the “via media,” see Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, chap. 1.

15 Martin Bulmer, “Support for Sociology in the 1920s: The Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial and the Beginnings of Modern, Large-Scale, Sociological Research in the University,” The American Sociologist 17, no. 4 (1982): 185–92; Earlene Craver, “Patronage and the Directions of Research in Economics: The Rockefeller Foundation in Europe, 1924-1938,” Minerva 24, no. 2/3 (1986): 205–22.

16 For an exhaustive study of this exchange of social scientists, see Fleck, A Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences, chap. 2.

17 Lazarsfeld, Oral History (1975), 50.

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and encouraged the internationalization of the discipline.18 Lazarsfeld, Charlotte Bühler, and several of their American interlocutors were present at the International Psychology Conference in Copenhagen in 1932, the last full meeting of the Union before the Second World War.19

Bühler, William Stern, and David Katz integrated elements of Lazarsfeld’s methods and conclusions into their presentations.20 Lazarsfeld himself delivered a paper, “Inquiry into the

Conditions of Village Unemployment,” that, in the words of one reporter, “showed how with the restriction of economic life the psychic life becomes restricted, while the will to community breaks down.”21 In short, Lazarsfeld, only thirty-one years old, was enmeshed in this international exchange of social and psychological research.

Lazarsfeld and his colleagues repeatedly emphasized the specific affinities of their work with the methods and aims of American research. As early as 1932, Lazarsfeld published a summary of Marienthal in the new American psychological journal Character and Personality, emphasizing the distance between the ÖWF and other European research centers.22 In the methodological appendix to Marienthal, Lazarsfeld’s close friend and collaborator, Hans Zeisel,

18 Rozenzweig, History of the International Union of Psychological Science, chap. 2.

19 For a detailed account of the 1932 conference, see Jörgen L. Pind, “Before the Deluge: The 1932 International Congress of Psychology in Copenhagen.,” History of Psychology, 20180816, https://doi.org/10.1037/hop0000100. Lazarsfeld mistakenly identified the location of the conference as Germany. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir,” in The Intellectual Migration. Europe and America, 1930-1960, ed. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), 293.

20 Bühler, “Der menschliche Lebenslauf als psychologisches Problem”; David Katz, “Zum Grundlegung einer Bedürfnispsychologie,” Acta Psycholgica, Papers Read to the X. International Congress of Psychology at Copenhagen, 1932, 1, no. 1 (1935): 119–29; William Stern, “Raum und Zeit als personale Dimensionen,” Acta Psycholgica, Papers Read to the X. International Congress of Psychology at Copenhagen, 1932, 1, no. 1 (1935): 220–32.

21 Werner Wolff, “The Tenth International Psychological Congress,” Character and Personality 1, no. 2 (December 1932): 159. It is unclear why this report was not included in the special issue of Acta Psychologica that collected the presented papers.

22 Lazarsfeld, “An Unemployed Village,” 147.

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represented recent American researchers—including, among others, Robert and Helen Lynd—as the inheritors of a European tradition stretching back, through Max Weber, Ernst Engel, and Karl

Marx to Adolphe Quetelet and Frederic Le Play.23 In his contribution to the British journal of industrial psychology, Human Factor, Zeisel emphasized the ÖWF’s proximity to American methods still further.24

When he arrived in the United States as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in the United

States, however, Lazarsfeld’s enthusiasm turned to criticism. Between 1933 and 1934,

Lazarsfeld toured the country, meeting leading American sociologists and psychologists: Robert and Helen Lynd, Luther Fry, and George Lundberg.25 Although impressed by these researchers’ methods and findings, Lazarsfeld was, in the main, disappointed with the status of American social science. Researchers working in the Federal Emergency Relief Administration were unfamiliar, Lazarsfeld found, with even the basic statistical procedure of cross-tabulation and, worse, with the fundamental distinction between correlation and causation.26 Consumer research—interwoven, in this period, with academic social and human science—was no better.

Both, Lazarsfeld complained, were mired in “nose-counting” techniques that were so naïve as to be practically useless.27

23 Zeisel, “Zur Geschichte der Soziographie.”

24 Zeisel, “Market Research in Austria.” This misspelling of Zeisel’s name as “Zeisl” appeared in the article’s byline.

25 Lazarsfeld, “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir,” 289–90, 294. Interestingly, Lazarsfeld recalled having nothing more than a “respectful lunch” with L. L. Thurstone, the psychologist who was perhaps his most important interlocutor in this period.

26 Ibid., 293–94; Lazarsfeld, Oral History (1962), 22–23.

27 Lazarsfeld, “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir,” 295; cf. Lazarsfeld, Oral History (1975), 25.

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Beneath Lazarsfeld’s specific critiques of Americans’ technical abilities and research methods was a more general complaint: sociology, psychology, and associated disciplines in the

United States seemed to lag behind their European counterparts.28 Echoing views of prominent

American researchers, like Pitrim Sorokin, Lazarsfeld claimed that social and psychological scientists had retreated from their role as the leaders of the worldwide research community.

Writing in 1929 Sorokin bemoaned the fact that researchers followed the same stultifying course from their masters’ theses onwards: send out a questionnaire; tabulate the results with a known correlation. According to Sorokin:

All this is done half-automatically; just following the usual routine, without any attempt to penetrate into, or to ask of the validity of the material, its adequacy, the validity or spuriousness of [sic] the correlation, the real significance of the formula applied and the adequacy of the results achieved, their similarity or discrepancy with the results of similar studies, the survey of these other studies, and so on and so forth.29

Sorokin was convinced that America had the edge over Europe in social-scientific technique, training, and institutions, but he worried that it would fall behind if it continued to follow the same well-trodden path of investigation and analysis. America suffered a “missing link” between textbook technique and empirical research; a link that could be forged in “an elaboration of new inductive theories, principles, and generalizations based on the data of special researches [sic].”30

28 For a concise introduction to this period see Dorothy Ross, “Changing Contours of the Social Science Disciplines,” in The Cambridge History of Science: Volume 7, The Modern Social Sciences, ed. Theodore M. Porter (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003). An exceptionally detailed and useful account is Jennifer Platt, A History of Sociological Research Methods in America, 1920-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 1998). For a recent discussion of the relevant historiography, see Andrew Jewett, Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1–9.

29 Pitrim Sorokin, Contemporary Sociological Theories. Through the First Quarter of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1956 [1928]), 61.

30 Ibid., 60.

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Put simply, Sorokin warned that the objectivist paradigm lacked methodological concerns and sophistication.31

Sorokin was hardly alone in this view. Both Charles Beard and L. L. Thurstone,

Lazarsfeld’s longtime interlocutor, noted in the introduction to a workbook prepared for his graduate students that, while “it is not very becoming for a psychologist to peddle tests around without knowing at least the rudiments of the statistical logic that underlies their construction and use,” such methods were not, in his view, “responsible for much that can be called fundamental, important, or significant in psychology.”32 Indeed, Thurstone continued:

[T]he correlational methods have probably stifled scientific imagination as often as they have been of service. As tools in their proper place they are useful but as the central theme of mental measurement they are rather sterile. On the other hand I should never recommend the loose thinking that is current in some European psychology where biometric logic is conspicuous by its absence. What is needed there is more of the biometric methods for testing clever ideas. In this country the reliability formulae have become a sort of fetish rather than a tool. It is almost as though “busy-work” becomes science as soon as it can be made to sprout correlation coefficients.33

For Thurstone, as for Sorokin, bold, new ideas were needed. To be sure, Thurstone held that new experiments must be “rationalized” using statistical methods but that such methods could not dictate the direction of experiments themselves.

31 On the objectivist paradigm and its critics, see Robert C. Bannister, Sociology and Scientism: The American Quest for Objectivity, 1880-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), chaps. 8–9, viz., 185-190.

32 L. L. Thurstone, The Reliability and Validity of Tests: Derivation and Interpretation of Fundamental Formulae Concerned with Reliability and Validity of Tests and Illustrative Problems (Ann Arbor: Edwards Brothers, 1931), 1– 2. On the origin of the textbook, see L. L. Thurstone, “L. L. Thurstone,” in A History of Psychology in Autobiography, ed. Edwin G. Boring et al., vol. 4 (Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, 1953), 305.

33 Thurstone, The Reliability and Validity of Tests: Derivation and Interpretation of Fundamental Formulae Concerned with Reliability and Validity of Tests and Illustrative Problems, 3.

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In his early years in the United States, Lazarsfeld sought to supply the sorts of bold, new ideas that he, Sorokin, and Thurstone thought to be lacking in American social research. Across a series of essays written for popular, trade, and academic publications between 1934 and 1937,

Lazarsfeld not only articulated a technical critique of American research but also developed an ambitious plan for revitalizing it. Specifically, he framed these recommendations in two distinct- but-interconnected ways: a return to the neglected psychological paradigm and a renewal of asking why-questions. To advance these claims, Lazarsfeld deployed his burgeoning reputation as a specialist—a researcher trained in and formed through the methodological debates of

European social and psychological research.34

Lazarsfeld’s first salvo came in 1934, in the form of an article in the Harvard Business

Review. Lazarsfeld’s argument was straightforward: American executives, managers, and researchers should turn to the domain of psychology in order to improve their bottom lines.35

Lazarsfeld later claimed that this essay, on which he had been working for several years, was the first of its kind—the first to apply psychological techniques to the issue of marketing.36 But this was not the case. Although by no means prominent, essays on market psychology had appeared in the Review as early as 1924.37 In 1928, Albert Poffenberger, a leading advocate for market

34 On the burgeoning field of “methodology” in this period, see Platt, A History of Sociological Research Methods in America, 1920-1960, chap. 4.

35 Lazarsfeld, “The Psychological Aspect of Market Research.”

36 Lazarsfeld, Oral History (1962), 27.

37 See, in particular, Melvin T. Copeland, “Consumers’ Buying Motives,” Harvard Business Review 2, no. 2 (January 1924): 139–53; Albert Theodor Poffenberger, “The Unknown Quantity in Marketing,” Harvard Business Review 6, no. 2 (January 1928): 188–93; “Analyzing Advertising Results I,” Harvard Business Review 7, no. 2 (January 1929): 185; “Analyzing Advertising Results II,” Harvard Business Review 7, no. 3 (April 1929): 312. The main text on the subject to appear prior to Lazarsfeld’s arrival in the United States was, Albert Theodor Poffenberger, Psychology in Advertising (London: McGraw-Hill, 1932).

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psychology, asked his readers to speculate about “what a profound change might follow the adoption of the principles of a sound educational psychology as the basis of advertising methods.”38 Moreover, these essays framed the importance of psychology in terms that

Lazarsfeld would have found familiar from his work with the ÖWF. As Poffenberger put it:

The study of human motivation has disclosed a number of fundamental needs or wants. They are not so limited in number and kind as the psychoanalysts would have us believe, but they are as powerful forces in the motivation of behavior as psychoanalytic studies indicate. Among them are the need for food and drink, for rest and comfort, for social intercourse, for the domination over our own kind, and many others, which arise in the interaction among people. Although these needs or wants demand satisfaction, the exact means of satisfying them are not prescribed once for all by nature. It is the main function of advertising to demonstrate the means of satisfying them, that is, to show how a given commercial product will satisfy one or more of these needs.39

Joining—rather than inventing—this discourse, Lazarsfeld argued not for the use of a particular psychological paradigm per se but for the use of psychological interpretation as a whole. As he wrote three years later, the goal was for researchers to reorient their thinking: “Whether or not the interpretation is correct and adequate does not matter here. The very search for motives guided by comprehensive understanding of behavior determinants is the important thing to be noted.”40 This situation was, according to Lazarsfeld, a “thinking problem”—a question of paradigm rather than technique.41

Lazarsfeld justified the contribution of psychologists to market research on both normative and epistemological grounds. “Our analysis,” he wrote in 1934, “will come to the

38 Poffenberger, “The Unknown Quantity in Marketing,” 192.

39 Ibid., 190.

40 Arthur William Kornhauser and Paul Felix Lazarsfeld, The Techniques of Market Research from the Standpoint of a Psychologist, Institute of Management Series 16 (New York: American Management Association, 1935), 23.

41 Robert N. King et al., The Technique of Marketing Research (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937), 13.

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conclusion that it is mainly the procedure of interpretation, and the formal analysis of the act of the purchase, which the psychologist can and ought to contribute to market research.”42

Psychologists could and so ought to contribute. By so arguing, Lazarsfeld joined academics and intellectuals in Europe and the United States, who, since the end of the First World War, had been arguing for the application of psychological methods—writ large—to the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and even physiology and, further, questions of social reform, domestic governance, and international politics.43 Nowhere was this trend more in evidence than in the field of “industrial psychology” (Psychotechnik) popularized by Lazarsfeld’s fellow émigré,

Hugo Münsterberg.44

It is important to underscore the first of these claims: the ability of psychology to contribute to marketing research. In contrast to his interlocutors, who argued for the possibility of psychology over and against those who believed the human mind to be “unknowable,”

Lazarsfeld targeted those skeptics who believed psychological interpretation to be misleading.

The danger, Lazarsfeld insisted, lay not in “false interpretations” that might confuse business strategy but in “overlooked interpretations” that left possibilities for profit unexplored.45 As will

42 Lazarsfeld, “The Psychological Aspect of Market Research,” 54. For an example of an argument for the possibility of a knowable mind, see Poffenberger, “The Unknown Quantity in Marketing.”

43 For an incisive discussion of psychology’s arrogation of disciplines and discourses to itself, see Geroulanos, “The Plastic Self and the Prescription of Psychology: Ethnopsychology, Crowd Psychology, and Psychotechnics, 1890– 1920.” On the use of psychology in international relations, in particular, see Glenda Sluga, Nation, Psychology, and International Politics, 1870-1919 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), chaps. 1, 3.

44 See Hugo Münsterberg, Psychologie und Wirtschaftsleben. Ein Beitrag zur Angewandten Experimentalpsychologie (Leipzig: Barth, 1912); Grundzüge der Psychotechnik (Leipzig: Barth, 1914); Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), chaps. 7, 10.

45 Lazarsfeld, “The Psychological Aspect of Market Research,” 62; cf. Falk, “Analyzing Advertising Results I”; “Analyzing Advertising Results II.”

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become clear in the later sections of this chapter, Lazarsfeld made this task—the unearthing of

“overlooked interpretations”—the very center of his method for asking why-questions.

In 1935, Lazarsfeld developed a different, complementary argument for the necessity of psychology in market research. Together with Arthur Kornhauser, an academic at the University of Chicago who advocated for the further development of industrial-psychological studies,

Lazarsfeld argued that psychology formed a “master technique”—a set of first principles and guiding questions—organizing, motivating, and connecting the many “servant techniques” of market research.46 Kornhauser and Lazarsfeld did not argue, this is to say, that psychology ought to be the “master technique,” but that it was; they aimed to awaken practitioners of market research to this fact. Engineers recognized that their masters were the principles of mechanics; physicians knew that their master techniques were physiology, bacteriology, and pathology; but market researchers had yet to acknowledge the primacy of psychological principles.47 As they wrote:

All that we are suggesting is: first, that market research needs general, orienting, intellectual techniques, even more at the present time than it requires everyday digging tools; and second, that these larger techniques are supplied in considerable part, though not at all exclusively, by psychology. We suggest simply that a systematic view of how people's market behavior is motivated, how buying decisions are arrived at, constitutes a valuable aid in finding one's way around

46 This essay was originally delivered as a lecture at The Institute of Management Meeting in May 1935. Interestingly, Lazarsfeld was still listed as affiliated with the “Psychological Institute, University of Vienna.” Kornhauser was primarily interested in another aspect of the use of psychology in business: the psychological study of workers’ attitudes as a means to increase both understanding and efficiency. His arguments that psychological studies could work, that attitudes could be studied, aligned him with both theoretical and practical researchers such as Thorndike, Thurstone, Allport, and, of course, Lazarsfeld. As discussed above, this argument was directed primarily against the exclusive use of engineers, efficiency experts, and human-relations personnel in the rationalization of production. For a characteristic example of Kornhauser’s position in this period, see Arthur W. Kornhauser, “The Study of Work Feelings,” Personnel Journal 8, no. 5 (February 1930): 348–53; A. Kornhauser, “Psychological Studies of Employee Attitudes,” Journal of Consulting Psychology 8, no. 3 (May 1944): 127–43, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0056317.

47 Kornhauser and Lazarsfeld, Techniques of Market Research, 3–4.

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amidst the thousand and one questions of specific procedures and interpretations in market research.48

Kornhauser and Lazarsfeld’s pamphlet went further, arguing, in contrast to Lazarsfeld’s earlier writings, for the importance of a specific school of psychology to market research: the

“psychology of action.” Kornhauser and Lazarsfeld formulated the psychology of action as a trenchant critique of American market research. “What a person is at any moment,” the authors wrote, “governs what he does in the given circumstances.”49 Both individual and situational factors—personal motives, psychological mechanisms, exogenous influences, etc.—combined to produce the being that results in action (figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1: Procedure of Market Research. Source: Kornhauser and Lazarsfeld, “Techniques of Market Research,” 9.

48 Ibid., 4, emphasis original.

49 Ibid., 5, emphasis original.

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Although the authors did not make the connection explicit, their argument followed from the Bühlers’ theory of individual development through the interaction of exogenous and endogenous forces over the course of a lifetime.50 Such was the depth, significance, and pace of this change that researchers could never study the same psyche twice; it was continuously being remade.51 Properly psychological research would proceed historically, understanding the transformation of the psyche through a series of encounters between influences and attitudes

(figure 3.2). American researchers’ reliance on servant techniques prevented them from recognizing this process of development. It was only with a robust psychological theory—a master technique—that market research could provide results. Put differently, Lazarsfeld did not criticize American researchers for having faulty premises but for having no premises at all.

Figure 3.2: Structure of Action. Source: Kornhauser and Lazarsfeld, “Techniques of Market Research,” 3.

50 See, e.g., Bühler, “Der menschliche Lebenslauf als psychologisches Problem.”

51 Kornhauser and Lazarsfeld, Techniques of Market Research, 8.

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How did Lazarsfeld propose that psychology could shape marketing? Across his mid-

1930s essays, Lazarsfeld developed a number of specific proposals. Using carefully phased questions and systematically constructed surveys, psychologists would collect statistical data that would serve as a “microscope” to examine individual subjective attitudes and then, through a process of “psychological conversion,” be used to construct a model of the “standard consumer” for the firm’s product.52

Through this procedure, the psychologist could discover the individual “concepts” and social “patterns” that pushed consumers towards certain products and away from others:

The distinctions between a passive and an active attitude, between a rational and irrational attitude toward a commodity; the most unexpected forms of social prejudices, which suppress latent readiness to buy a certain commodity; psychological nonawareness which makes an intellectual knowledge ineffective— a wealth of such concepts turns out to be of immediate practical value in the hand of the experienced market psychologist.53

For the business-owner, psychological interpretation provided insight into the common elements behind consumers’ mysterious preferences and behaviors. What did subjects mean by saying, ‘I did this because…’? Psychological interpretation could shed light on the often-used but little- understood concepts of impulse, reason, and motive.54 In an essay from 1940 Lazarsfeld put this task in psychoanalytic terms: subjects had “repressed” the real reasons why they thought and acted as they did, covering them over with “screens.”55 The researcher’s task was thus not

52 Lazarsfeld, “The Psychological Aspect of Market Research,” 56–57.

53 Ibid., 62–63.

54 Ibid., 65 et passim.

55 Elias Smith and Edward Suchman, “Do People Know Why They Buy?,” Journal of Applied Psychology 24 (December 1940): 677.

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dissimilar from the analyst’s objective: to overcome the subject’s “psychological resistance” and introduce ego to psychical realms dominated by id.56

But Lazarsfeld also developed a more general answer to the question of psychologists’ contribution to American research. As he put it in an essay from 1935, psychologists could teach market researchers how to ask why.57 At the core of the essay was the distinction between two kinds of why-questions. In everyday life, Lazarsfeld maintained, people were perfectly capable of explaining to one another why they thought or behaved as they did. If asked why he came to visit on a certain day, a friend is able to select the relevant exogenous causes and internal attitudes that prompted his visit from the almost infinite number of contexts, forces, and states that have shaped him from birth down to the present moment.58 In this context, why-explanations were correct when they aided participants’ understanding of both the present situation and its antecedents. But this was not the only sense in which it was possible to ask why. Lazarsfeld held that there were other, deeper reasons for action, preference, and choice; reasons largely unknown to or unrecognized by subjects themselves. In contrast to the superficial, literal reasons known to subjects themselves, these deeper reasons captured the true meaning of action. Lazarsfeld claimed that American researchers did not ask “why?” in this second sense; they remained

56 Kornhauser and Lazarsfeld, Techniques of Market Research, 66.

57 Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “The Sociology of Empirical Social Research,” American Sociological Review 27, no. 6 (1962): 758, https://doi.org/10.2307/2090403; Allen H. Barton, “Paul Lazarsfeld and Applied Social Research: Invention of the University Applied Social Research Institute,” Social Science History 3, no. 3/4 (1979): 20–21.

58 Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “The Art of Asking WHY in Marketing Research: Three Principles Underlying the Formulation of Questionnaires,” National Marketing Review 1, no. 1 (1935): 26.

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content to take the reasons offered by the subjects themselves as valid, comprehensive, and true.59

Lazarsfeld used this framework to distill his critique of contemporaneous American research into three principles: specification, division, and tacit assumption. According to the principle of specification, only focused, clear, and precise questions that illuminated a choice made or action taken by the subject were to be used. Researchers should not ask “Why do you like it [a particular brand]?” but “What made you start to use it?”60 Lazarsfeld’s principle of division established that questionnaires must be temporally extensive, topically exhaustive, and logically distinct. More important, Lazarsfeld wrote, with this “technic [sic] of fitting our questions to the experience of the respondent…we might be forced to specify it [the why- question] in a different way for different types of purchase experiences undergone by different individuals.”61 Adhering to this principle ensured that the subjects was able to recount her experiences, without being relegated to “stereotyped” categories that would present her subjectivity as “homogenous.”62

The principle of tacit assumption added an additional check on such tendencies. Market researchers must cultivate questioning dispositions and skeptical attitudes—an ability to examine research design, data-gathering methods, and interpretations for assumptions and bias.63 Only by adhering to this principle could the researchers ensure they was asking why in the right sense.

59 Ibid., 26–29.

60 Ibid., 29–30.

61 Ibid., 30, emphasis original.

62 Ibid., 32.

63 Ibid., 32–35.

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“The real task,” he wrote in the introduction to the essay, “which confronts the market student every time he starts out with a why program is to be constantly aware of what he really means or seeks to discover by his questionnaire.”64

Although explicitly aimed at his new American colleagues, Lazarsfeld’s methodological critique had implications for his fellow European émigrés. As will be recalled from chapter 2,

Lazarsfeld’s interrogation and clarification of the concept “why” had begun during his work for the ÖWF and had shaped his contribution to the Institute’s study of authority in the family. In fact, Lazarsfeld applied the insights discovered in his critique of American research to the methodological debates captured in Authority and the Family. Although that text had been published in 1936, this is to say, Lazarsfeld continued to engage with its concepts, theories, and methods. It is to this engagement that the chapter now turns.

THE TASK OF SUBSTRUCTION

Lazarsfeld, Horkheimer, and Fromm arrived in the United States almost concurrently.

Lazarsfeld began his tenure as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in the fall of 1933; the Institute made its creation of a New York City branch official in the summer of 1934. Lazarsfeld, however, had a more seamless adjustment to the intellectual climate of the United States, as a result of both the institutions and ideas of the via media. But the Institute was not without connections in the United States: Fromm was personally and professionally acquainted with

64 Ibid., 28.

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American psychoanalysts; Julian Gumperz, a leftist economist who maintained a peripheral connection to the Institute in its early years, secured its affiliation with Columbia University.65

Columbia expected the Institute to carry out methodologically sophisticated, theoretically inflected, and politically engaged social research. Horkheimer, Fromm, and their associates fulfilled this obligation. In the years after its arrival in the United States, the Institute continued existing empirical projects and began new studies.66 Fromm undertook a social-psychological study of “patriarchal” and “matriarchal” types revealed through responses to the termination of unemployment payments in conjunction with the Family Society of Philadelphia; Lazarsfeld designed a study of changes in patriarchal authority caused by unemployment.67

The first major accomplishment of the New York City branch of the Institute was the completion and publication of Authority and the Family in 1936.68 American researchers received the text quite favorably; in the words of one reviewer, it was the product of “the cool vision of realistic thinkers” directed towards “modern social life.”69 Even those—most notably the émigré sociologist Hans Speier—who disliked Fromm’s psychoanalytically oriented social

65 The most exhaustive account of the Institute’s establishment in the United States can be found in Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile, chap. 1. On Gumperz, in particular, see 45-60. On Fromm’s connections to and transformation in the United States, see Friedman, The Lives of Erich Fromm, chap. 3.

66 For an account of this period and a discussion of its later representation in the Institute’s collective memory, see Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile, chap. 2 viz., 64-81.

67 Preliminary findings from Fromm’s study were included in Authority and the Family. See Erich Fromm, “Probeerhebung über die seelische Einstellung Arbeitsloser zur Unterstützung in U. S. A.,” in Studien über Autorität und Familie, Forschungsberichte aus dem Institut für Sozialforschung, ed. Max Horkheimer (Paris: Libraire Félix Alcan, 1936), 463–69. Lazarsfeld’s study of authority among the unemployed will be discussed in the next section of this chapter.

68 See, for example, Horkheimer’s letter to Nicholas Murray Butler of March 14, 1936 in Horkheimer, Horkheimer GS, 1985, 15:483–86.

69 John Dollard, review of Review of Autorität und Familie, by Max Horkheimer, American Sociological Review 1, no. 2 (1936): 302, https://doi.org/10.2307/2084493.

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psychology praised aspects of the study.70 In the most critical appraisal of the text, Clifford

Kirkpatrick called for “a more formal marriage of fact and theory in the hope of methodological offspring with a talent for both insight and certitude.”71

Chapter 2 argued that Authority and the Family was not the endpoint of but a waypoint within the trajectory of a program of methodology and research. The Institute’s project, this is to say, did not end with the publication of the text. Nor yet did it end with its partial translation into

English in 1937.72 Rather, researchers affiliated with the Institute continued to conduct empirical studies and to pursue methodological debates connected with Authority and the Family through

1940. Although without recognizing it as such, these researchers implemented the change to the

Institute’s project for which Kirkpatrick had called: the “formal marriage of fact and theory” in order to yield more insightful and certain “methodological offspring.”

Nowhere was this continuation of Authority and the Family more apparent than in

Lazarsfeld’s essay, “Some Remarks on the Typological Procedures of Social Research” (1937), a review of Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim’s The Concept of Types in Light of the New Logic

(1936) published in the Zeitschrift.73 In the essay, Lazarsfeld enthusiastically extended Hempel

70 Hans Speier, review of Review of Studien über Autorität und Familie, by Max Horkheimer, Social Research 3, no. 4 (1936): 501–4.

71 Clifford Kirkpatrick, review of Review of Autorität und Familie, by Max Horkheimer, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 188 (1936): 364.

72 W. R. Dittmar, ed., “Authority and the Family. A Partial Translation of the Investigations by the International Institute of Social Research,” trans. A. Lissance (State Department of Social Welfare and Department of Social Science, Columbia University, 1937).

73 Lazarsfeld, “Typological Procedures in Social Research.” Lazarsfeld’s was one of several essays in the Zeitschrift concerned with logical positivism, empiricism, and critical theory. One such essay was Otto Neurath’s positivist- socialist “Inventory of the Standard of Living.” These essays should be taken as further evidence of the sustained debate between the Institute and the Vienna Circle prior to the Positivismusstreit of the 1960s. Although it has been shown to be incorrect, the canard that there was no connection between the two groups appears all-too often in current scholarship. For Neurath’s essay, see “Inventory of the Standard of Living.” On the ongoing debates between logical positivism and critical theory, see Hans-Joachim Dahms, “Die Vorgeschichte des Positivismus- Streits: von der Kooperation zur Konfrontation. Die Beziehungen zwischen Frankfurter Schule und Wiener Kreis, 176

and Oppenheim’s positivist philosophy to “practical problems of social research,” following them in distinguishing three distinct kinds of attributes that could combine to form a concept: the

“characteristicum,” the “variable,” and the “serial.”74 An attribute was a characteristicum when it was binary, a variable when it existed in gradations, and a serial when it emerged through comparison, but did not permit of exact measurement. Thus, an object was either square or not square (characteristicum), was so many inches in height (variable), and was harder than another

(serial).75 Whereas Hempel and Oppenheim were largely concerned with establishing the existence and validity of the serial in contradistinction from the characteristicum, Lazarsfeld was mainly interested in the connections between the serial and its manipulation.76

According to Lazarsfeld, both the variable and serial attributes delimited by Oppenheim and Hempel permitted social scientists to order and group types. For example, four people, A, B,

C, and D could be ranked or grouped according to height whether the exact measurements were known or unknown.77 And although serial attributes did not permit the researcher to know the

“'‘distance’” between individuals and groups, the process of standardization could derive “quasi-

1936-1942,” ed. H-J Dahms et al., Jahrbuch für Soziologiegeschichte, 1990, 9–78; Positivismusstreit, Die Auseinandersetzung der Frankfurter Schule mit dem logischen Positivismus, dem amerikanischen Pragmatismus und dem kritischen Rationalismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994).

74 Lazarsfeld, “Typological Procedures in Social Research,” 119. As will be discussed further in chapter 4, Lazarsfeld’s enthusiasm for positivism rankled Horkheimer, and, especially Adorno. In fact, Adorno complained to Horkheimer about the latter’s decision to assign Lazarsfeld the task of reviewing Hempel and Oppenheim’s book. See Adorno to Horkheimer, August 7, 1937 in Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer; Briefwechsel 1927-1969, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 389–96, at 390.

75 Lazarsfeld, “Typological Procedures in Social Research,” 120.

76 Lazarsfeld suggested that this was Hempel and Oppenheim’s main interest. Ibid., 120, fn. 1.

77 The thought here is as follows. If A is 6’ 2”, B is 6’ 1”, C is 5’ 11”, and D is 5’ 10” then they could be put in an order—e.g., descending order of height: A, B, C, D—or grouped—e.g., those over 6’ (A and B); those under 6’ (C and D). Hempel, Oppenheim, and Lazarsfeld argued that these same procedures could be performed when the actual heights were unknown. The researcher could create a rank order from tallest to shortest (A, B, C, D) or groups (those taller than C, those shorter than C) without knowing the exact values.

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intervals” between them. After ranking individuals on a scale of pacifism, for example, a researcher could separate them by percentiles.78 “Apparently,” Lazarsfeld wrote of the process of standardization, “the statistical results of the inquiry enforce a certain order” on the data.79 On the surface, this procedure was similar—indeed, perhaps identical—to the deduction of categories and intervals Lazarsfeld demonstrated in Statistical Practicum. In contrast to his earlier textbook, which, following Thurstone, had implicitly grounded the validity of psychometrics in the mathematical operations themselves, Lazarsfeld now sought out a philosophical foundation for standardization and typologization.80 Lazarsfeld clarified the ordering function of statistics using an example: the relation between a wife’s opinion of her husband and the husband’s economic success.81 The relevant categories for both the wife’s attitude and the husband’s success were created by the standardization of serials into three categories, yielding a total of nine possible attitude-success combinations (figure 3.3). As

Lazarsfeld explained:

Suppose, however, that as a result of a further analysis, we find that if the wife’s attitude toward the husband is favorable, then the economic success will not influence marital relations, whereas, if the wife has only a medium attitude toward him, he needs at least medium success to make the marriage a success, and only

78 In this sense, a serial became like a variable. The key difference between the two was that, whereas a variable used “real” measurements and intervals, a standardized serial could only create “quasi-intervals” that correspond to reality but are not anchored in it. Lazarsfeld, “Typological Procedures in Social Research,” 122.

79 Ibid., 124.

80 Thurstone himself acknowledged that much of his thinking was indebted to the work of George Herbert Mead. Further research would be necessary in order to determine the role of Mead’s thought in Thrurstone’s psychometric work specifically. In the texts themselves, Thurstone did not cite Mead (or, to my knowledge, any other philosopher). See Thurstone, “L. L. Thurstone,” 302.

81 I have extended Lazarsfeld’s example here in order to clarify his thinking. Lazarsfeld, “Typological Procedures in Social Research,” 130.

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great success can save the marriage if the wife’s attitude is altogether unfavorable.82

According to Lazarsfeld, the “reduction” of the two serials into these categories—successful

(represented by horizontal shading) and unsuccessful (represented by vertical shading) marriages—was an empirical operation that could be justified logically.83 “It can safely be stated,” Lazarsfeld asserted, “that most progress in measurement consists in taking this step: That for an impressionistic rank order, logically representing the definition of a serial, is substituted a systematic process of reduction.”84

Figure 3.3: Typology of a Marriage. Source: Lazarsfeld, "Typological Procedures in Social Research," 130.

Most social research, Lazarsfeld claimed, was conducted with unrecognized reductions.

Social scientists, in this view, often began with preconceived notions of what they would find and so used empirical and analytical categories—reductions—that excluded alternatives

82 Ibid.

83 Ibid., 132.

84 Ibid., 131.

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perforce. For instance, researchers studying marriages who conducted their fieldwork and interpreted their results with preexisting notions of “satisfaction” were liable to miss the multiple reasons for this experience—as Lazarsfeld’s graphical representation demonstrated.

Even those researchers following as closely as possible the dictates of inductive empiricism, Lazarsfeld continued, may miss possible combinations of serials that, while not appearing in data, were logically possible.85 To guard against this possibility, researchers must first identify the kinds and combinations of attributes in their categories, a process Lazarsfeld described as the reconstruction of a multidimensional “attribute space.” Next, researchers must examine the attributes—composed of characteristics, serials, and variables—logically to see what other combinations might be possible. Lazarsfeld termed this whole process “substruction” and recommended that it be carried out with the use of multidimensional tables. Through substruction, researchers could determine which logical and empirical concepts had escaped their investigation.86

The ostensible object of Lazarsfeld’s analysis was Hempel and Oppenheim’s Concept of

Types, but his argument was inextricable from his critique of Fromm’s social-psychological program as represented in Authority and the Family. Remarkably, Paul Oppenheim himself identified this affinity between Concept of Types and Authority and the Family, writing to

Horkheimer in July 1936 that he and Hempel had understood their philosophical logic to have implications for both sociological and psychological research. Further, Oppenheim claimed a

85 As Lazarsfeld made clear in a research memorandum coauthored with Samuel Stouffer, he considered the techniques of typologization to demonstrate both the insufficiencies of inductive empiricism and other alternatives to it, above all to Robert Angell’s theory of “analytic induction.” See Samuel A. Stouffer and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Research Memorandum on the Family in the Depression (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1937), 79– 84; Robert Cooley Angell, The Family Encounters the Depression (Chicago: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 265–308.

86 Lazarsfeld, “Typological Procedures in Social Research,” 134–36.

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striking affinity between his and Hempel’s work and Lazarsfeld and Leichter’s contribution to

Authority and the Family. Oppenheim went so far as to suggest not only that the Zeitschrift review Concept of Types but also that Lazarsfeld write the review.87 Lazarsfeld, then, by going beyond a consideration of Oppenheim and Hempel’s text itself to use its contents to perpetuate his methodological argument from Authority and the Family was, in a sense, fulfilling

Oppenheim’s wish.88

Most basically, Lazarsfeld argued that, by failing to use the method of substruction,

Fromm had overlooked both logical and empirical possibilities for the experience of authority.

Lazarsfeld claimed that Fromm had begun his research with four conceptions of “authoritarian situations”: complete authority; simple authority; lack of authority; and rebellion.89 As described in chapter 2, these concepts originated in Fromm’s evolving theory of social psychology.

Although Fromm had conducted his research using a method he identified as “structural statistics,” he relied less on quantitative techniques or logical procedures than on a process of

“interpretation” that remained opaque to his readers and, perhaps, to Fromm himself. In their contribution to Authority and the Family, Leichter and Lazarsfeld had not disputed Fromm’s method per se but had articulated an altogether different method of “structural statistics” that

87 Paul Oppenheim to Max Horkheimer, July 6, 1936 in Horkheimer, Horkheimer GS, 1985, 15:584–87.

88 Lazarsfeld acknowledged this move beyond the review itself. See Lazarsfeld, “Typological Procedures in Social Research,” 134 fn. 1.

89 Ibid. It is important to note that, throughout “Typological Procedures,” Lazarsfeld directed his criticism at Fromm; he presented the types and categories under examination as following from Fromm’s contribution to Authority and the Family. However, these concepts and categories seem much more closely connected to Lazarsfeld’s own contribution, with Leichter, to the Institute’s text. As argued above, in chapter, 2, Leichter and Lazarsfeld—not Fromm—centered their research around the axes of the “exercise” and “acceptance” of authority; they—not Fromm—identified the four “authoritarian situations.” Lazarsfeld’s elision of the difference between these subsidiary elements of Authority and the Family can be traced to his identification of Fromm, in “Typological Procedures,” as the “director of the study”—a role in which he “suggested the theoretical basis” that guided the project (134). Further research might reveal how Lazarsfeld arrived at this view and how Fromm received it.

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sought to elucidate analytical categories and interpretive concepts directly from the empirical findings themselves. The roots of this procedure lay in Lazarsfeld’s Statistical Practicum, in which he had argued that statistics applied retrospectively to empirical data could supply alternative and superior categories to those with which researchers began; the procedure had evolved in the ÖWF’s methodological writings, writings which included critiques of its own texts, most notably Marienthal, for its reliance on unjustified categories.90

In “Typological Procedures,” Lazarsfeld continued the work begun in Authority and the

Family in three interrelated ways. First, he linked his methodological critique of Fromm to

Hempel and Oppenhiem’s logic, thereby providing the critique with a philosophical foundation.

Second, Lazarsfeld used this philosophical foundation to refine his critique of Fromm’s method.

After developing their logical critique of Fromm’s structural-statistical method and interpretive method, I argued in chapter 2, Leichter and Lazarsfeld seemed to retreat, arguing that the method of interpretation was both valid and useful.91 In “Typological Procedures,” Lazarsfeld reversed course, setting aside this endorsement of interpretation and redoubling his formal, logical critique of Fromm’s approach. Third, Lazarsfeld brought this critique, which was merely implied in his and Leichter’s contribution to Authority and the Family, into the open. As I will argue in chapter

5, Lazarsfeld’s publicization of his disagreement with Fromm likely followed from the Institute’s own critique of its former colleague.

90 See the analysis above, in chapter 2 of the dissertation.

91 See Leichter and Lazarsfeld, “Erhebung bei Jugendlichen über Autorität und Familie,” 404–15. For a discussion of this argument, see chapter 2 of the dissertation.

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Lazarsfeld, who had assisted Fromm in the initial stages of his research, explained,

Fromm used two separate surveys, each of which contained two questions.92 In the first, Fromm asked: 1) whether corporal punishment was used in the home and 2) whether this punishment interfered with the child’s life. Responses to this survey generated four possible combinations

(figure 3.4). After eliminating the combination (+ -), in which punishment did not interfere with the child’s life, as “practically contradictory,” Fromm was left with three pairs, which, according to Lazarsfeld, he coded as high (+ +), medium (- +), and low (- -) instances of the “exercise of power.” Fromm, Lazarsfeld continued, repeated this procedure with a second survey, which, again, contained two questions: 1) whether the child had confidence in his/her parents and 2) whether there were conflicts in the home (figure 3.5). In this instance, Fromm eliminated the response in which conflicts and confidence coexisted (+ +) as a contradiction in terms and coded the remaining pairs as high, medium, and low instances of the “acceptance of authority.”

Lazarsfeld then conjectured that the three levels of these two dimensions (exercise of power and acceptance of authority) could be combined into a multidimensional attribute space (figure 3.6).

Lazarsfeld explained that Fromm reduced these nine logical possibilities to four concepts (figure

3.7). To do so, Fromm drew from and combined multiple logical categories in these concepts: complete authority, simple authority, lack of authority, and rebellion.

92 The following reconstruction is drawn from Lazarsfeld, “Typological Procedures in Social Research,” 134–36.

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Figure 3.4: Conceptual Possibilities for the Exercise of Authority. Source: Lazarsfeld, "Typological Procedures in Social Research," 134.

Figure 3.5: Conceptual Possibilities of the Acceptance of Authority. Source: Lazarsfeld, "Typological Procedures in Social Research," 135.

Figure 3.6: Multidimensional Attribute Space of Authority. Source, Lazarsfeld, "Typological Procedures in Social Research," 135.

Figure 3.7: Concepts of Authority Reduced from Typologies. Source, Lazarsfeld, "Typological Procedures in Social Research," 135.

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Lazarsfeld did not, to be sure, suggest that Fromm should not have performed this reduction. As he explained in a memorandum written, with Samuel Stouffer, in 1937, there were no fewer that

6,651 possible combinations in Fromm’s unreduced typology.93 Without reducing this number, research and analysis would have been impossible. Lazarsfeld implied—but did not overtly argued—that Fromm had erred or, at least, been imprecise in conflating multiple categories into one concept. But Lazarsfeld did make explicit his claim that bringing “the reduction used into clear relief” through the process of substruction showed that Fromm had failed to consider two combinations (1 and 2 in figure 3.6), which formed the category of “voluntary acceptance.”94

Recognizing this oversight was significant, for it “discloses the possibility that children might long for an authority which no one offers them.”95 Specifically, Fromm had overlooked the logical possibility that there might be a situation in which high acceptance of authority followed from the low exercise of authority (combination 7 in figure 3.6). Further, this combination lay outside Fromm’s conceptual framework; not an instance of complete, low, or absent authority, it was something else altogether. Lazarsfeld’s account of substruction suggested that, because Fromm had overlooked this logical possibility, he had necessarily been unable to discover empirical evidence for its existence. Thus, Lazarsfeld endowed the process of substruction with a neutral-scientific and normative valence: researchers should substruct their types in order to correctly determine and qualify their conclusions; researchers ought to substruct

93 Stouffer and Lazarsfeld, Memorandum on the Family in the Depression, 197.

94 Lazarsfeld, “Typological Procedures in Social Research,” 132, 135.

95 Ibid., 136.

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their types because doing so uncovered possibilities for social organization and psychological disposition that were not otherwise visible.96

“The problem of substruction,” Lazarsfeld wrote elsewhere, “in its general form is an old one, familiar to logicians.”97 But the existence of the type of authority for which “children might long” was no mere logical possibility; it was an empirical reality. In their contribution to

Authority and the Family, Leichter and Lazarsfeld identified, though the method of structural statistics they outlined in contradistinction to Fromm’s procedure, the existence of a “wise- authority type” of parent: a father who exercised a kind of benevolent oversight of his children, shaping their upbringing and choice of career without, however, threatening physical violence; a father who induced his children to accept his authority willingly.98 As will be argued in the following section of this chapter, the existence of this type of parent not only demonstrated the inadequacy of Fromm’s empirical method but also undermined the tenets of his social- psychological theory. As Lazarsfeld explained, substruction “may very probably lead to improvements in typologies which have been construed on the basis of theoretical considerations and intuitions.”99

Lazarsfeld understood his procedure of reduction and substruction as applying as much to his new American interlocutors as to his established Institute colleagues. Publications contemporaneous with “Typological Procedures” demonstrated how the method could be

96 Ibid., 132–33.

97 Stouffer and Lazarsfeld, Memorandum on the Family in the Depression, 187.

98 Leichter and Lazarsfeld, “Erhebung bei Jugendlichen über Autorität und Familie,” 402; cf. Lazarsfeld and Bühler, Jugend und Beruf, 175–96.

99 Lazarsfeld, “Typological Procedures in Social Research,” 136.

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integrated into the asking and answering of why-questions. In The Technique of Marketing

Research (1937), for example, Lazarsfeld and his coauthors included substruction in their painstakingly detailed outline of the entire research process. Diagrams in the text—which were sketched before and inspired the work itself—included a procedural step similar to substruction—albeit without naming it as such (step c in figure 3.8).100

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> Figure 3.8: Outline of the Process of Interpretation. Source: American Marketing Society, The Technique of Marketing Research (New York: McGraw Hill, 1937), 282.

Likewise, in “The Quantification of Case Studies” (1940) Lazarsfeld and W. S. Robinson outlined a “suggested plan of procedure” for empirical research in which researchers must first

“[d]efine the continuum in terms of which the case studies are to be analyzed” and then “[d]ecide which indicators (i.e., ‘bits of information’) in each case study are items on this continuum, i.e.,

100 As Frank Coutant wrote in the book’s forward, the project of outlining marketing-research methodology so precisely originated with the charts themselves. Robert N. King et al., The Technique of Marketing Research (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937), ix–x.

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are relevant to the classification” before “[giving] a numerical value, with a sign, to each indicator, according to its position on the continuum” and finally “combine the ‘scores’ on the different indicators for each case study in order to determine the final index of the positions of the case study on the continuum.”101 These instructions did not describe the substruction of established concepts per se but outlined the methods for the standardization and reduction of serial attributes—techniques Hempel and Oppenheim had inspired Lazarsfeld to develop. In another article from the same issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology Lazarsfeld and Edward

Suchman led readers through the construction of a serial, the development of quasi-types, and the identification of standard examples.102

Taken together, these texts show how Lazarsfeld sought to break the sclerosis of

American research—as identified by the likes of Sorokin—through the method of substruction.

By reversing and then interrogating the reductions that shaped their research, substruction could alleviate the concerns of Sorokin, Lazarsfeld, and their contemporaries that American social scientists researched through the rote application of statistical procedures. The authors of

Technique of Marketing Research brought these two interrelated developments together when they described their method, which emphasized the process of substruction, as an attempt to offer researchers the exact instructions necessary to create the “proven solvent” of interpretation in their own laboratories.103

101 Paul F. Lazarsfeld and W. S. Robinson, “The Quantification of Case Studies,” Journal of Applied Psychology 24 (December 1940): 818–19, emphasis original. This issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology was one that Lazarsfeld guest-edited in order to publish the results of several of his and his colleagues’ studies simultaneously.

102 Smith and Suchman, “Do People Know Why They Buy?,” 677–81. As will be discussed further below, “Elias Smith” was one of Lazarsfeld’s pseudonyms.

103 King et al., The Technique of Marketing Research, ix–x, 3–12.

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But Lazarsfeld did not merely broadcast this programmatic method to American scientists. Rather, even as he was developing it, Lazarsfeld began to apply this approach in his own research. Nowhere was this application clearer than in his two studies of consumer responses to rayon conducted between 1934 and 1937. In the first of these Lazarsfeld collaborated with David Craig of the University of Pittsburgh Research Bureau for Retail

Training—the organization that sponsored Lazarsfeld’s relocation to the United States.104

Rowena Ripin—an American psychologist who, like Lazarsfeld, had studied with both Alfred

Alder and Karl and Charlotte Bühler—was Lazarsfeld’s collaborator on the second project.105

Although supported by academic monies, Lazarsfeld and Craig’s study of rayon culminated in a report made to the American Society for Testing Materials in 1934.106 The report was unequivocal about the importance of both methodological thinking and research methods to its success. The authors opened with a striking description of the project’s inception:

A department store raises the question: “Why do our customers run away when we label our merchandise ‘rayon’? And what can we do about it that is honest?” This question was asked, one day, of the staff of the Research Bureau for Retail Training. On the following day, by accident, the two authors of this paper happened to meet. One was an Austrian with a method, seeking an opportunity. The other was an American with a problem, seeking a solution that appeared attainable through the Austrian’s method. The result was a happy collaboration, a

104 In the event, this job did not materialize: Craig left the Research Bureau while Lazarsfeld was in Europe preparing for his relocation to the United States. Lazarsfeld went so far as to suggest that the job offer may not have been genuine at all, that Craig offered Lazarsfeld a position solely so that the latter would have justification for remaining in America. Lazarsfeld, Oral History (1975), binder 2, 57.

105 See, for instance, Ripin’s translation of Bühler’s seminal study of child psychology: Charlotte Bühler, The First Year of Life, trans. Rowena Ripin (New York: The John Day Company, 1930). Ripin later served as one of the editors for collection of Adler’s works: Alfred Adler, Alfred Adlers Individualpsychologie. Eine systematische Darstellung seiner Lehre in Auszügen aus seinen Schriften, ed. Heinz Ansbacher, Ernst Bornemann, and Rowena Ansbacher Ripin, 3rd ed. (Munich: Ernst Reinhardt, 1972).

106 Paul Lazarsfeld and David Craig, “Some Measurements of the Acceptance and Rejection of Rayon by Pittsburgh Women” October 1934, PFL Papers Series I, Box 38, Folder 18.

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three-month collaborative arrangement involving a thousand organized interviews and innumerable experimental calculations summarized briefly herewith.107

The authors went on to emphasize that Lazarsfeld had already fully formed and had applied this method in earlier studies, where it “yielded significant results.”108 Craig and Lazarsfeld used the body of the report to describe Lazarsfeld’s method of gathering and interpreting data in great detail. Lazarsfeld studied “some unusual variables,” the authors wrote, including “the age and personal characteristics of the persons interviewed.” Moreover, “the raw data were not only evaluated, they were also interpreted by means of rather complex and refined internal comparison; and in the interviews themselves many elaborate questions were asked for the purpose of increasing the reliability of the relatively small number of answers finally used in this report.”109 Putting the procedures outlined in this description in logical order, Lazarsfeld first identified unusual variables to investigate, documented these variables with detailed interviews, evaluated the raw data, and interpreted the results by means of internal comparison. This process was consonant with the research procedure Lazarsfeld documented in Technique of Market

Research.

Craig and Lazarsfeld went further in their description of the complex comparisons made and elaborate questions asked. By interpreting and transforming the raw data, Lazarsfeld uncovered four key dimensions in which consumers expressed their feelings about rayon: touch, appearance, wear, and handling. Each consumer would combine these dimensions differently. A consumer might reveal concern about the potential of rayon garments to cling (wear) and her

107 Ibid., 1.

108 Ibid., 2.

109 Ibid., 1–2.

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appreciation of the fact that rayon felt cool on her skin (touch). One of these attributes might be more “urgent” to her than the other: an unflattering fit, for example, might outweigh a comfortable feel. Lazarsfeld and Craig instructed their interviewers to ascribe a “feeling tone” to each articulated position, documenting objectively whether the respondent gave it a positive or negative valence.110 These attitudes can be framed in the terms Lazarsfeld would develop in

“Typological Procedures in Social Research.” Each attitude was a type composed of two serial attributes (the dimensions of touch appearance, wear, and handling; the level of urgency about each) and a characteristicum (the binary valence of “feeling tone”). So framed, the report’s description of Lazarsfeld’s Austrian method embodies the process for constructing and standardizing serials Lazarsfeld would later describe in his articles for the Journal of Applied

Psychology.

What characteristic attitudes—or types—did Lazarsfeld’s method discover? After many serial transformations and reductions, Lazarsfeld arrived at the observation that attitudes towards rayon correlate to “maturity” and “status.”111 More mature women tended to have higher opinions of rayon than less mature women; women of higher status tended to have lower opinions of rayon than women of lower status.112 Why did higher-status and less-mature women—college students and unmarried, professional women—have lower opinions of rayon?

Substructing the types that led to his initial conclusion, Lazarsfeld found that these “enemies of

110 Ibid., 10.

111 In an article from 1939 Lazarsfeld laid out the logical case for the argument that multiple indices can be combined and interchanged; that is to say, that multiple indices capture the same social and psychological phenomena. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Interchangeability of Indices in the Measurement of Economic Influences,” Journal of Applied Psychology 23, no. 1 (February 1939): 33–45, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0056732.

112 Lazarsfeld and Craig, “Acceptance and Rejection of Rayon,” 14–18.

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rayon” valued superficial attributes over practical ones, emphasizing the importance of appearance and touch rather than wear and handling.113 Lazarsfeld likewise discovered that many of these women had little experience with clothing made of rayon; their opposition was based on ignorance.114 As in Fromm’s study of authority, Lazarsfeld’s method of substruction here uncovered a neglected category and pointed to a way forward: companies producing clothing with rayon, the study suggested, should acquaint low-status, less-mature women lacking experience with rayon with their product.

Unfortunately for rayon manufacturers and clothiers, Lazarsfeld and Craig uncovered an impediment to the implementation of such a solution. Many potential customers had experienced the fabric at least once and had come away unfavorably disposed towards it. The Research

Bureau further discovered that many of these women were unwilling to change their views even after seeing, touching, handling, and wearing rayon again. It was thus not ignorance but prejudice that kept women from buying rayon. The report drew a deep psychological conclusion from this fact: consumers prejudiced against rayon were less willing “to accept events in the world around them.” Craig and Lazarsfeld meant this point quite literally. Prejudice was a precognitive or unconscious orientation that shaped and delimited the subject’s perception of the world: “At a dinner party the other evening this study was mentioned, and one of the guests said:

‘If rayon weren’t such lousy stuff they would advertise in Vogue or in The New Yorker.’ Of course, they do advertise it in both these magazines. The point is that she did not notice the advertisements.115

113 Ibid., 10–11.

114 Ibid., 22.

115 Ibid., 26.

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If producers and distributors wanted to convince reluctant consumers to buy rayon, the research suggested, they would have to find some way of overcoming psychical and ideological opposition. Like social researchers, this is to say, ordinary consumers were apt to overlook empirical evidence that did not comport with preexisting categories and concepts.

In 1937 Lazarsfeld returned to the study of rayon and took his conclusions even further, identifying the deep psychological structure that made prejudice possible. Lazarsfeld collaborated with Rowena Ripin to study consumers’ “tactile-kinaesthetic [sic.]” responses to rayon fabric for DuPont Chemical.116 As in Lazarsfeld’s earlier study with Craig, the researchers documented and explained the methods by which they constructed and standardized serials for attributes such as roughness, crepiness, stiffness, elasticity, firmness, and strength.117 Asking subjects to feel and assess both rayon and silk fabrics in a variety of situations—sometimes with their eyes open, sometimes closed; sometimes told to rank the fabrics in order of similarity, sometimes in order of preference—the investigators believed would “enforce the hedonic, evaluating attitude.”118 Ripin and Lazarsfeld made two striking observations. They concluded that “judgments of elements were so influenced by the totality of experience in which they occurred that a consideration of one without the other was meaningless.” This conclusion was both a demonstration of the validity of serial attributes as distinct and meaningful —there was no roughness per se, only some fabrics which were rougher than others—and a radicalization of the

116 Rowena Ripin and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “The Tactile-Kinaesthetic Perception of Fabrics with Emphasis on Their Relative Pleasantness,” Journal of Applied Psychology 21, no. 2 (April 1937): 198–224, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0058436.

117 Ibid., 203–4.

118 Ibid., 200–201.

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Bühlers’ situational social psychology.119 Further, Ripin and Lazarsfeld found that subjects’ conclusions determined their perception of reality:

Once a fabric is perceived as such, it is classed in a category either in the sense of tactile-kinaesethetic configuration or in the further sense of “identification.” This type, in turn, makes certain demands upon the individual attributes which go to make it up, such that the O [subject] judges the attributes according to the way in which they measure up to the standards of the type. In other words, the O’s [sic] experience a compulsion arising from recognition of the whole which affects their judgements of the parts—hence the phrase categorical imperative.120

As he had with Craig three years earlier, Lazarsfeld here intended this claim in the strongest possible sense. Believing they knew what the fabric was, subjects perceived certain attributes in it. Freely adapting Kant’s famous phrase, Lazarsfeld and Ripin called this phenomenon a

“categorical imperative.” But this was no statement of ethics. Rather, Lazarsfeld and Ripin intended the phrase to describe how categories of classification and identification impressed themselves on the deepest structures of perception and cognition. To anticipate, the Institute would make this influence—which Lazarsfeld and Craig called “prejudice” and which

Lazarsfeld and Ripin named the “categorical imperative”—the subject of the first empirical studies they conducted in the United States.

CONCRETE EVIDENCE AND DISCERNING INTERPRETATIONS

In the same year that he published “Typological Procedures” in the Zeitschrift, Lazarsfeld authored a book-length report with Samuel Stouffer: Research Memorandum on the Family in the Depression (1937). Lazarsfeld and Stouffer’s report was one in a series commissioned by the

Social Science Research Council (SSRC) that aimed to discover how “[a]ll the major social

119 Ibid., 208–9; cf. Bühler, Entwicklung des Kindes, 391–409.

120 Ripin and Lazarsfeld, “Tactile-Kinaesthetic Perception,” 212–13.

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institutions, such as the government, family, church, and school” were affected by the

Depression. As the series editors wrote in their foreword, 1929 “was like the explosion of a bomb dropped in the middle of society.”121 At the same time, however, the SSRC saw the

Depression as a singular chance to conduct social and psychological research on America and

Americans. Further animating the SSRC’s series was the worry that the “ephemeral” evidence was disappearing as conditions improved and memories faded. According to the SSRC, there was no time to waste in devising and applying new methods of interdisciplinary research.122

Stouffer and Lazarsfeld partially concurred with this view. Although they thought the

Depression was a valuable natural experiment, they worried that existing empirical techniques were not sufficiently developed to take advantage of it. Given Lazarsfeld’s critique of American social research, this view is hardly surprising. Yet, Stouffer and Lazarsfeld maintained, not all was lost. Although empirical research would not be able to use the Depression to produce valuable conclusions, it might be able to use the situation to refine its methodology. Above all, they held, the Depression and its aftermath could be used to hone techniques for the

“clarification of hypotheses.”123 Across their memorandum, Stouffer and Lazarsfeld identified recent and ongoing projects that might make such a contribution—including Authority and the

Family—and proposed new directions for future research.124

121 William F. Ogburn, Shelby M. Harrison, and Malcolm M. Wiley, “Foreword,” in Research Memorandum on the Family in the Depression, by Samuel A. Stouffer and Paul F. Lazarsfeld (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1937), v.

122 Ibid., v–vi.

123 Stouffer and Lazarsfeld, Memorandum on the Family in the Depression, 2 et passim.

124 For the authors’ positive references to Authority and the Family, see ibid., 198, 200–201.

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Lazarsfeld was in the process of conducting such a project: a study of the social and psychological effects of unemployment on working-class men and their families.125 Inspired by both Marienthal and Authority and the Family, the project was organized by Lazarsfeld’s recently-created research center at the University of Newark in collaboration with the Institute.126

As Horkheimer described it in a letter to Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia

University, the project centered around “investigating the effect of unemployment upon family relationships, with special emphasis on the maintenance of the authority status in connection with the lack of employment.” The project was both an extension of and a complement to

Fromm’s still-ongoing study of German workers and, more broadly, Authority and the Family.

“This work,” Horkheimer wrote to Butler, “should give us a further basis for international comparison.”127

Although the design of the study and the procedure of fieldwork reflect Lazarsfeld’s influence, the analysis of the evidence and interpretation of the findings were carried out by

Mirra Komarovsky, then a graduate student in sociology at Columbia University. Komarovsky, a

Russian émigré, had attended Barnard College as an undergraduate and, while there, had been a student of William F. Ogburn.128 She subsequently worked with Dorothy Thomas at the Yale

125 For Lazarsfeld’s reference to the study in the memorandum, see ibid., 88.

126 Brief discussions of this study and its contexts can be found in Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 165; Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile, 70–72. Both Wiggershaus and Wheatland suggest that the study originated with the Institute and then “delegated” (Wiggershaus) to Lazarsfeld. Horkheimer’s preface to the published text of the study affirms this claim. But comments in the final text by both Komarovsky, its principal author, and Lazarsfeld, its director, suggest that, while the study was a continuation of the Institute’s earlier work, it was an independent project. Further research is needed to determine this relationship more precisely.

127 Horkheimer to Butler, 14 March, 1936 in Horkheimer, Horkheimer GS, 1985, 15:483–86 viz., 484.

128 Ogburn, who left Columbia for the University of Chicago in 1927, was one of the editors for the SSRC series in which Stouffer and Lazarsfeld published their research memorandum.

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Institute of Human Relations and with George Lundberg at the Westchester Leisure Project.

From 1934 to 1936, Komarovsky worked for the Institute as a research assistant on the unemployment project; from 1936 to 1940, she turned this project into her doctoral dissertation.129 In 1940, the study was published, with introductions by both Horkheimer and

Lazarsfeld, as The Unemployed Man and His Family: The Effect of Unemployment Upon the

Status of the Man in Fifty-Nine Families.130

Unemployed Man was, to some extent, a continuation of Authority and the Family. In their contributions to the Institute’s text, Leichter, Lazarsfeld, and Fromm had all emphasized the effects of pervasive and endemic unemployment on the shifting dynamics of authority in the family.131 Horkheimer obliquely referenced the connection between the projects in his preface to

Unemployed Man, allusively calling it a “continuation of the earlier studies” the Institute had conducted, “which were largely concerned with European countries.”132 Komarovsky herself was more explicit, identifying the text’s fundamental task with Authority and the Family:

At a time when the discussion between democratic and authoritarian systems dominates political life, it is important to get more insight into the psychological conditions of the two systems. Because the family, as Horkheimer has pointed out, is so important an agent of developing and molding authoritarian attitudes,

129 On Komarovsky’s training and early work, see Shulamit Reinharz, “Finding a Sociological Voice: The Work of Mirra Komarovsky,” Sociological Inquiry 59, no. 4 (October 1989): 375–78, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475- 682X.1989.tb00115.x. It is unclear how, as Reinharz and others claim, Lazarsfeld directed Komarovsky’s dissertation, since he did not become a professor at Columbia until 1940. Further research would be needed to resolve this uncertainty.

130 Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family. As Horkheimer made clear in a letter to his French colleague, Raymond Aron, in 1936, he expected the study to be completed and published in the spring of 1937. See Horkheimer to Aron, November 20, 1936 in Horkheimer, Horkheimer GS, 1985, 15:727–32 viz., 729. Horkheimer made a similar claim in a letter to Henryk Grossman later that same month. See Horkheimer to Grossman, November 27, 1936 in ibid., 15:748–51 viz., 749.

131 For an analysis of this point, see chapter 2 of the dissertation.

132 Max Horkheimer, “Preface,” in The Unemployed Man and His Family: The Effect of Unemployment upon the Status of the Man in Fifty-Nine Families, by Mirra Komarovsky (New York: The Dryden Press for the Institute of Social Research, 1940), v.

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changes in the authoritarian relations in the family may have far-reaching social implications for the coming generation. Even a partial breakdown of parental authority in the family as an effect of the depression might tend to increase the readiness of the coming generation to accept social change.133

Like Horkheimer, Fromm, Leichter, and Lazarsfeld—indeed, like many of the researchers based in interwar Geneva—Komarovsky linked changes within the nuclear family to upheavals in society. Indeed, Komarovsky perhaps went further than Horkheimer, Fromm, and their colleagues in linking the transformation of patriarchal authority to the rise of authoritarian politics.

Unemployed Man extended the work of Authority in the Family in a second dimension: methodology. Like Lazarsfeld and Leichter’s contribution to the Institute’s study, Komarovsky’s text raised important methodological questions and developed technical innovations. As

Horkheimer wrote to President Butler in March 1937, “[t]he data secured through it [the study] may not only supply an answer to our immediate problem but prove useful also from methodological viewpoints.”134 In his preface to Unemployed Man, Horkheimer went further, identifying the text’s methodological contributions as its only real source value: “[w]hile the number of cases studied was small,” and therefore not empirically conclusive, “the publication of the study may be of some value to those who, like ourselves, have to struggle with the methodological difficulties which beset empirical investigations of the interrelationship of the separate cultural factors.”135 According to the arguments of some historians, Horkheimer’s

133 Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family, 3.

134 Horkheimer to Butler, March 18, 1937 in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, vol. 16 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1985), 91–96 viz., 92. Horkheimer’s intriguing suggestion that “[i]n order to check the results of this study of American families, we are conducting a parallel inquiry in Vienna, Austria” requires further research (92).

135 Horkheimer, “Preface,” 1940, v.

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striking identification of himself and his colleagues with empirical researchers was likely a product of the Institute’s recent affiliation with Columbia University, where it was expected to perform social-scientific research.136 But Horkheimer did not present the task he and his fellow researchers faced as something new. Rather, by describing the need to determine the “relative importance of the separate realms of culture” not through “considerations of a general character” but through a “series of research studies,” Horkheimer was reaching back to the research program laid out in 1931 and implemented in Authority and the Family.137 Komarovsky saw herself within this trajectory, writing that unemployment constituted a “laboratory situation” in which the interrelation of economic, social, and ideological spheres could be studied.138

Although Lazarsfeld agreed with Horkheimer and Komarovsky that the true value of

Unemployed Man was to be found in its methodological questions and insights, he disagreed with them about what, precisely, these questions and insights were. Lazarsfeld held that

Unemployed Man illuminated both the need for and the possibility of scrutinizing and systematizing “nonquantitative operations” in social research.139 Lazarsfeld identified substruction—here termed “typological classification”—among these operations, but he emphasized another procedure in particular: “discerning.”140 According to Lazarsfeld,

136 Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile, 40–60.

137 Horkheimer, “Preface,” 1940, v.

138 Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family, 2–3.

139 Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Introduction,” in The Unemployed Man and His Family: The Effect of Unemployment upon the Status of the Man in Fifty-Nine Families, by Mirra Komarovsky (New York: The Dryden Press for the Institute of Social Research, 1940), ix.

140 Ibid., x–xi.

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Komarovsky had formulated the procedure of discerning by clarifying the logic and codifying the process of another, similar technique: interpretation.141 As he explained:

Innumerable are the discussions of what "interpretation" means—whether it is a legitimate procedure in the social sciences, and how it is related to the notion of scientific law which has proved so successful in the natural sciences. But very seldom has an attempt been made to describe how one actually goes about interpreting a case.142

By so arguing, Lazarsfeld identified yet another, subtler way in which Unemployed Man continued earlier projects: in it, Komarovsky extended and refined the critique of Fromm’s practice of interpretation Lazarsfeld had developed in Authority and the Family.

In both the research memorandum he wrote with Stouffer and his introduction to

Komarovsky’s study, Lazarsfeld claimed that, when shoddily executed, interpretation was of little value to the social scientist, but, when rigorously formulated and astutely implemented, interpretation was invaluable. Indeed, Lazarsfeld went so far as to suggest that interpretation—or discerning—supplied answers to the most important and elusive question of social research:

“Why?”143 Elaborating implications of Lazarsfeld’s argument in “Typological Procedures,”

Stouffer and Lazarsfeld suggested in their memorandum that formal methods, like substruction, could do no more than supply hypotheses for subsequent testing.144 Only through the interpretation of case studies—only by discerning—was it possible to test these hypotheses. In his introduction to Unemployed Man, Lazarsfeld emphasized that discerning was not a method of

141 Ibid., x. In a footnote, Lazarsfeld references another study—an investigation of radio-music listening among rural populations conducted as part of the Princeton Radio Research Project—as a further example of the formalization of interpretation. This manifestation of interpretation will be discussed further below, in chapter 4 of the dissertation.

142 Ibid.

143 Ibid., ix–x; cf. Stouffer and Lazarsfeld, Memorandum on the Family in the Depression, 190–91.

144 Stouffer and Lazarsfeld, Memorandum on the Family in the Depression, 79–85.

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generalizing from examples but a technique for assessing causality in discrete events.145 In their memorandum, Stouffer and Lazarsfeld put the matter somewhat more dramatically: “‘Why did the airship Hindenburg catch on fire?’ Many ‘laws’ are known which, if applicable, would explain the disaster. The problem is to determine their applicability.”146

Komarovsky described discerning in a lengthy methodological appendix to Unemployed

Man.147 But before researchers initiated the process of discerning, Komarovsky cautioned, they must first consider the nature of their empirical evidence. Taking research into unemployment as her example, Komarovsky identified three kinds of evidence: a “statement of some sequence of events involving unemployment” made by participants, an “interpretation of a sequence [of events involving unemployment] concerning another person,” and a “confessed experience that unemployment caused a change.”148 After determining the type of evidence with which they were working, researchers could begin the process of discerning. When fully elaborated, clarified, and systematized, Komarovsky wrote, discerning would include three steps: the maximization of concreteness, the evaluation of consistency, and the consideration of alternatives.

First, researchers would work to make evidence more concrete by increasing the specificity and exactness of subjects’ claims. Beyond serving as a kind of “[p]reliminary

145 Lazarsfeld, “Introduction,” 1940, x.

146 Stouffer and Lazarsfeld, Memorandum on the Family in the Depression, 191.

147 Komarovsky, “Description of Discerning.”

148 Ibid., 136. As an example of the first kind of evidence, Komarovsky offered the following statement: “Prior to unemployment the children used to go to my husband’s church. Now they go with me to the Catholic Church.” As an example of the second kind, Komarovsky cited the following observation: “My wife lost respect for me because I failed as a provider.” As an example of the third kind, Komarovsky provided the following statement: “I lost my love for my husband because he turned out to be a failure.”

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checking to make the evidence more specific and complete,” such questions aimed to transform the kind of evidence subjects gave, creating “statements of experienced interconnection between the two” conditions—employment and unemployment.149 Otherwise put, in the first step of discerning, researchers attempted to change the first kind of evidence (a “statement of some sequence”) into the third kind (a “confessed experience”). As Komarovsky explained: “It has been established that a man goes to church more often. Does he know why he goes more often now? Is it in the hope of making useful contacts or as a substitute for more expensive leisure time activities or because of increased need for religious consolation?”150Although Komarovsky was suspicious of subjects’ why-statements, she also relied upon them. Like Lazarsfeld and his

ÖWF colleagues, she saw the interrogation of such statements as the foundation of social- psychological research.151

Second, researchers would assess the consistency of these why-statements. Komarovsky identified the key question: “[c]an the causal relation between unemployment and the change be true?”152 This evaluation was equal parts logical and psychological. Researchers would perform a series of logical reflections, interrogating both the causes and the outcomes: were there situations in which the outcome appeared without the cause? Conversely, were there situations in which the cause appeared without the outcome?153 As Komarovsky made clear in her discussion of the third step in discerning, such tests were intended not to be conclusive but to indicate the

149 Ibid., 137 emphasis original.

150 Ibid.

151 See the discussion of Komarovsky’s method in chapter 3 of the dissertation.

152 Komarovsky, “Description of Discerning,” 138.

153 Ibid., 138–39.

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incompleteness of the process of discerning. Subsequently, researchers would submit subjects’ claims to a kind of holistic psychological assessment: were their why-statements about unemployment consistent with what was known about their characters and, crucially, behaviors?

Thus: “A woman may deny that loss of earning ability has undermined her respect for her husband. This statement may be inconsistent with what is known about her values of life, her attitude towards her husband at the time of marriage, and her present behavior towards him.”154

In his contribution to Authority and the Family, Fromm had insisted that subjects’ answers to survey questions be assessed not in isolation but in relation to the totality of their responses.155 Komarovsky, like the ÖWF, shared this conviction but refined Fromm’s approach.

To assess the relation between the parts and the whole, she argued, it was necessary to transform statements into causal claims, to submit these claims to logical scrutiny, and to consider both character and behavior. Eventually, Adorno would develop a similar procedure for situating subjects’ individual responses in relation to their overall “characters” or “personalities.”156

Third, researchers would assess whether alternative explanations might account for the change. “What other factors,” the researchers would ask, “might have accounted for the change in question?”157 Doubts raised in the second step of discerning, this is to say, would be put to the logical test in its third step. Komarovsky emphasized the importance of this step for the research question raised in Authority and the Family and Unemployed Man: how did fathers’

154 Ibid., 139.

155 Fromm, “Geschichte und Methoden der Erhebungen,” 235–37. See the analysis of Fromm’s method in chapter 2 of the dissertation.

156 This point will be elaborated further in chapter 6 of the dissertation.

157 Komarovsky, “Description of Discerning,” 140.

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unemployment affect the authority they exercised over their children? Alternative explanations must be raised in this context, in particular, because two factors were at work simultaneously:

Father-child relations undergo changes in the normal course of development. More than that, the changes that take place are in the direction of the emancipation of the child from the father's authority. Adolescence is likely to bring about increased conflict and a more or less conscious struggle of the child for self-determination. In other words, coincident with unemployment there has been going on a process of growth.158

Such considerations led Komarovsky to ask an obvious, if dispiriting, question: “How can we decide whether the loss of authority is due to unemployment or to the growth of the child?”159

Komarovsky seemed to concede that there would always be alternative explanations for the changes researchers sought to understand.

This particular topic—the effects of unemployment on father-child relationships— seemed to put the whole process of discerning into question. How could discerning ever be successful? Komarovsky identified factors that would contribute to the “conclusiveness” of discerning: the intelligence, willingness, and truthfulness of the subjects; the skill, biases, and methods of the researcher.160 Further, Komarovsky argued that the “nature of the causal connection” itself played no small part in determining the success of discerning. In cases in which unemployment was a “sudden break,” the consequent change was radical, the link between unemployment and the change was “direct” or “immediate,” and the subject was

“actively implied” in the change, discerning was more likely to be successful.161 Yet, as

158 Ibid.

159 Ibid.

160 Ibid., 146.

161 Ibid., 145–46.

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Komarovsky showed through her implementation of the process of discerning in Unemployed

Man, the quality of the evidence was not entirely beyond researchers’ control. Rather, by following the procedure she outlined, Komarovsky argued, researchers could create or, at the very least, improve the empirical evidence, raising it to a level at which discerning might succeed.

Whatever steps researchers took to improve discernment, the process was unlikely to be conclusive. Komarovsky’s argument to this effect may have disappointed some readers of

Unemployed Man, but it was fully consonant with the methodological expectations she,

Horkheimer, and Lazarsfeld had for the text. As Lazarsfeld had written in his introduction to the text, “nonquantitative methods cannot be formulated as explicitly as an arithmetic computation.”

But this fact should not deter researchers from recognizing the need for such methods to be

“described and standardized.”162 Lazarsfeld and Stouffer put the same point somewhat more dramatically in their research memorandum:

[T]he word “science” has appeared nowhere in this monograph. It should be obvious, from the discussion in the first few pages of this appendix, that a scrupulous limitation of research to that which will yield immediately an order of verification comparable to what is required in the more developed natural sciences, would result in almost no knowledge about the effects of depression on the family. Some of us are extremely interested in helping push sociological research more in the direction of verification. But that cause will not be served by an insistence on an exclusive technique which too often may yield trivial results where valid, and pretentious nonsense where invalid.163

Neither Komarovsky nor Lazarsfeld, this is to say, intended discerning to be a science. Yet both—Lazarsfeld more directly—held that the clarification and codification of the process would yield results superior to those of Fromm’s psychoanalytically-inflected method of interpretation.

162 Lazarsfeld, “Introduction,” 1940, ix.

163 Stouffer and Lazarsfeld, Memorandum on the Family in the Depression, 201.

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Concomitantly, both—although Lazarsfeld again stated his views more explicitly—held that discerning could never be independent of substruction. Interpretation, this is to say, required typologization; the former elaborated hypotheses and the latter put them to the test. To anticipate: although the Institute members disagreed with Lazarsfeld and Komarovsky about the need—indeed, the possibility—of putting theoretical insights to the empirical test, they embraced these researchers’ argument about the necessity of weaving together typologization and interpretation.

Komarovsky claimed that the interviews—conducted with 59 working-class families in

Newark, New Jersey between 1935 and 1936—that supplied the evidence for Unemployed Man followed the process of discerning as she described it.164 Like the ÖWF researchers who studied unemployment in Marienthal, Komarovsky and her colleagues did not survey subjects but interviewed them. Rather than present their subjects with a list of questions, the answers to which were then recorded by the interviewer, the researchers conducted a conversation with the family members, took no notes, and afterwards wrote comprehensive case histories.165 But these interviews were not as unstructured as they likely seemed to Komarovsky’s subjects. Once again following the ÖWF, she and her colleagues followed explicit instructions derived from methodological principles.166 Specifically, the researchers were instructed to pursue the three steps—the maximization of concreteness, the evaluation of consistency, and the consideration of alternative explanations—of discerning.

164 Horkheimer wrote to his French colleague, Raymond Aron, to relay the news that fieldwork had finished in November 1936. See Horkheimer to Aron, November 20, 1936 in Horkheimer, Horkheimer GS, 1985, 15:727–32 viz., 729.

165 Komarovsky, “Description of Discerning,” 5–6.

166 For the approach taken in the ÖWF’s study of Marienthal, see ÖWF, “Anweisung für Marienthal.”

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Researchers were instructed to pursue concreteness throughout their interviews. After an initial period of conversation—a period of misdirection intended to defeat subjects’ “deliberate lies and rationalizations”—the interview would turn toward a “systematic inventory of life situations.”167 As Leichter and Lazarsfeld had maintained in their contribution to Authority and the Family, Komarovsky emphasized in her text that such an inventory would link psychological changes to concrete situations. Komarovsky used the radio as an apt example of this approach:

If members of the family want to listen to a different program, how is the conflict resolved? Does the father’s choice take precedence over that of the children’s? Does the father complain that he cannot listen to his favorite programs because they conflict with the favorite choices of the wife or the children?168

In the most fortuitous instances, interviewers observed concrete manifestations of struggles over authority.169 Whether obtained through interview, observation, or both, concrete evidence formed the core of the researchers’ evidence about the families of unemployed men.

Discerning, Komarovsky made clear, was not a procedure applied retroactively to evidence; it was a process undertaken during the collection of the material itself. Interviewers were taught techniques by which they might transform a “statement of some sequence” into a

“confessed experience.” Komarovsky proposed a step-by-step approach that would assist subjects in the reconstruction and interpretation of concrete episodes in which authority changed as a result of unemployment.170 Further, she indicated the features of an interview to which researchers must pay particular attention. “Be alert to new situations,” she instructed her

167 Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family, 17.

168 Ibid., 16–17.

169 Ibid., 31–32.

170 Ibid., 19. Komarovsky wrote that this method was especially useful in interviewing children.

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interviewers. “Be alert to uncover conflicts” and “[f]ollow up each indication of a conflict with a question as to change.”171 Attentiveness to change was especially important, for, as Komarovsky argued in her methodological appendix, the identification of a distinct, dramatic, and immediate change in character increased the likelihood of successful discerning. Komarovsky instructed her interviewers accordingly: “[i]f you encounter attitudes, conflicts, relations which by their very character must be affected by the depression do not fail to trace change” and, concomitantly,

“[f]ollow up each change with the possible implications for authority.”172 Komarovsky went so far as to authorize the use of leading questions in the pursuit of evidence about change:

Whenever the informant answers, “I don’t know,” “I can’t think of anything,” don’t give up too quickly. Suppose the informant, when asked “What aspects of the depression have hit your children the hardest?” answers: “I don’t know.” It is legitimate to suggest possible effects of the depression and to test the informant’s reaction to them: Is it lack of money for movies or sweets? Inadequate food? Sympathy for the worries of the parents?173

In a methodological article published in the same year as Unemployed Man, Lazarsfeld, writing with W. S. Robinson, argued that social researchers could reduce the incidence of evasive responses by designing surveys in particular ways and giving interviewers specific instructions.174 Komarovsky eschewed this approach, opting for the simpler solution of not taking “I don’t know” for an answer.

171 Ibid., 19–20 emphasis original.

172 Ibid. emphasis original.

173 Ibid., 21. Komarovsky did insist that researchers note the use of such leading questions in their reports.

174 Paul F. Lazarsfeld and W. S. Robinson, “Some Properties of the Trichotomy ‘Like, No Opinion, Dislike’ and Their Psychological Interpretation,” Sociometry 3, no. 2 (April 1940): 151–78.

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What results did Komarovsky’s process of discerning, the method Lazarsfeld held to be superior to Fromm’s technique of interpretation, produce? What did it reveal about unemployment and authority? Komarovsky organized her findings into three groups: those pertaining to “the breakdown of the husband’s status,” those shedding light on “personality changes of the unemployed husband,” and those documenting the changed relations between unemployed fathers and their children. In her discussion of each group, Komarovsky not only presented the distinct findings produced by discerning but also revealed the affinities of

Unemployed Man to both Marienthal and Authority and the Family.

Men suffered “breakdown” of status when “the hitherto concealed contempt for the husband came into the open” as a result of unemployment or when unemployment “reversed the husband-wife relation.”175 Within this category—the very name of which recalled Marienthal—

Komarovsky identified three “patterns” corresponding to unbroken, broken, and resigned villager the ÖWF had met in Marienthal. Komarovsky’s account of “Mr. Scott,” for example, echoed

Lotte Danziger’s observation of “Man 467.” As Komarovsky reported:

“Before the depression,” said Mr. Scott, “I wore the pants in this family and rightly so. During the depression I lost something. Maybe you call it self-respect, but in losing it I also lost the respect of my children, and I am afraid I am losing my wife.” […] He became discouraged and apathetic. After the first year of relief, he withdrew from contact with the children and let his wife handle the financial and other affairs of the family. In the early days of unemployment the children kept asking him to play with them, but because of his constant refusal and irritability they gave it up. He spends most of the day in the corner candy store and has ceased to look actively for work.176

Both Mr. Scott and Man 467 could be said to suffer from “broken morale” resulting from unemployment. How did discerning guide Komarovsky’s argument? While Mr. Scott’s self-

175 Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family, 23–24.

176 Ibid., 41; cf. Jahoda, Zeisel, and Lazarsfeld, Marienthal, 46.

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description might lead researchers to ascribe the change in authority to the children or wife,

Komarovsky used “other evidence than his own testimony” to claim that “the decisive feature in the deterioration of his status was his own reaction to unemployment, his broken morale and loss of self-respect.”177 Specifically, applying the method of discerning suggested to Komarovsky that Mr. Scott had relinquished his authority before it had ever been challenged; unemployment, in this instance, caused nothing more than the “crystallization” of preexisting feelings of inferiority.178

Komarovsky generalized from cases like the fate of Mr. Scott. Some men who lost their jobs sought solace in church while others sought escape in bars. More broadly, some unemployed men lost all authority over their wives and children while others retained it.179 What social force or psychological factor could account for this diversity? Through the repeated application of the process of discerning, Komarovsky arrived at the conclusion that only the

“personality” of the jobless man could account for his reaction to unemployment.180 In one sense, this conclusion followed from common sense, for:

Individuals vary in their reactions to hardships. Some become disorganized by hardships more easily than others. They become more panicky in the face of hardship. Various personality traits undoubtedly converge to give a person this or that attitude to crises: a relative sense of security in general, a relative amount of resources in other spheres which might compensate for the hardships, a relative placidity of temperament, and so on.181

177 Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family, 41.

178 Ibid., 40, cf. 25.

179 Ibid., 45–46, 66, 70.

180 Ibid., 70–74.

181 Ibid., 74.

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Understood in this sense, Komarovsky’s argument carried to its logical conclusion the claim implicit in Marienthal: it made the jobless themselves responsible for the “brokenness” resulting from unemployment; stronger, better-formed personalities would be more resilient to the physical and psychological privations.

But Komarovsky went beyond Marienthal by tracing the link between personality and society. Continuing the work of Authority and the Family, she argued that the two were interwoven; neither personality nor society could be understood without the other. Komarovsky argued, for example that the “pattern” that “[i]t is the man’s duty to provide for the family” is

“apparently taken for granted by the cultural group to which our families belong.” Understood as

“cultural” in Horkheimer’s sense, this belief structured individual personalities. To say that a man’s self-esteem rested on his ability to provide was correct but, in some sense, insufficient.

According to Komarovsky, “being the provider appear[s] to him [as] the core of his role in the family” and, indeed, the core of his identity. Removing a man’s ability to provide did not merely raise “economic anxiety” or cause “deep humiliation;” it destabilized his entire personality structure.182 As one unemployed man put it, “‘I would rather turn on the gas and put an end to the whole family than let my wife support me.’”183

What did the method of discerning reveal about the key argument of Authority and the

Family? How did Komarovsky’s method complicate Fromm’s social-psychological interpretation of the Oedipus complex? In this context, discerning played a negative role, calling

182 Ibid., 74, 82.

183 Ibid., 76. Komarovsky developed a related argument which further bound Marienthal and Authority and the Family together. She argued, as Lazarsfeld had done in Marienthal, that the loss of employment disrupted workers’ sense of time and pursuit of goals; the unemployed men of Newark felt as aimless as the jobless workers of Marienthal. Komarovsky went beyond Lazarsfeld, however, in arguing that, “in our culture, work is apparently the sole organizing principle and the only means of self-expression.” Moreover, Komarovsky developed a striking indictment of a culture that inverted the relationship of work and leisure. See 81-2.

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into question both the theoretical premises and empirical findings of Fromm’s argument. In the first place, Komarovsky called into question the basic premise of the Oedipal relationship: mothers, her research suggested, played the “masculine” role in 25 percent of the families surveyed. “It was against the mother’s will that the child must oppose his own. The struggle for emancipation, if there was one, was from the mother’s authority” in 15 out of 59 families.184

Adolescents, although not likely to be under the sway of an Oedipal struggle with their fathers, were nevertheless subjects of their authority. Komarovsky concluded that patriarchal authority was likely to wane when it depended on “utilitarian” or “coercive” methods and likely to endure when it was exercised with “firmness” and “consistency.”185 Komarovsky, this is to say, used discerning to verify the categories Lazarsfeld proposed through his substruction of Fromm’s essay in Authority and the Family.

Unemployed Man lacked a clear, concise conclusion. Komarovsky provided no summary of her findings, no final adjudication on the theory that supplied her initial motivation: “[e]ven a partial breakdown of parental authority in the family as an effect of the depression might tend to increase the readiness of the coming generation to accept social change.”186 Implicitly,

Komarovsky’s analysis of the relationship between unemployed fathers and their children militated against this thesis, for it suggested that the decline of patriarchal authority as a result of unemployment was not as widespread or consequential as Horkheimer, Fromm, and, indeed, their counterparts in the SCIU, the ILO, and the ICRC imagined it to be. Komarovsky put the

184 Ibid., 85; cf. Margaret Mead, “On the Institutionalized Role of Women and Character Formation,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5 (1936): 69–75.

185 Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family, 107–9, 112.

186 Ibid., 3.

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most basic claim of Horkheimer’s argument to the test with the method of discerning and found it lacking. In cases in which fathers’ authority did wane as a result of unemployment—for those fathers who used inducements and coercion to control their children—the results were determined to a considerable degree by the personalities of the children themselves.187 It was to the concept of personality—above all, the personality of the unemployed—that Komarovsky directed attention. This topic, along with the method Komarovsky had built upon Lazarsfeld’s own, became integral to the Institute’s empirical research.

CONCLUSION

In addition to the empirical findings she organized into her three principal categories

(breakdown of status, changes in the personality, shifts in authority over children), Komarovsky presented, in the final chapter of Unemployed Man, a number of more eclectic findings about the effects—or lack thereof—of extended joblessness on the families of Newark. She argued, for example, that prolonged unemployment led to almost total social isolation. “The typical family in our group,” she wrote, “does not attend church, does not belong to clubs, and for months at a time does not have social contacts with anyone outside the family.”188 Jahoda, Zeisel, and

Lazarsfeld made similar observations in Marienthal. But Komarovsky went beyond the ÖWF, arguing that the jobless of Newark lacked even the shallow, apolitical fellow-feeling—the sense

187 Ibid., 104. Lazarsfeld had reached a similar conclusion during his work with Charlotte Bühler. See Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Zur Berufseinstellung des jugendlichen Arbetiers,” in Jugend und Beruf: Kritik und Material, by Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Charlotte Bühler (Jena: Fischer, 1931), 157–74; cf. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Die Berufspläne der Wiener Maturanten,” in Mitteilungen aus Statistik und Verwaltung der Stadt Wien (Vienna: Magistratsabteilung für Statistik, 1927), 21; “Die Berufspläne der Wiener Maturanten,” in Mitteilungen aus Statistik und Verwaltung der Stadt Wien (Vienna: Magistratsabteilung für Statistik, 1928), 311–15.

188 Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family, 122.

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of “common destiny”(Schicksalsverbundenheit)—that bound the Marienthalers together during the first stage of unemployment.189

Komarovsky attributed this isolation to the cultural “pattern” that equated economic success with personal status, a pattern that led those without work to feel humiliated and to avoid former friends.190 But Komarovsky identified the real source of this isolation as the lack of class consciousness among American workers. Although the study had concentrated on blue- and white-collar workers, its subjects were not members of the “industrial proletariat” but mostly tradespeople. “They formed what might, in a way, be termed a marginal group between the proletariat and the lower middle class,” she argued.191 Komarovsky gave this argument a quasi- materialist foundation:

The industrial worker, working in a large concern, performing a specified task in a vast and complicated series of operations, is more likely to develop a feeling of individual impotence. The relation between his particular operation and the finished product is mediated by many processes and operations of which he has often only a vague notion. He cannot feel any control over the whole enterprise in which he is engaged. On the contrary, this enterprise appears to him vast, mysterious, and overpowering. The men in our study, on the other hand, worked alone or in small groups. Their relation to the job was such as to increase their self-confidence and feeling of importance: they possessed a craft that required training; they did a job from the beginning to the end, seeing clearly the relation between their work and the completed product. Their relation to the whole enterprise was such as to give them a greater sense of control.192

Although Komarovsky did not deploy Marxist terminology, she claimed that these workers’ relation to the means of production—a position that enabled them to witness the evolution of

189 Ibid., 123–27; cf. Jahoda, Zeisel, and Lazarsfeld, Marienthal, 79.

190 For examples of subjects’ accounts of such perceived humiliation, see Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family, 123–28. For Komarovsky’s articulation of this theory, see 78-80.

191 Ibid., 116.

192 Ibid., 117.

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their product and, consequently, ameliorated some of the alienation inherent in commodity exchange—militated against their formation of working-class consciousness. Many belonged to unions, but few felt themselves to be among the working class.193 In fact, Komarovsky argued, because so many of these workers aspired to self-employment—either as contractors or small- business owners—they tended to evince “the general individualistic traditions of the American middle class.” This is to say that “[t]heir lives centered around the hopes of raising the standard of living of the family, of acquiring a car or perhaps a home, bringing up the children in some comfort, or perhaps putting them through high school.”194

Komarovsky found that unemployment did little to change this view: the workers she surveyed were not radicalized by the mental and material privations they had suffered since losing their jobs. Despite the “shock” of unemployment, “the majority of them did not change their fundamental class notions.” In their view, “[t]he system had nothing to do with it. They would have succeeded had they been more capable or tried harder.”195 Komarovsky summarized their view in stark terms:

It is up to the man. The individualistic attitudes of this group of men were so remarkably strong that after four years of insistent but futile search for work some men in the group put the responsibility for unemployment on their own shoulders. One marvels at the strength of the traditional social attitude that would make some of these men, who looked for work tirelessly, week in and week out, for three or four years, still cling to the belief that it is “up to the man.”196

193 Ibid., 129.

194 Ibid., 117.

195 Ibid.

196 Ibid., 118, emphasis original.

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Komarovsky suggested that this faith led to a kind of cognitive dissonance. Some workers retreated into obdurateness. As one subject, “Mr. Adams,” told Komarovsky: “‘I would like you to put it down in black and white […] that I am to blame for my present state. It isn’t the system.’”197 Men like Mr. Adams often lapsed into a sense of “resignation” familiar to readers of

Marienthal.198 Many workers, unable to identify “the system” as the cause of their unemployment, looked for scapegoats, developing “violent hatred” of those they believed to be responsible for the Depression. Included in the list were married women workers, “insurance companies,” “the Italians and colored people, [and the] Irish.”199 Other subjects—and here

Komarovsky presented the testimony not only of the unemployed men but also of their wives— blamed nefarious, shadowy forces: “the Communists,” “the rich,” “the capitalists,” the “crooked politicians,” the ““insiders,’” and the “‘have nots.’”200

With these concluding arguments, Komarovsky positioned Unemployed Man between

Marienthal and Authority and the Family. She shared with the ÖWF a profound suspicion of the working class, a fear—seemingly born out in empirical research—that members of the proletariat had failed to develop the solidaristic consciousness entailed by their economic position. Like

197 Ibid.

198 Ibid., 120. A version of this sense of resignation one step removed from insistence on personal responsibility was the obsession with “luck and fate”—forces which were, if anything, more immutable than personality.

199 Ibid.

200 Ibid., 121. This last category—the “‘have nots’”—seems to present something of a contradiction, for it is precisely those who suffered privation that identified this nebulous group as responsible for their condition. As will become discussed in chapter 5, however, the subjects often identified some lower, less worthy group—the “malcontents” or the “‘have nots’”—who usurped the advantages and benefits the subjects viewed as rightfully their own and from whom the subjects were anxious to distance themselves. As one of Komarovsky’s subjects explained, “‘Why, the colored people down south have more food than they ever had. […] That certainly made me boil. Where do I come in to be compared with those colored people? They have always lived like animals. It may be good for them, but they can’t class me with the colored.’” (121)

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Jahoda, Zeisel, Lazarsfeld, and, more broadly, Max Adler and his Austro-Marxist interlocutors,

Komarovsky seemed concerned by the prospect that the unemployed would become reactionaries rather than revolutionaries. That Komarovsky shared these arguments and anxieties with the ÖWF was hardly surprising: I showed in this chapter, her work continued the methodological trajectory laid out in Statistical Practicum, applied in Marienthal, refined in the

ÖWF’s early-1930s studies, and deployed in Leichter and Lazarsfeld’s contribution to Authority and the Family. As a complement to Lazarsfeld’s procedure of substruction, Komarovsky’s method of discerning helped social and psychological researchers answer their foundational question: “Why?”

At the same time, Komarovsky shared elements of the conceptual framework and theoretical argument Horkheimer had developed in Authority and the Family. Like Horkheimer, she emphasized the role of “culture” in shaping individual personalities; she identified the role of

“fate” in encouraging allegiance to the capitalist status quo. Again, such affinities were to be expected: Komarovsky identified Unemployed Man with Authority and the Family. This is to say that her study exemplified the Institute’s description of the text as a work in progress, a preliminary contribution to a study that would be completed in the United States. But

Unemployed Man did more than merely continue Authority and the Family. As I demonstrated,

Komarovsky worked to realize the goal Clifford Kirkpatrick had suggested to the Institute in his review of the text: “a more formal marriage of fact and theory in the hope of methodological offspring with a talent for both insight and certitude.”201

Unemployed Man did not merely retrace the methodological path Lazarsfeld,

Horkheimer, and their colleagues had been walking for more than a decade. Komarovsky’s text

201 Kirkpatrick, “Review of Autorität Und Familie,” 364.

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also, and more importantly, demarcated the path the Institute researchers would break in the coming years. Not long after Komarovsky completed her study of unemployment in Newark, finished her dissertation, and published Unemployed Man, the Institute began a project on the phenomenon of anti-Semitism among the American working class. In it, Institute researchers identified many of the phenomena to which Komarovsky had called attention: the absence of class consciousness, hope for upward mobility, paranoia about shadowy forces, and so on. They argued that these were symptoms of the social-psychological disease of prejudice. Simply put, the roots of the Institute’s study of anti-Semitism and, research into authoritarianism lay in

Komarovsky’s investigation of unemployment.

Through Unemployed Family, Komarovsky reoriented the Institute’s program of empirical research, turning it away from the social-psychological approach developed by Fromm and towards the sociographical method pioneered by Lazarsfeld and the ÖWF. This shift was neither seamless nor immediate. Before analyzing the Institute’s studies of anti-Semitism and authoritarianism, it is necessary to examine the most trenchant and enduring critique of

Lazarsfeld’s method by a member of the Institute: the critique Theodor Adorno developed during his collaboration with Lazarsfeld on a study of radio-listening in the United States.

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CHAPTER 4

EXPERIMENTING WITH THEORY: THE PRINCETON RADIO RESEARCH PROJECT, 1938-1941

EXTRAORDINARY POSSIBILITIES AND A LARGE POTENTIAL AUDIENCE

Theodor W. Adorno arrived New York City in February 1938. In later years, Adorno recalled his impressions of the United States and of American life in strikingly negative terms:

“When you come to America, everywhere looks the same. The standardization, the product of technology and monopoly, is disconcerting.”1 Although exiled from Germany, Adorno adopted a thoroughly Germanic view of America as a land of intellectual, cultural, and even moral regression.2 But, as Stefan Müller-Doohm has ably shown, Adorno had decidedly different reactions in the moment, praising their new neighborhood—Greenwich Village—for its similarity to fashionable districts of Paris. When Adorno relocated to the Upper West Side of

Manhattan, his apartment became a hub for émigré artists, composers, and intellectuals.3

Adorno had come to the United States at Lazarsfeld’s behest. In 1937, the Humanities

Division of the Rockefeller Foundation appointed Lazarsfeld the director of the Princeton Radio

Research Project, an expansive study of the present state future prospects of radio programming.

As its organizers made clear in their original proposal for the study, the Radio Project aimed to develop scientific methods for “quantifying the influence of radio listening” on American

1 Quoted in Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 243.

2 On this trope in German literature and philosophy, see Dan Diner, America in the Eyes of the Germans: An Essay on Anti-Americanism (Markus Wiener Publishers, 1996).

3 Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 242–44. As Müller-Doohm points out, this was not Adorno’s first trip to the United States. Doubtless, however, there was a categorical difference in feeling following from the fact that this was no visit but an emigration.

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audiences.4 Lazarsfeld recruited Adorno to lead the “musical section” of the Radio Project, which, he assured Adorno, would be the “hunting ground” for a more “European” approach to the questions of music and media.5

Adorno’s response to the Radio Project mimicked his reaction to life in America more generally. Contemporary accounts, this is to say, contrasted sharply with later reflections.

Writing in 1968, Adorno recalled feeling utterly alienated from Lazarsfeld and the Radio Project from the outset:

The Princeton Radio Research Project had its headquarters, at that time, neither in Princeton nor in New York but in Newark, New Jersey, and, indeed, in a somewhat pioneering spirit, in an unoccupied brewery. When I travelled there through the tunnel under the Hudson I felt a little as if I were in Kafka’s Nature Theater of Oklahoma. I was very much taken by the lack of embarrassment about the choice of a site that would scarcely have been conceivable by the lights of the European academic community.6

Adorno’s reference to Kafka’s incomplete and unpublished novel Amerika was not coincidental.

Like Karl Roßmann, the novel’s hero, Adorno feared that life in the United States would extirpate his humanistic learning and reduce him to a “technical worker” in the factory of social- scientific research.7 Adorno described his revulsion at this way of thinking in a phrase worthy of

4 Lazarsfeld’s papers are held at the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library. They are hereafter cited as “PFL Papers.” See Cantril, “Essential Value of Radio.” For examples of Lasswell’s views, see Harold D. Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in the World War (New York: P. Smith, 1938); “Radio as an Instrument of Decreasing Personal Insecurity,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941): 49–64.

5 Quoted in Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 238. Lazarsfeld did not likely know of Adorno’s other critical essay, ‘On Jazz’ (1936), which had been published under the pseudonym of ‘Hektor Rottweiler’. For an overview of Lazarsfeld’s recruitment of Adorno from the former’s perspective, see Fleck, A Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences, 176–87.

6 Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” 342. Detlev Claussen rightly suggests that scholars read this essay through the prism of Adorno’s attempt to distinguish himself from Lazarsfeld and to correct a “mistaken” narrative about the history of social research. Claussen, One Last Genius, chapter 6, viz.183-185.

7 See the fragment entitled, “On a street corner Karl saw…” in Kafka, Amerika: The Missing Person, 267–87.

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Kafka: “I felt a strong inner resistance to meeting this demand by turning myself inside out.”8 In

1938, however, Adorno framed the experience in decidedly more positive terms. In March,

Adorno informed Walter Benjamin that “[t]he radio project has turned out to be something with extraordinary possibilities and a very large potential audience.”9

In this chapter I recover and analyze Adorno’s tenure at the Radio Project. To do so, I first locate the origin of the Radio Project in the context of American intellectuals’ debates about the merits and dangers of the radio and, concomitantly, social scientists’ attempts to measure the effects of radio on the individual mind and social order. Just as Lazarsfeld, Leichter, their ÖWF colleagues, and Komarovsky had argued in texts from Statistical Practicum and Marienthal to

Unemployed Man, these thinkers claimed that, before they could address the problems and realize the opportunities of radio, they must develop reliable methods for observation, measurement, and analysis. Next, I build on the arguments of chapter 3, demonstrating that

Lazarsfeld argued that the “European approach” to social research was a necessary corrective to the “American” methods prominent in the Radio Project. This is not to say, however, that

Lazarsfeld drew a distinction between research and theory. Rather, both Lazarsfeld and his chosen ‘European’ colleague—Adorno—maintained that the “European approach” entailed empirical research. At the core of the chapter, I reconstruct Adorno’s intertwined critique of and contributions to social-psychological research into the radio—a critique encapsulated in

Adorno’s contestation of Lazarsfeld’s description of the “European approach.”

I show that Adorno criticized existing empirical techniques as myopic and ideological.

Specifically, Adorno argued that Lazarsfeld’s style of research perpetuated a conception of

8 Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” 344.

9 Adorno to Benjamin, March 7, 1938 in Adorno and Benjamin Complete Correspondence, 240–41, at 240.

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individuality that was, under modern social and economic conditions, impossible. By so doing, empirical studies like the Radio Project perpetuated the ideology of individuality and so obfuscated the social and spiritual privations of capitalism. But Adorno did not countenance the abandonment of empirical research. Instead, I argue, Adorno held that empirical methods must be modified to correspond to and, more importantly, to challenge contemporary material and social conditions. It was on these grounds that Adorno outlined radical new experiments and metrics for assessing disappearance of individuality under the conditions of monopoly capitalism and its culture industry.

In developing and deploying his critiques of the American research methods in general and of the Radio Project in particular, I demonstrate that Adorno drew on the Institute’s burgeoning empirical research program. Simultaneously, Adorno channeled ongoing conversations with Max Horkheimer about the foundations and implications of psychoanalysis into his both his critiques of “American” social psychology and his conception of the “European” approach. I recover Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument that psychoanalysis depended upon and perpetuated the illusion of individuality—a subjective experience that, if it had ever existed, was no longer impossible. This claim followed from the positions Horkheimer developed in Authority and the Family. Moreover, Adorno applied the logic of this argument to his critique of social psychology, holding that these techniques, too, perpetuated the ideology of individuality. In fact,

Adorno argued that both psychoanalytic theory and, by extension, psychological research must be carried on with the full recognition of their own impossibility. Throughout my reconstruction and explanation of Adorno’s claim, I document interpersonal links and conceptual similarities between it and the methodological debates of Horkheimer, Fromm, Lazarsfeld, Leichter, and

Komarovsky. To anticipate: in subsequent chapters I will show that the apparently paradoxical

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position Adorno developed during the Radio Project became a cornerstone of the Institute’s empirical research.

Finally, I describe affinities between Adorno’s proposals for empirical research and studies conducted by his erstwhile colleagues as the Radio Project. These affinities might be interpreted as evidence of Adorno’s influence on the researchers. But I argue that the resemblances reveal a closer proximity between Adorno and Lazarsfeld’s conceptions of the

“European approach” than either man realized.

Both canonical and recent histories of the Institute analyze the Radio Project.10 However, much of this scholarship has focused prioritized interpersonal rather than intellectual aspects of the study. Following—either implicitly or explicitly—Adorno’s later characterization of his time at the Radio Project, many historians have asserted the disjuncture between the fundamental principles of Adorno’s incipient critical theory and Lazarsfeld’s established communications research. According to some scholars, the incompatibility originated in the ontological and epistemological foundations of the two approaches.11 Others have argued that the incongruity followed from Lazarsfeld’s determination to apply the research results to the reform of radio—an

10 For an insightful analysis of this historiography, see Wheatland, “Lazarsfeld and the Horkheimer Circle on Morningside Heights.” Wheatland’s otherwise-excellent study of Adorno’s career in the United States curiously neglects—except in passing—his interaction with Lazarsfeld. See Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile, 70–72, 86, 145–46.

11 David Jenemann, for example, has argued that the in the “modernist texts Adorno embraced and celebrated,” the “modernist subject utterly resists the logic of a social science that reduces human qualities to data points.” Stefan Müller-Doohm, likewise, has argued that Lazarsfeld “found himself in the difficult situation of having to feed Adorno’s profusion of ideas into an empirical research project that had to be based on the three stages of concept- formation, operationalization, and measurement.” Adorno, for his part, studied “phenomena which could simply not be verified by opinion surveys and interview techniques.” And Frederic Jameson has argued that Adorno’s language itself defied easy comprehension and interpretation. See Jenemann, Adorno in America, 6; Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 250–51; Frederic Jameson, “T. W. Adorno, Or, Historical Tropes,” Salmagundi 2, no. 1 (5) (1967): 3–43. Claussen—the most perspicacious scholar of the collaboration between Lazarsfeld and Adorno—has argued that the two researchers had different-but-intersecting interests. Specifically, “Lazarsfeld’s interest lay in transcending the problem formulated by Adorno: to understand how human subjects consciously mediate objective social processes.” “Intellectual Transfer,” 13.

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instrumentalization inimical to the Frankfurters’ critical theory of society in its totality.12 Such studies occasionally stray into the ascription of blame for the failed collaboration: scholars of critical theory argue that Lazarsfeld was unable to recognized Adorno’s brilliance; historians of communications research claim that Adorno was unwilling to cooperate—intellectually and personally—with his Radio Project colleagues.13 More successful are the studies that document

Adorno’s intellectual development during his tenure at the Radio Project. As he worked with

Lazarsfeld, these scholars argue, Adorno came to see that “normal scientific techniques” could not verify the profound changes in culture and subjectivity.14 I do not dispute this argument but build upon it. Adorno, I argue, did indeed conclude that existing research techniques could not serve the needed function of social research. It was as a result of this conclusion that Adorno began to formulate his own research methods: experiments in theory.

AN OPPORTUNITY FOR RELATIVELY FREE EXPERIMENTATION

Interwar American intellectuals were at once terrified of and mesmerized by the power of radio.15 Recent memories of the efficacy of George Creel’s Committee on Public Information

12 See, e.g., Morrison, “Kultur and Culture.” This argument is not incompatible with the one outlined just above. See, e.g., Jenemann, Adorno in America, 17–18.

13 Morrison, for example, lays the blame squarely at the feet of Adorno and John Marshall. See “Kultur and Culture.” For an example of a study taking the side of Adorno against Lazarsfeld, see Jenemann, Adorno in America, chap. 1.

14 Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 190–93, at 190. For a complementary argument, see Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 238–43.

15 On of intellectuals’ varying reactions to the radio, see Richard W. Steele, Propaganda in an Open Society: The Roosevelt Administration and the Media, 1933-1941 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985), 17–21; Douglas B. Craig, Fireside Politics : Radio and Political Culture in the United States, 1920-1940 (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 215–33; David Goodman, Radio’s Civic Ambition: American Broadcasting and Democracy in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 65–115.

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(CPI) in solidifying Americans’ support for the First World War and contemporary evidence supplied by the spread of mass politics in Europe convinced radio’s critics that the medium lent itself to malign use. These intellectuals feared that, unless properly controlled, radio could easily broadcast insidious propaganda that would corrupt the democratic individualism and republican institutions of the nation. “The result of most [radio] propaganda,” the psychologist Donald

Slesinger wrote in 1941, “is to turn people into automatons, reacting blindly and incapable of thought.”16 Other intellectuals who, seeing radio’s ability to reach across space and into the private sphere, understood it to be, as one historian has described it, “the savior of the nation.”17

Although more numerous, these proponents of radio were deeply divided over questions of the methods by which it would save the nation and, indeed, what, precisely, the nation was.18

Following John Dewey and Charles Horton Cooley, some American intellectuals and New Deal policymakers hoped that radio would become a means of cultivating the rationality and individuality of the elusive “public.”19 Other, more pessimistic thinkers believed that radio might indeed save the nation from its own naïve faith in democracy. Guided by Walter Lippmann and

Edward Bernays, these intellectuals argued that the fragmentation of society and massification of

16 Quoted in Brett Gary, The Nervous Liberals: Propaganda Anxieties from World War I to the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 95.

17 Heidi J. S. Tworek, “The Savior of the Nation? Regulating Radio in the Interwar Period,” Journal of Policy History 27, no. 03 (July 2015): 465–91, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898030615000196.

18 For an overview of these debates, see Patrick Brantlinger, Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Benjamin L. Alpers, Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s-1950s (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003); and, especially, Gary, The Nervous Liberals.

19 As Dewey argued, modern communications—including the radio—might provide an answer to the seemingly intractable question, “How can a public be organized […] when it literally does not stay in place?” John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (H. Holt and Company, 1927), 141.

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the individual everywhere in evidence were irreversible; radio, they hoped, might provide the means of exerting the “social control” necessary to modern politics.20

While the contours and arguments of these debates can be traced to the now-famous exchanges between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey, more directly relevant to the Princeton

Radio Research Project were the ideas of Harold Lasswell. Too young to have been a member of the CPI, Laswell was nevertheless affected by it. His mentor, Charles E. Merriam, had worked for Creel during the First World War and, after it, turned his academic attention towards the study of nationalism, psychology, and propaganda.21 In his Propaganda Technique and the

World War (1927), Lasswell offered a definition and theory of propaganda:

By propaganda is not meant the control of mental states by changing such objective conditions as the supply of cigarettes or the chemical composition of food. Propaganda does not even include the stiffening of moral [sic] by a cool and confident bearing. It refers solely to the control of opinion by significant symbols, or, to speak more concretely and less accurately, by stories, rumours [sic], reports, pictures, and other forms of social communication. Propaganda is concerned with the management of opinions and attitudes by the direct manipulation of social suggestion rather than by altering other conditions in the environment or the organism.22

For Lasswell, this is to say, politics consisted not in the management of the distribution of goods or services but in the control of the public’s view about this management through the dissemination of ideas, signs, and symbols.

20 Radio, Lippmann wrote as early as 1922, had helped instantiate the sense of “‘common consciousness’” that led the Allies to victory over the Central Powers. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1991), 208–9.

21 See, e.g., Charles Edward Merriam and Harold Foote Gosnell, Non-Voting, Causes and Methods of Control (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1924); Charles Edward Merriam, The Making of Citizens: A Comparative Study of Methods of Civic Training (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931).

22 Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in the World War, 8–9.

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Although Lasswell’s understanding of propaganda and argument for its use in politics evolved during the 1930s, the central elements of this definition endured. In Psychopathology and Politics (1930), Lasswell argued that politics arose not from the struggle for resources or power but in the displaced energy of psychological drives. According to this view, public intellectuals and social scientists were to develop “therapeutic” techniques that would ameliorate political conflict at this atavistic level. Propaganda would play a key role in this “preventive politics” and “preventive mental hygiene” by shaping popular attitudes. The propagandist recognized and balanced the needs of competing interest groups, earning the consent of all and, thereby, increasing political harmony and social integration.23 In World Politics and Insecurity

(1935) and Politics: Who Gets What, When, and How (1936), Lasswell went further still, arguing that the modern masses could—and should—be managed by a group of self-identified “world elites.” Elites, he claimed, would control the “universal values” of “safety, deference, and income” by distributing the symbols and ideas connected to them.24 Lasswell was one of a growing number of American “realist” thinkers skeptical about democratic theory in general and

Deweyan pragmatism in particular.25 In developing these ideas, however, Lasswell was deeply influenced by his travels to Europe between 1928 and 1930. While visiting Vienna and Berlin,

Lasswell met and studied with prominent psychologists—including Karen Horney, Alfred Adler, and Fromm—and social theorists—such as Robert Michels, Karl Mannheim, and Vilfredo

23 Harold D. Lasswell, Psychopathology and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), 17–29, 175– 205.

24 Harold D. Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1936).

25 For an overview of Lasswell’s travels, see Gary, The Nervous Liberals, 65–72.

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Pareto.26 Like Lazarsfeld’s innovative social psychology, Lasswell’s psychological politics of propaganda evolved through the transmission of ideas and methods in both directions across the interwar Atlantic.27

Few contemporaries shared Lasswell’s unbridled enthusiasm for propaganda. Indeed, although they reached no consensus on what, exactly, constituted propaganda, most interwar social scientists framed the method and its content in decidedly negative terms as a danger to

America or an affront to democracy—or both.28 Ethical and epistemological questions—how could the truths be distinguished from the lies in modern politics? Could democracies, sustained by facts and reason, survive an assault by anti-democratic propagandists?—proliferated as fascism spread across Europe.29 Organizations like the Institute for Propaganda Studies at the

Teachers College of Columbia University, the Council for Democracy, and the Friends of

Democracy, Inc. proliferated, coordinating, funding, and conducting research into the nature and effects of propaganda and its amelioration.

But Lasswell successfully attached his views to the research program of one prominent organization: the Rockefeller Foundation. Specifically, Lasswell shaped the orientation and aims of the Communications Group, a subsidiary of the Humanities Division within the Foundation.

John Marshall, a scholar of medieval literature at Harvard University and an editor at the

26 On these thinkers’ pessimism and its impact on interwar discourses, see Brantlinger, Bread & Circuses.

27 For a similar argument about Walter Lippmann, whose ideas had an important influence on Lasswell, see Sluga, Nation, Psychology, and International Politics, 1870-1919, viz., 132-149.

28 On such reactions, see J. Michael Sproule, Propaganda and Democracy: The American Experience of Media and Mass Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 22–52.

29 For examples of such arguments, see the essays collected in Harwood Lawrence Childs, Propaganda and Dictatorship: A Collection of Papers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1936).

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American Council of Learned Societies, had joined the Humanities Division and the Education

Board of the Rockefeller Foundation.30 From the Humanities Division, Marshall directed the

Foundation’s activities in the nascent field of communications research. In January 1936, he suggested to John Stevens that the Foundation provide funds for “a few younger men” in the field, thereby providing them “an opportunity for relatively free experimentation.”31 That spring, the Foundation began underwriting a number of projects, ranging from the Film Library of the

Museum of Modern Art, the Experimental Division for the Study of Wartime Communications at the Library of Congress, and the Graduate Library Reading Project at the University of

Chicago.32 Aiming to make the provision of monies more systematic and, consequently, effective, Marshall organized the Communications Group: a seminar, composed of prominent academics and independent researchers, that met monthly from 1939 to 1941 to discuss the question of the epistemological and methodological foundations of a communications-research paradigm that would produce scientific-but-actionable—which is to say, behaviorist—results.33

Among its members were Hadley Cantril, Robert Lynd, Charles Siepmann, I. A. Richards,

Donald Slesinger, and Paul Lazarsfeld. But it was Lasswell who became the intellectual leader of the Communications Group.34

30 For an overview of Marshall’s largely neglected career, see Gary, The Nervous Liberals, 86.

31 Quoted in ibid.

32 Ibid., 89.

33 On the Communications Group, see Brett Gary, “Communication Research, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Mobilization for the War on Words, 1938–1944,” Journal of Communication 46, no. 3 (September 1, 1996): 124– 47, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1996.tb01493.x. On the Rockefeller Foundation’s interest in behaviorism, see Samelson, “Organizing for the Kingdom of Behavior.”

34 On Lasswell’s de facto leadership of the Communications Group, see Gary, “Mobilization for the War on Words.”

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Lasswell’s positive understanding of propaganda was not, to be sure, the only view within the Communications Group. As will be discussed further below, other participants mobilized multiple arguments—including some of Adorno’s critiques of the Radio Project—to contest the epistemological foundations, normative assumptions, and claimed efficacy of

Lasswell’s position. Nevertheless, Lasswell effectively dominated the Communications Group by determining the seminar’s aims and methods. In July 1940, Lasswell outlined the central elements of his paradigm in an intermediary report for the Rockefeller Foundation.35 He made clear the fact that the research would be what historians of the social sciences have since termed

“objectivist” or “scientistic.” 36 According to this paradigm, researchers would seek empirical facts which would lead to absolutely true knowledge; this knowledge, in turn, would enable experts to establish and maintain effective social control.37 While empiricism lurked beneath the surface of this approach, behaviorism was more prominent—albeit an inverted one. In contrast to the behaviorism of John B. Watson—another Rockefeller Foundation-funded researcher—

Lasswell did not first generate a stimulus and then measure the psychological response but deduced the original stimulus from an observed response.38 As Marshall put it, the goal of the

35 The Rockefeller Foundation Records are held at the Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Hereafter, this collection is cited as “RF Records.” See Communications Group, “Research in Mass Communications,” July 1940, RF Records, RG 1.1 (FA 386), Box 224, Folder 2674.

36 As Dorothy Ross described it, “[t]he aim of scientism has been to establish prediction and control of the historical world and perhaps its most conspicuous accomplishment has been a set of quantitative techniques for information gathering and analysis that are used to manipulate such things as the money supply, consumer choices, votes, and remedial social therapies." See Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, 496. For a definition of “objectivism,” see Gary, The Nervous Liberals, 102.

37 See Communications Group, “Research in Mass Communications.”

38 On the close connection of Watson’s work to the larger goals of the Rockefeller Foundation, see Samelson, “Organizing for the Kingdom of Behavior.”

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Communications Group was to develop tools for understanding communication “not by what it says, but by what it does.”39

Central to Marshall’s Communications Group and its Princeton Radio Research Project was Hadley Cantril, a founding editor of Public Opinion Quarterly and member of the

Department of Psychology at Princeton University. In his The Psychology of Radio (1935), coauthored by Gordon Allport, Cantril had described the medium as “a novel phenomenon, something new under the psychological sun.” As such, radio raised a “flood” of pressing social- psychological questions:

Why do young people listen for hours on end to the impersonal blare of their loud-speakers, or is the blare for them not so impersonal after all? What do they like best to hear, and how much do they understand of what they hear? What is the most effective way to address the listeners, to persuade them, to lead them? How long will they listen, and what will they remember? Are the prevailing programs adapted to the mentality of the listeners? Are the minds of the listeners influenced more by what they hear on the radio, by what they see on the screen, or by what they read? Does the broadcasting of concerts and church services keep people away from concert halls and places of worship?40

Questions such as these were as much social and social psychological. Indeed, Cantril and

Allport insisted that the phenomenon of the radio was itself an indicator of the need for social psychologists to enter the realm of social policy and engineering.41 But, caught unawares by the degree to which radio had overturned existing models of information dissemination, social psychologists had to revise their methods prior to answering substantive questions (figure 4.1).

39 Quoted in Gary, The Nervous Liberals, 87.

40 Hadley Cantril and Gordon W. Allport, The Psychology of Radio (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1935), 4.

41 Ibid., vii.

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Figure 4.1: Models of Communication Before and After the Radio. Source: Cantril and Allport, The Psychology of Radio, 12.

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In 1937, Cantril sought funding from Marshall for a project entitled, “The Essential

Value of Radio to All Types of Listeners.” Reiterating the position of The Psychology of Radio,

Cantril’s proposal claimed that existing social-psychological methods were both ill-suited to and insufficient for studying the revolutionary new medium. In order to understand the “unique psychological and social characteristics of radio,” he wrote, researchers must first answer seven basic questions:

1. Who listens? 2. Where does listening take place? 3. When does listening take place? 4. What is listened to? 5. Why people listen? 6. How people listen? 7. What are the effects of listening?42

Questions such as these, according to Cantril, subtended broader, deeper investigations of how radio satisfied the “genuine human needs” of modern individuals.43 Framed in the terms elucidated in chapter 3, Cantril argued that the task facing social psychologists was the development of nose-counting techniques.44 Towards this end, Cantril requested funding for a four-year project. Two of these years would be focused on the development of new methods for studying radio listening; two would be devoted to applying these new techniques to answering the pressing questions raised by the radio.45 Concurring with Cantril’s assessment, the

42 Cantril, “Essential Value of Radio,” 3. Handwritten notes express considerable surprise at the fifth question, marking it with exclamation points, underlining, and asterisks. Although the notes may be those of Robert Lynd, whose name on the first page of the document suggests the copy was his, the excitement about a why-question, familiar from chapter 2, suggests that they may be Lazarsfeld’s comments.

43 Ibid., 1.

44 Indeed, it was perhaps the inclusion of a why-question in such a list of nose-counting techniques that so surprised the author of the handwritten comments discussed above.

45 Cantril, “Essential Value of Radio,” 7.

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Rockefeller Foundation decided to fund the first half of the Princeton Radio Research Project, as it became known.

Frank Stanton was Cantril’s first choice for director of the Radio Project. Stanton, a recent graduate of Ohio State University, had written a doctoral thesis critiquing existing methods for studying listeners’ reactions to the radio and, more important, proposing new techniques.46 Although initially inclined to accept Cantril’s offer, Stanton ultimately declined after being promoted within the Research Department at CBS (where he later served as president). Paul Lazarsfeld later complained that Cantril offered the position to “every American before they finally turned out of despair” to him, but archival evidence suggests that this was not, in fact, the case.47 After Stanton declined the directorship—he did participate in the Radio

Project as a researcher—Robert Lynd recommended Lazarsfeld to Cantril. Lazarsfeld and Cantril had known one another since 1933, not least through their work on Public Opinion Quarterly.

Lazarsfeld had many qualities—both intellectual and organizational—to recommend him for the position. As discussed in chapter 3, Lazarsfeld had been a Rockefeller Foundation

Fellow in 1933 and 1934. Indeed, it was in this capacity that he had become friends with prominent American social scientists such as Robert Lynd. Despite having held this position, however, Lazarsfeld was unknown to John Marshall.48 Further, Lazarsfeld had, through the

ÖWF, conducted a survey of radio-audience preferences and habits for RAVAG, the Austrian

46 Frank Nicholas Stanton, “A Critique of Present Methods and a New Plan for Studying Radio Listening Behavior” (The Ohio State University, 1935), viz., 90-189.

47 Lazarsfeld made this claim in an interview in the 1970s. Quoted in David E. Morrison, “The Beginning of Modern Mass Communication Research,” European Journal of Sociology 19, no. 2 (1978): 349.

48See Ibid.

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radio syndicate.49 Cantril was familiar with the RAVAG study and with Lazarsfeld’s work in

Vienna more generally.50 It is unsurprising that he would have found Lazarsfeld’s work consonant with his own. The methods and goals of the RAVAG study were remarkably similar to those of the incipient Radio Project. Like Cantril, Lazarsfeld documented who listened to the radio, when they listened to it, and, crucially, what content they liked—and disliked—in current broadcasts.51 More broadly, the premises and aims of Lazarsfeld’s early methodological writings accorded with the social-control-through-behaviorism paradigm developed by Lasswell and funded by Marshall. Although with a decidedly different political valence, the Austrian and the

Americans aimed to shape political views and overcome social antagonisms through the mobilization and manipulation of symbols and ideas. More prosaically, Lazarsfeld had much- needed experience building and directing research institutions in both Europe and the United

States.

This last asset very nearly became a liability. As Cantril had anticipated, Lazarsfeld was hesitant to leave his newly established research center at the University of Newark for the

Radio Project. Cantril worked hard to convince Lazarsfeld to accept the directorship, offering

Lazarsfeld the princely salary of $7,000 with an extra $1,000 for his wife and research associate,

Herta Herzog (this latter amount was later raised to $2,000).52 Other inducements were more immaterial. “Your title throughout the job,” Cantril wrote to Lazarsfeld in August 1937, “would

49 See Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Was wollen Sie hören?,” 1931, PFL Papers Series I, Box 34, Folder 20; “Hörerbefragung der RAVAG.”

50 Hadley Cantril to Paul F. Lazarsfeld, December 11, 1933, PFL Papers Series I, Box 28, Folder 8.

51 Lazarsfeld, “Was wollen Sie hören?”; “Hörerbefragung der RAVAG.”

52 Hadley Cantril to Paul F. Lazarsfeld, August 9, 1937, 3, Series I, Box 26, Folder 10, PFL Papers.

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be Research Associate in the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

Doesn’t that appeal to your bourgeois soul!”53 While these offers were likely compelling,

Lazarsfeld would not have accepted the position without the conviction that would it meet his intellectual requirements.54 Specifically, Lazarsfeld acceded after Cantril informed him that

“[t]he Rockefeller Foundation, through John Marshall, got quite excited about it [the proposal],” he wrote. The Foundation, he continued, “felt that it was a new type of project getting at some of the ‘why’ questions so long neglected.”55 As chapter 3 demonstrated, Lazarsfeld had long been keen to revive such questions, which had been excluded from contemporary American social science on methodological grounds.56 Cantril represented the Radio Project as an unparalleled opportunity to develop further methods for asking—and answering—why-questions.57

HUNTING FOR THE EUROPEAN APPROACH

On January 1, 1938, Lazarsfeld sent a memorandum to Cantril and Stanton outlining his aims for the Radio Project. Lazarsfeld wrote and edited multiple versions of the memorandum, ultimately titled “Plans and Problems,” both inserting material that indirectly referenced

Lasswell, Lynd, and Cantril and restructuring the document to bring out its affinities with

53 Ibid., 2.

54 On Lazarsfeld’s desire to shape his own legacy, see Pooley, “Fifteen Pages That Shook the Field: Personal Influence, Edward Shils, and the Remembered History of Mass Communication Research.”

55 Cantril to Lazarsfeld, August 9, 1937, 1.

56 Lazarsfeld, “The Psychological Aspect of Market Research”; Kornhauser and Lazarsfeld, Techniques of Market Research; and, especially, Lazarsfeld, “Art of Asking Why.”

57 For Lazarsfeld’s own—somewhat revisionist—account of his acceptance of Cantril’s offer, see Lazarsfeld, “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir,” 304–9.

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Marshall’s priorities.58 An unsubtle allusion to Lasswell’s Politics: Who Gets What, When, and

How in the first draft became, in later iterations, an explicit statement of the need for social control.59 Although technical matters were largely settled, he argued, social questions remained unanswered. “It is characteristic for today’s life,” Lazarsfeld wrote in the final draft of the memorandum, “in all fields that the technical side of knowledge and control is far ahead of its social side. Radio is no exception.”60 Given this problem, the goal of the Radio Project was unambiguous: the Rockefeller Foundation-funded researchers must “try to overcome the lag between the technical and social side of our knowledge.”61

Why did social research into broadcasts lag behind technical research into transmission?

Like Cantril, Lazarsfeld maintained that researchers had failed to ask the most pertinent questions about the “patterns of listening” in the United States or, put differently, about the

“actual effect which radio has upon different groups of listeners and on the service it could render them at its best.”62 Broadcasters had conducted “sporadic” research themselves and were largely successful in determining the size and composition of radio audiences.63 The Radio

58 See the multiple revisions in PFL Papers Series I, Box 26, Folder 11.

59 In the first draft, Lazarsfeld described the Radio Project’s aims as follows: In the past, the main concern was who should broadcast, when, and how. To whom one should broadcast, what, and why has since come to the foreground of general interest.” In a later iteration, the claim became: “Who should broadcast, when, and how is now under control. To whom one should broadcast, what, and why has since come to the foreground of general interest.” Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Draft of Program for Princeton Radio Research Project,” January 1, 1938, 1, 1a, emphasis original, PFL Papers Series I, Box 26, Folder 11.

60 Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Princeton Radio Project. Plans and Problems,” January 1, 1938, 1, PFL Papers Series I, Box 26, Folder 8.

61 Ibid.; cf. “Draft of Program for Princeton Radio Research Project,” 1a.

62 Lazarsfeld, “Plans and Problems,” 1–2.

63 For a penetrating account and critique of these methods, see Jenemann, Adorno in America, 47–104.

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Project, he wrote to Cantril and Stanton, would extend and revise these methods. Doing so, the memorandum made clear, would answer the questions Cantril had laid out as foundational in his proposal. In order to truly understand the patterns of listening, however, the Radio Project must ask why listeners tuned in to the radio. With these arguments, Lazarsfeld extended the critique of

American marketing research and social psychology he had been developing since his arrival in the United States. When charged with asking nose-counting questions, Lazarsfeld responded by insisting on the importance of asking why-questions.64

Lazarsfeld held that psychology could provide the tools necessary for understanding why audiences listened. To be sure, Lazarsfeld reassured Cantril and Stanton, the Radio Project did not endorse the “psychoanalytic stress laid upon the unconscious” but sought to “use the conscious knowledge which people have of their own experiences” in its research.65 Central to this method would be the methods of developmental psychology Lazarsfeld had learned in

Vienna and brought to the United States. Lazarsfeld did not explicitly reference his earlier work, but, given Cantril’s demonstrated familiarity with it, such a reference was likely unnecessary. In order to understand why individuals acted as they did—why they developed certain preferences, habits, and tastes—it was necessary to understand their “motives to action,” which, in turn, required knowing how the “nucleus of personality” evolved within the “total context” and changed at specific “breaking points.”66 As argued in earlier chapters, this approach, while

64 See the discussion of Lazarsfeld’s critique of American research in chapter 3 of the dissertation.

65 Lazarsfeld, “Plans and Problems,” 12, emphasis original.

66 See, inter alia, ÖWF, “Neue Wege”; “Gegenstand der Wirtschaftspsychologie”; “Diskussionsbemerkung”; Kornhauser and Lazarsfeld, Techniques of Market Research.

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thoroughly Viennese, nevertheless resonated with American paradigms.67 Lazarsfeld emphasized this connection in “Plans and Problems” by identifying the “total context” under examination not with subjects’ lives as Charlotte Bühler—and, indeed, Lazarsfeld himself—had done but with

“community” as elucidated by Robert Lynd.68

To reiterate: Lazarsfeld’s subtle insistence on the necessity of asking why-questions—not merely as a supplement but also as a precursor to who-, what-, when-, and how-questions— followed from the general critique of American research methods he had developed in the half- decade period since his arrival in the United States. But, in “Plans and Problems,” Lazarsfeld went further, proposing a different reason for the importance of asking why audiences listened to the radio. Above, Lazarsfeld’s emphasis on the lag of social knowledge of radio broadcasts behind technical knowledge of radio transmissions was introduced. This claim became central to

“Plans and Problems,” undergirding Lazarsfeld’s insistence on the necessity of developing new methods—not only developmental-psychological approaches but also panel studies, factor analyses, “radio biographies,” and classificatory schemes—that would enable the transition

“from technical to social knowledge.”69 More generally, however, Lazarsfeld argued that asking why-questions was the only real protection against radio research sliding back into the scientific lag from which these methods emancipated it. Technology developed so quickly, Lazarsfeld held, that only the commitment to a comprehensive, systematic research approach could ensure more-than-momentary relevance:

67 See Paul Lazarsfeld, “From Vienna to Columbia,” Columbia Forum 12, no. 2 (1969): 31–36; “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir”; Fleck, A Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences, chap. 6.

68 See Lazarsfeld’s handwritten addition to the text, “Plans and Problems,” 11.

69 Ibid., 1, 4–5, 9–13.

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If we learn more details about the processes by which radio affects people and social institutions, then, later on, our knowledge and our techniques might be applied to changed conditions. The kind of questions pertaining here, are equally formulated in many different phrases. Research ought to find out why things happen, what the basic motivations of people are, and so on. Irrespective of the word, we shall try to attack this most difficult sector of any social research proposition. So little common understanding does exist here, that a theoretical background must first be gained. One of our monographs will consist of a scrutiny of all the theories and techniques available for studying motivation in social research, with particular attention paid to radio.70

Cantril asserted that new methods would lead social-scientific research into the radio forward;

Lazarsfeld, without disputing this assertion, claimed that these new methods would also prevent the discipline from sliding backward.

Lazarsfeld held that such questions required a ‘“European approach’” to social research.

As chapter 3 showed, Lazarsfeld had made such claims before. Upon his arrival in the United

States, Lazarsfeld had begun to emphasize a difference between “European” social research and

“American” social science and, further, to represent himself as a thoroughly “European” researcher. The chapter argued that Lazarsfeld used this distinction and representation in order to establish himself as an expert “methodologist” able to modernize American social science, which, in the view of many of its practitioners, lagged behind its European counterpart. It is unclear why Lazarsfeld did not position himself as a specialist in the “European approach” the

Radio Project required. Perhaps the basis for Lazarsfeld’s claim to the directorship of the Radio

Project—his study of Austrian radio-listening, which relied upon the methods of American psychologists such as L. L. Thurstone—precluded him from doing so.71 More likely, the

70 Ibid., 8–9.

71 See Lazarsfeld, “Was wollen Sie hören?”; “Hörerbefragung der RAVAG.” It will be recalled from above that Cantril was familiar with this study and justified his recruitment of Lazarsfeld upon it.

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proposed target of the “European approach”—music broadcast over the radio—may have been too far from Lazarsfeld’s areas of competence.

In order to find a scholar versed in the European approach, Lazarsfeld turned to the

Institute for Social Research—specifically to Theodor W. Adorno. At this time, in the mid-to- late-1930s, Adorno was not yet the prominent critical theorist he would later become. Indeed, despite his remarkable commentaries on contemporary philosophy, he was likely better known as a musicologist and critic. Born into a musical family, Adorno had, as a young adult, studied composition in Austria with members of the Second Viennese School—specifically, with Alban

Berg. In 1925, Adorno began to publish essays on the School’s twelve-tone compositions for the avant-garde journal Musikblätter des Anbruch; in 1929 he became one of the journal’s editors.

Soon after taking up this position, Adorno effectuated a “radical reorganization” of Anbruch, introducing a feature on “mechanical music” that analyzed the record industry, gramophones, film scores, ‘talkies,’ and radio broadcasts. He further encouraged the journal to pay attention to

“light” music and kitsch, which, he argued, had both regressive and emancipatory tendencies.72

Adorno refined these points in writings on music published in the Zeitschrift. In “On the Social

Situation of Music” (1932), he traced the emergence of music as a commodity and argued that this reified product could no longer reflect the disjunction between individual and society; only twelve-tone music retained emancipatory potential.73 In “On Jazz” (1936), Adorno analyzed

72 On Adorno’s career as a music critic in Vienna, see Thomas Y. Levin and Michael von der Linn, “Elements of a Radio Theory: Adorno and the Princeton Radio Research Project,” The Musical Quarterly 78, no. 2 (1994): 316; Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 110–14; Heinz Steinert, Adorno in Wien: über die (Un-)Möglichkeit von Kunst, Kultur und Befreiung (Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1989).

73 Theodor W. Adorno, “Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 1 (1932): 103–24.

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swing music as a duplicitous commodity. Promising its listeners enjoyment and mastery—an illusion generated through improvisation—jazz music in fact compelled obedience.74

Although unlikely, Lazarsfeld and Adorno may have met in interwar Vienna.75 What is certain, however, is that the two men knew one another by reputation by the mid-1930s. In

October 1936, Adorno wrote to Horkheimer, asking who had been assigned to review Carl

Gustav Hempel and Peter Oppenheim’s Studies in the Logic of Explanation (1936), a pioneering work of logical empiricism. Horkheimer responded that Lazarsfeld would be reviewing the text, but, instead of praising the latter’s acumen, Horkheimer framed the assignment as an instrumental decision: Lazarsfeld, Horkheimer explained to Adorno, could prove useful by introducing the Institute’s work and views their new American colleagues.76 But, when publication of Lazarsfeld’s essay was delayed by the need to correct its error-filled prose,

Adorno wryly noted the irony: “Incidentally, [it is] characteristic that the men, who certainly speak worse English than we do, write in English, adjusting themselves to the new “juste milieu” very quickly—out of sheer zeal!”77

Adorno did not confine his critique to Lazarsfeld. While spending time at the Paris offices of the Institute, Adorno reported to Horkheimer, he met Hilde Weiss, who was then earning a second graduate degree, under the direction of Célestin Bouglé, on the subject of

74 Theodor W. Adorno, “Über Jazz,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5 (1936): 235–63.

75 Detlev Claussen suggests that this may be the case. See One Last Genius, 178. Lazarsfeld himself later insisted that he did not meet “any of the Horkheimer group” while in Europe, although he did work for them. It should be noted, however, that the memoir in which Lazarsfeld made this claim was, as Claussen himself recognized, a highly polemical document intended, in part, to distance himself from Adorno. See Lazarsfeld, “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir,” 275.

76 Horkheimer to Adorno, October 22, 1936 in Adorno and Horkheimer, Briefe und Briefwechsel, 1994, 1:192–98, viz.195.

77 Horkheimer to Adorno, May 12, 1937 in ibid., 1:351–60, at 359.

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Marx’s innovative social-scientific survey of French workers. Adorno’s view of Weiss was dim; his comment to Horkheimer withering: “I met Hilde Weiss in the office [of the Institute]: in terms of institutional politics, she is unpresentable.”78 Horkheimer, who, a year earlier, had corresponded with Bouglé about Weiss and expressed concern over the state of her research funding, seemed surprised, confused, and, perhaps, irritated to hear of Weiss’ presence at the

Paris offices of the Institute. “I have no idea why Weiss would regularly be in the office,” he wrote to Adorno. “Officially, she no longer has the slightest thing to do with [the Institute].”79

Adorno kept his critique of Lazarsfeld up throughout 1937. First in April and then in

September, Adorno wrote to Walter Benjamin, criticizing Lazarsfeld as a positivist and a substandard contributor to the Zeitschrift. Lazarsfeld and Adorno finally met in person at the

International Congress of Philosophy in Paris in August. Adorno, summarizing the events in a letter to Horkheimer, complained that, during a six-hour meeting with Lazarsfeld and major positivist philosophers—Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, Hans Frank, and Hempel—Lazarsfeld did not speak a single word. “His soul,” Adorno wrote, “was apparently torn apart by the conflict between duty and inclination,” by, that is, his connection to the critical theorists and his affinity for the positivists.80

78 Adorno to Horkheimer, October 12, 1936 in Horkheimer, Horkheimer GS, 1985, 15:666.

79 Horkheimer to Adorno, October 22, 1936 in ibid., 15:688. For the correspondence with Bouglé, see Bouglé to Horkheimer, January 29, 1935 and Horkheimer to Bouglé, February 15, 1935 in ibid., 307-309, 316-318, respectively.

80 Adorno to Horkheimer, August 7, 1937 in Adorno and Horkheimer, Briefe und Briefwechsel, 1994, 1:389–96, at 390.

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Lazarsfeld, by contrast, held Adorno in high regard. Writing to Adorno in November

1937, he praised the critic’s five-year-old essay, “On the Social Situation of Music.”81 Indeed, it was on the strength of the essay that Lazarsfeld offered Adorno a position in the Princeton Radio

Research Project, organizing a subsidiary study on radio music. This “musical section,”

Lazarsfeld informed Adorno, would be the “hunting ground for the ‘European approach.’ By that

I mean two things,” he continued, “a more theoretical attitude toward the research problem, and a more pessimistic attitude toward an instrument of technical progress.”82 In Lazarsfeld’s view,

Adorno’s European approach would counterbalance what might be presumed to be an American approach: an unrestrained enthusiasm for scientific methods and pursuit of social control. But

Lazarsfeld did not intend to except Adorno from empirical research. As he wrote to Adorno in the fall of 1937:

Our project definitely deals with empirical research. But I am convinced, the same as you are, that fact-finding can be extremely improved by extensive preliminary theoretical thinking. Taking, for instance, the papers that you wrote in the Institute’s magazine, I might put the situation in the following terms: It is exactly this kind of thing which we shall expect from you, but it has to be driven two steps further:

(1) Toward an empirical research problem.

(2) Toward an actual execution of the field work.83

Adorno did not seem concerned by this stipulation. In his response, Adorno assured Lazarsfeld that his “theoretical attitude does not incorporate any aversion to empirical research. On the

81 Christian Fleck maintains that Lazarsfeld likely did not know about Adorno’s “On Jazz,” as it had been published pseudonymously as the work of “Hetkor Rottweiler.” See Fleck, A Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences, 176.

82 Quoted in Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 238.

83 Quoted in ibid.

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contrary, the concept of ‘experience,’ taken in the very precise sense, is moving closer and closer to the center of my thinking.” Referencing the work his Institute colleagues, Adorno wrote that

“[t]here is an interrelationship between theory and empirical research which we call the dialectical method.”84 Adorno, this is to say, affirmed Lazarsfeld’s view that the sought-for

European approach entailed empirical research.

Adorno hesitated to accept Lazarsfeld’s offer, but not because he was being asked to conduct empirical social research. Rather, his considerations turned on personal and intellectual matters. As his report to Horkheimer in August 1937 suggested, Adorno had come to criticize

Lazarsfeld as both a scholar and as a person. His letters to Horkheimer weighing the possibility of accepting the position at the Radio Project were replete with worries that Lazarsfeld might be jealous of his position within the Institute and his proximity to Horkheimer. Was there a chance, he asked Horkheimer, that Lazarsfeld might be planning to humiliate him by employing him as a lowly assistant?85 Moreover, as Adorno wrote to Benjamin in November, leaving the United

Kingdom would remove him from the “indescribable peace” he had found at Oxford University, where, since 1934, he had been an “advanced student.”86 Further still, relocating to the United

States would take Adorno far from Europe—and, therefore, from his parents and from

Benjamin.87

84 Quoted in ibid.

85 Adorno to Horkheimer, November 2, 1937 in Briefe und Briefwechsel, 1994, 1:462–67.

86 On Adorno’s time in Oxford, see Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 187–201. For his description of the university as a place of “indescribable peace,” see his letter to Ernst Krenk, quoted in ibid., 193.

87 See Adorno’s letter to Benjamin of December 27, 1937 in Adorno and Benjamin Complete Correspondence, 227– 32.

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But Lazarsfeld’s offer had much to recommend it. Adorno had cherished the hope of securing a permanent position at the Institute since 1934, but Horkheimer, citing financial limitations, repeatedly informed him that this was not possible. Lazarsfeld’s offer solved this problem: by offering Adorno a half-time position, the Radio Project relieved the Institute of the burden of paying him a full-time salary. 88 There were intellectual benefits, too. Horkheimer wrote to Adorno in the fall of 1937, both assuaging Adorno’s fears that Lazarsfeld would subordinate him and suggesting that the Radio Project might be intellectually stimulating. By studying radio music, Horkheimer suggested, Adorno might be able to continue exploring the aesthetic and social aspects of both “serious” and “light” music that appeared in his contributions to Anbruch and the Zeitschrift.89 Ultimately, it was the prospect of collaboration with

Horkheimer that induced Adorno to accept the position. “The only partial consolation to me,” he wrote to Benjamin of the impending relocation, “is the prospect that I shall be able to start collaborating with Max [Horkheimer] on his hopefully crucial work on dialectal materialism.”90

This dialectical materialism, Adorno had made clear in his letter to Lazarsfeld, entailed empirical research.

ADORNO’S MOST DANGEROUS THESIS

Although doubtless exaggerated in his later recollections, Adorno’s first experience with the Radio Project were certainly jarring. Even before he departed from the United Kingdom for

New York City in February 1938, Adorno had written to Horkheimer that a memorandum sent

88 On this dimension of Lazarsfeld’s offer, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 188.

89 Horkheimer to Adorno, October 20, 1937 in Briefe und Briefwechsel, 1994, 1:441–42.

90 Adorno to Benjamin, December 27, 1937 in Adorno and Benjamin Complete Correspondence, 227–32, at 228.

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by Lazarsfeld—likely a version of “Plans and Problems”—was a “considerable convolute.”91

Resonant with Benjaminian overtones, this phrase likely voiced Adorno’s lingering suspicions about his new position.92 When, in March 1938, Adorno and Horkheimer met to discuss the

Radio Project, Adorno expressed surprise and confusion about the fact that his colleagues seemed to be treating listeners’ reactions as constant and broadcasters’ programming as variable.93 Lazarsfeld, Cantril, and Stanton were indeed conducting such studies. In February, the three researchers had met with Gordon Allport in an attempt to develop a framework in which

Allport’s attitude tests and Lazarsfeld’s panel studies could be combined to determine the appeal of particular radio programs to individuals and groups.94 Armed with such knowledge, broadcasters could improve their programming, using educational and informative broadcasts to create and sustain “autonomous interests” among “those large masses of the population who have had no opportunity to express or improve their latent interests and capacities.”95 To

Horkheimer and Adorno, who theorized that broadcasts and preferences were locked together in

91 Adorno to Horkheimer, January 19, 1938 in Briefe und Briefwechsel, 1994, 2:12–16, at 16.

92 Benjamin referred to the individual items in his sprawling, incomplete study of the nineteenth-century Parisian cityscape and bourgeois interiority as “convolutes.” See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 29–826.

93 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “Ein Methodenproblem des ‘Radio Research Project,’” in Max Horkheimer Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 12, 14 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1985), 431–35. For the studies to which Adorno likely referred, see Hadley Cantril to Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Frank Stanton, “Re: Conference with Allport,” February 21, 1938, 2–3, PFL Papers Series I, Box 26, Folder 7; cf. Paul F. Lazarsfeld to Hadley Cantril and Frank Stanton, “Re: Panel Study,” Memorandum, May 12, 1938, PFL Papers Series I, Box 26, Folder 8.

94 Cantril to Lazarsfeld and Stanton, “Re: Conference with Allport”; cf. Lazarsfeld to Cantril and Stanton, “Re: Panel Study.”

95 Cantril to Lazarsfeld and Stanton, “Re: Conference with Allport,” 2–3.

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a “pre-established harmony” engendered by the economic imperatives of modern capitalism, such research made little sense.96

Despite any reservations, Adorno spent the spring of 1938 drafting a memorandum outlining the theoretical and, more importantly, methodological basis for his work for the Radio

Project. In the document, Adorno articulated established Institute positions. He inveighed, for example, against the scholarly division of labor—a claim central to the Institute’s program of a critical theory of society. Adorno also argued for conducting research through the interpretation of particular instances of experience instead of through the analysis of evidence in the aggregate:

The usual positivist assertion, however, insisting that generalizations should not be made on the basis of individual experiences but that the investigator should rather try to get as many cases as possible and only then try to induce general rules, is based upon the fallacious assumption that the individual is absolutely ‘individual’ and not the product of non-individual forces.97

To be sure, this claim followed from the axioms and arguments of the Institute’s incipient critical theory. But Adorno did not invoke these ideas. Instead, he subtly suggested that Lasswell’s conception of the radio as a means of controlling mass society served as the foundation for this claim. “Here,” Adorno wrote, “is the chief viewpoint of the theory which we hope to verify by individual inquires: radio is to be regarded as an instrument influencing and ruling the masses.”98

At Lazarsfeld’s urging, Adorno presented this memorandum to his new colleagues in

March 1938. Between March and June, Adorno drafted a 150-page memorandum that developed these theses into an extensive program of musicological and social research into the phenomenon

96 Horkheimer and Adorno, “Ein Methodenproblem des ‘Radio Research Project.’”

97 Theodor W. Adorno, “Theses about the Idea and Form of Collaboration of the Princeton Radio Research Project,” in Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory, ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity, 2009), 477.

98 Ibid., 478.

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of radio music. Across two chapters, “Music in Radio” elaborated a number of arguments about the interconnection among changes in society, music, and individuality. In keeping with the balance of the “Theses on Collaboration,” attention was given to both the critique of existing empirical techniques and the description of future research projects. To anticipate, Adorno argued that the empirical approach of the Radio Project was ultimately self-defeating:

Lazarsfeld, Cantril, and the other researchers were so focused on the development of neutral, scientific methods for the observation of individual experience that they had missed the erosion of both individuality and experience. Put simply, Adorno held that, its own assertions to the contrary notwithstanding, empirical research lagged behind empirical reality.

Adorno maintained that studying the means of radio transmissions was as important as analyzing the content of radio broadcasts. In order to examine both aspects independently and to understand their combination in the “unity” of the “radio experience,” Adorno deployed a method he called “physiognomics.”99 Just as the eighteenth-century science of physiognomy studied facial expressions in order to discover the personality behind them, so twentieth-century radio physiognomics examined the “expressions” of the radio “voice” in order to discover the unified “personality” of social, technological, and psychological components behind it.100

Physiognomics, Adorno argued, revealed the poor state of radio technology. Neither transmitters nor receivers were capable of reproducing compositions in true fidelity. Technical limitations might, for instance, exaggerate the bass at the expense of the treble. Listeners often responded to such distortions of frequency by distorting dynamics, increasing the volume for some portions of

99 On the varieties of physiognomy in Adorno’s own time, see Matthias Uecker, “The Face of the Weimar Republic Photography, Physiognomy, and Propaganda in Weimar Germany,” Monatshefte 99, no. 4 (2007): 469–84.

100 Adorno, “Music in Radio,” 16-17,38-39; cf. Theodor W. Adorno, “Radio Physiognomics,” in Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory, ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Malden, MA: Polity, 2009), viz., 65-74.

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the broadcast and decreasing it for others.101 As he made clear in an unpublished essay on the subject of physiognomics, Adorno did not view such changes as trivial:

One of the chief characteristics of the symphonic style of Beethoven is a preference for very short and very pregnant motifs impressed upon the mind of the listener by an unabating intensity of presentation. The best known example is the opening bars of the Fifth Symphony. This emphatic manner of presentation requires a strength of sound that gives the distinct effect of exposing the symphonic material affirmatively. As soon as this strength is tuned down, these motifs lose much of that meaning. The importance of the material is no longer underlined. Hence the stubborn repetition —of the rhythm of the initial motif of the Fifth Symphony, for example—becomes utterly senseless. The intensity of musical “statement,” which is so important for the impressiveness of the symphonic movement, is lost as soon as it is lowered to the acoustic conditions of a private room. But it is only this intensity which makes allowance for the excessive simplicity of texture in some of Beethoven's symphonies, a simplicity which otherwise touches the borders of futility.102

Adorno called this process “musical decomposition” or, more frequently, “musical atomization.”

And, he argued, although listeners who first encountered music in the concert halls for which it was written might be able to maintain their ability to truly hear “serious music,” those in the new

“radio generation” would suffer from a “regression of hearing” that would render them unable to hear anything but musical atoms.103

Expanding this formal analysis into a sociological and economic interpretation, Adorno argued that capitalism had turned the regression of hearing to its advantage. Although the composition of music had not yet been regimented into the mass-production apparatus of modern capitalism, the transmission of songs most certainly had. American broadcasters used their monopoly over the airwaves to “plug” those songs made of recycled musical atoms, for these

101 Adorno, “Music in Radio,” 29–30.

102 Adorno, “Radio Physiognomics,” 54.

103 Adorno, “Music in Radio,” 69–71, 93–95; cf. Theodor W. Adorno, “Über den Fetishcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 7 (1938): 321–56.

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“hits” satisfied audiences and, thus, brought in revenue. This “pre-established harmony” between broadcasters and audiences induced composers to standardize their works.104 But, Adorno argued, these standardized compositions—like all capitalist commodities—must mask their essential sameness behind a veneer of difference in order to attract consumers’ attention.

Adorno, writing in reference to jazz, in particular, described this dynamic:

Today commodities have a chance for success as luxury commodities only if the buyer can be made to forget the fact that they are commodities. The must masquerade as unconscious and vital, so that even the perfectly readymade product furnished to the potential customer entirely without his intervention must still appear as something very close not only to his wants, but to an ideal of unmechanized life; and his luxury expenditures are to enable him to retreat into this ideal of unmechanized life, as [Thorstein] Veblen, particularly, pointed out.105

Whether listening to the Columbia Broadcasting Service (CBS) or the National Broadcasting

Corporation (NBC) to hear the latest performances of Irving Berlin or Guy Lombardo, audiences were sure to hear the same tunes over and over again, their essential sameness masked by a veneer of difference. “The standardization of production in this field, as in most others goes so far that the listener has virtually no choice,” Adorno later wrote. “Products are forced upon him.

His freedom has ceased to exist.”106

Although this argument could be productively analyzed in connection to the Institute’s evolving theory of capitalist society and critique of its attendant culture industry, more important to the present discussion are its specific, pointed implications for the empirical techniques used in the Radio Project. Under Lazarsfeld, the Radio Project researchers had focused on the

104 Adorno, “Music in Radio,” 69–71.

105 Ibid., 75–76.

106 Theodor W. Adorno, “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” The Kenyon Review 7, no. 2 (1945): 216; “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” in Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory, ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Malden, MA: Polity, 2009), 141.

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development of tools and metrics for the accurate measurement of audiences’ preferences. That the Radio Project moved in this direction was far from surprising: Lazarsfeld had sought to determine listener preferences in his study for RAVAG and had explicitly written, in “Plans and

Problems,” that the Radio Project would extend and improve commercial broadcasters’ own methods for studying audiences—methods aimed primarily at gauging listeners’ preferences.

Working with Stanton, Lazarsfeld developed a mechanical device for recording audiences’

“likes” and “dislikes” in real time: the Lazarsfeld-Stanton Program Analyzer (figure 4.2).107

Figure 4.2: Sample Data Produced by the Lazarsfeld-Stanton Program Analyzer. Reproduced from Peterman, "The 'Program Analyzer,'" 733.

107 For an academic treatment of the Lazarsfeld-Stanton Program Analyzer, see J. N. Peterman, “The ‘Program Analyzer’: A New Technique in Studying Liked and Disliked Items in Radio Programs,” Journal of Applied Psychology, Progress in Radio Research, 24, no. 6 (December 1940): 728–41, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0056834. The device enjoyed widespread approval among the general public, who hailed it as a remarkable invention. See, e.g., “Radio: What Do They Like?,” Time 40, no. 12 (June 29, 1942): 54; Robert Lewis Taylor, “Let’s Find Out,” The New Yorker, January 18, 1947, viz., 35-36.

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“Music in Radio” questioned the analyzer—which Adorno dismissively referred to as

“that machine”—and the paradigm behind it.108 Given the essential sameness of all standardized radio music, individuals’ claimed preferences lacked both validity and meaning. Subjects could not articulate their preferences because, quite simply, they could not have preferences. Focused to exclusion on the development and refinement of tools—both material, like the Lazarsfeld-

Stanton Program Analyzer, and immaterial, like the classificatory schemas—for the measurement of preferences, the Radio Project researchers were unable to see the erosion of the foundation for these preferences.109

“Music in Radio” did not content itself with this exposition of consumer capitalism and concomitant critique of empirical research techniques and tools. In keeping with the Institute’s developing conception of critical theory, Adorno took as axiomatic the connection between cultural products and social forces. Indeed, radio, Adorno wrote, “may be regarded as one of the most outspoken and straightforward instruments at the disposal of present-day society and which is governed by the same forces behind those other ‘influences.’”110 According to Adorno, radio was not an independent instrument that stood apart from and could be used to direct society but was itself a product of society. “Perhaps what matters most in radio is not so much what influence it exercises upon people,” Adorno continued “as it is how the general mechanism of society which affects people everywhere shows itself in a new tool in a very distinct and definite

108 On Adorno’s reaction to the Program Analyzer, see Jenemann, Adorno in America, 25–26. Lazarsfeld and Stanton, by contrast, called the Program Analyzer “Little Annie.”

109 Adorno, “Music in Radio,” 98–100. Adorno’s critique could be understood as an indictment of Lazarsfeld’s research program more generally. After all, Lazarsfeld had, while leading the ÖWF, undertaken numerous studies of consumer preferences. Such a view would align with Adorno’s critique of Marie Jahoda, expressed in a letter to Horkheimer in November 1937 in Briefe und Briefwechsel, 1994, 1:475–76. On the role of “paper tools” in the social sciences, see Isaac, “Tool Shock.”

110 Adorno, “Music in Radio,” 99.

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way.”111 Although this argument ran against the hopes of Lasswell, Marshall, and, in some moments, Lazarsfeld, it accorded with the latter’s exhortation to Adorno that he adopt a “more pessimistic attitude toward an instrument of technical progress.”112

Adorno identified multiple instances of the intersection of radio music and contemporary society. Once decomposed into musical atoms, “serious music” revealed itself to be a commodity like any other. Connoisseurs’ fetishization of famous conductors, unique instruments, and expensive radios echoed the fetishization of any other “luxury commodities.” Possessing and exchanging musical commodities—whether by showing off arcane knowledge or humming a tune from a symphonic composition—compensated for the spiritual privations of alienated existence.113 Much as Mirra Komarovsky had argued about the causes of isolation caused by joblessness in Unemployed Man, Adorno emphasized the lack of real solidarity and the concomitant false sense of community in radio-listening: when isolated listeners spread across the United States imagined themselves to be participating in a common audience, they reproduced the false solidarity of alienated workers.114 For Adorno, these and other examples were not accidental but instances of a general principle: the interwoven nature of culture and society. To be sure, Adorno drew such ideas from the arguments of his fellow critical theorists and, further, from programmatic descriptions of critical theory.115 But it is also important to

111 Ibid.

112 Quoted in Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 238.

113 Adorno, “Music in Radio,” 69–70, 93–95, 126–27; cf. Theodor W. Adorno, “Analytical Study of the NBC Music Appreciation Hour,” in Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory, ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity, 2009), 164–215.

114 Adorno, “Music in Radio,” 33–34; cf. Adorno, “Radio Physiognomics.”

115 See, e.g., Horkheimer, “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research”; “Traditional and Critical Theory.”

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recall in this context the affinity for dialectical materialism Adorno claimed in his letter to

Lazarsfeld in the fall of 1937. In “Music in Radio,” Adorno developed this claim further—and in the direction set by critical theory. Just as the “serious music” of the nineteenth century—both symphonic works performed in concert halls and chamber pieces performed in intimate settings—had shaped the introspective, discriminating bourgeois individual, so the radio music of the mid-twentieth century at once reflected and furthered the creation of the alienated, standardized monad. “This tendency,” Adorno wrote, “of ‘de-individualization’ is complementary to that of ‘individualization’ and as time goes on it becomes more apparent that this ‘individualization’ is merely a veneer.”116

The concatenation of consumer-capitalist social and economic forces, Adorno argued, replaced the real agency of true individuals with the “pseudo-activity” of standardized subjects.

Made anxious by the vague sense that they were beholden to “haunting or ghost-like” forces held by “anonymous powers,” these subjects undertook action—ultimately impotent—intended to both reclaim and prove their identity and agency. Adorno illustrated the concept of pseudo- activity with the figure of the Bastler, the archetypal German tinkerer and hobbyist. In the context of the radio, the Bastler built his own receiver and mastered the adjustment of all the dials and knobs.117 By controlling the qualities of the sound emanating from the radio, the

Bastler hoped to prove that he controlled the forces behind it. Adorno noted the similarities

116 Adorno, “Music in Radio,” 34.

117 Ibid., 117.

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between the Bastler and other hobbyists—like the auto enthusiasts who knew the qualities of different grades of gasoline—and experts—like the jazz connoisseur.118

Pseudo-activity could become destructive. After all, annihilating a phenomenon demonstrated an unsurpassable control over it. In the case of listening to radio, destruction amounted to switching off the device. As Adorno described it: “It is the specifically petit bourgeois attitude of protest; ‘What the hell! I can’t stand this stuff any longer!’ – and he switches off the station because he doesn’t have the strength to face a disagreeable experience.”

Similar, Adorno argued, is the common situation in which the disgruntled customer slams the phone receiver back into its cradle, cutting off a conversation with a retailer.119 More overtly dangerous was the troublemaker who “tickles the gas jet to make the gas director laugh.”

According to Adorno, this proverbial figure takes destructive delight in covering up the mains feeding gas-powered stoves and lights, potentially precipitating an explosion.120 In these cases, the subject “avenges himself” upon the representative of the anonymous forces without, however, actually effectuating any real change.121 But, Adorno argued, the real danger of pseudo-activity followed not from its manifest nihilism but from its inherent optimism. “Through their pseudo-activity,” he wrote, “people want to alter conditions; but they only conceal them, gaining a false sort of satisfaction. In the long run they help only to preserve the very conditions

118 For Adorno’s discussion of the similarities and differences between the Bastler and the person who has a “knack” for jazz, see ibid., 121–22. For the connection of the Bastler to the auto enthusiast, see Adorno, “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” 1945, 217.

119 Adorno, “Music in Radio,” 118.

120 Ibid., 16–17.

121 Ibid., 16, 122–25.

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which ought to be altered.” As a form of action in which people “behave as if they were free,” pseudo-activity only further strengthened the forces by which they were “strictly confined.”122

“Music in Radio” identified the Radio Project’s proposals for reform as instances of pseudo-activity:

We believe that most attempts made by radio to “activate” the listener belong to that sphere of pseudo-activity. Here is one example: the amateur orchestra in which the orchestra broadcasts the music and the amateur listeners at home can fit in the noises they make themselves. This is plainly a pseudo-activity insofar as the activated listener actually has no control over the real orchestra because he cannot be heard by it. Instead of that the lone amateur derives only a false narcissistic pleasure from his belief that he is able to play under a famous conductor and along with [illegible—possibly “hits”]. No doubt he is even unable fully to realize how much he necessarily falls behind the standard achieved by the unseen orchestra with which he has joined.123

But Adorno did not merely critique this and other attempts to reform radio programs as instances of pseudo-activity. Instead, he argued that the reformist impulse as such was an embodiment of pseudo-activity. Educators and reformers had correctly identified the problems of radio programs—the passivity and alienation of the listener—but had mistakenly thought that these deficiencies could be overcome within the current social, economic, and technological system:”

Every idea of ambitious radio reform under present day conditions must be renounced, not only because it would prove unrealizable in the face of existing conditions of production, but also because it would be disastrous even if it could obtain limited success within this framework.”124

As in other forms of pseudo-activity, the danger of radio reform followed from the partial realization of its intentions: just as the Bastler, having mastered the technical apparatus of the

122 Ibid., 124, emphasis original.

123 Ibid., 123.

124 Ibid., 136.

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radio receiver, imagines himself to be free, so would the reformers, having altered the content of radio programs, consider society to be in control. In both cases, the subjective experience of freedom masked deeper, stronger constraints. “Music in Radio” adopted, in the main, an even- handed tone in its analysis of the Radio Project, but in its discussion of the project’s proposed reforms, the memorandum was explicitly and unequivocally critical. Any effort to reform radio broadcasts, Adorno wrote, was nothing short of “cheap Utopianism [sic].”125

To summarize: the Princeton Radio Research Project studies were not—could not— accomplishing the task they set for themselves. Measurements of listener preferences did not provide researchers with evidence about radio audiences, broadcasts, or the link between the two.

Instead, these projects were caught in self-defeating contradiction. Although they understood themselves to be measuring variation in psychological and behavioral responses (in the form of listeners’ habits and preferences) caused by changes in stimuli (in the form of radio broadcasts), the stimuli were, in fact, unalterable. Put in simpler terms, the Radio Project researchers could not be observing changes in the dependent variable as a result of changes in the independent variable because this independent variable itself was incapable of change. At worst, these empirical studies participated in the ideology of late capitalism. Because it purported to study variation in cultural products, the Radio Project supported the veneer of difference that masked the essential sameness of commodities. Indeed, by virtue of its claim to scientific objectivity, the study sanctified this ideological appearance. Lazarsfeld, Cantril, and their colleagues, this is to say, ratified capitalism’s claim of a meaningful difference between the programs of CBS and

NBC, between the music of Guy Lombardo and Irving Berlin. By so doing, the Radio Project

125 Ibid.

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participated in the pseudo-activity of asserting agency and claiming individuality in the social and economic system that prohibited them.

Although Adorno did not acknowledge the connection, such critiques continued and extended the methodological debates within and between the ÖWF and the Institute. Adorno’s charge of myopia within the Radio Project, for example, echoed the ÖWF’s own critique of

Marienthal for becoming entangled in its own theoretical concepts.126 This critique, in turn, became the foundation for Leichter and Lazarsfeld’s negative assessment of Fromm’s method of

“structural statistics” in Authority and the Family.127 Rather than adopt this view, however,

Adorno indirectly argued that the steps Lazarsfeld and Komarovsky had described in their methodological writings to correct for these errors had been insufficient. If anything, Adorno charged, Lazarsfeld’s ambitious program of reforming American research—by encouraging the asking and answering of why-questions—had further obscured the technical errors and methodological implications of social psychology.

How—if not through reform of radio programs—did Adorno recommend improving the radio? Quite simply, radio could not be improved without fundamentally altering the economic and social forces operating on and through it. Could its alienating, standardizing, reifying effects on the human subject be overcome? Again: very little could be done. Adorno named this pessimism the “most dangerous thesis.” “The statement of one of the outstanding pianists of our day,” Adorno wrote at the conclusion of “Music in Radio,” “who, in a discussion of deterioration of ‘classical music,’ was to the effect that, in his opinion, one should even help deterioration, and

126 See Lazarsfeld, “Principles of Sociography.” As was noted above, “Principles” may have been written sometime in the 1930s—closer to the period of Adorno and Lazarsfeld’s work on the Radio Project.

127 See Leichter and Lazarsfeld, “Erhebung bei Jugendlichen über Autorität und Familie.”

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shove something which is already falling, in order to make room for something new.” Although

Adorno refused to endorse this thesis fully—claiming that it could well lead to “blunt and paradoxical barbarism”—he maintained that it “deserves close attention” from the researchers of the Radio Project.128

What, exactly, was falling? What needed to be pushed? Contrary to expectations, Adorno held that it was not radio but music that was deteriorating. Across “Music in Radio,” Adorno emphasized that his critiques were not aimed at the evolution of radio per se but at the development of this new medium within the cultural framework of earlier times.129 Building on the work of Benjamin, for instance, Adorno singled out the effects of radio transmission on the

“aura” of serious compositions: even as the transmission degraded that which was unique and spectacular in the performance—its aura—it nevertheless insisted upon the continued existence of these aspects. Radio broadcasters and reformers erred, the most dangerous thesis suggested, in their attempts to save this already-falling aura; it would be far better to recognize the truth of its collapse and, even, to give it another push.130 Freed from the burden of squaring the circle of serious-music broadcasts, composers could write new pieces adapted to the new medium itself.

Inventions like the Theremin, Sphärophon, Hammond organ, and Miessner instruments would make it possible to escape the composition-broadcast contradiction altogether: “The idea is that we should no longer ‘broadcast over the radio’ but ‘play on the radio’ in the same sense that one plays a violin.” Electric wires would take the place of strings, radio receivers would replace

128 Adorno, “Music in Radio,” 158.

129 See Adorno’s discussion in ibid., 150.

130 Ibid., 32–33, 160.

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resonant bodies, and the home would supersede the concert hall.131 Such music would be attuned not to the social and economic forces of nineteenth-century market-exchange capitalism but to the conditions of twentieth-century consumer capitalism. Put in terms familiar to his colleagues at the Radio Project, Adorno’s argument was that the distance lag modern economic, social, and technological conditions and current artistic creations and forms must be overcome.

Empirical research, according to “Music in Radio,” likewise suffered from—and could overcome—the problem of lag. As proposed by Cantril and directed by Lazarsfeld, the Princeton

Radio Research Project was out of step with current economic, social, cultural, and technological positions. Its members maintained that their experiments relied on and contributed to cutting- edge methods for researching individuals and their preferences. With tools such as the

Lazarsfeld-Stanton Program Analyzer, the Radio Project researchers asserted their ability to accurately capture and faithfully reproduce the evidence of experience. And yet, Adorno’s physiognomic and historical-social analyses of radio music showed, such evidence could not exist because the conditions of its possibility—both choice and individuality—were disappearing.

Like his colleagues at the Radio Project, Adorno understood the study to be a methodological prelude to a later and larger study of radio broadcasting and listing.132 As a result, most of his suggestions for new empirical studies were both provisional and unspecific.

“We shall probably have to begin,” he wrote, “with empirical investigations of what is actually

131 Ibid., 152–54. The Sphärophon was a more advanced Theremin; it was a device that permitted the musician to change the timbre and pitch of the sound. Miessner instruments included an electric organ, electric violin, electric cello, and electric piano.

132 See, e.g., ibid., 66.

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heard by the listeners.”133 But what, Lazarsfeld wondered in his marginal comments on the memorandum, did this claim actually mean?134 Although Adorno was far from clear on the matter, the arguments of “Music in Radio” suggest that he intended to study whether or not audiences truly listen to the stations to which their radios are tuned and, further, whether, if listening, they hear musical compositions or musical atoms. Questionnaires may prove useful in such a study, Adorno conceded, but the most apposite tool would be interviews.135 According to

Adorno, interviews were the more flexible tool, allowing researchers to combine an investigation of what audiences hear with their motivations for listening. Adorno recommended using more- or-less standard interview techniques:

If the respondent is directly asked, “Why do you like this and why do you dislike that?” he very easily might become frightened and try to uphold a certain cultural pseudo-status by not telling the truth. If, however, he is asked questions demanding an answer similar to the usual research interviews (such as which station he tunes in, what sort of music he tunes in) and then the point is very carefully reached about why he does this and why he does that, then the respondent may be much less suspicious and give much better answers. We recommend the method of following the respondents as far as possible. Only when he comes, through his own suggestions, to one of the crucial points of our study, to try to induce him by more precise questions to discuss problems interesting to us.136

At the same time, Adorno maintained, this technique must be supplemented with an altogether different approach:

On the other hand, there are certain questions, like the question of the hear-stripe or ubiquity, which are definitely not conscious to the listeners so that they

133 Ibid., 100.

134 Lazarsfeld scrawled “about what?”, “Was heißt das?”, and even “Idiotisch!” in the margins.

135 See Adorno’s further discussion of interviews in “On the Use of Elaborate Personal Interviews in the Princeton Radio Research Project,” in Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory, ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Malden, MA: Polity, 2009), 456–60.

136 Adorno, “Music in Radio,” 101.

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never—or practically never—would bring them up alone. We must pursue this opposite method. We must make careful suggestions about our own ideas on the subject, and then insist that people tell their own opinions, or, at any rate, say definitely whether they agree or disagree.137

Adorno’s two suggested changes to the Radio Project’s existing approach can be reframed as implied critiques of Lazarsfeld’s own research methods. Adorno, this is to say, held the interviews Lazarsfeld had conducted as part of the Marienthal study, for example, to be superior to the questionnaires he had designed and refined after his emigration to the United States.

Further, Adorno disputed Lazarsfeld’s insistence—in “Plans and Problems”—that the Radio

Project would be best served by using psychological—but not psychoanalytic—techniques.

Empirical research, Adorno suggested through his description of the interview method, must go beyond querying the conscious subject and investigate the unconscious mind.138

Adorno did outline a number of more concrete proposals for empirical studies of radio music. Many of these plans originated in suggestions Horkheimer had made to Adorno earlier in

1938.139 For example, Adorno proposed studying the “construction” of radio programs through an analysis of broadcasters’ internal correspondence. Such a study, Adorno wrote, would “prove very helpful to social scientists” by illuminating the theorized connection—the “pre-established harmony”—between broadcasters and listeners.140 Adorno further recommended studying

“provincial” radio commentary published in Hearst newspapers. After an initial sample was

137 Ibid.

138 Adorno repeatedly returned to this last point. See, e.g., ibid., 102.

139 See, e.g., Max Horkheimer, “Traditionelle und kritische Theorie,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 6 (1937): 245– 94.

140 Adorno, “Music in Radio,” 108; cf. Horkheimer and Adorno, “Ein Methodenproblem des ‘Radio Research Project.’”

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“analyzed and put into certain categories,” the study could be conducted on a large scale; it would yield insights into listeners’ reactions.141 To isolate and study the “subjective equivalent of the objective deterioration of music,” Adorno proposed conducting experiments on listeners’ abilities to remember music heard over the radio: “The hit should be played to one panel over the radio and to one as live music. Then the panel should be interviewed to see if they remember it.

The next step is to repeat the experiment; and, finally, they should be questioned, again, so that the experimental conditions would be comparatively alike.”142 Finally, Adorno advocated for empirical studies of listeners’ pseudo-activities. Researchers could, for example, analyze the fan mail sent by countless listeners to their favorite fictional characters from serialized programs.

Borrowing from Lazarsfeld and Leichter, Adorno held that quantifying, typologizing, and analyzing these letters would lead social psychologists to a better understanding of the mass neurosis arising from consumer capitalism.143

Uniting these diverse empirical studies was a shared commitment to social theory.

Following the programmatic statement of critical theory Horkehiemer had produced between

1931 and 1937, Adorno insisted that empirical research must arise from and through a theoretical orientation to society. Put simply, Adorno predicated his empirical studies on the aspects and phenomena of the contemporary economic, social, technological, and cultural conditions brought to light by the theoretical analysis of society.144 It was for this reason that Adorno proposed

141 Adorno, “Music in Radio,” 108–11.

142 Ibid., 116.

143 Ibid., 111–13.

144 Max Horkheimer, Die gegenwärtige Lage der Sozialphilosophie und die Aufgaben eines Instituts für Sozialforschung (Frankfurt a. M.: Englert & Schlosse, 1931); “Traditionelle und kritische Theorie.” It is worth 264

designing empirical studies of listeners’ pseudo-activity, of pre-established harmony between broadcasters and audiences, and of musical decomposition. In his discussion of an empirical study investigating what listeners actually heard, for example, Adorno claimed that the proposal

“is based entirely on the first two [theoretical] sections” of the memorandum.145 Specifically, this and other studies would follow the theory that “radio may be regarded as one of the most outspoken and straightforward instruments at the disposal of present-day society and which is governed by the same forces behind those other ‘influences.’”146

How did this conception concur with or differ from the social-psychological method

Fromm had described and applied in Authority and the Family? Fromm, as shown in chapter 2, held that practitioners of “structural statistics” would apply concepts taken from social- psychological theory to empirical data through a process of “interpretation.” In “Music in

Radio,” Adorno developed a similar, but distinct and, in some ways, more modest, claim about the relation between theory and research. In contrast to Fromm, Adorno did not call for the application of theoretical concepts to empirical findings. Rather, he held that researchers should orient themselves according to and ground themselves in social theory. Theory, this is to say, provided the overarching framework in which research was conducted. At the same time,

Adorno did not embrace—or even discuss—the critiques of Fromm developed by Lazarsfeld,

Leichter, and Komarovsky. As will become clear below, Adorno articulated a qualified endorsement of psychoanalytical interpretation on other, different grounds.

noting that this essay appeared in the same year as Lazarsfeld’s own methodological contribution to the Institute’s journal. See Lazarsfeld, “Typological Procedures in Social Research.”

145 Adorno, “Music in Radio,” 98.

146 Ibid., 99.

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More radically, Adorno insisted that the empirical studies contribute to the theory of society. Although his proposals allowed—indeed, relied upon—techniques of quantification and typologization in the collection and analysis of evidence on a large scale, Adorno maintained that these results were ultimately of secondary importance. “That is,” he continued his description of what listeners actually heard by writing, “if it is found, for example, that these theses of image- consciousness in radio is [sic] reaffirmed by a spontaneous description of the phenomenon offered by a respondent it would be of infinitely greater value than if one gets 100 answers re- affirming trivialities such as the fact, for example, that during the daytime a high percentage of listeners are housewives.”147 Importantly, Adorno did not advocate the kind of evidence-theory relationship found in American research, a framework in which theory served to organize material.148 Like Fromm, Adorno held that the evidence gathered through empirical studies

“shall contribute to our stock of interpretation.”149 For Adorno, this was the “European approach” to empirical research. This approach centered around what Adorno called “an experiment in theory” that supplied evidence for interpretation.150 How, precisely, would the evidence of experiments in theory further theoretical interpretation? “Music in Radio” gave no firm answer to this question. The memorandum merely asserted that, in contrast to the ideological function of current empirical research, these studies would not instantiate

147 Ibid., 103.

148 Interestingly, Adorno did gesture at such a dynamic—in which new experimental evidence modified theoretical positions—in the preface to “Music in Radio.” See ibid., 1.For the Institute members’ discussion of this topic, see Horkheimer, “Debatte über den Methoden”; cf. Max Horkheimer, “Zur Kritik der amerikanischen Sozialwissenschaft,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 12, 14 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1985), 319–20.

149 Adorno, “Music in Radio,” 103.

150 Ibid., 3.

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“affirmative consciousness” by “bewitching” listeners with hollow satisfaction but would cultivate instead “consciousness,” “intelligence,” and the “power of discrimination” that allowed subjects to see the world as it actually existed.151 Over the next months and years, Adorno went on to elucidate the methods and results of experiments in theory in considerable detail.

INDIVIDUAL AS MERE IDEOLOGY

“Music in Radio” was not well received by the man who had sought the European approach. Lazarsfeld’s copy of the memorandum is replete with interjections and exclamations in both German and English: “Idiotic!!!” “Culture Fetisch [sic]!” “How does he know this?”

“This has nothing at all to do with the empirical situation.”152 Lazarsfeld’s marginal comments increase in number and intensity as “Music in Radio” came closer to critiquing those empirical techniques Lazarsfeld himself used—such as the panel study—and reached their highest pitch when Adorno proposed his own empirical studies. In response to Adorno’s proposed study of fan mail, for instance, Lazarsfeld listed several rhetorical questions: “What is the thesis[?] How is it relevant to other parts of your presentation[?] What are possible alternative assumptions[?] How can your position bee [sic] proven either directly or indirectly[?]”153 Seemingly overwhelmed with frustration, Lazarsfeld scrawled “Never visit Institut [sic].” on the back of one page.154

Lazarsfeld’s letter to Adorno summarizing his critiques of the memorandum was hardly less vituperative. Although he assured Adorno of his “unchanging respect for your ideas” and

151 Ibid., 139, 146–48, 161.

152 Ibid., 100, 103, 107, 108, et passim.

153 Ibid., 112a.

154 Ibid., 113a.

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reaffirmed his conviction that “our project will profit greatly by your cooperation,” Lazarsfeld detailed a number of “great objections against the way you present your ideas and against your disregard of evidence and systematic empirical research.”155 It is these former comments—on

Adorno’s style—that scholars have most frequently cited. This preponderance is likely due to the cutting, personal nature of Lazarsfeld’s critiques. As few as ten pages of “Music in Radio,”

Lazarsfeld wrote, “could probably spoil the effect of all your work however important it is.”

“You pride yourself on attacking other people because they are neurotic and fetishists, but it doesn’t occur to you how open you are yourself to such attacks,” Lazarsfeld charged. He continued, “[d]on’t you think that it is perfect fetishism the way you use Latin words all through your text?”156 More damningly, Lazarsfeld claimed that Adorno “seem[ed] to confound the independence of the critical mind with the readiness to be insulting.”

More important to the present discussion, however, are Lazarsfeld’s substantive critiques of Adorno’s view of empirical research. Lazarsfeld charged that Adorno did not know whereof he spoke:

You repeatedly condemn the ‘usual’ experimental methods. But it so happens that the word ‘usual’ cannot possibly have any sense. The experimental methods used by different psychologists and sociologists are so utterly different that it is impossible to know without further specification which you mean. It might well be that you mean all of them. But then I only need to remind you of your very great lack of knowledge and experience in this field to make you feel how senseless this kind of insinuations are [sic].157

155 For a draft of the letter, see Paul F. Lazarsfeld to Theodor W. Adorno, Draft of Letter, September 1938, 1, PFL Papers Series I, Box 20.

156 Ibid.

157 Ibid., 1–2.

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Lazarsfeld’s assessment was quite correct: Adorno did know little about the empirical methods he criticized throughout “Music in Radio.”158 In both his critiques of existing techniques and his proposals for new methods, Adorno presented as radically new arguments and techniques that were, in fact, either known to or used by American researchers. This pattern, as subsequent chapters show, persisted in Adorno’s—and, more broadly, the Institute’s—methodological writings and empirical studies over the next decade.

Adorno’s proposals for new empirical studies, Lazarsfeld continued, suffered from this lack of knowledge of existing work: “Your disrespect for possibilities alternative to your own ideas becomes the more disquieting when your text leads to the suspicion that you don’t even know how an empirical check upon a hypothetical assumption is to be made.” Although some of

Adorno’s proposed projects were “very stimulating,” they were almost meaningless without a more rigorous description of the methods to be used in conducting them.159 This shortcoming, according to Lazarsfeld, was most evident when Adorno wrote about the techniques and applications of interviews. Lazarsfeld had a “vague sense” about what Adorno wanted to achieve through the open-ended interviews, but he rejected the method on practical grounds: “you would quickly find out that in actual work you can interview people only if you have first made up your mind what precisely you want to hear from them.”160 Most broadly—and most damningly—

Lazarsfeld critiqued the logic behind these proposals. Adorno, he charged, disregarded “logical

158 Detlev Claussen has reached a similar conclusion. See, Claussen, One Last Genius, 180–81.

159 Lazarsfeld to Adorno, September 1938, 2–3. It should be noted that this statement appears to have been genuine. In addition to his negative marginal comments, Lazarsfeld made notes expressing approval of and interest in some of Adorno’s proposed empirical studies. Among these were a study of the motivations of listeners who fiddle with the radio dial obsessively, of the relation between political ideology and radio preferences, and of the distribution of radio preferences in the “new parts” of the United States. See 115, 132-34.

160 Ibid., 4.

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cleanliness,” avoided “discursive analysis,” and laced “intellectual candidness.” In keeping with his marginal comments, Lazarsfeld emphasized that Adorno repeatedly failed to consider alternatives to the assumptions he used as preconditions for his theoretical arguments and empirical studies.161

Lazarsfeld insisted that his critiques were intended to help Adorno improve “Music in

Radio.” The memorandum could not, in its present form, be presented to other members of the

Radio Project, he informed Adorno. Consequently, Lazarsfeld asked Adorno to revise the document, to disaggregate and refine its critiques and proposals, and to present its components to the Radio Project researchers in other memoranda and presentations.162 Adorno dutifully did so.

In January 1939, Adorno completed “Music and Radio,” a clarification of the physiognomic method and the concept of the “radio voice” proposed in the first pages of the earlier memorandum.163 In March, Adorno presented “The Problem of Experimentation in Music

Psychology” to members of the Department of Psychology at Princeton University. By the summer of 1939, Martin Jay has argued, both Lazarsfeld and Adorno recognized that their collaboration was no longer viable.164 And yet, Adorno continued to work on the task Lazarsfeld had assigned him. In June, Adorno completed “The Radio Voice,” a further revision to “Music in

Radio.” Adorno prepared and presented “A Social Critique of Radio Music” to his Radio Project colleagues in October. By the end of the year, Adorno had drafted another major essay, an

161 Ibid., 2–3.

162 Lazarsfeld, “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir,” 323–24.

163 This memorandum, in turn, became two other documents: “Radio Physiognomics” and “Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory: Section II: The Radio Voice.” In 1941, Adorno again revised this latter memorandum, titling the new document “Radio Voice: an Experiment in Theory.”

164 Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 221–22.

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“Analytical Study of Music Appreciation Hour.”165 If Lazarsfeld hoped that Adorno would moderate his critique of the Radio Project through these writings, he was mistaken. Rather,

Adorno developed—both refining his arguments and expanding their scope—his critiques still further.

Adorno further elucidated and sharpened these ideas against the background of intense discussions with Horkheimer.166 It was the prospect of such debates, as Adorno had written to

Benjamin in 1937, that convinced Adorno to emigrate to the United States and to accept

Lazarsfeld’s offer of a position at the Radio Project. During the winter and into the spring of

1939, Adorno and Horkheimer met weekly to treat topics ranging from German idealism to

Marxist political economy. Across the discussions, a consistent theme emerged: Horkheimer and

Adorno came to doubt both the concept and the experience of individuality. Building on the arguments Horkheimer had developed in his introduction to Authority and the Family and, consequently, the texts influenced that essay, he and Adorno argued that capitalist economics and bourgeois ideology required the concept of individuality as the foundation of the system of private-property ownership. But, Horkheimer and Adorno claimed, bourgeois philosophers and political theorists had elevated this ideology into an essence.167 Further, the framework of subjectivity instantiated by capitalist economics and bourgeois society denied the experience of individuality it asserted. Because subjectivity was objectively—economically and socially—

165 For an overview of this chronology, see Robert Hullot-Kentor, “Second Salvage: Prolegomenon to a Reconstruction of Current of Music,” in Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory, ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Malden, MA: Polity, 2009), 1–40.

166 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “Ursprung und Ende des Individuums,” in Max Horkheimer Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 12, 14 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1985), 437–66.

167 Ibid., 439–41.

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determined, no true individual could exist under conditions of material privation and spiritual alienation.

Horkheimer and Adorno differed over the degree to which they thought the individual to be a mere “theater” (Schauplatz) of bourgeois ideology. Horkheimer maintained that this was a theoretical point, an argument for the basic validity of Hegel’s social phenomenology over

Kantian transcendental idealism and Lockean positivism. Adorno, for his part, insisted on the subjective, experiential reality of this claim. Individuals, if they had ever existed, were disappearing under the weight of economic, social, and cultural forces.168 “There are no such individuals as there were in the novels of the nineteenth century,” he asserted.169 But Horkheimer and Adorno did agree that their incipient theoretical program had as its objective the elimination of the false concept of the individual, for “he is a mere ideology.”170 Paradoxically, doing away with the concept of individuality required the concept itself:

Thesis: the individual is a necessary but mere appearance [Erscheinung]. The fact of individuation is not accidental but is necessarily shaped by the movement of society as a whole. The mistake is that this appearance is elevated to essence. On the one hand, why accept the principle of the individual at all? On the other hand, it can then be shown that the individuals who exist under this principle do not actually exist at all.171

Deploying the gesture of immanent critique, Horkheimer and Adorno maintained that the most effective critique would be the demonstration of the inability of the present system to fulfill the promise of individuality it asserted.

168 Ibid., 440, 451–52, 454–55.

169 Ibid., 441.

170 Ibid., 439–40.

171 Ibid., 450.

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Further, Horkheimer and Adorno concurred about the ideas and practices subtending this ideology. First, they condemned positivism, a philosophy they understood to be nothing more than the uncritical affirmation of the existent. Positivism was, for this reason, the epitome of bourgeois thinking.172 Second, and more surprisingly, Horkheimer and Adorno indicted psychoanalysis for suborning the ideology of the individual. From its inception, they concluded, psychology supported capitalism and the bourgeoisie by trying to adjust the supposedly irrational individual to the self-proclaimed rational world when, in reality, the world created by capitalism itself was irrational. Specifically, psychoanalysis induced otherwise-protesting subjects to conform to the imperatives of production and consumption. “Analysis,” Horkheimer and Adorno claimed, “serves the standardization [Uniformierung] of people.”173 Psychology was, for this reason, a species of positivism, a mode of intellection that affirmed the given and denied the possibility of change.174

For Adorno, at least, psychology was further mistaken because—historically—the individual that constituted the subject of analysis and experimentation no longer existed.175

172 Ibid., 445–48. Horkheimer and Adorno further differed over which thinkers should be numbered among the positivists. For Horkheimer, the list did not include such innovative thinkers as Ernst Mach. For Adorno, by contrast, not only Mach but also Kant and Hume should be considered positivists.

173 Ibid., 441–44, at 443.

174 Ibid., 444. Horkheimer and Adorno went so far as to argue that “[t]he analytic ego is the positivist unity of consciousness [Bewußtseinseinheit].” The phrase “unity of consciousness” first appeared in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

175 As Brandon Bloch has persuasively argued, the young Adorno found in Freud the conceptual tools needed “to outline a dialectical relationship between psychoanalysis and social theory.” The conversations Adorno held with Horkheimer in 1939 suggest, however, that Adorno had departed from the view that “psychoanalysis reinforced the conclusions of Marxian social theory regarding the limits to autonomous subjectivity, while nevertheless pointing toward possibilities for the exercise of freedom amidst heteronomous social and psychological forces.” See Brandon Bloch, “The Origins of Adorno’s Psycho-Social Dialectic: Psychoanalysis and Neo-Kantianism in the Young Adorno,” Modern Intellectual History, October 2017, 1–29, https://doi.org/10.1017/S147924431700049X viz., 5, emphasis original.

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Introspecting, discriminating individuals—the characters of nineteenth-century novels—no longer existed; modern society was populated by standardized automata.176 Positivism, psychology, and, ultimately, the concept of the individual were bound together; “always speaking of open horizons” when, in reality, “the horizon is always bounded [abgesteckt].”177

Although unlikely, Adorno’s comment may have been a reference to Marienthal, in which

Lazarsfeld, following his mentor Karl Bühler, had argued that the “horizon of experience” collapsed as a result of unemployment.178 No matter the intention, Adorno’s comment had the effect of linking his and Horkheimer’s critiques of positivism and psychoanalysis to the ÖWF’s ambition to transform the working class through social-psychological—or, as the ÖWF termed it, economic-psychological—research. Bounded by the limited horizons of the status quo, these efforts, Adorno implied, would be unable to deeply interrogate or radically reconceive the modes of subjectivity created by late-capitalist society.

Adorno integrated these ideas into the revisions he made to “Music in Radio” in 1939.

Already in his presentation to the Department of Psychology at Princeton University in March,

Adorno hoped to “lead [his audience] to a point where you could see that this very same empirical security is endangered by the method which we have always regarded as the most empirical and secure one.”179 Adorno took as his subject the work of the psychologist, linguist, and musicologist Carl E. Seashore, arguing that his fellow émigré misrepresented music as a

176 Horkheimer and Adorno, “Ursprung und Ende des Individuums,” 440.

177 Ibid., 447.

178 Jahoda, Zeisel, and Lazarsfeld, Marienthal, 47–48; Bühler, Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache, 16.

179 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Problem of Experimentation in Music Psychology,” in Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory, ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Malden, MA: Polity, 2009), 452.

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mere “acoustic event” that stimulated the human mind.180 “He treats,” Adorno claimed, “the psychology of music as if music were nothing more but the sum total of sensory reactions to physical stimuli, more or less independent of any free activity of will and imagination. The psychology of music, in Seashore’s work, remains within the layer of merely reflex reactions.”181

Adorno was not incorrect: Seashore sought to measure listeners’ responses to physical alterations in the pitch, loudness, ornamentation (vibrato), duration, wave form (timbre), sonance (tone quality), and consonance of musical compositions.182 Adorno developed two interrelated critiques of this approach. First, Adorno believed that Seashore’s experiments were inaccurate.

Despite all the time he had spent developing and refining his methods, Adorno held, Seashore was not able to effectively explain the differences in listeners’ responses to auditory stimuli.

Second, Adorno held that Seashore had misallocated his time in developing such methods—not least because, in the final result, these methods were inaccurate. “Not only are Seashore’s basic concepts inexact and insufficient—they miss their actual subject,” for music was not, in fact, a collection of stimuli but a social phenomenon.183 If Seashore wanted to understand music, this is to say, he must examine the psychology of the endowment of music with sense by the individual mind and social context. For these reasons, the psychologist’s quest for “empirical verification may become the enemy of empirical knowledge.”184 In his search for the ultimate foundation of a

180 Although his references were not always clear, Adorno included in his critique all three of Seashore’s main works: Carl E. Seashore, The Psychology of Musical Talent (New York: Silver, Burdett and Company, 1919); Psychology of Music (London: McGraw-Hill, 1938); Psychology of the Vibrato in Voice and Instrument (Iowa City: The University of Iowa Press, 1936).

181 Adorno, “The Problem of Experimentation in Music Psychology,” 420.

182 See, e.g., Seashore, Psychology of Music.

183 Adorno, “The Problem of Experimentation in Music Psychology,” 419, emphasis original.

184 Ibid., 440.

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psychology of music in empirical techniques, this is to say, Seashore had neglected the empirical reality of music itself.

Adorno took Seashore as a metonym for not only the “physicalist” approach to psychology but also for the “American method” of empirical research as a whole.185 Cantril— who, as a member of the Radio Project and a member of the Department of Psychology at

Princeton, was likely in the audience—Lazarsfeld, and Stanton were as misguided as Seashore in their attempts to measure radio-listeners’ reactions with their empirical techniques. And yet,

Adorno was simultaneously scornful of the Gestalt-psychological approach, with its “cheap talk” of forms and structures.186 Indeed, Adorno devoted much of his presentation to defending preliminary experiments conducted as part of the musical division within the Radio Project:

We want to find out how large sectors of today’s listeners, just as they are, react to the music offered to them by radio. We want to settle problems of the type: What is the concrete meaning of the musical emotions which people today profess to have?; what about their likes and dislikes about which there is so much talk and which offers such complicated problems? And finally, we are interested in types of actual listeners instead of mere listening potentialities which could be spotted in each individual.187

According to Adorno, the best way to answer these questions was through empirical experimentation. But these were not experiments of the type Seashore—or, for that matter, the

Princeton Radio Research Project—had conducted. Instead, the experiments would gather empirical evidence from the social situations in which listeners encountered music and then submit this material to psychological interpretation. In order to understand the psychology of jazz, for example, psychologists must leave the laboratory and go to the nightclub in order to

185 Ibid., 414–16.

186 Ibid., 419–21.

187 Ibid., 429.

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discover the “total attitude” of ambivalence, guilt, and, ultimately, rage in the psyches of swing- music aficionados and jitterbug dancers.188 Adorno had developed such ideas in “Music in

Radio,” but they were both more substantially proposed and more publicly disseminated in his

Princeton presentation. Indeed, Adorno made explicit the corrective to existing research techniques implied in his proposals: an empirical research project of the kind he proposed

“necessarily takes a critical turn against our empirical experiments themselves.”189 To be truly empirical, this is to say, a study must abandon the aims, conditions, and methods maintained by purportedly empirical studies like those of Seashore and the Radio Project.

Adorno explicitly recommended psychoanalysis as the prism for interpreting empirical evidence gathered through these experiments.190 On the one hand, this position suggests that the

Institute had not yet adopted the critiques developed by Leichter, Lazarsfeld, and Komarovsky of

Fromm’s psychoanalytically inflected social psychology in general and of his technique of

“interpretation” in particular. Indeed, it was not until the early 1940s that Adorno adopted elements of this critique into his own assessment of Fromm’s social-psychological research. On the other hand, Adorno’s conception of the psychoanalytic interpretation of empirical evidence was both nuanced and qualified. In keeping with the line of thinking he and Horkheimer were developing, Adorno argued, that the psychoanalytic interpretation of empirical evidence would show that the individual as such was disappearing under the weight of standardized—and

188 This was just one of the experiments Adorno discussed. In addition, he mentioned the ongoing “Tape Study,” which tested the standardization of music and about which no evidence survives, and the “Style vs. Material” study, which tested the effects of different arrangements of popular songs. Ibid., 429–34; cf. Theodor W. Adorno, “Experiment on: Preference for Material or Treatment of Two Popular Songs among Twelve Subjects,” in Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory, ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Malden, MA: Polity, 2009), 399–412.

189 Adorno, “The Problem of Experimentation in Music Psychology,” 434–35.

190 Ibid., 435.

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standardizing—social forces and cultural artifacts: “The more standardization increases and the less choice is left to the people, the more does the tendency increase to hide standardization, to make the surface of the consumer goods offered to the customer as manifold as possible and to reaffirm the subject in the view that his taste upon which everything depends, just because he loses more and more his influence on upon the stuff forced upon him.”191 Anticipating a claim that would come to characterize the Institute’s empirical methodology and research, Adorno implied that psychoanalysis would have to be used against itself. Psychoanalytic interpretation, this is to say, would be used to show that the individual subject that was its foundation no longer existed. Untangling this apparently paradoxical view and, further, applying it through empirical research occupied Adorno and his Institute colleagues for much of the next decade.

In October 1939, Adorno delivered another presentation to his colleagues at the Radio

Project, “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” that extended this line of thinking still further.

Between March and October, relations between Adorno and Lazarsfeld, Cantril, and Marshall had deteriorated. Moreover, relations between Lazarsfeld and Cantril had deteriorated. Struggles over the location, direction, and budget had been endemic to the Radio Project. Lazarsfeld may well have defended Adorno against the by-then prevailing antipathy of Cantril and Marshall, but, unsurprisingly, his application for a renewal of funding from the Rockefeller Foundation did not include Adorno’s music study.192 It was, perhaps, as a result of this disappearing sense of collegiality that Adorno felt able to frame his presentation as an “antagonistic” critique of

“administrative research.” Such research, he informed his audience, masked the reality of capitalist monopolies in the guise of progressive improvement. The Radio Project, for instance,

191 Ibid., 442.

192 See Lazarsfeld, “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir,” 324.

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aimed to determine how “more good music [could] be made available to more people,” without, however, asking what “good” music actually was. Instead, confining itself to a supposedly neutral means-ends rationality, the Radio Project adopted broadcasters’ understanding of good music. Further, the researchers never questioned the broadcasters’ interest in making this music available. Thus:

No doubt, a question as, e.g., how can more good music be made available to more people, is a question of benevolent administrative research. By taking such notions as good music or listening to good music as something given, and being concerned merely with the interrelationship of aim and effect instead of analyzing the aim, the tool and the subjects more radically, the results may easily turn out to be directly opposite to the very aim which they are supposed to further.193

How could administrative research produce results opposite to the researchers’ intentions? In the specific case of the Princeton Radio Research Project, Cantril, Lazarsfeld, and his colleagues were simply enabling the more-efficient dissemination of music deemed by the broadcasters to be good—jazz music composed of musical atoms—that was, in reality, a source of subjective standardization and alienation. Thus, “common sense notions, such as ‘giving the people what they want,’” work against the researchers’ stated intentions of improving listeners’ experiences: giving listeners “‘what they want’” would only deepen their alienation and standardization.194 More broadly, however, consumer-research studies—like those designed and conducted by Lazarsfeld—supported the illusion of difference and choice among commodities.

Capitalism, Adorno had argued in “Music in Radio” and emphasized in “A Social Critique of

193 Adorno, “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” 2009, 134. Although this argument appeared in Adorno’s later revision of the presentation into an essay, the above-quoted material did not. Cf. Adorno, “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” 1945, 208–9.

194 Adorno, “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” 2009, 141; cf. “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” 1945, 216.

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Radio Music,” subsisted on this illusion.195 Social and consumer research that did not challenge it, therefore, did the ideological work of capitalism. Further, through this ideology, existing research supported the false consciousness of individuality. Such reassurances may well comfort listeners—or, more broadly, consumers of social research—but were hardly salutary.

Adorno recommended a new form of social research. Rather than propose new methods and studies, he argued for the revision of the framework in which empirical research was undertaken. Gesturing toward Horkheimer’s “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937), Adorno claimed that research must be founded on axioms. Specifically, he outlined a set of for core principles: the unchecked spread of commodification, the heavy concentration of capital, the inexorable ossification of power relations, and the indelible contradiction of social and economic antagonisms.196 To frame this recommendation in the terms of Adorno’s initial critique of the

Radio Project, Adorno argued that researchers ought to determine for themselves what “good” music was not by reference to some external aesthetic standard but through this axiomatic framework. Research of this kind, according to Adorno, would not reinforce but challenge the status quo: "The principal task of our approach, is to question what everybody knows and accepts as given and inescapable—that is, to challenge the givenness of the given.”197 Put differently, this new empirical research would be the exact opposite of the positivism Adorno and Horkheimer had been so fervently critiquing. As a critique of the existent, this research would deny people “‘what they want.’” It would have none of the “cheap utopianism” that

195 Adorno, “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” 2009, 140–41; cf. “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” 1945, 216.

196 Adorno, “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” 2009, 135–39; cf. “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” 1945, 210– 14.

197 Adorno, “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” 2009, 136. This sentence did not appear in the revised version of the essay published in The Kenyon Review.

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pervaded the Radio Project. Rather, by unmasking the commodification of culture and the standardization of individuals, it would reveal the ideological foundations of capitalism and, possibly, “promote a resistance which could easily endanger the whole system.”198

STUDYING THE NEW TYPE OF HUMAN BEING

Adorno’s presentations and memoranda did little to improve his standing with his colleagues. After attending the presentation of “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” Marshall complained to Lazarsfeld that Adorno seemed to have “an axiom to grind.” 199 Adorno’s fate had already been sealed: the Rockefeller Foundation had not renewed funding for the musical study of the Radio Project. When, in early 1940, the study officially ended, Adorno wrote to Benjamin that he was “finally free of the Radio Project.” “This new freedom,” he continued, “has given me enormous encouragement” to renew languishing projects and begin new studies of Stefan

George, Heinrich Rickert, and Søren Kierkegaard.200 To Horkheimer, Adorno wrote that he was overwhelmingly grateful for Horkheimer’s assistance in securing his “emancipation” from the

Radio Project.201

Adorno’s thought persisted in the Radio Project after his departure in January 1940.

Studies published in Radio Research (1941) and the final issue of the Zeitschrift (1941) revealed that studies that had been in-progress in 1939 bore a striking resemblance to those that Adorno

198 Ibid., 141; cf. “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” 1945, 216.141, cf. On Popular Music p. 288

199 Quoted in Jenemann, Adorno in America, 49.

200 See Adorno’s letter of February 29, 1940 in Adorno and Benjamin, Adorno and Benjamin Complete Correspondence, 322.

201 See Adorno’s letter of January 14, 1940 in Adorno and Horkheimer, Briefe und Briefwechsel, 1994, 2:63.

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had first proposed in “Music in Radio” and had revised for presentation in 1939. In fact, these studies went beyond what Adorno had proposed for studying radio music, articulating methods and arguments that echoed Adorno in other subsidiary studies within the Radio Project.

One interpretation of these affinities suggests that Adorno exerted a powerful, enduring influence over his erstwhile colleagues. Despite his tendentious relationship with Lazarsfeld,

Cantril, and the other leaders of the Radio Project, this is to say, Adorno impressed his critiques of and contributions to empirical research upon those researchers who carried out the project.

Considerable evidence supports this interpretation. Edward Suchman, a researcher attached to the Rockefeller Foundation, specifically cited Adorno in outlining the theoretical foundations of his interview method.202 These interviews, further, led Suchman to argue that radio broadcasts could, at best, instantiate a “pseudo-interest” in audiences. Listeners who first encountered serious music over the radio might display the “religious fervor of the recent convert,” but this interest was unlikely either to be deep or lasting.203 More broadly, Suchman concluded—like

Adorno—that radio could not be understood apart from the social forces of centralization, standardization, and massification of which it was but a representative element.204 Even

Lazarsfeld seemed to make a concession to this Adornian argument, writing, in his introduction to Radio Research, that “[p]rograms are the result of the producers’ intentions, the social forces working upon him, and the technological properties of the medium with which he is working. No

202 See the appendix to Suchman’s article in Paul F. Lazarsfeld, ed., Radio Research, 1941 (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941), 303–5.

203 Edward Suchman, “Invitation to Music: A Study of the Creation of New Music Listeners by the Radio,” in Radio Research, 1941, ed. Paul F. Lazarsfeld (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941), 179–80.

204 Ibid., 188.

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specific radio situation can be understood without remembering all three factors.”205 Whereas

Lasswell, Marshall, and Cantril had previously understood radio as standing apart from and acting upon society, Adorno, Suchman, and perhaps even Lazarsfeld came to view the two as ineluctably intertwined.

An alternative interpretation suggests that these affinities were not the product of

Adorno’s direct influence upon his colleagues but evidence of a closer link between the Institute and the Radio Project than has been recognized—least of all by Adorno himself. Such a link would have its origins in the connections between Adorno’s evolving conception of empirical research and the methodological debates among members of the Institute and the ÖWF.

Although Lazarsfeld and Adorno both laid claims to the “European approach,” this is to say, their understandings were, perhaps, more similar than they were different.

Evidence for this interpretation can be found in the final issue of the Zeitschrift.

Horkheimer devoted the final issue of the journal—renamed Studies in Philosophy and Social

Science in order to appeal to a broader American readership—to the publishing the results of collaboration between the Institute and the Radio Project.206 “As a result of frequent exchanges of views between members of the two institutions,” Horkheimer wrote in his preface to the issue,

“many specific questions have arisen concerning the interaction between critical theory and empirical research.” The studies published in the issue were mere “examples” of a broader

205 Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Introduction,” in Radio Research, 1941, ed. Paul F. Lazarsfeld (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941), viii. In his personal copy of Radio Research, Robert Lynd emphasized this passage (one of only a few markings in the text).

206 On the decision to rename the Zeitschrift in order to attract attention from their American peers, see Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile, 177. Despite the change in name, the journal retained the same numbering.

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opportunity to “integrate theoretical thinking with empirical analysis.”207 In this context,

“theory” connoted both theorizing about the structure and effects of the radio and theorizing about the modification of empirical research methods to better capture current social and material conditions. Adorno, Lazarsfeld, Lasswell, and a number of other contributors to the

Radio Project published both methodological essays and research reports.208 Especially relevant to the present discussion are the contributions of Herta Herzog and Charles Siepmann.

As a former member of the ÖWF and contributor to Marienthal, Herzog embodied the individual and intellectual continuity between the methodological debates held and the research conducted in Europe and the United States.209 If there were a practitioner of the “European approach” in the United States, it was Herzog. She positioned her article as a preliminary study for a more-thorough investigation of the degree to which soap operas supplied listeners with

“borrowed experience.” How, she asked, did these programs change audiences’ attitudes toward their own lives and problems?

Herzog’s method echoed those developed by the ÖWF and, later, by Komarovsky not only in procedure but also in orientation. Herzog, this is to say, proceeded with the kind of methodological reflectiveness Leichter, Lazarsfeld, and Komarovsky had cultivated in themselves and sought to awaken in their interlocutors. Herzog began by conducting preliminary, open-ended interviews with a small test population. After discovering that subjects gave almost-

207 Max Horkheimer, “Preface,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941): 1.

208 Theodor W. Adorno, “On Popular Music,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941): 17–48; Lasswell, “Radio as an Instrument of Decreasing Personal Insecurity”; Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Remarks on Administrative and Critical Research,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941): 2–16. Jenemann mistakenly interprets Lazarsfeld’s essay as opposed to—instead of conciliatory towards—critical theory. See Jenemann, Adorno in America, 14–20.

209 Herzog was also Lazarsfeld’s second—and then-current—wife.

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identical answers, Herzog reformulated her questionnaire to test for these stereotypes.210

Evidence collected through this procedure was subjected to typological classification and interpretation along the lines Komarovsky had described in Unemployed Man.211

Herzog’s analysis of the empirical evidence showed that that listeners combined dramatic elements (the “trouble”) from multiple serials into a “patchwork” of “reality” that provided the emotional release and alleviated drudgery.212 According to Herzog, this “pseudo-catharsis” served not only a psychological need but also a social function: it provided “ideology and recipes for adjustment” to the modern world.213 Herzog identified three specific contributions: radio dramas supplied continuities of events in an otherwise-fragmented existence; they created models of behavior that made the alien world seem less threatening; and they provided labels for thoughts and emotions that the psychologically stunted subject lacked.214 Ultimately, Herzog concluded, listeners tuned into the radio in order to both escape from reality and adjust to it.215

Herzog’s use of open-ended interviews and psychological interpretation seemed to follow

Adorno’s recommendations for the reformulation of empirical research. Further, her discovery of stereotyped responses and standardized listeners further seemed to confirm Adorno’s claims.

More broadly, Herzog’s arguments and conclusions about the social function of this

210 On Herzog’s method, see Herta Herzog, “On Borrowed Experience,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941): 66–67. Walter Lippmann—a central influence on Lasswell’s thinking—invented and popularized the concept of stereotypes in social research. See Lippmann, Public Opinion, 3–34, 79–158.

211 See Komarovsky, “Description of Discerning.”

212 Herzog, “On Borrowed Experience,” 67–79.

213 Ibid., 72, 69, respectively.

214 Ibid., 82–84.

215 Ibid., 86.

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psychological effect—the adjustment of the listener to contemporary life—echoed Adorno’s thinking. At the same time, these components of Herzog’s study also resonated with Lazarsfeld’s ideas and the research program he represented. Herzog’s methodological path—from open-ended interview to questionnaire to interpretation—resembled that developed by Lazarsfeld, Leichter, and Komarovsky in and through their critiques of Fromm’s social-psychological methods.

Moreover, Herzog’s conclusions about the deep effects of modern media upon the human mind echoed Lazarsfeld and Ripin’s arguments about the role of “prejudice” in shaping the perception of reality itself. Further still, Herzog’s warning about the “inhumanity” evident in the radio’s pernicious standardization of culture and the massification of individuals resembled Lasswell’s own worries about modernity.216 None of this is to say that Herzog was a follower of Lazarsfeld and Lasswell and not Adorno—or vice versa. Rather, it is to suggest a fundamental consonance between the contributions of Lasswell, Lazarsfeld, and Adorno to the Radio Project.

Siepmann’s essay in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science substantiates this claim.

Siepmann, who was born in Britain and would go on to become an advisor to the Federal

Communications Commission, argued that, because of its ability to enter the domestic sphere, radio created a sense of proximity to its listeners. Radio audiences, this is to say, felt that the hosts of variety programs and the characters of dramas were speaking directly to them. For this reason, Siepmann argued, radio possessed the remarkable ability to touch listeners on an emotional level, to shape their innate potential for personal development. But radio had not realized this enormous potential. Instead, the monopolistic control of a few broadcasters had created a homogeneity in programming. This standardization, in turn, accelerated the malign forces of capitalism itself. Instead of treating the listener as an active agent and discerning

216 For this conclusion, see ibid., 86–87.

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individual, broadcasters—and the consumer researchers who worked for them—reduced each to

“a bare statistic, an object of manipulation and exploitation.” According to Siepmann, this dynamic further instantiated the “slave mentality” characteristic of modern capitalism. Subjects falling prey to this attitude lost their abilities to choose among options, to think for themselves, and to participate in the direction of their lives. Breaking broadcasters’ centralized control of the airwaves, Siepmann repeatedly insisted, was the first and most important step to undoing radio’s alienating and reifying effects. More radically, Siepmann advocated subjecting radio to democratic control by disconnecting it from the profit motive altogether.217

Echoes of the arguments Adorno developed in 1938-1939 pervaded Siepmann’s essay.

His vehement argument for the objectification of listeners and striking description of the “slave mentality” bore a more-than-passing resemblance to Adorno’s account in “Music in Radio” and—doubtless unknown to Siepmann—his discussions with Horkheimer. Further, like Adorno

Siepmann insisted on the inexorable relationship between the radio medium and the social structure: no effective revision to the former could be accomplished without a thorough change to the latter. But, as was the case in Herzog’s study, Siepmann’s essay also bore the marks of other thinkers. For example, Siepmann counterposed the “slave mentality” of the objectified listener to the Jeffersonian individualism of the democratic subject.218 And Siepmann’s arguments for the creation of such individuals—and, through them, the “will of the people”— through the exercise of “democratic control” over the radio invoked John Dewey’s rebuttals of

Walter Lippmann’s arguments nearly two decades earlier. Put simply, Siepmann seems to have drawn his motivation from the social theory of both the Frankfurters and the Progressives. What

217 Charles Siepmann, “Radio and Education,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941): 110.

218 Ibid., 106–7.

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this dual influence suggests is a basic compatibility between these two paradigms, a compatibility that has been largely overlooked.219

Adorno remained intellectually connected to his former colleagues through at least 1941.

In 1940, as Robert Hullot-Kentor and Rolf Tiedemann have painstakingly documented, Adorno began to revise his writings on radio music for publication. Adorno proposed that Oxford

University Press publish a monograph, entitled Current of Music, comprised of the revised and expanded text of “A Social Critique of Radio Music” (which was to serve as an introduction),

“The Radio Voice,” and “Analytical Study of NBC’s Music Appreciation Hour.”220 Although

Oxford University Press rejected the proposal, Adorno persisted in revising the component essays for publication in Anglo-American academe. In 1940, Adorno revised his extensive study of popular music, “Likes and Dislikes in Light-Popular Music,” for submission to the American

Sociological Review. Adorno’s manuscript was again rejected. But in 1941, Adorno had more luck. In that year, a further-revised version of the popular-music study appeared in Studies in

Philosophy and Social Science (alongside the essays of Herzog and Siepmann discussed above).

That same year, Adorno published “The Radio Voice” as “The Radio Symphony: An Experiment in Theory” in Radio Research. Finally, in 1945, “A Social Critique of Radio Music” appeared in the Kenyon Review. Simultaneously, Adorno continued to develop ideas for further research and, remarkably, education in radio music. In March 1940, Adorno transformed his criticisms of

NBC’s Music Appreciation Hour into an outline for a less-ideological musical education

219 To the best of my knowledge, only one of the main studies of the Frankfurt School mentions Siepmann. See Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 212.

220 See Hullot-Kentor, “Second Salvage: Prolegomenon to a Reconstruction of Current of Music,” 30–31.

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program. WNYC accepted Adorno’s proposal and duly broadcast two installments of his experimental program.221

Adorno also continued to develop and submit proposals for empirical studies to

Lazarsfeld. Marshall and Cantril had decided that Adorno’s music study had no place in the

Radio Project, but Lazarsfeld continued to believe that Adorno’s “European approach” might prove useful—if applied in a different context. In June 1938, Adorno sent Lazarsfeld a memorandum for a framework of research entitled “The Problem of a New Type of Human

Being.” In it, Adorno carried to their conclusions the arguments about contemporary society and modern individuals he had developed in “Music in Radio” and refined in his subsequent presentations and memoranda. Radio music was only tangential to his argument:

The fact that music is still unexplored territory in socio-psychological terms means that one finds far fewer rigid views here than in other fields, and that there are far fewer obstacles in the form of clichés to impede the posing of questions. We intend to erect a small model settlement within this unoccupied theoretical field, one that would have little chance closer to the centres [sic]; but, once its results on this remote terrain are secure, there are prospects of applying these results to the truly decisive socio-psychological and socio-pedagogical questions.222

What theoretical horizons did the empirical study of music expand? Adorno argued that studying music illuminated the more general situation of contemporary culture. Specifically, such studies would show that cultural artifacts no longer exercised influence over the human subject. In

Adorno’s telling, efforts to reform and educate individuals had long been predicated on the idea

221 Theodor W. Adorno, “Exposé for the Music Education Radio Course,” in Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory, ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity, 2009), 218–30.Adorno would build on this experience after his return to Germany. Between 1950 and 1960, Adorno delivered more than 100 broadcasts as part of the Hessischen Rundfunk program Kulturelles Wort. See Parkinson, “Adorno on the Airwaves.”

222 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Problem of the New Type of Human Being,” in Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory, ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Malden, MA: Polity, 2009), 467.

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that “inducing people to listen to Beethoven symphonies, read Milton, and gaze upon Raphael madonnas [sic]” was “‘progressive’” and “humanistic.” Why had these works of art ceased to shape listeners, readers, and observers? According to Adorno, it was not culture but individuals that had changed. Or—more accurately—individuals had ceased to exist altogether:

While the individual as a biological unit naturally continues to exist, and hence also those of its characteristics which serve its procreation, it [the individual] has entered a social constellation in which the reproduction of its life can no longer be carried out in the old sense by its “monadological” nature, that is to say, its independent and antagonistic separation from its environment. The individual seems to be on the way to a situation in which it can only survive by relinquishing its individuality, blurring the boundary between itself and its surroundings, and sacrificing most of its independence and autonomy. In large sectors of society there is no longer an ‘ego’ in the traditional sense.223

Adorno intended these claims about the reproduction of the individual in a literal sense.

Recapitulating the arguments Horkheimer had developed in Authority and the Family, Adorno claimed that economic conditions had changed the structure and function of the nuclear family.

As a result, the “family is no longer the mediating agency between society and the individual; rather, society has taken hold of the individual directly and, by depriving him of the usual protective shield of the family, prevents him from becoming an individual in the old sense.”224

One result of this direct socialization was the disappearance of cultural “images” and the advent of reified objects (or “imagines”). Horkheimer, chapter 2 argued, had been somewhat ambivalent about the fading of the nuclear family, believing that the disaggregation of the structures that maintained patriarchal authority, in particular, might induce the creation of new, non- authoritarian subjects. Adorno, for his part, seemed far less sanguine. To be sure, Adorno did not eulogize the nuclear family, but he did argue that, with its disappearance, individuals would no

223 Ibid., 462, emphasis original.

224 Ibid., 464.

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longer develop through the introjection of bourgeois culture. Instead, modern persons would evolve into standardized subjects by complying with the models provided by industrial capitalism and consumer culture. Children grew up to “believe in the religion of cars.”225

“The Problem of a New Type of Human Being” did not simply articulate Adorno’s arguments and anxieties about the social totality and culture industry of contemporary capitalism. Rather, the memorandum mobilized these ideas to critique existing research methods and to propose new approaches. But, in contrast to Adorno’s earlier critiques of the methods of physicalist and behavioral psychology used in the Radio Project, this memorandum focused its critical attention on the techniques of depth psychology. Specifically, Adorno argued that psychoanalysis offered little to researchers studying the new type of human being because, as a paradigm, it assumed both the sovereignty of the individual and the power of culture. Adorno thoroughly explained this former claim in “Music in Radio” and, further, in “The Problem of

Psychological Experimentation,” but the latter argument was new. Adorno was not wrong: as chapter 1 showed, Lazarsfeld was but one of many psychologists who sought to harness the power of culture to improve the individual. But it was precisely this power, Adorno believed the study of music to show, that no longer obtained. Put simply, researchers could only use psychoanalytic methods as long as there were individuals to psychoanalyze. In the current social context—in which individuals as such no longer existed—such methods were, at best, inadequate and, at worst, misleading. What methods remained to researchers? How did Adorno propose to study the inhuman subjects of this inhumane world? “The Problem of a New Type of Human” raised but did not answer these questions. As Adorno continued to propose and conduct research projects, however, it became clear that empirical methods were the best tools for this task.

225 Ibid., 466.

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CONCLUSION

How should Adorno’s unsettled tenure in the Radio Project be understood? According to the prevailing narrative, Adorno’s collaboration with Lazarsfeld was over almost before it began.

Historians writing in this vein claim that the two men were fundamentally mismatched: scholars supporting—implicitly or, sometimes, explicitly—either Lazarsfeld or Adorno combine evidence from retrospective autobiographies and selected archival materials to argue that the two had incompatible personalities or incommensurate epistemologies.226 Historians seeking a convincing conclusion for this narrative might well turn to Adorno’s 1939 presentations, plumbing them for evidence of an insuperable disjunction between critical theory and empirical research. Lazarsfeld himself later wrote that his “efforts to bring Adorno’s type of critical research into the communications field were a failure.”227

In this chapter, I have shown that this narrative must be amended and qualified.

Collaboration between the Radio Project and the Institute did not emerge in the United States; it was not the product of the immediate needs of either organization. Rather, it followed from and built upon nearly a decade of partnership in Germany and Switzerland. This is not to say that

Lazarsfeld and Adorno worked together harmoniously. Rather, they came into conflict over the meaning and practice of the “European approach” to social research. This conflict itself sharpened methodological debates among the members of the ÖWF and the Institute. Through it,

Adorno called into question the role of social psychology in perpetuating the ideology of

226 For representative examples of such partisan accounts, championing Adorno and Lazarsfeld, respectively, see Jenemann, Adorno in America; Morrison, “Kultur and Culture.”

227 Lazarsfeld, “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir,” 324.

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individuality. But Adorno did not suggest that either the Institute or the Radio Project abandon empirical research. Rather, he traced the contours and described examples of “experiments in theory”—empirical studies that would identify, foreground, and interrogate their own insufficiencies. In subsequent chapters, I will show how the Institute refined and implemented these experiments. Finally, I interrogated the depth and extent of the perceived rupture between

Lazarsfeld and Adorno. As the studies of other members of the Radio Project suggest, the two conceptions of empirical, social-psychological research were linked by individual continuity and intellectual affinity.

Adorno’s brief tenure at the Radio Project is best understood as a point of inflection in the Institute’s development of mutually imbricated programs of empirical research and social theory. Horkheimer himself characterized the collaboration in this way: “It gives us great satisfaction,” he wrote in his preface to the final issue of Studies in Philosophy and Social

Science, “that for the first time some of our ideas have been applied to specifically American matters and introduced to the American methodological debate.”228

228 Horkheimer, “Preface,” 1941.

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CHAPTER 5

A HIGHLY PROMISING METHOD: CRITICAL THEORY AND EMPIRICAL RESEARCH, 1941-1945

METHODS EUROPEAN AND AMERICAN

In 1941, Adorno relocated to California, hoping to begin his long-anticipated collaboration with Horkheimer on a study of dialectical logic.1 Although the two men worked steadily throughout 1942, Horkheimer continued to be distracted by Institute obligations.

Because of its increasingly precarious financial position, the Institute had, since the early-1940s, sought funding for large-scale studies that would employ multiple researchers for an extended period of time.2 When America entered the Second World War late in 1941, the researchers sensed an opportunity: as Franz Neumann wrote to Horkheimer, there now existed an unparalleled opportunity to contribute to the production of knowledge about the new enemies of

American democracy.3 Neumann proved to be correct: in the spring of 1943, the American

Jewish Committee agreed to fund a one-year study of the historical, economic, social, and, especially, psychological problems of anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States. In the following years, the number and variety of the Institute’s empirical studies grew exponentially.

Although this decade is often associated with Horkheimer and Adorno’s completion of the dialectical-logic project—ultimately published as Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, 1947)—it

1 Detlev Claussen has argued that Horkheimer and Adorno saw California as an “extraterritorial sphere,” a place apart from the obligations of Institute administration that had distracted them in New York City. See Claussen, One Last Genius, 185, 201.

2 For an overview of the Institute’s proposals and their changes, see Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile, 227– 57.

3 See Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 353.

was also a period in which the Institute pursued, as Horkheimer put it, the “combination of the highly developed American empirical methods with the more established European methods” into an approach “which many scholars regard as highly promising.”4

Adorno himself was quickly drawn into this work. In the summer of 1943, he and Leo

Lowenthal documented the rhetoric of right-wing agitators, prizing apart their language in order to examine its stimulation and satisfaction of psychological needs.5 That winter, Adorno outlined new studies of anti-Semitism.6 Among these highly speculative proposals were an ethnography of Jewish-Gentile interactions, a “quantitative content analysis” of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories concerning Franklin Roosevelt, and systematic interpretation of prejudiced tropes in popular magazines, cartoon strips, and horror stories. Adorno suggested collaborating with a number of scholars and intellectuals—many of them American—in the execution of these studies: Margaret Mead, Harold Lasswell, Edward Shils, Heinz Hartmann, Erik Erikson, and

Rudolf Arnheim.7 Between 1943 and 1947, Adorno led the Institute’s contribution to the comprehensive study of fascist psychology and characterology, ultimately published as The

4 Institut für Sozialforschung [IfS], “Political Function of Anti-Semitism,” 30–32; cf. IfS, “Re: Anti-Semitism Project of the Institute of Social Research,” 1941, MHA, Box IX, File 93.

5 For the results of this study, see Theodor W. Adorno, “Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda,” in Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease, ed. Ernst Simmel (New York: International Universities Press, 1946), 125–37; Leo Lowenthal and Norman Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949); Theodor W. Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” in Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences, ed. Géza Róheim, vol. 3, 1951, 279–300.

6 The Institute members and their interlocutors were unsystematic in their capitalization of “anti-Semitism” and its derivatives. When citing these sources, I have followed the authors’ usages without indicating each instance of variation.

7 See, inter alia, Theodor W. Adorno, “Iconographies of Antisemites,” “Research Project on Antisemitism among Housewives,” “Research Project on Contact Areas between Gentiles and Jews,” Research Project on Indirect Antisemitic Propaganda,” and “Research Project on the Imagery of Subconscious Antisemitism” in Theodor W. Adorno, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer; Briefwechsel 1927-1969, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 443–94.

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Authoritarian Personality (1950). As Adorno himself later wrote, this study was nothing less than “a first, preliminary attempt to integrate depth-psychology and statistical generalization.”8

In this chapter I reconstruct one of these empirical projects: the Institute’s sociological and psychological study of American workers’ anti-Semitic prejudices. The project—which

Adorno and his colleagues referred to as the “Labor Study”—has received less attention than its counterparts.9 According to some scholars, the study was an important “testing ground” for the project that became The Authoritarian Personality.10 Even those scholars working in proximate disciplines, who have recovered many of the Institute’s other empirical projects, have not turned their attention to the Labor Study.11 But, I will argue in this chapter, the Labor Study warrants attention as a remarkable example of midcentury efforts to identify the social contexts and psychological causes of anti-Semitic prejudice. Moreover, the project was a key point of inflection in the Institute’s developing program of empirical research.

Between 1944 and 1945, the Institute gathered, quantified, and interpreted evidence from thousands of “indirect interviews” with unionized workers. In its final report—entitled

“Antisemitism among American Labor”—the Institute concluded that prejudice arose from workers’ inability to grasp the complexities of modern capitalism. Further, the Institute argued that the stereotypes arising from such animus actively eroded workers’ capacities for critical thought and rational judgment. Late in 1944, Adorno drafted a series of memoranda concretizing

8 Adorno, “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality,” 8.

9 Wiggershaus, Claussen, Müller-Doohm, and even Wheatland mention the Labor Study either not at all or only in passing.

10 Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 224–26.

11 One exception is Amidon and Worrell, “A. R. L. Gurland, the Frankfurt School, and the Critical Theory of Antisemitism.” Although welcome, this essay provides little more than an introduction to the Labor Study.

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and defending the Institute’s methods and conclusions. According to the prevailing historical narrative of the Institute-in-exile, these memoranda served the instrumental purpose of keeping the critical theorists in good standing with their American counterparts. If the Institute ran afoul of what Adorno derisively called the American “research racket,” this is to say, it would be unlikely to attract the material support it so badly needed.12

Without disputing the significance of such material concerns, I suggest that the Labor

Study and attendant memoranda must be understood in the context of the Institute’s developing conceptions and methods of empirical research. By reconstructing the Labor Study, I connect the researchers’ methods, intentions, and findings to earlier projects—including Marienthal,

Authority and the Family, and Unemployed Man. To anticipate: the Institute researchers who conducted the Labor Study came, like their predecessors, to view the working class with deep suspicion. As a result of misplaced class identity and underdeveloped class consciousness, they feared, members of the working class were more likely to become reactionary anti-Semites than revolutionary proletarians.

Subsequently I turn to Adorno’s memoranda, showing that he extended this critique of empirical methods to include the social-psychological research conducted by Erich Fromm, who, until recently, had been at the Institute’s intellectual core. Adorno, I demonstrate, deployed a critique of Fromm homologous to the position Leichter and Lazarsfeld developed in Authority and the Family. Criticizing Fromm for mingling sociology and psychology, Adorno, albeit in different terms, echoed the claim of the ÖWF affiliates. Crucially, Adorno understood this

12 Although, by virtue of the fact that it largely neglects the Labor Study, it is impossible to say how existing scholarship interprets this empirical project, this characterization follows those developed for other, similar studies. For an example of such an argument, see Wheatland, “Lazarsfeld and the Horkheimer Circle on Morningside Heights,” viz., 190.

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critique in terms of the distinction between “European” and “American” approaches to social research. Moreover, Adorno further refined his understanding of the “European” approach, claiming that in it, critique and research would be interwoven in a virtuous circle of theorical argument and empirical evidence. Adorno believed that this approach would reveal the hollowness of individuality in modern society. I argue that this framework resembled Leichter and Lazarsfeld’s conception of “structural statistics.”

THE PERIL OF ANTI-SEMITISM & THE PROMISE OF SOCIAL RESEARCH

During the 1930s, Horkheimer, Adorno, and other Institute researchers had examined the problem of anti-Semitism only occasionally and tangentially.13 In the early 1940s, however, the members’ attention became both more sustained and more direct. By 1941, Horkheimer labeled anti-Semitism “one of the dangers inherent in all more recent cultures” and worried that it “finds nooks in the hearts of even the noblest humans.”14 As Adorno would later write, the Institute came to recognize the anti-Semite as the “child of our social system;” in him, the researchers could discern the “deepest levels of repression” inherent to that system.15 Between 1941 and

13 Martin Jay, “The Jews and the Frankfurt School: Critical Theory’s Analysis of Anti-Semitism,” New German Critique, no. 19 (1980): 137–38, https://doi.org/10.2307/487976; cf. Jack Jacobs, “Horkheimer, Adorno, and the Significance of Anti-Semitism: The Exile Years,” in Exile, Science, and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of German Emigre Intellectuals, ed. David Kettler and Gerhard Lauer, Studies in European Culture and History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 157–68. As Jay insightfully argues, the absence of anti-Semitism from the Institute’s earliest studies of National Socialism in particular and authoritarianism in general was significant.

14 Max Horkheimer, “Research Project on Anti-Semitism,” Zeitschrift Für Sozialforschung 9 (1941): 124–25.

15 Theodor W. Adorno, “Ansprache Adornos vor den ‘Young Men’s Christian Association-Veterans’ der UCLA am 1. Juni 1948,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer; Briefwechsel 1927-1969, vol. 3, Briefe und Briefwechsel 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 536.

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1943, the Institute developed multiple proposals for empirical studies of the origins, functions, and consequences of prejudice.16

Franz Neumann’s Behemoth (1942) exerted a strong influence on these proposals.

Neumann, then a central figure in the Institute, argued that fascism had arisen from a fundamental conflict between the equally matched interest groups of the ill-fated Weimar

Republic. But for all its strength, Neumann held, the fascist order could not reconcile these enemies and end class conflict.17 In the first edition of Behemoth, Neumann argued that the

National Socialists responded to this situation by manufacturing an enemy—the specter of the

Jew—who could serve an integrative function, shoring up the mechanisms of control by redirecting enduring antagonisms outward.18 Two years later, in the second edition of Behemoth,

Neumann argued that anti-Semitism was just a prelude to the National Socialists’ inevitable eradication of the middle class and, along with it, “the destruction of free institutions, beliefs, and groups.”19 The Institute adopted this “spearhead theory,” writing in a 1942 proposal for an empirical study, that: “[w]hen integration from inside, that is, by compromise, becomes impossible, anti-Semitism helps to achieve it from the outside, that is by force. Anti-Semitism

16 See Horkheimer, “Research Project on Anti-Semitism.” For the evolution of this proposal, see IfS, “Re: Anti- Semitism Project of the Institute of Social Research”; “Anti-Semitism, a Research Project of the Institute of Social Research,” November 10, 1941, MHA, Box IX, File 92.7A; “Remarks to the New Form of the Project on Anti- Semitism,” October 27, 1942, MHA, Box IX, File 94.A; “Memorandum on a Research Project on Anti-Semitism. Prepared for the American Jewish Committee,” October 30, 1942, MHA, Box IX, File 95.A; “Outline of a Research Project on Anti-Semitism. Prepared for the American Jewish Committee,” December 15, 1942, MHA, Box IX, File 97.A; “Political Function of Anti-Semitism”; “Memorandum on the Project on Antisemitism,” December 30, 1942, MHA, Box IX, File 98.a.

17 On the persistence of antagonisms in the totalitarian order, see Franz L. Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1942), 384–89; Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), 470–76.

18 Neumann, Behemoth (1942), 105–10.

19 Neumann, Behemoth (1944), 551.

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fulfills this task without harm to the most powerful groups in society, and at the same time helps to conceal the autocratic nature of their rule.”20

Concurrently, the Institute began to identify psychology as the battleground on which the struggle against anti-Semitism—and, therefore, totalitarianism—would be waged.21 In

Behemoth, which C. Wright Mills described as a work of “sociologically oriented psychiatry” that revealed both “structural shifts” and “happenings in the human mind,” Neumann maintained at the importance of psychology by arguing that anti-Semitism had an ameliorative effect on the

Germans’ collective consciousness.22 In response to the National Socialists’ crimes, he wrote, the ideology taught that “[t]he Jews are to blame” and, in so doing, “the German sacred ego is spared.”23 Horkheimer and the Institute expanded on this claim, arguing variously that anti-

Semitism provided psychological compensation to the masses who were denied political freedom and democratic participation and that prejudice dissipated anxiety and frustration created by alienation at the hands of obscure social and economic forces.24 Specifically, the Institute

20 IfS, “Memorandum on a Research Project on Anti-Semitism,” 4.

21 The Institute’s earliest proposals mention psychology infrequently, but by December 1942, the Institute included an entire appendix on “A Suggested Psychological Approach” in their proposal to the AJC. See IfS, “Outline of a Research Project on Anti-Semitism,” 14–16. Another memorandum sent to the AJC later that same month detailing the Institute’s research into anti-Semitism to that point emphasized the role of psychology. See IfS, “Memorandum on a Research Project on Anti-Semitism.”

22 C. Wright Mills, review of The Nazi Behemoth: Book Review of Franz Neumann’s Behemoth: The Structure and Function of National Socialism 1933-1944, by Franz L. Neumann, Partisan Review 9, no. 5 (October 1942): 432.

23 Neumann, Behemoth (1942), 105; Behemoth (1944), 123.

24 IfS, “Memorandum on the Project on Antisemitism,” 4–5; “Political Function of Anti-Semitism,” 19–20.

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proposed to study psychology as a set of “intermediary processes whereby the objective forces tending to produce anti-Semitism affect and master the behavior of the individual.”25

This argument—that psychology represented the “intermediary processes” connecting individual development and social forces—was not new to the Institute. As the discussion of

Horkheimer and Fromm’s contributions to Authority and the Family in chapter 2 demonstrated, this position was, by the time of the Labor Study, at least a decade old. What was new in the

Institute’s argument, however, was their connection of this conception of psychology to the problem of anti-Semitism.

The Institute members were far from the only researchers to develop and carry out psychological studies of anti-Semitic propaganda and prejudice. Ernst Kris, Hans Speier, J. F.

Brown, Talcott Parsons, Bruno Bettelheim, Allen Edwards, Gordon Allport, Otto Fenichel, and

Ernst Simmel pursued similar projects in this period.26 Moreover, the Institute’s increasing focus on psychological studies of anti-Semitism won approval from a number of prominent American social scientists, including Charles Beard, Hadley Cantril, Harold Lasswell, Alfred McClung

Lee, Robert Lynd, Robert MacIver, Robert Park, and Arthur Schlesinger.27 The Institute recognized the importance of such support and, in 1942, its members went so far as to propose collaboration with American psychologists. Working together, the Institute suggested, the two groups could design experiments in free association around the ideas of “force, domination,

25 IfS, “A Research Project on Anti-Semitism,” November 10, 1941, 6–7, MHA, Box IX, File 92.7B; “Anti- Semitism, a Research Project,” 6–7.

26 See, inter alia, the essays collected in Isacque Graeber and Steuart Henderson Britt, eds., Jews in a Gentile World: The Problem of Understanding (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1942); Ernst Simmel, ed., Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease (New York: International Universities Press, 1946). See also the volumes of The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology between 1941 and 1947.

27 Also endorsing the project were recent—but nevertheless prominent—émigré intellectuals such as Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr. IfS, “A Research Project on Anti-Semitism,” 4.

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stronger and weaker Germany, democracy, home, race, cruelty, competition, anti-Semitism,

[and] peace,” among others. By so doing, the researchers would elucidate the “basic syndroms

[sic]” of anti-Semitism.28 Such a goal echoed the ÖWF’s ambition, in Marienthal, to capture the

“central components” of unemployment.29 Indeed, Horkheimer himself suggested that the Labor

Study was a “combination of the highly developed American empirical and quantitative methods with the more theoretical European methods,” that was “highly promising.”30

According to existing scholarship, the Institute’s manifest interest in empirical research in this period was purely instrumental; it was the Institute’s attempt to appear more amenable to the methods and approach of their American hosts and, crucially, their potential funders.31 But reading these proposals against the background of the Institute’s earlier critiques of empirical research suggests a different interpretation. First, the proposals reveal that the Institute had largely adopted the distinction between “American” methods and “European” theory that

Lazarsfeld had helped institute and reinforce in the 1930s. Second, the proposals show that the

Institute had begun to recognize the advantages of a link between these two approaches. These advantages were not merely intellectual but also practical. The Institute maintained, for example, that European émigrés had “the obvious advantage of considerable concrete experience” of totalitarianism and yet, as a result, they ran the risk of “emotional or dogmatic bias.” To guard

28 IfS, “Memorandum on the Project on Antisemitism,” 15.

29 Jahoda, Zeisel, and Lazarsfeld, Marienthal, 1. See the discussion of this process in chapter 1 of the dissertation.

30 IfS, “Political Function of Anti-Semitism,” 30. Although the description applied specifically to the collaboration between psychoanalysts and psychologists, it could equally have been used to describe the proposed project in its entirety.

31 See, e.g., Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985); Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile.

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against this latter, in particular, the Institute assured its potential funders that the researchers would work closely with American scholars and, further, would be overseen by an American advisory committee.32

This is not to say that the Institute wholeheartedly endorsed American social science.

Even as it called for collaboration between European and American researchers, the Institute maintained its critique of quantitative techniques. Adorno and, especially, Lowenthal began to argue in 1943, polls and surveys of anti-Semitism undertaken by George Gallup’s American

Institute of Public Opinion and published in the likes of Fortune magazine were fundamentally misconceived and misleading.33 The Institute researchers’ objections to existing methods were threefold. First, they argued that polling recorded merely conscious attitudes and ideas, barely scratching the surface of inchoate psychological phenomena.34 Second, the researchers maintained that the topic of anti-Semitism would further compound this problem: “[t]he inhibitions (moral, political, and tactical) are furthermore strengthened by the democratic ideology of the war. The situation today is such that almost everyone, when asked about the

Jews, will give an answer which does not reveal his true sentiment and attitude.”35 Third, they argued that polls and surveys did not measure preexisting attitudes, opinions, and preferences but

32 IfS, “Re: Anti-Semitism Project of the Institute of Social Research,” 3.

33 For a distillation of the Institute’s objections, see Theodor W. Adorno, “American Jewish Committee Progress Report of the Scientific Research Department June 22, 1945,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer; Briefwechsel 1927-1969, vol. 3, Briefe und Briefwechsel 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 495–520.

34 Leo Lowenthal, “Critical Remarks on Various Polls for Measuring Changes in Antisemitic Attitudes,” July 8, 1943, 3, MHA, Box IX, File 100. IfS, “Some Suggestions Concerning Poll Methods (by L.A. Group),” July 27, 1943, 2, MHA, Box IX, File 100. Although unsigned, this document was likely the work of Lowenthal, who had earlier been tasked with investigating the methodological problems posed by questionnaires. See Friedrich Pollock, “Report on the Work’s Progress of New York and West Coast Group,” May 7, 1943, 2, MHA, Box IX, File 100.

35 Leo Lowenthal, “Critical Remarks on Various Polls,” July 1, 1943, 1, MHA, Box IX, File 100; cf. IfS, “Suggestions Concerning Polling Methods,” 2–3.

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in fact created them.36 According to Lowenthal, some “individuals do not know what they feel until the moment when they have to face the issue in reality.”37

Although Lowenthal and his Institute colleagues considered various ways that polls and surveys might be improved, they ultimately concluded that the method’s problems were endemic.38 As a result of these weaknesses, Lowenthal argued, polls and surveys often underreported the breadth and depth of anti-Semitic prejudice, inducing “a terribly dangerous optimism” about the current state of and future prospects for democracy.39 For Lowenthal, the methodological implications of this situation were clear:

How then can the inhibitions [of respondents to surveys and polls] be neutralized? In my opinion, only by abandoning altogether the method of the open poll question. In one way or the other, the respondent must be put into a situation which resembles the Psychoanalytical Situation [sic]. He must be induced to talk freely and apparently at random; he must be induced, not to answer the question but to narrate.40

Already in its 1941-1942 proposals, the Institute had argued for the practical advantages to be gained from collaboration between “European” psychoanalysis and “American” experimental psychology. In its 1943 memoranda, the Institute went further, asserting the methodological necessity of such collaboration. According to Lowenthal—who represented the consensus of the

36 In making this argument, the Institute anticipated their later study of German public opinion. See Friedrich Pollock, Gruppenexperiment: Ein Studienbericht., Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie 2 (Frankfurt a. M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1955).

37 IfS, “Suggestions Concerning Polling Methods,” 3.

38 In addition to the memoranda cited above, see Adorno, “Progress Report June 22, 1945”; Max Horkheimer, “Fortune Polls,” 1947, MHA, Box IX, File 153.1a (688); “Fortune Polls and the Danger of a New Antisemitism,” n.d., MHA, Box IX, File 153.2 (688).

39 Leo Lowenthal, “How to Get an Idea of the Minds of the People with Regard to the Jewish Problem and Why. Statement of the West Coast Branch, (7/3/43),” July 3, 1943, MHA, Box IX, File 100; “Critical Remarks on Various Polls for Measuring Changes in Antisemitic Attitudes.”

40 Lowenthal, “Critical Remarks on Various Polls,” 1–2.

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Institute’s leading members on this issue—only the introduction of psychoanalytic approaches could save the polling method from itself.

Although the Institute researchers either failed to recognize or chose not to comment upon it, their critique of current research methods in general and of polling techniques in particular built upon arguments developed in the middle of the previous decade. Lowenthal’s claims that polls merely scratched the surface of subjects’ psyches, for example, recapitulated

Lazarsfeld’s own critique of the naïve “nose-counting” methods of American market research and social psychology. Further, Lowenthal’s suggestion that polls created, rather than captured, opinions echoed, albeit in a different key, Lazarsfeld’s worry that simplistic surveys would engender stereotyped responses and, consequently, standardize subjects.41 Likewise, Lowenthal’s argument that polls reflected the prevailing moral inhibitions rested upon the same theoretical logic as Adorno’s criticism of psychological experiments for perpetuating the dominant ideology of bourgeois individuality. But Lowenthal’s arguments did not remain confined to an inchoate dialogue with his predecessors and colleagues for long. In 1944, Lowenthal and his Institute colleagues found an opportunity to apply such methods in the practice of social research.

THE STEREOTYPE TAKES CARE OF EVERYTHING

In 1943, the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC) began receiving reports of widespread anti-

Semitic prejudice in the industrial workforce and armed forces. Labor leaders and concerned citizens from around the country sent word of implicit discrimination and outright slurs.42 In

41 Lazarsfeld, “Art of Asking Why,” 30.

42 See, e.g., “Confidential Memorandum from Unusually Well-Informed Person in the Government Service in the South,” June 10, 1943, JLC Records, Part III, Box 270, Folder 4.

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July, the JLC concluded that a social-scientific study was needed to assess the danger and devise a solution to the animus.43 Motivating the JLC’s decision was a report by Julie Meyer, the one- time executive secretary of the German-Jewish Zentralverein who had emigrated to the United

States. In her study, which the JLC circulated internally and among other “defense organizations,” Meyer argued that the Verein had tried to combat Nazi anti-Semitism by appealing to Germans’ rationality. Verein leaders decided to gather the real facts obscured by fascist propaganda and present the truth in “enlightening material” (Aufklärungsmaterial).

Working- and middle-class Germans who read these publications would be disabused of their false beliefs and liberated from their prejudices. Meyer conceded that the Verein had failed because it naively trusted “the good common sense of the masses.”44 “Therefore,” she summarized, “in the beginning of the Nazi movement a normally reasoning man could not assume that the anti-semitic Nazi nonsense would be accepted by large parts of the population. In other words mass psychology was then an academic problem.”45 Meyer continued to believe that education—enlightenment—might have proven successful, if only the Verein had begun its activities earlier: “How much of the resistance against anti-semitic influences during the long years of Hitler's fight for power may have been the result of educational devices—used directly by the Jewish organization or indirectly through the channels of the labor movement—no one can tell.”46 Inspired by Meyer’s warning, the JLC envisioned its survey of anti-Semitic attitudes

43 Charles B. Sherman, “Minutes of the First Meeting of the Committee to Combat Anti-Semitism,” July 14, 1943, JLC Records, Part III, Box 270, Folder 5.

44 Julie Meyer, “Jewish Anti-Defamation Work in Pre-Hitler Germany,” 1944, 27, JLC Records, Part III, Box 270, Folder 27.

45 Ibid., 25.

46 Ibid., 29.

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among American workers as the first step of an anticipatory battle against anti-Semitism in the

United States.

Within two months, organizational complications forced the JLC to abort its study.47

Several months later, A. R. L. Gurland, a somewhat-peripheral figure at the Institute who had helped Horkheimer secure its affiliation with Columbia University almost a decade earlier, used his good reputation with the JLC to suggest that the organization consider outsourcing the study to the Frankfurt émigrés.48 First, however, Gurland had to convince Horkheimer, who had previously rejected the efforts of another Institute researcher—Franz Neumann—to develop a study of labor anti-Semitism, to consider the idea. Perhaps in order to obtain further funding or to gather evidence for other empirical projects, Horkheimer assented.49 In February 1944, the

Institute submitted a proposal for a yearlong study of anti-Semitism among American labor to be led by Gurland, Paul Massing, and Lowenthal.50

Like Meyer, the Institute observed that differences between German and American labor would certainly change the tenor of fascist propaganda and, more important, the nature of anti-

Semitic prejudice itself. Moreover, the Institute’s preliminary research pointed to the European bourgeoisie as susceptible to Nazi ideology and stereotypes.51 It was the middle class’ tenuous

47 Sherman, “First Meeting of CCAS”; Charles B. Sherman, “Minutes of the Second Meeting of the Committee to Combat Anti-Semitism,” September 8, 1943, JLC Records, Part III, Box 270, Folder 5.

48 Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 367. On Gurland’s career and interaction with the Institute, see Amidon and Worrell, “A. R. L. Gurland, the Frankfurt School, and the Critical Theory of Antisemitism.”

49 Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 355.

50 IfS, “Project on Antisemitism and American Labor,” February 29, 1944, JLC Records, Part III, Box 270, Folder 29.

51 See, e.g., preliminary reports of results from The Berkeley Adult Study—the project that would go on to be published as The Authoritarian Personality: Else Frenkel-Brunswik to Max Horkheimer, January 10, 1944, MHA, Box IX, File 140.2.

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economic position and social status, Institute researchers argued, that primed its members to accept National Socialism. The Institute asked whether American labor might suffer from this same dynamic. While the American middle class was relatively stable, the proposal suggested, its working class had hopes for upward mobility. Continued frustration of this aspirations might induce American workers to develop the same sorts of prejudice that characterized the ill-fated

German middle class.52 Anti-Semitism, Adorno wrote in a memorandum on the study in 1949, arose from “a peculiar break between the objective class situation and subjective class consciousness in American Labor.”53

As early as Marienthal, researchers involved in or connected to the Institute’s empirical program had been suspicious of the working class. Indeed, the ÖWF’s study of unemployed workers had drawn from and amplified interwar Marxists’ suspicions about the present state and future prospects of the European proletariat. Using Marienthal to authorize their claims, Austro-

Marxist intellectuals suggested that jobless workers were more likely to become fascist reactionaries than proletarian revolutionaries. Institute studies, including both Fromm’s investigation of German workers and the international research into the modern family, deployed a similar logic—albeit reaching somewhat more sanguine conclusions. Although in a less-overtly

Marxist idiom, Komarovsky elaborated on the ÖWF’s findings, suggesting in the conclusion to her Unemployed Man that jobless American workers often blamed shadowy forces for their

52 IfS, “Project on Antisemitism and American Labor,” 3.

53 Adorno’s memoranda are contained in the papers of Paul Lazarsfeld, held at the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New York, NY. The collection is hereafter cited as “PFL Papers.” Theodor W. Adorno, “Antisemitism among American Labor, as Edited by the Bureau of Applied Social Research,” July 15, 1949, 3, PFL Papers Series I, Box 20, Folder 1.

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suffering. Indeed, Komarovsky identified the same root cause for this conviction as the Labor

Study researchers: underdeveloped class consciousness and misplaced class identity.

Despite the commonalities between their initial findings and previous studies, the

Institute researchers insisted in their initial proposal that “the conventional methods of statistical investigation, public opinion polls, and direct questioning are not sufficient” to the “highly complex psychological phenomenon” of anti-Semitism, which was “hidden and devious both in its individual and group expression.”54 With a veiled reference to Lazarsfeld, the Institute researchers wrote in their final report to the JLC that anti-Semitism was “too complex a phenomenon to be successfully compressed into the straight-jacket of the ‘check-one-out-of-five- answers’ or the ‘check-yes-or-no’ variety.”55 This unsuitability followed—as the Institute’s methodological writings between 1941 and 1943 would suggest—not only from the insufficiently sophisticated polling methods themselves but also from subjects’ propensity to accede to social pressures and political norms. “In the ‘interview situation,’” the researchers claimed, “the interviewee’s real opinion is often consciously or unconsciously falsified, distorted, turned upside down.”56

Instead of such “straight-jacket” methods, the Institute proposed to develop a “new procedure” aiming “to make people openly discuss their prejudice in relation to issues which

54 IfS, “Project on Antisemitism and American Labor,” 4; Paul Massing, A. R. L. Gurland, and Leo Lowenthal, “Antisemitism among American Labor. A Research Project Conducted by the Institute of Social Research (Columbia University) in 1944-1945,” May 1945, 1254–55, JLC Records, Part III, Box 53A.

55 Massing, Gurland, and Lowenthal, “Antisemitism among American Labor,” 15; cf. Lazarsfeld and Robinson, “Properties of the Trichotomy ‘Like, No Opinion, and Dislike.’”

56 Massing, Gurland, and Lowenthal, “Antisemitism among American Labor,” 1255.

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they themselves felt to be of importance.”57 More simply, these were “indirect” methods “so designed as to give access to hidden motivations.”58 Such ambitions echoed Horkheimer’s proposal to bring together psychologists and psychoanalysts in the creation of tests of free association and, more directly, Lowenthal’s description of a technique allowing subjects to narrate their own lives as in the “Psychoanalytical Situation.” Neumann went so far as to argue that such indirect methods themselves be a weapon against totalitarian anti-Semitism, for the questions asked might prompt both interviewers and interviewees to examine their conscious convictions and unconscious biases.59 This “plan of study,” the Institute promised the JLC, “that would combine research and education is possible and would, of course, be highly desirable.”60

The Institute’s proposed methods were by no means as new as its affiliates insisted.

Indeed, just as the Institute’s conception of psychology and framing of the study built upon earlier debates and projects, so, too, did their research methods. Although Neumann termed the

Institute’s interviewing technique “psychoanalytical,” it resembled, as will become clear below, the indirect methods Lazarsfeld, Komarovsky, and the ÖWF had used in their various studies of unemployment. Moreover, as the researchers made clear in their methodological appendix to the completed study, the Institute followed Adorno’s critiques of the Radio Project in holding that such an approach was, in fact, more rigorously and truly empirical than self-proclaimed scientific research, for it eliminated the “extraneous influences” created by polls, surveys, and

57 Ibid., 15.

58 IfS, “Project on Antisemitism and American Labor,” 4.

59 Neumann’s comment was a marginal addition to Lowenthal, “Critical Remarks on Various Polls,” 2–3; cf. Massing, Gurland, and Lowenthal, “Antisemitism among American Labor,” 1258.

60 IfS, “Project on Antisemitism and American Labor,” 5.

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questionnaires.61 Strikingly, the Institute’s assertion that the Labor Study constituted a work of

“education” that would combat anti-Semitism echoed the description of the tradition of Marxist social research articulated by Weiss—a tradition in which she placed the Institute’s studies.

Despite these similarities, the Institute’s proposed methods were marked out by the researchers’ description of them as “psychoanalytic.” Adorno and Horkheimer, as shown in the previous chapter, had begun to question and criticize the role of psychoanalysis in perpetuating the ideology of individuality. Adorno’s methodological memoranda on the Labor Study, discussed below, made clear his view on the uses and limitations of psychoanalysis in social research.

The JLC approved the Institute’s proposal in May 1944. Fieldwork began soon thereafter.

Researchers in New York City, New Jersey, and Philadelphia initiated a program of interviews with unionized labor and, to a lesser extent, non-unionized workers and management. After the first programs were launched in June, the study expanded to Los Angeles, Detroit, San

Francisco, and Pittsburgh in July. During the fieldwork, the Institute went beyond the methods it had proposed to the JLC. As the researchers wrote in their final report to the JLC, they worried that even these newly developed methods would be insufficient to the task of studying the psychology of anti-Semitism. Even when the “interview schedule permitted the interviewee freely to elaborate on the questions asked,” they wrote in their final report, “there still was the danger of a psychological barrier between him and the interviewer which impaired free communication.”62 This barrier, it was implied, followed from the existence of the interview situation as such. In order to surmount it, the researchers went a step beyond Lowenthal’s proposals, developing and implementing a technique of “screened” or “participant” interviews.

61 Massing, Gurland, and Lowenthal, “Antisemitism among American Labor,” 1255.

62 Ibid., 1254–55.

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Conducting such interviews required several actors and multiple steps.63 To begin, the

Institute researchers formulated questions pertaining to the psychology of anti-Semitism. Next, the researchers trained social workers in the purpose and methods of the study; the social workers, in turn, trained volunteer workers from the factories. Workers were required to memorize the questions, identify potential targets among their coworkers, and engage the unknowing subjects in conversation. The social workers instructed the volunteer interviewers to weave the Institute’s questions—including “Can you tell a Jew from a non-Jew? How?” and

“How do you feel about what the Nazis did to the Jews in Germany?”—unassumingly into casual exchanges. After subsequently recording the results on provided forms, the volunteer interviewers took part in a more substantive debriefing by the Institute’s social workers.64

Although the Labor Study researchers may not have known it, their screened-interview technique built upon and exaggerated the indirect-interview method the ÖWF had used in Marienthal.

The Institute had planned to conclude its fieldwork in August, but the interviews dragged on into September. Quantification of the results took place during October; interpretation of the data commenced in November. Once reviewed, analyzed, collated, and tabulated, the Institute’s interviews painted a chilling picture of prejudice in the United States. All told, fifty percent of

American workers were susceptible to some form of fascist agitation about the Jews. Eleven percent of these workers comprised a “fascist vanguard” ready and willing to establish a totalitarian government in the United States. Further, very few individuals in the remaining fifty

63 For a description of the sequence, see ibid., 16–17, 1254–63.

64 For the instructions issued to the volunteer interviewers, the interview schedule (questions), and the answer forms, see Appendix B of this dissertation.

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percent could be counted on to take a stand against anti-Semitism and fascism.65 Massing,

Gurland, and Lowenthal were most concerned about these middle strata of ambivalent anti-

Semites and latent fascists. Whereas overt fascists might welcome violence and reject all rational argumentation, they were, at least, easy to identify. Conversely, truly unprejudiced individuals were unshakable in their convictions.66 Workers between these two extremes, however, represented the real danger to American Jews, for they were able to rationalize their prejudice and dissemble about their politics.67

Although the JLC requested that a final presentation of the results be made in January

1945, the Institute completed its final report, a 1300-page document entitled “Antisemitism

Among American Labor,” in May 1945. Most of the Institute’s report focused on documenting the extent, depth, and content of anti-Semitic prejudice. Although Massing, Gurland, and

Lowenthal insisted that their evidence could not—indeed, given their methods, should not—be subjected to statistical analysis, they maintained that the interview material could be abstracted, classified, and analyzed.68 This process led the researchers to formulate 70 categories describing different combinations of the degree and content of subjects’ prejudice.69 From these, the

Institute distilled an eight-category typology, ranging from extreme anti-Semites and overt

65 For a summary of the report’s statistical findings, see Massing, Gurland, and Lowenthal, “Antisemitism among American Labor,” 173–75.

66 Ibid., 151–58.

67 Ibid., 106.

68 For the most forthright statement of this claim, see ibid., 1264–66.

69 Ibid., 1265.

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fascists (Type A) to principled liberals and genuine humanists (Type H).70 Except for Type H subjects, American workers were prejudiced because they “suffered” under the dominant economic and social order yet “failed to discover the cause of their suffering.” Combining elements of Neumann’s arguments, Massing, Gurland, and Lowenthal claimed that anti-

Semitism was the result of “vague protest against prevailing conditions” hijacked by malign political forces.71

Massing and Gurland were responsible for drafting most of “Antisemitism among

American Labor” and, consequently, for the report’s explanation of anti-Semitism as a vague protest against suffering. Although they never named Marx or his followers, Massing and

Gurland relied on the Marxist conception of class consciousness and its diagnosis of capitalism’s pernicious effects in their account.72 Motivated by the American dream, workers in the United

States believed that consistent hard work would lead to an improvement in their economic condition and social stature. When the dream failed to materialize, Massing and Gurland argued,

American labor looked to assign blame. Because they lacked what the Austro-Marxist theorist

Max Adler, drawing on Marienthal, usefully called “a good Marxist education,” the workers did not recognize that the system itself was the cause of their condition.73 Without the strong sense of solidarity and developed class consciousness of its European counterpart, American labor did not indict capitalism itself but instead attacked those it believed to be retarding it. In contrast to

70 For a description of these categories, see ibid., 73–158.

71 Ibid., 8–9.

72 On Massing and Gurland as social researchers and Marxists, see Worrell, “Signifying the Jew”; “Es Kommt Die Nacht”; Amidon and Worrell, “A. R. L. Gurland, the Frankfurt School, and the Critical Theory of Antisemitism.”

73 Adler, “Wandlung Part I”; “Wandlung Part II.” See the discussion of this concept and its importance for socialist research in chapter 1, above.

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bourgeois anti-Semitism in Europe (and, as Institute-affiliated researchers would later argue, the

United States), in which the fear of downward social mobility animated prejudice, the working- class hostility in America drew strength from hopelessness about stymied movement upward in society.74

Massing and Gurland developed a “portrait of an American fascist” based on this reasoning. A thirty-year-old, ambitious, and intelligent worker:

His middle-class dream is badly bruised but not shattered. He will keep trying, and he will fight anyone who tries to stop him. In his eyes, the world is a big racket. Unions, bankers, churches are smaller rackets within the big one. Once he did have a yearning for human solidarity. Maybe he still has it. But he does not believe that there is room for genuine human relationships in the present set-up [sic] of American society. Until something better comes up—the “people’s community” as Hitler built it or [Father Coughlin’s] “Christian America”—he is out on his own and determined to get ahead of the spoil. His alibi is ready. He wants money, and if he cannot get money he will certainly get those he thinks have it—the Jews.75

Although the Institute researchers did not acknowledge it, “Antisemitism among American

Labor” concurred with the Marienthal in arguing that the frustrations of capitalism turned hopeful, forward-looking workers into reactionary, rage-filled cynics. To be sure, the anti-

Semites identified in the Labor Study were decidedly more active than the resigned villagers found in Marienthal, but a common logic of subjectivity and the intentions of social research underlay both studies. Moreover, “Antisemitism among American Labor” described with more specificity psychological manifestations of social phenomena—above all underdeveloped class

74 This argument concerning bourgeois anti-Semitism was familiar to the JLC from the work of the Verein. See Meyer, “Anti-Defamation Work.” Although the Labor Study did not focus on middle class prejudice, it did gather enough evidence to claim that, in the United States, white-collar workers were in fact a bulwark against fascism. Massing and Gurland speculated that this surprising finding followed from American white-collar workers’ upward economic and social mobility. Massing, Gurland, and Lowenthal, “Antisemitism among American Labor,” 772–79.

75 Massing, Gurland, and Lowenthal, “Antisemitism among American Labor,” 843.

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consciousness and mistaken class identity—Komarovsky had identified provisionally in her conclusion to Unemployed Man.

The Labor Study confirmed Massing and Gurland’s description empirically—although not statistically. Typologizing workers showed that older, less-educated, embittered workers were the most likely to be anti-Semitic. Conversely, younger, better-educated workers were more likely to be tolerant.76 Gurland and Massing emphasized that the key distinction between these two groups was their optimism: “The young American worker is full of hope to ‘make good.’

His dream is to climb the economic and social ladder to independence and wealth.”77 Not yet disabused of their faith in the American dream, these young workers have no reason to be cynical.

Importantly, Massing and Gurland emphasized that workers’ prejudice did not arise spontaneously or inevitably within capitalism. While they recognized that anti-Semitic tropes of rich, avaricious, powerful Jews were both, the researchers insisted that contemporary hatred was the result of an active campaign of “organized anti-Semitism”—National Socialist propagandists and American fifth columnists—designed to undermine democratic politics and foment fascist sympathies.78 Making “anti-Semitism such a persuasive mass emotion was one of Nazism’s foremost political stratagems” in Europe, they argued.79 Consequently, Massing and Gurland warned, Nazis would use prejudice in their efforts to create a fifth column in the United States.

Further, the recent history of Europe “has shown to what extent antisemitic poison may infiltrate

76 Ibid., 736–49, 862–900.

77 Ibid., 736–37.

78 Ibid., 802–900.

79 Ibid., 10.

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into democratic countries torn by social and economic frictions and conflict.” America might not suffer such conflicts in the present—at least not on the surface—but “a situation of dissatisfaction and disillusionment” could “explode in violent outbreaks when the war is over.”80

National Socialism, the researchers cautioned, might be laying the seeds for a Fourth Reich through prejudice.

At the center of this account lay the concept of stereotypes and stereotyped thinking.

Massing and Gurland deployed this concept in three interrelated settings. First, they argued that

National Socialist stereotypes had introduced new forms of prejudice against Jews. In the past,

“the anti-Semite thought and spoke of the Jews as a money-grabber, cheater and smart-aleck; as rude, slick, and cowardly; as selfish, clannish, penny-pinching and asocial.” But, under the guidance of National Socialism, the anti-Semite’s scope of hatred had expanded:

Today the Jew is much more than just a repulsive individual. He is a war-monger. Millions of American boys have to fight in this ‘Jewish war’—for what? And while they fight and die, the Jew is dodging the draft, sitting in soft jobs, running the black market, his eyes already on the huge profits that can be made from the sale of war surplus goods—blood money. Organized antisemitism, operating along such lines, is likely to find attentive ears among demoralized victims of a post-war depression.81

Second, Massing and Gurland held that the new anti-Semitic stereotypes acted as a “sluice” connecting interpersonal animus to totalitarian politics. Once introduced to thinking according to stereotypes, this is to say, workers could be more easily coaxed into welcoming fascism.82

Stereotyped thinking begot stereotyped thinking, creating a vicious circle that culminated in

National Socialism. Third, Massing and Gurland argued that stereotypes explained events and

80 Ibid., 10–11.

81 Ibid., 699–700.

82 Ibid., 781.

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forces that lay beyond workers’ comprehension. The case of “Mr. Wilcox,” a composite figure representing the Type E worker, is illustrative:

Mr. Wilcox is troubled by large-scale events outside his own experience. His habitual orbit of reasoning is not shaped to embrace events and developments which go beyond his everyday happenings. He gets emotional and loses his poise when the subject of the war is brought up. To cope with problems novel to his experience, Mr. Wilcox needs intellectual, and, what is more, political guidance.83

Rather than seek real knowledge about that which he does not understand, Mr. Wilcox—and those innumerable workers like him—“gullibly grabs the ready-made stereotyped notion and squeezes his responses into its frozen mold.”84 Ironically, American workers reached for

National Socialist stereotypes when confronted with information about the Nazis’ crimes themselves: unable to understand why a sane human would inhumanely terrorize, torture, and kill another without some powerful cause, workers concluded that some such reason must exist.

“This kind of reasoning, this attempt at ‘understanding’ prepares [workers] for the ultimate acceptance of Nazi arguments and Nazi deeds.”85 Casting about for such a reason, American laborers alight on anti-Semitic stereotypes, caricatures that “supply the charges sought for.”86

Type A, B, C, D, E, and F individuals were, Massing and Gurland found, either wholly or partly under the sway of stereotyped thinking. Even when experience broke through the reified stereotypes, individuals in these categories responded either by ignoring and repressing it entirely—methods frequently causing no small amount of psychological distress—or by using it to create and justify their stereotypes—selectively using observations from experience to create a

83 Ibid., 119–21.

84 Ibid., 10.

85 Ibid., 781.

86 Ibid., 815–20, viz.820.

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composite picture or pointing to individuals as the proverbial exception that proves the rule.87

Only types G and H individuals—the least anti-Semitic—were immune from stereotyped thinking. How could this immunity be synthesized, transformed into an inoculation, and administered?

To combat the slide into totalitarian thinking through the sluice of anti-Semitism,

Massing and Gurland argued, it would be necessary to give workers a “political education.”

Once “politically awakened” through such an education, workers would be able to discern the political function of anti-Semitism. By asking, “‘Cui bono?’” educated workers brought the utterly incomprehensible crimes of National Socialism back into the domain of experience.88 The

Nazis did not murder without reason; they murdered in order to strengthen the forces of reaction and preserve capitalism. The politically awakened worker thus “has the weapons required and resists the pressure and temptation to use Jews as the lightning-rod for shunting hatred, fury, and aggression generated in our social system” onto surrogate targets.89

Through such arguments, Massing and Gurland effectively combined the aims and obligations of social research articulated by Weiss and Komarovsky during the previous decade.

Like Komarovsky, Massing and Gurland identified the underdeveloped class consciousness characteristic of American workers as a central cause of the social problems under examination.

Americans failed to develop class consciousness, all three researchers held, because of a kind of

87 Ibid., 97–106, 701–3.

88 Ibid., 862–65. Massing and Gurland emphasized that, although linked to lower degrees of prejudice, formal education itself was not a bulwark against fascism. Political education—in unions, on the shop floor—was distinct from and more important than traditional schooling in this regard.

89 Ibid., 862, emphasis original.

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individualism.90 All three researchers held that this individualism was itself caused by economic forces: because American workers aspired to independence—as contractors or small- businesspeople—they lacked the sense of belonging to their actual economic class. Horkheimer,

Adorno, and Lowenthal, it should be noted, doubtless concurred with this view of the pernicious effects of the ideology of individuality, but they located its origins and workings more deeply in social forces and psychological development. Gurland and Massing, moreover, concurred with

Weiss that social research both could and should bring the proletariat to consciousness of its current state and its historical task. Weiss, to be sure, understood this educative function of social research to be more immediate than did Gurland and Massing. In her view, workers who completed Marx’s survey filled this “socialist textbook” with “living contents.”91 Massing and

Gurland, for their part, described the task of researchers as breaking the hold of stereotypes over individuals.

How did stereotyped thinking come to have so much sway over the individual? Massing and Gurland described this power of stereotypes as a feature of modernity more generally. To do so, they momentarily switched from their more orthodox Marxist paradigm to Horkheimer’s register of critical theory. “In modern, technologically disciplined society,” they claimed, “ideas, notions, slogans again and again impressed upon the human mind by constant repetition leave a permanent imprint, grow rigid and inflexible like the printer's stereotype plate cast in metal.”92

This unceasing repetition broke down the intellect—effectively making all workers resemble Mr.

Wilcox. Thus:

90 See Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family, chap. 7.

91 Weiss, “Die Enquête ouvrière von Karl Marx,” 86.

92 Massing, Gurland, and Lowenthal, “Antisemitism among American Labor,” 10.

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People have become used to accepting pre-fabricated values, emotions, patterns of living, with which mass production industries have saturated them. They accept what they hear and see, and the more often they hear and see it, the greater their readiness to accept. […] Anti-Jewish prejudice harbored by a few becomes a mass emotion when organized groups impress it upon the minds of people who are conditioned to imitate, to let stereotypes supplant and destroy genuine experience, emotion, and thought.93

In this sense, the researchers summarized, “the fascist technique of conquering the mind of the

‘man in the street’ is nothing but a skillful handling of this modern mentality.”94

Although they described this condition in the Institute’s inimitable idiom, Massing and

Gurland were hardly alone in their analysis of stereotypes and their connection to totalitarianism.

Indeed, the application of the term “stereotype” to mentalities and thinking was first accomplished in 1922 by Walter Lippmann, the American intellectual who, by virtue of his connections with Lasswell and Marshall, stood behind the Radio Project.95 More proximately, at the same time as the Institute was at work on the Labor Study, Ernst Kris and Hans Speier,

émigré researchers associated with the storied Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social

Research, emphasized the role of stereotypes in their exhaustive study, German Radio

Propaganda (1944):

There is no agitator who does not use stereotypes to simplify events and vilify the enemy; all war propaganda abounds in them. Stereotypes intensify the emotional charges of a sentence, and, when they stand alone, they can act like slogans. Nazi propagandists are not satisfied with using stereotypes in a haphazard way. […] They are also condensed into significant formulas, into single words or simple combinations of words which repeated ad libitum can eventually replace the larger text. The associations that are to be stimulated by the stereotypes are

93 Ibid., 9–10.

94 Ibid., 10.

95 See Lippmann, Public Opinion, 79–158.

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created gradually by the propagandist, who assumes that they will return when the appropriate stimulus is given, once their coherence has been firmly established.96

In such claims, Kris and Speier exhibited the more conventional opposition to propaganda held by many liberal intellectuals.97 Simply put, the thrust of Massing and Gurland’s account in the

Labor Study suggests that the Institute was moving closer to the anxieties and arguments central to American social research.

In his shorter contribution to the Institute’s report, a chapter entitled “Image of

Prejudice,” Leo Lowenthal rephrased Massing and Gruland’s in a different register. From a more psychological orientation—about which more will be said below and in chapter 6—Lowenthal argued that stereotypes supplied the prejudiced mind with images that became grist for the mill of sadomasochistic repression and projection.98 Importantly, working in this psychoanalytic register allowed Lowenthal to ground his arguments about stereotypes more deeply than either

Massing and Gurland or Kris and Speier. Despite their frequent assertions that stereotypes disrupted or wore down rational thinking, replacing independent thought drawn from experience with blind adherence to received ideas, these other researchers lacked a thorough account of this process. Lowenthal, by contrast, claimed that he could better explain how stereotypes undercut prejudiced subjects’ connection to reality. Using the same link between psychoanalysis and empirical research as Fromm—that of “interpretation”—Lowenthal argue that, because they were rooted deep in the psyche, stereotypes collapsed the distance between reason and emotion,

96 Kris and Speier, German Radio Propaganda: Report on Home Broadcasts During the War, 32–33.

97 On this view among both American and émigré intellectuals and academics, see Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise; Gary, The Nervous Liberals.

98 Massing, Gurland, and Lowenthal, “Antisemitism among American Labor,” 904–1144. Interestingly, Lazarsfeld argued around this same time that stereotypy was opposed to psychological projection. See BASR, “Purpose and Use of Image Studies,” n.d., PFL Papers Series I, Box 38, Folder 12.

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cause and effect, action and reaction. “The stereotype,” Lowenthal wrote “takes care of everything.”99

OUTFLANKING THE RESEARCH RACKET

Massing, Gurland, and Lowenthal concurred on the quantitative findings of the Labor

Study and on the structure and function of stereotypes in anti-Semitism, but their agreement ended there. At the same time as they were collecting, categorizing, and interpreting the results of the Labor Study, the three Institute affiliates engaged in a vitriolic debate over the Institute’s account of anti-Semitism and the practical implications thereof.

In 1944, Lowenthal drafted a memorandum on the subject of preventing anti-Semitism in the now-inevitable postwar Germany. Broadly, Lowenthal argued that anti-Semitism was a problem of ideology to be solved through legislation and civil society.100 By so doing, Lowenthal departed from the spearhead theory of totalitarian anti-Semitism with which the Institute—or, at least, some of its members—had been operating. Massing and Gurland took exception to this departure, criticizing Lowenthal for being insufficiently attentive to changes in the material causes of National Socialism: “The Memo [sic]—by a member of the Institute!—ignores that social upheavals have taken place in Europe which have revolutionized all social relations."101

The only solution to the problem of anti-Semitism, Massing and Gurland insisted in a

99 Massing, Gurland, and Lowenthal, “Antisemitism among American Labor,” 952.

100 Leo Lowenthal, “Post-War Antisemitism in Germany,” n.d., MHA, Box IX, File 147.5a; “Post-War Antisemitism in Germany (Second Version),” n.d., MHA, Box IX, File 147.5b; cf. Georg Peck, “On the Problem of Antisemitism in Post-War Germany,” July 28, 1943, MHA, Box IX, File 147.6.

101 Paul Massing and A. R. L. Gurland, “Some Remarks on L.L.’s Memorandum,” September 1944, 7, MHA, Box IX, File 147.4.

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memorandum they sent to Horkheimer in September 1944, was the radical reconfiguration of labor, property, and democracy. In October, Horkheimer, defending Lowenthal, criticized

Massing and Gurland for being insufficiently dialectical and overly romantic, for deploying a

“universal anthropology” formulated from “obsolete psychological conceptions.”102 As the exchange continued, it descended into acrimony. Nevertheless, this argument contained, beneath its vituperative exchanges, a real debate about the future of the Institute’s theory of anti-

Semitism.103 Would it, as Gurland and Massing clearly hoped, remain grounded in the materialism suggested by Neumann’s work? Or would it, as Lowenthal indicated, move towards an account grounded in ideology?

Ultimately the Institute followed Lowenthal, replacing Neumann’s economic-rationality explanation of anti-Semitism with a psychological-social account of prejudice.104 More immediately, however, the division between Massing, Gurland, Lowenthal, and, by extension,

Horkheimer, had the effect of imperiling the completion of the Labor Study. The Institute researchers explained the delay in finalizing their report to the JLC as an unfortunate consequence of the participant-interview method: it was time consuming, expensive, and difficult to train interviewers; moreover, many fieldworkers failed to complete their assigned interviews.105 It seems likely, however, that the acrimonious argument over the Institute’s approach to anti-Semitism more broadly accounted for this tardiness.

102 Max Horkheimer to A. R. L. Gurland and Paul Massing, October 5, 1944, viz., 2, MHA, Box IX, File 147.3.

103 See A. R. L. Gurland and Paul Massing to Max Horkheimer, September 29, 1944, MHA, Box IX, File 147.3; A. R. L. Gurland and Paul Massing to Max Horkheimer, October 12, 1944, MHA, Box IX, File 147.3.

104 On the Institute’s gradual move away from Neumann’s approach, see Jay, “The Jews and the Frankfurt School.”

105 Massing, Gurland, and Lowenthal, “Antisemitism among American Labor,” 1282–1308.

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Adorno stepped into the breach between the two factions, drafting a series of memoranda focused on defending the Institute’s methods in order to reinforce its findings.106 Across these memoranda—written in November and December 1944—Adorno strove to position the Labor

Study between quantitative-sociological and qualitative-psychological research.107 In so doing,

Adorno revisited his critiques of existing empirical techniques and, further, translated them into a positive program of empirical research.

Adorno’s Labor Study memoranda can be read in three interrelated ways. First, Adorno attempted to reconcile the orientations taken and conclusions reached by Gurland, Massing, and

Lowenthal—a task made more difficult by the researchers’ recent falling out. By way of framing the Labor Study’s central insight into class consciousness, for example, Adorno proposed two hypotheses. On the one hand:

At the basis of Labor [sic] antisemitism—as far as class-consciousness is concerned—is the idea that the Jews, while actually belonging to the oppressed, identify themselves with the capitalists and thus appear as capitalists. […] This has a real economic basis, namely that the Jews, while being permanently threatened and without decisive social control, still seem to act according to middle-class patterns […] and in many situations present themselves against the workers as the agents of capitalism.108

On the other hand, Adorno continued:

The rational aspect of the problem [i.e., the aspect presented above], however, is one-sided. Roughly speaking, one may say that the blame of the Jew’s “superiority complex,” the Jewish urge for success and domination, is largely due to the worker’s envy of those Jewish qualities which make for success and which

106 Theodor W. Adorno, “Evaluation of Participant Interviews (Labor Project),” November 3, 1944, PFL Papers Series I, Box 20, Folder 1; Theodor W. Adorno, “Problems of Qualitative Analysis,” November 20, 1944, PFL Papers Series I, Box 20, Folder 1; Theodor W. Adorno, “Write-Up of Final Report,” December 1, 1944, PFL Papers Series I, Box 20, Folder 1.

107 For an overview of the Institute’s arguments about the relation between psychology and sociology, see Jay, “Positive and Negative Totalities,” 1985.

108 Adorno, “Evaluation of Participant Interviews,” 6.

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the average worker himself lacks. Speaking in scientific, psychological terms, one might say that the trend is largely of a projective nature, that is to say, that the domineering features for which the Jews are blamed by the workers are actually inherent in the worker’s mentality itself.109

Adorno, as will be explained further below, emphasized that these explanations—and the sociological (or economic) and psychological frameworks animating them—ought not be integrated. And yet, he claimed, they could nevertheless work together: “As far as the objective basis is concerned, the inescapability of the Jewish middle-class identification should be pointed out and should be used to enlighten those antisemitic workers who complain about this particular attitude of the Jews.”110 Like Massing, Gurland, and, by extension, Weiss, this is to say, Adorno viewed the Labor Study’s principle task of bringing the workers to consciousness of their situation; like Lowenthal, however, Adorno understood this consciousness in a more literal—that is to say, psychological—sense.

Second, Adorno straightforwardly proposed strategies for defending the Labor Study against charges leveled by those in the “research racket” who would think the project unscientific, biased, and limited.111 Adorno suggested, for example, explaining away criticism of the small sample size by emphasizing the “pioneer character” of the study. Like the Radio

Project, then, the Labor Study would be framed as a preparation for future research. In the final report, Adorno wrote, the researchers must emphasize that “we want to find out how to study

Antisemitism, not to obtain final results.”112 Further, Adorno suggested that the report

109 Ibid., 7.

110 Ibid., 8.

111 Adorno, “Write-Up of Final Report,” 2.

112 Ibid., 1, emphasis original.

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underscore the limitations of the existing polling methods catalogued by Lowenthal in earlier memoranda for the Institute.113 It was as a result of such shortcomings, Adorno urged the researchers to claim, that the Institute was forced to fashion its own methods.114 Likewise, the researchers ought to hedge against critiques of selection bias—that the participating interviewers had selected subject already known for their vitriolic prejudices—by claiming that “inference from the extremes” would shed light on the “supposedly ‘normal’ person” who hid his prejudice beneath the surface.115

Third, the memoranda subtly elaborated Adorno’s critiques of the Radio Project. In contrast to Lazarsfeld and his colleagues, the Institute researchers did not sequester themselves in psychological laboratories but went out into the field—or, at least, trained others to do so—to study phenomena in their social contexts. Anticipating an argument that would become central to the Institute’s postwar study of German public opinion, Group Experiment (1955), Adorno claimed that the interview itself was a situation that conjured thoughts, preferences, and opinions where none had previously existed.116 Lazarsfeld’s methods, built on Karl and Charlotte Bühler’s developmental psychology, of tracing respondents’ decisions and attitudes backwards in time,

113 Adorno likely had in mind Lowenthal, “Critical Remarks on Various Polls”; Lowenthal, “How to Get an Idea of the Minds of the People with Regard to the Jewish Problem and Why. Statement of the West Coast Branch, (7/3/43)”; cf. “Some Methodological Errors in the Study of Antisemitism (Jewish Social Studies, January 1943),” 1943, MHA, Box IX, File 99.B.

114 Adorno, “Write-Up of Final Report,” 1–3.

115 Adorno, “Evaluation of Participant Interviews,” 3–5.

116 Although Group Experiment lies beyond the purview of this dissertation, it is certainly a point in the arc this project describes. For a brief discussion of the study as it relates to the dissertation—a discussion which identifies Group Experiment as a topic for future research—see the conclusion to the dissertation.

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this argument implied, hypostatized their thoughts and reified their subjectivities.117 More broadly, Adorno’s insistence that the Labor Study approached its topic “through particular reference to a theory of society” was a thinly veiled critique of the Radio Project’s claimed objectivity and neutrality.118 Although he joined the Labor Study only after the completion of its fieldwork, this is to say, Adorno aimed to shape its completion and presentation as a work of empirical research—the kind of empirical research he had called for but could not undertake at the Radio Project.

Adorno distinguished the Labor Study from the Radio Project most fully by insisting that the Institute’s research would not perform a “naïve statistical breakdown of the [quantitative] results” because it recognized that this “material is not an ultimate source of knowledge but needs incessant critique and correction.”119 To be sure, this claim contained no small amount of self-preservation: Adorno recognized that the researchers’ “statistical findings are likely to be most open to all kinds of critique.”120 Making a virtue of necessity, however, he suggested that this theoretically inflected critique was connected to further empirical research. As Adorno put it:

“The critical study of our own findings should offer us a lead for positive statistical work in a sphere that offers peculiar obstacles to quantitative analysis.”121

117 Adorno, “Evaluation of Participant Interviews,” 4–5, 41; cf. Friedrich Pollock and Theodor W. Adorno, Group Experiment and Other Writings. The Frankfurt School on Public Opinion in Postwar Germany, ed. and trans. Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

118 Adorno, “Write-Up of Final Report,” 1–3.

119 Ibid., 7, 4, emphasis original.

120 Ibid., 10.

121 Ibid., 7.

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Specifically, Adorno argued that the categories used in statistical analysis and theoretical critique connected the two approaches. In “Antisemitism among American Labor,” Massing,

Gurland, and Lowenthal had developed a typology of anti-Semites, sorting the study’s experimental subjects according to degree and content of prejudice. Above, this typology was discussed in terms of social theory—specifically, the Institute researchers’ account of stereotypy.

And yet, the Institute’s project also relied on empirical findings to formulate this typology and to draw conclusions from it. Quantification—a process involving, first, the abstraction and, second, the categorization of responses—preceded typologization. Although Adorno insisted that the results of the JLC study could not be used to characterize American labor more generally—it was simply too small to be statistically meaningful—the Institute’s typology formed a nexus where a theory of stereotypy and an analysis of stereotypes converged.122 As Horkheimer put it in 1941, the subject matter and methods used in a study depended “essentially” on the existing theory of society.123

Adorno’s suggestion of a link between critical social theory and empirical social research was by no means new. Horkheimer had argued for the necessity of such a connection as far back as his first programmatic writings on critical theory and this impulse had been carried forward in a variety of methodological writings and research projects from Authority and the Family (1936) to the Princeton Radio Research Project. More proximately, Adorno invoked ideas developed in a debate among Institute members and affiliates in 1941 to argue that empirical research would replace a “vicious circle” in which empirical findings merely proved or disproved a hypothesis

122 Adorno, “Evaluation of Participant Interviews,” 3.

123 Horkheimer, “Debatte über den Methoden,” 546; cf. “Traditional and Critical Theory.”

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with a virtuous circle in which the reciprocal interaction between research and theory generated new insights and further theories.124

In these group discussions, in private conversations with Horkheimer, and in his writings for the Radio Project, Adorno insisted that the Institute’s virtuous circle was fundamentally different from and superior to naïve—by which he meant American—empirical research.125 The memoranda on the Labor Study extended this claim.126 “We cannot take the opinion of a Labor

[sic] boss about Antisemitism in his local [union chapter] at its face value,” Adorno wrote by way of example, “but we shall always have to ask why he gave that answer, which political, economic, and self-interest factors influence his judgment […] and [we] can employ his statements only in proportion to such a critique.”127 Such comments, which bore a striking resemblance to Lazarsfeld’s why-question research discussed in chapter 3, carried a multifarious significance. They show clearly that Adorno continued to operate within the why-question paradigm. Indeed, Adorno’s comments suggest his intention was to improve Lazarsfeld’s approach, to find better ways of asking—and answering—why-questions. Adorno’s Labor Study

124 Adorno, “Write-Up of Final Report”; Horkheimer, “Debatte über den Methoden.”

125 See Adorno’s contribution to the discussion in Horkheimer, “Debatte über den Methoden”; Horkheimer and Adorno, “Ein Methodenproblem des ‘Radio Research Project’”; cf. Horkheimer, “Zur Kritik der amerikanischen Sozialwissenschaft.”

126 Not only Adorno’s but also Lowenthal’s memoranda contributed to making this point. See, e.g., Lowenthal, “Critical Remarks on Various Polls”; Lowenthal, “How to Get an Idea of the Minds of the People with Regard to the Jewish Problem and Why. Statement of the West Coast Branch, (7/3/43).”

127 Adorno, “Write-Up of Final Report,” 4. “Antisemitism among American Labor” itself contained such statements. As Massing, Gurland, and Lowenthal wrote, "To find what is at the base of antisemitic prejudice as it manifests itself within the ranks of labor, it is not sufficient to know how many workers are antisemitic. We will have to learn what being antisemitic means for these workers. Why do they react the way they do? What is the nature and intensity of their prejudice? Does labor antisemitism show the same features as antisemitism manifested by middle- class people, intellectuals, etc.? Or, if it is different, what makes up the difference? What specific social and economic conditions, what particular experiences, make the workers hate 'the Jew'?" Massing, Gurland, and Lowenthal, “Antisemitism among American Labor,” 13.

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memoranda were, therefore, not a break with but an extension of his Radio Project writings.

Adorno’s lack of reference to Lazarsfeld should be understood as deliberate. By tying the why- question approach to the Institute’s broader and established critical-theoretical orientation,

Adorno sought to adopt it as the Institute’s own. It was only possible to ask why, this is to say, by combining social theory and social research.

ALMOST-MONADOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY

Alongside his account of the Labor Study as an empirical research project—one working towards the promise of the union between empirical social research and critical social theory—

Adorno’s memoranda contained a defense of the project from any perceived similarity to recent works of social psychology. His efforts on this front complicate those historical accounts that identify a shift from social to psychological analysis in the Institute’s American work.128

Moreover, and, for the purposes of this dissertation, more important, these writings situate the

Labor Study within an evolving critique of social psychology that originated with Leichter and

Lazarsfeld’s critiques of Fromm.

Since its inception in the 1870s, the academic discipline of psychology had posed questions about and conducted research into nation, race, and, by extension, prejudice. As

Glenda Sluga has shown, the professionalization of psychology, the quest for scientific objectivity, and the pursuit of lasting peace deepened and operationalized this connection in the years leading up to—and, by extension, the results of—the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.129 In

128 See, e.g., Zoltan Tar, Frankfurt School (New York: Schocken, 1985), 102–12; Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 41–52. For an incisive critique of Tar’s approach, see Jay, “Adorno in America.”

129 Sluga, Nation, Psychology, and International Politics, 1870-1919.

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America, influential scholars like William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki developed psychological interpretations of racial prejudice and sociological arguments for its supersession.130 From Thomas and his peers, American intellectuals developed an interest in the psychological origins and amelioration of prejudices; by the time of America’s entrance into the

Second World War, such concerns had entered the mainstream, appearing in essays written for

The Antioch Review, The Atlantic, Common Ground, and The New Republic.131 Thomas

Wheatland has argued that this growing interest in the problem of anti-Semitic prejudice helped convince the funding organizations to support the Institute’s study of the phenomenon in its social and psychological dimensions.132

Although Lowenthal and Adorno critiqued American researchers, Adorno directed his criticism of social-psychological research into anti-Semitism not at Thomas’ followers but at his

European counterparts. Adorno’s complicated, shifting relationship with these psychologists will be discussed more fully below, in chapter 6. For the moment, suffice it to say that the European approach to the problem of anti-Semitism stemmed from Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913) and

130 See, e.g., William I. Thomas, “The Psychology of Race-Prejudice,” American Journal of Sociology 9, no. 5 (1904): 593–611.

131 David W. Petegorsky, “The Strategy of Hatred,” The Antioch Review 1, no. 3 (1941): 376–88, https://doi.org/10.2307/4608845; Miriam Syrkin, “How Not to Solve the Jewish Problem,” Common Ground 2, no. 1 (Fall 1941); Alfred Jay Nock, “The Jewish Problem in America,” The Atlantic 167, no. 6 (June 1941); James Marshall, “The Anti-Semitic Problem in America,” The Atlantic 168, no. 2 (August 1941); Benjamin Akzin, “The Jewish Question After the War,” Harper’s Magazine, no. 1096 (September 1941): 430–330; Michael Straight, “The Anti-Semitic Plot,” The New Republic 105, no. 2 (September 22, 1941); Arthur H. Compton, “The Jews: A Problem or An Asset,” The Atlantic 168, no. 4 (October 1941).Horkheimer included references to these articles in a research proposal sent to the AJC in November 1941. See IfS, “Anti-Semitism, a Research Project.”

132 Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile, 234–35. As the above description of the genesis of the Labor Study shows, the same cannot be said of the JLC. Its interest in the problem of anti-Semitic prejudice among American labor was decidedly different, originating in the perceived failures of the German Zentralverein.

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later interpretations of it by Otto Fenichel and Ernst Simmel.133 Adorno objected strenuously to the social-psychological revision of the orthodox Freudianism he detected in the work of Fromm.

As in his account of the Labor Study as a work of empirical research, Adorno developed two intertwined arguments. First, Adorno emphasized the need for methodological clarity. When studies “à la Fromm” combined concepts, arguments, and insights from sociology and psychology, Adorno wrote, they confused “motivating ideas” acting on the conscious mind with

“compulsory psychological forces” operating below the surface, leading to imprecise analysis.134

According to the Adorno, Institute researchers would “not call the influence of socio-economic factors psychological since they are more or less on a rational level. They are motivating ideas rather than compulsory psychological forces. […] The term psychological should be reserved for those traits which are prima facie irrational.”135 Already in 1944, such a statement, Adorno recognized, ran against the grain of interdisciplinary research in the social and behavioral sciences.136 “These statements contain in a rather pointed form my own attitude toward the entire complex; it is exactly the opposite of the kind of ‘synthesis’ favored by the usual

‘Wissenschaftsbetrieb’ [academic organization].” Adorno informed his Institute colleagues that

“such unconventional and apparently paradoxical statements will shock our sponsors.”137 Despite

133 See, e.g., Simmel, “Anti-Semitism and Mass Psychopathology”; Fenichel, “Elements of a Psychoanalytic Theory of Anti-Semitism.” Horkheimer would later laud Simmel for his “productive [Freudian] orthodoxy.” Max Horkheimer, “Ernst Simmel und die Freud’sche Philosophie,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Alfred Schmidt and Gunzelin Noerr, trans. Helmut Dahmer, vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1997), 400.

134 Adorno, “Evaluation of Participant Interviews,” 44; cf. Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, ed. Max Horkheimer and Samuel H. Flowerman (New York: Norton, 1950), 94, fn. 10.

135 Adorno, “Evaluation of Participant Interviews,” 43.

136 On this trend, see Isaac, Working Knowledge; Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind, 65–103.

137 Adorno, “Evaluation of Participant Interviews,” 43–44.

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the institutional pressure to conduct interdisciplinary research, Adorno wrote in the Labor Study memoranda, the Institute researchers would keep sociology and psychology distinct from one another.

Second, Adorno followed the Institute’s evolving critique of Fromm in arguing that the latter’s social psychology vitiated the radical critique of contemporary society in orthodox psychoanalysis. Until 1939, Fromm had been a central figure at the Institute, integral to empirical studies including the survey of German workers and the social-psychological essay and studies in Authority and the Family. Moreover, as Wheatland has argued, Fromm was, in this capacity, integral to the Institute’s representation of itself as capable of high-caliber empirical research.138 But Horkheimer and Adorno—long wary of psychoanalysis, as was shown in chapter

4, because of its potential to sustain the ideology of individuality—began to oppose Fromm’s revisionism of Freudian orthodoxy. Simply put, Horkheimer and Adorno moved in one direction while Fromm moved the other.139 Because it came at the expense of Freud’s most radical theories of instincts, drives, and sexuality, they argued, Fromm’s social psychology lacked the incisive critiques of its original orthodoxy. As Herbert Marcuse—doubtless the Institute’s fiercest critic of Fromm—later wrote, under Fromm’s guidance, “psychoanalytic theory turns into ideology: the ‘personality’ and its creative potentialities are resurrected in the face of a reality which has all but eliminated the conditions for the personality and its fulfillment.”140

Fromm’s revisionist psychoanalytic therapy particularly offended Marcuse’s critical-theoretical sensibilities, for it explicitly aimed to adjust individuals to their societies: “while psychoanalytic

138 Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile, 84.

139 For an account of this shift, see Friedman, The Lives of Erich Fromm, 59–62.

140 Herbert Marcuse, “The Social Implications of Freudian Revisionism,” Dissent 2 (1955): 225.

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theory recognizes that the sickness of the individual is ultimately caused and sustained by the sickness of his civilization, psychoanalytic therapy [i.e., Fromm’s approach] aims at curing the individual so that he can continue to function as part of a sick civilization without surrendering it altogether.”141

In his Labor Study memoranda, Adorno argued that the Institute researchers would not only keep the disciplines of psychology and sociology separate but also sharpen their inherent differences by “following up to the extreme the inherent categories of each discipline involved.”142 Both social—under which heading Adorno included historical, economical, and sociological orientations and their constituent modes of materialist and ideological analysis—and psychological—by which Adorno meant orthodox-Freudian psychoanalytic theory—approaches would pursued to their limits. According to Adorno, this approach would force both methods to confront their limitations and contradictions. But whatever contradictions or impasses arose would be preserved and parsed, not discounted or explained away. Through this method, Adorno argued, the Institute would “rediscover the social element at the very bottom of psychological categories.” Specifically, this “almost-monadological psychology” would uncover the disappearance of the individual as a psychological entity and social category.143

How did Adorno’s 1945 critique of Fromm’s social psychology relate to Leichter and

Lazarsfeld’s criticism, almost a decade earlier, of Fromm’s “structural-statistical” method?

Adorno and Leichter and Lazarsfeld used different registers to assess Fromm’s methodology and its shortcomings, to be sure, but all three concurred in their view that Fromm erred in combining

141 Ibid., 222.

142 Adorno, “Evaluation of Participant Interviews,” 44.

143 Ibid.

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concepts, insights, and methods from two scientific disciplines. According to Adorno, Fromm ought to have pursued one discipline to its limits. Leichter and Lazarsfeld’s argument that

Fromm ought to have derived the analytical categories and argumentative concepts from the empirical material itself—rather than applying exogenous elements of psychological theory through “interpretation”—echoed this point in a methodological idiom. In their contribution to

Authority and the Family, Leichter and Lazarsfeld argued for the potential superiority of

“structural types” over “interpretive types;” in his essay on “Typological Procedures in Social

Research,” Lazarsfeld refined this argument and used it—explicitly—against Fromm. Although

Adorno did not argue for the superiority of structural types in his methodological essays for the

Labor Study, this claim was an element of his contributions to the Institute’s contemporaneous study of authoritarianism.

CONCLUSION

In the late 1960s, Adorno looked back on his experience in the United States with contempt.144 Lazarsfeld, Cantril, Marshall, and, by extension, Lasswell reduced Adorno to a mere “knowledge technician.” When “confronted with the demand to ‘measure culture,’”

Adorno wrote, “I reflected that culture might be precisely the condition that excludes a mentality capable of measurement.”145 In earlier chapters, I showed that Adorno’s characterization of

American social research distorted actual events. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that Adorno departed from the Radio Project because of his dissatisfaction with the premise and execution of the study.

144 See Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America.”

145 Ibid., 347.

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In this chapter, however, I demonstrated that Adorno did not abandon his interest in the theories and practices of empirical social research. Rather, Adorno remained deeply enmeshed in the Institute’s ever-growing number and variety of research projects. I sketched the methodological core of these projects by tracing Lowenthal’s developing argument for the importance of a link between “European” psychoanalysis and “American” experimental psychology. For Lowenthal, such a link was both pragmatically valuable and methodologically necessary. Lowenthal, Massing, and Gurland adopted this approach—which included a number of complex techniques for conducting interviews, categorizing responses, and typologizing subjects—in their study of anti-Semitic workers for the Jewish Labor Committee. Ultimately, it fell to Adorno to define and defend this method. In so doing, I showed, Adorno turned his earlier critiques of “American” methods against a new target: the decidedly “European” approaches of revisionist psychologists. These critiques led Adorno to suggest a framework in which critical theory and empirical research might work together—as Lowenthal had hoped. Specifically,

Adorno proposed that various approaches be kept distinct and pursued to their ultimate limits.

Adorno argued that only there, at the limits of coherence and the precipice of contradiction, would empirical methods become truly useful, for they would illuminate the contradictions of capitalism and the ideology of individualism. Otherwise put, only as it approached an “almost monadological psychology” could social research become a method of experimenting in theory.

Further, I situated the Labor Study in the arc of the Institute’s developing conception and practice of empirical social research. Massing, Gurland, and Lowenthal, the chapter demonstrated, claimed to have developed entirely new methods of social research—techniques for elucidating information from subjects by putting them in the “psychoanalytical situation”— but were, in fact, deploying techniques of indirect interviews that members of the ÖWF had used

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as early as Marienthal and, more proximately, Komarovsky had used in Unemployed Man. Less concretely, but no less importantly, the Institute researchers aligned themselves with the framework of “experiments in theory” Adorno had outlined in his critique of the Princeton Radio

Research Project. Using these established techniques, Massing, Gurland, and Lowenthal arrived—perhaps unsurprisingly—at an insight anticipated by Max Adler, Lazarsfeld,

Komarovsky and others: members of the working class were inherently unreliable political actors; at root, they were more likely to become reactionaries than revolutionaries. Institute researchers echoed their predecessors in arguing that this lamentable situation, resulted from the pernicious concatenation of a lack of class consciousness and a misplaced class identity. Workers imagined themselves to be members of the upwardly mobile middle class; when such aspirations were stymied, they failed to examine the capitalist economy itself but instead cast about for those why might be thwarting it. By so arguing, Massing, Gurland, and Lowenthal sharpened the insights of Komarovsky, who had located such sentiments in her late-1930s study of unemployed workers in Newark. In their reaction to this finding, the Institute researchers again followed an established pattern: like Lazarsfeld and Weiss, they framed their empirical research as a method of political education. Social research, this is to say, could initiate the transformation of the proletariat by instilling class identity and consciousness.

On the basis of these multiple, thoroughgoing similarities, I argued that the Labor Study was not only a continuation of the Institute’s evolving program of empirical research but also a part of the distinctively Marxist tradition of transformative social research described by Weiss and undertaken by the ÖWF. But this claim raises an important question: why would the Institute researchers who took part in the Labor Study neglect the project’s place in this tradition? Indeed, why would they go so far as to insist upon the novelty of their methods? Questions of this kind

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can be answered definitively only through further research. Provisionally, however, I suggest several possibilities. The Institute researchers may well have insisted on the innovativeness of their methods because they aimed to win the support of the AJC. Claiming methodological novelty and denouncing polls, this is to say, may have been a rhetorical strategy used to secure institutional support. Relatedly, the Institute may well have assumed that members of the AJC were unlikely to be familiar with these long-running, “European” debates. Alternatively, the leaders of the Labor Study may have failed to recognize the place of their project within the

Institute’s methodological development and the paradigm of Marxist social science. As a result of his recent disagreement with Lazarsfeld over the meaning and practice of the “European approach” to social research, Adorno may have been reluctant to recognize these connections.

But “Antisemitism among American Labor” and Adorno’s memoranda provide offer only a partial view of the Institute’s empirical research during the 1940s. Moreover, Adorno soon repudiated the Labor Study. In 1946, the Institute asked Daniel Bell, later a prominent public intellectual, to revise the Labor Study. The plan came to naught and the report lay dormant for three years.146 In 1949, Horkheimer and Adorno asked Lazarsfeld and his new Bureau of Applied

Social Research to take up the task of transforming the document into a manuscript that could appear alongside the Institute’s growing number of studies of anti-Semitism.147 But Adorno quickly came to think that the Labor Study was deeply—perhaps fundamentally—flawed.

146 See Irving Salert to Paul Massing, February 27, 1946, JLC Records, Part III, Box 272A, Folder 9; Friedrich Pollock to Jacob Pat, “Re: Publication of the Institute’s Study of Antisemitism within American Labor,” April 24, 1946, JLC Records, Part III, Box 272A, Folder 9; Horace M. Kallen to Adolf Held, May 10, 1946, JLC Records, Part III, Box 272A, Folder 9; Irving Salert to Horace M. Kallen, May 15, 1946, JLC Records, Part III, Box 272A, Folder 9.

147 Adorno, “Antisemitism Among American Labor as Edited by Bureau of Applied Social Research,” 4. According to Martin Jay, Glencoe Press announced as late as 1953 its intention to publish the Labor Study, although this plan, too, did not materialize. See Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 225.

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“Antisemitism among American Labor” painted a picture of workers that was so damning,

Adorno worried, as to be almost unbelievable to American audiences.

Compounding this worry was Adorno’s growing sense that the Labor Study had been methodologically misguided. Even the revised study, Adorno wrote in a memorandum, neglected

“the most elementary issue,” namely, “to what extent skeleton questions [i.e., those used in the indirect interviews] are to be regarded as leading ones and very likely to have induced the workers to talk in a more antisemitic vein than they would have done otherwise.”148 Finally,

Adorno critiqued the Institute’s earlier work in light of its more recent studies. He complained that the “frustration-aggression thesis”—that is, the psychological principle latent in Neumann’s

Behemoth and explicit in Massing and Gurland’s contributions to the project—pervaded the

Labor Study. “The problem of frustration,” Adorno wrote in 1949, “becomes meaningful against the background of the social system as a whole, but not in terms of the specific worries of individual subjects.” Put simply, Adorno complained that, despite his own earlier efforts to shape the Labor Study, the JLC project remained crippled by a “rhetorical pseudo-logic” in which psychological causes were the consequences of social forces.149

Adorno’s multiple and varied criticisms of the Labor Study cut the project to the quick.

Despite his efforts to identify, describe, and remove the social-psychological elements of the

Institute’s method, the Labor Study had failed to situate the psychology of prejudice against the

“background of the social system as a whole.” Given this seemingly endemic shortcoming,

Adorno might well have wondered whether any empirical research could accomplish this task or whether the critical investigation of the “objective spirit” of the social totality was a task for

148 Adorno, “Antisemitism Among American Labor as Edited by Bureau of Applied Social Research,” 7.

149 Ibid., 4.

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theory alone. Simply put, Adorno had taken steps towards realizing the “experiments in theory” he had described during his work the Radio Project but had not realized their full potential. But

Adorno did not countenance the abandonment of empirical social research. In fact, at the same time as he was critiquing attempts to revive and publish the Labor Study, Adorno was conceptualizing and describing an array of methods—which went under names such as

“phenomenology” and “anthropology”—that he hoped would capture the “objective spirit” of the social totality empirically.

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CHAPTER 6

EUROPEAN CONCEPTS AND AMERICAN METHODS: STUDIES OF AUTHORITARIANISM, 1943-1950

GUIDED BY A THEORETICAL ORIENTATION

Almost immediately after completing his memoranda on the aims, methods, and conclusions of the Labor Study, Adorno began drafting proposals for the further—empirical— study of American anti-Semitism. Between January and March 1945, Adorno outlined no fewer than twelve projects, ranging from an analysis of popular cartoon strips containing “imagery which exercises unvoluntarily [sic] the most pernicious antisemitic influences” to an ethnography of the “contact zones”—such as names, holidays, and foods—between Jews and

Gentiles.1 The intensity and breadth of Adorno’s thinking about anti-Semitism during these months lend credence to the interpretation developed in the previous chapter: although Adorno played a pivotal role in the Labor Study—not only defending it from the attacks of the “research racket” but also integrating it into the Institute’s evolving view of empirical research methods— his influence was, in the final analysis, limited by the limitations of the study itself and, further, by Adorno’s brief participation in it. Adorno’s early-1945 proposals signal a more expansive engagement with the phenomena of anti-Semitism and the methods of empirical research. As one

1 Theodor W. Adorno, “Research Project on the Imagery of subconscious Antisemitism,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer; Briefwechsel 1927-1969, vol. 3, Briefe und Briefwechsel 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 452; “Research Project on contact areas between Gentiles and Jews,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer; Briefwechsel 1927-1969, vol. 3, Briefe und Briefwechsel 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 489–93. Like chapter 4, the present chapter will not note the many variations of “anti-Semitism” used by the Institute and its interlocutors.

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of Adorno’s collaborators from this period, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, later wrote, this research

“was guided by a theoretical orientation that was present at the start.” 2

Frenkel-Brunswik’s description might seem to suggest that the Institute’s empirical studies in this period were subordinate to or, perhaps, extensions of their theoretical projects.

According to this view, texts such as Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment

(1947), which interrogated the structure of “Enlightenment reason” in the “social totality” of

Western modernity, subtended the Institute’s empirical research into anti-Semitism and, later, authoritarianism for the American Jewish Committee (AJC) between 1943 and 1947.3 Some historians have taken this position. According to Adorno’s biographer, for example, the

Institute’s research into anti-Semitism was a “continuation of Dialectic of Enlightenment by other means.”4 I do not dispute the obvious and important interrelationship between the

Institute’s critical-theoretical studies and empirical projects, but I do complicate existing understandings of this link. To do so, I elaborate Frenkel-Brunswik’s claim, asking what theory guided the Institute’s empirical projects and how this theory shaped their social research. By so doing, I aim to illuminate the methodology that Adorno termed “phenomenology” and

Horkheimer dubbed “anthropology.”5

2 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 225.

3 Although Dialectic of Enlightenment itself was not published until 1947, its contents—the “Philosophical Fragments”—had been completed and circulated among Institute associates in 1944.

4 Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 292.

5 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, ix. More research is needed in order to determine the relation between the Institute’s use of anthropology in this sense and its members’ earlier criticism of the “philosophical anthropology” of Martin Heidegger and Max Scheler. Max Horkheimer developed this critique in early issues of the Zeitschrift. See, e.g., Max Horkheimer, “Notes on Science and the Crisis,” “Materialism and Metaphysics,” and “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics” in Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (New York: Continuum, 1972).

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Adorno, Horkheimer, and their Institute colleagues applied this method most extensively and successfully in their study of authoritarianism—known variously as “The Berkeley Project on the Nature and Extent of Anti-Semitism,” “The Function of Anti-Semitism in the

Personality,” or, simply, “the Adult Project”—conducted for the AJC between 1943 and 1947.

Published as The Authoritarian Personality (1950), the Berkeley Project established Adorno’s reputation in the United States and, later, Europe as an empirical social scientist.6 In this chapter,

I focus on the Berkeley Project, reconstructing the origins, development, and execution of the project. In so doing, it should be noted, I describes events, ideas, and texts that, in many cases, overlapped with those I discussed in chapter 5. As will become clear in what follows, this overlap is significant, for examining Horkheimer and Adorno’s roles in the Berkeley Project adds nuance to their critiques of social psychology and their conceptions of empirical social research.

First, I describe the organizational origins and intellectual affinities of the Institute’s collaboration with the Berkeley Public Opinion Study Group between the spring of 1943 and the summer of 1944. Although the Berkeley Group was a comprised of behavioral, developmental and experimental psychologists, several of its members were alumni of the ÖWF. Horkheimer understood this collaboration to be the last, best opportunity for the creation of a link between

“European concepts” and “American methods.” I argue that this distinction was far less clear than Horkheimer imagined it to be. Instead, the Berkeley Group combined concepts and methods from both Europe and the United States—a process especially evident in its members’ reliance on Freudian theory to explain anti-Semitism. I demonstrate that this reliance made questions

6 On Adorno’s recognition as a social scientist, see Jay, “Positive and Negative Totalities,” 1985, 41; Claussen, One Last Genius, 201, 212–13. On the popularity of The Authoritarian Personality among social scientists, see Samelson, “Odyssey of a Problem.”

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about the psychoanalytic and social-psychological approach unavoidable in the subsequent studies of authoritarianism conducted by the Berkeley Group and the Institute.

Next, I document the execution of the Berkeley Project between 1944 and 1946. I show that Adorno, who represented the Institute in the study, derived key insights and arguments from

Dialectic of Enlightenment. Simultaneously, however, Adorno utilized of the techniques he previously identified and critiqued as “American.” Through my reconstruction of the Berkeley

Project itself, I argue that Adorno did so for both practical and theoretical reasons. On the one hand, “American” methods—namely the techniques of typological classification described by

Lazarsfeld and his colleagues—provided the best means for organizing, analyzing, and presenting an otherwise-overwhelming amount of evidence. On the other hand, Adorno argued that the broader “American” paradigm was apposite to studying authoritarianism, because its inherently reifying approach reflected the thoroughly reified social totality. Otherwise put,

Adorno’s contributions to the Berkeley Project brought to its conclusion the search for the means of conducting “experiments in theory” that would critically examine modern subjects without relying on the ideology of individuality. In this roundabout way, Adorno realized Horkheimer’s long-hoped-for collaboration between “European concepts” and “American methods.”

Third, I document the contradictions generated by the Berkeley Project’s reliance upon psychoanalytic theories in general and social-psychological methods in particular. I show that between 1947 and 1950, Adorno wrestled with the role of seemingly ineluctable concepts, categories, theories, methods, and arguments borrowed from psychoanalysis and social psychology. The critiques of social psychology and argument for an “almost-monadological psychology” I analyzed in chapter 5 made this presence troubling—if not untenable. Ultimately,

I argue, Adorno could not completely reconcile his methodological position with his empirical

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research; he resorted to asserting a kind of paradox: only a psychology that presupposed its own impossibility could be used in social research. Adorno held that such a psychology could form the foundation for an immanent critique of the ideology of individuality.

INSIGHTS AND HUNCHES

Research for the AJC project began in the spring of 1943. Initially, the Institute pursued four interlinked studies: documenting the successes and failures of the Zentralverein (research that soon led to the Labor Study, discussed in chapter 5), analyzing the fate of European Jews under the conditions of modern capitalism, recording fascist and anti-Semitic rhetoric, and compiling anti-Semitic stereotypes and caricatures into a manual for those targeted.7 The first and second of these studies were carried out in New York City; the second and third in Los

Angeles. In addition, the Institute used these early months to catalogue existing methods—both social-scientific and psychological—for studying American anti-Semitism.8 Unsurprisingly, given the number and variety of subsidiary projects and the time-limited grant, Horkheimer began to worry that the Institute could not accomplish all it had promised the AJC. In February

1944, Horkheimer wrote to Friedrich Pollock that, “[i]f this piece is not done with some

7 For an overview of the Institute’s early work, see IfS, “Memorandum on the Project on Antisemitism.” The document is dated December 30, 1942, but this cannot be correct, as it describes—in the past tense—work undertaken during the spring of 1943. It seems likely, therefore, that it was written in December 1943 or 1944. More detailed accounts of this work can be found in: IfS, “Joint Meeting of the A.J.C. and the Institute on May 7, 1943,” May 7, 1943, MHA, Box IX, File 100; Friedrich Pollock, “Report on the Work’s Progress Since the Last Joint Meeting on May 7, 1943,” July 8, 1943, MHA, Box IX, File 100; IfS, “Agenda for the Intermediate Joint Meeting of the Institute of Social Research and the A.J.C. (July 8, 1943),” July 8, 1943, MHA, Box IX, File 100; IfS, “Agenda for the Intermediate Joint Meeting of the Institute of Social Research and the A.J.C. (July 27, 1943),” July 27, 1943, MHA, Box IX, File 100; IfS, “Assignments. Anweisungen zu Einzeluntersuchungen des Antisemitismus-Projekts,” 1943, MHA, Box IX, File 139.

8 In addition to the documents cited above, see “Some Methodological Errors in the Study of Antisemitism (Jewish Social Studies, January 1943)”; Lowenthal, “Critical Remarks on Various Polls”; “Critical Remarks on Various Polls for Measuring Changes in Antisemitic Attitudes”; IfS, “Suggestions Concerning Polling Methods.”

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superiority and enthusiasm, the reader will again get the impression that our group is just a bunch of European scholars heavily loaden [sic] with academic wisdom, trying to frighten the

American public into buying the awkward and highly theoretical stuff as being particularly useful and expedient.”9

Perhaps to assuage this anxiety about being perceived as intellectually aloof and theoretically abstruse, the Institute took pains to position its work as both concrete and pragmatic. In July 1943, Pollock had written that “we ourselves consider the project not as abstract research but on the contrary as a means of pointing out new methods with which to fight the ever-impending menace [of anti-Semitism].” The Institute, he continued would remain true to its theoretical analysis: “But we firmly believe that the best methods, as, for instance, in physics and chemistry, have sprung from the organization of the most thorough and seemingly aloof investigations.”10 But reflecting on the development of the AJC project in late 1943 or 1944, however, the Institute framed this moment as a point of inflection: “we became aware,” they wrote, “that the hour was too late for such a general historical and international survey. We decided to devote our efforts immediately to the drafting of methods which might lead to a better grasp of the social and psychological mechanisms underlying antisemitism.”11

Although Horkheimer and Adorno ostensibly took responsibility for developing psychological experiments to study anti-Semitism—including “a study on the psychology of destructive tendencies within civilization” and a “study on propaganda of hate in its relation to

9 Quoted in Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 362.

10 Pollock, “Report on Progress,” July 8, 1943, 1.

11 IfS, “Memorandum on the Project on Antisemitism,” 1. On the date of this memorandum, see above, fn. 7.

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the ‘decent citizen’”—these projects essentially reframed ongoing research.12 Examining the

“psychology of destructive tendencies” was doubtless linked to their collaboration on Dialectic of Enlightenment; researching propaganda was connected to Adorno’s study of the fascist agitator Martin Luther Thomas.13 In March 1943, the Los Angeles branch of the Institute began reaching out to specialist organizations in order to delegate this psychological research, contacting the Institute contacted the Department of Psychology and the School of Religion at the University of Southern California, the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and the

Department of Psychology at the University of California-Los Angeles.14 Around this time,

Horkheimer contacted another research organization in Northern California: the Berkeley Public

Opinion Study Group. Of the multiple collaborations with psychologists that the Institute proposed and realized, it was their partnership with the Berkeley Group that would prove the most important—not only to their study of anti-Semitism for the AJC but also for their development of critical, empirical research methods.

Central to the Institute’s collaboration with the Berkeley Group was a study of the

“psychosocial origins of morale” by its founder and leader, R. Nevitt Sanford. In the study,

Sanford critiqued research into morale conducted in the hopes of establishing social control as superficial. Developing a “deeper understanding requires attention to the individual as such.”15

Sanford continued: “[a]n adequate approach must, we think, be more personal and more

12 Pollock, “Report on Progress,” May 7, 1943, 3.

13 See Theodor W. Adorno, “The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses (Draft),” 1941, MHA, Box VI, File 143a (676).

14 Pollock, “Report on Progress,” May 7, 1943, 3.

15 R. Nevitt Sanford and Herbert S. Conrad, “Some Personality Correlates of Morale,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 38, no. 1 (1943): 3, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0050374.

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profound; it must consider not only the particular cultural situation and the individual’s group- membership, but also the individual’s past experiences, his attitudes, his repressions, his present goals, etc.”16 This view of an “adequate approach” to the question of morale implicitly referenced both the personality psychology of Gordon Allport—under whom Sanford had trained at Harvard—the action research of Kurt Lewin, and the functionalism of Egon Brunswik.

Crucially, by mentioning “the individual’s past experiences” and “his repressions,” Sanford also invoked the concepts of depth psychology.

This reference to psychoanalysis was neither isolated nor accidental. Another of the

Berkeley Group’s central figures, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, was both an accomplished developmental-psychological researcher and a sophisticated interpreter of psychoanalytic theory.

Prior to her emigration to the United States, Frenkel-Brunswik had trained with Karl and

Charlotte Bühler; through the Bühlers, she had met and collaborated with Egon Brunswik—later her husband—and with Paul Lazarsfeld.17 In her role as one of Karl Bühler’s students and

Charlotte Bühler’s research assistants, Frenkel-Brunswik became a skilled practitioner of developmental psychology. Although the Bühlers opposed psychoanalysis—indeed, Charlotte

Bühler forbade the use of psychoanalytic terminology in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute—

Frenkel-Brunswik, along with many others in the Bühlers’ orbit, was intrigued by psychoanalysis, undergoing both therapeutic and training analysis in the 1920s.18 In the 1940s,

16 Ibid.

17 On Frenkel-Brunswik’s career in the United States, see Marie Jahoda, “The Migration of Psychoanalysis: Its Impact on American Psychology,” in The Intellectual Migration. Europe and America, 1930-1960, ed. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), 422–23, 428, 440.

18 On Charlotte Bühler’s attempt to prevent psychoanalytic ideas from being used in the Vienna Psychological Institute, see Gardner and Stevens, Red Vienna and the Golden Age of Psychology, 1918-1938, 143.

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Frenkel-Brunswik defended psychoanalysis against the attacks of revisionists such as Otto Rank and, moreover, argued for the necessity of a connection between depth and personality psychology.19 According to Frenkel-Brunswik, psychoanalysis and personality psychology represented two sides of the same coin, “the central and the distal aspects” of the individual.20

But, she argued, these two aspects should not be understood in spatial terms. They were, rather, interlinked in each moment of experience: “Whereas psychoanalysis has been asking, ‘Which drive?’ and general psychology has been asking, ‘Which effect?’ a unified psychology would ask, ‘Which effect out of which drive?’”21

It was Horkheimer who was most enthusiastic about the Berkeley Group. Soon after reading Sanford’s study of morale, Horkheimer contacted Sanford to propose a collaborative study of anti-Semitic prejudice.22 The Berkeley Group offered the Institute several important advantages. As Sanford’s outline of a research method appropriate to the study of personality made clear, the Berkeley Group was conversant in the paradigms and techniques of mainstream academic psychology. Specifically, Sanford used scalar methods of attitude measurement similar

19 For Frenkel-Brunswik’s cutting remarks on Rank, see review of Review of Beyond Psychology, by Otto Rank, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 38, no. 1 (1943): 123–24. On the importance of psychoanalytic concepts to “academic psychology” in general and personality psychology in particular, see Else Frenkel-Brunswik, “Psychoanalysis and Personality Research,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 35, no. 2 (1940): 176– 97, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0060754; “Psychoanalysis and the Unity of Science,” Journal of Philosophy 52, no. 23 (1955): 692–695; “Meaning of Psychoanalytic Concepts and Confirmation of Psychoanalytic Theories,” in Readings in Psychoanalytic Psychology (East Norwalk: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1959), 29–42, https://doi.org/10.1037/11306-003.

20 Frenkel-Brunswik presented her interest in psychoanalysis as arising out of her own experience in analysis. “She discovered,” Frenkel-Brunswik wrote of herself, “that, in certain situations, which distally, proximally, or peripherally seemed very different from, and often contrasting to, each other, she was guided by one single motive—of which, as such, she had never before been conscious.” Frenkel-Brunswik, “Psychoanalysis and Personality Research,” 191–92.

21 Ibid., 197.

22 It seems likely that Horkheimer encountered Sanford’s work while reviewing the state of the psychological field. See his letter to Marcuse of July 17, 1943 quoted in Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 357.

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to those Lazarsfeld employed—and refined—in his studies in both Austria and the United

States.23 Frenkel-Brunswik, for her part, used techniques of “projective testing,” especially the

Thematic Apperception Test popular in the 1930s and 1940s.24 Put simply, the studies undertaken by the Berkley Group were not likely to face the critiques leveled at the Institute’s work by the American “research racket.” At the same time, the Berkeley Group researchers did not fall prey to the excesses of the approaches—neither the ideological individualism of psychoanalysis nor the shallow scientism of social psychology— Horkheimer and Adorno had criticized.

This is not to say that the Institute’s collaboration with the Berkeley Group was purely instrumental. In December 1943, Horkheimer wrote to Pollock that working with Sanford,

Frenkel-Brunswik, and their colleagues offered the Institute a chance to “constitute what we propagated in our first pamphlets after our arrival in this country: the bringing together of certain

European concepts with American methods.”25 This collaboration would not be the abortive integration of the “European approach” with the American paradigm Lazarsfeld had hoped for in

1938.26 Neither would it be the veneer of social science masking critical social theory some

23 Sanford used the scale developed by John Harding. See “A Scale for Measuring Civilian Morale,” The Journal of Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Applied 12 (1941): 101–10, https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1941.9917059; cf. Herbert S. Conrad and R. Nevitt Sanford, “Scales for the Measurement of War-Optimism: I. Military Optimism; II. Optimism on Consequences of the War,” The Journal of Psychology 16, no. 2 (October 1, 1943): 285–311, https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1943.9917176.

24 On the creation of and revisions to the Thematic Apperception Test, see Wesley G. Morgan, “Origin and History of the Thematic Apperception Test Images,” Journal of Personality Assessment 65, no. 2 (October 1995): 237–54. Frenkel-Brunswik used this test—discussed further below—despite her critiques of Murray for a reductive distinction between psychoanalysis and academic psychology. See Frenkel-Brunswik, “Psychoanalysis and Personality Research,” 178–81, et passim.

25 Quoted in Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 360.

26 Wiggershaus developed this line of interpretation, arguing that, “[f]or Horkheimer, Sanford became the Lazarsfeld of the Berkeley Project.” See ibid.

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historians have discerned.27 Instead, the Institute’s partnership with the Berkeley Group generated a contradiction—albeit a productive one—between European concepts and American methods.

Horkheimer initiated the “organization of a little study group at Berkeley University” in sometime in the spring or summer of 1943.28 Archival evidence suggests that Sanford, Frenkel-

Brunswik, and their colleague Daniel J. Levinson worked independently for the first year of the project.29 In this initial phase, the Berkeley Group limited itself to studying—as the Institute’s misnomer suggested—college students at the University of California-Berkeley. Instead of the

Institute’s indirect-interview method, the Berkeley Group used a combination of techniques to locate, measure, and analyze the students’ prejudices:

The procedure is the following: the students, who are not informed of the specific purpose of our Project [sic], fill out a comprehensive questionnaire containing questions about their background, religion, membership in associations, etc. They are also questioning about their views and traditions in which they were brought up, about their relations to their parents, about their own interests and inclinations. They questions concerning Jews are classified among other problems of public opinion.30

In contrast to the Berkeley Group and Institute’s later use of questionnaires as a rigorous tool in its own right, in 1943 the researchers relied on the surveys to “pick out typical cases of antisemitism” and to obtain preliminary life histories of anti-Semites.31 Representative students

27 See, e.g., Dubiel, Theory and Politics, 106 ff.

28 IfS, “Memorandum on the Project on Antisemitism,” 4.

29 See, e.g., Frenkel-Brunswik’s need to explain the project to Horkheimer in late-1944. Frenkel-Brunswik to Horkheimer, January 10, 1944. Further, see IfS, “Statements for Berkeley Public Opinion Study Group Accounts,” 1946, MHA, Box IX, File 140.14 (673).

30 IfS, “Memorandum on the Project on Antisemitism,” 5.

31 Ibid. In this sense, the Berkeley Group’s method mirrored the Institute’s own—more impressionistic— determinations of the intensity of prejudice. For a contemporaneous critique of this approach—and concomitant praise of its modification in The Authoritarian Personality—see Bo Anderson to Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Memo: Some 352

were asked to participate in further testing and clinical interviews. It was in this context that the true work began:

In these interviews […], we try, for the first time, to study antisemitism, so to speak, under the microscope. We observe how antisemitism is interconnected with other destructive tendencies, which function it has in the psychological storehouse of the individual, to what extent, and by which means it is transformable into other psychological trends and aspirations.32

Much like Lazarsfeld and his ÖWF colleagues, the Berkeley Group assiduously maintained a veneer of casual conversations in these interviews. Beneath the surface, however, the researchers were conducting carefully-structured investigations combining the free-association techniques of orthodox psychoanalysis with the “procedures of modern experimental psychology.”33

Most important among these procedures was the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT).

First developed at the Harvard Psychological Clinic in 1936, the TAT had undergone four revisions in less than a decade. Henry Murray had completed the most recent revision—Series

D—in 1943.34 Much like its more-famous analog, the Rorschach “Inkblot” Test, the TAT consisted of a series of cards printed with pictures. Researchers were instructed to show the cards to subjects in a specific order.35 Unlike the Rorschach Test, however, the TAT cards depicted not

Notes on the Authoritarian Personality and Autorität Und Familie,” Memorandum, May 31, 1958, PFL Papers Series I, Box 20, Folder 13.

32 IfS, “Memorandum on the Project on Antisemitism,” 5–6.

33 Ibid., 6.

34 According to Wesley Morgan, Murray sought to displace earlier revisions entirely, making his iteration the authoritative one. Morgan, “Origin and History of the Thematic Apperception Test Images.”

35 On the extremely detailed design and execution of the Rorschach Test, see Peter Galison, “Images of the Self,” in Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, ed. Lorraine Daston (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 257– 93.

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abstract designs but human interactions. Participants were asked to speak about the events shown. According to the Series D instructions:

This is test of imagination, one form of intelligence. I am going to show you some pictures, one at a time, and your task will be to make up as dramatic a story as you can for each. Tell what has led up to the events shown in the picture, describe what is happening at the moment, what the characters are feeling and thinking; and then give the outcome. Speak your thoughts as they come to mind. Do you understand? Here is the first picture.36

Subjects’ responses were transcribed and, later, scored according to preestablished criteria and subjected to psychoanalytic interpretation.37 Taken together, this evidence led researchers to an overall characterization of the subjects’ personalities.

The Berkeley Group departed from Murray’s authorized method in several respects.38

Rather than administer the entire TAT test, the researchers used only ten images. Of these, only six were from Murray’s compendium; the remaining four “were added to elicit direct reactions to racial problems.”39 Frenkel-Brunswik described the images in a letter to Horkheimer written in

January 1944: “One of the four additional pictures represents Jewish-looking people in a poor district, while a second represents an older Negro woman with a young Negro boy.”40 How did the subjects respond to these collected images? Case 7, a college-age woman, responded to image 12F (see figure 6.1) with the following story:

36 Henry A Murray, Thematic Apperception Test Manual (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943), 22.

37 Ibid., 26–41.

38 It is instructive to compare the following description to others—both published in academic journals and circulated among the Institute’s sponsors—from this period. See, IfS, “Memorandum on the Project on Antisemitism,” 6; Else Frenkel-Brunswik and R. Nevitt Sanford, “The Anti-Semitic Personality: A Research Report,” in Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease, ed. Ernst Simmel (New York: International Universities Press, 1946), 96–124.

39 Frenkel-Brunswik to Horkheimer, January 10, 1944, 1.

40 Ibid.

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Oh, Gosh! This is either temptation or vanity. I’ll tell the story, and maybe you can decide which. She wants to kill her husband because he doesn’t give her enough money. He was ill a lot and she has to take care of him. She would like to murder him. (Q: Why?) So that she can marry a wealthy man she has on the strong, and live on easy street. She has not a strong enough character to do this however. The evil looking woman behind her is tempting her. Both are evil and strong willed. The rest of her is good, but her eyes give me the idea that she is not the right sort. She goes ahead and does the dirty deed. Instead of trying to stop here [sic], she goes ahead and does more bad things. (Q: what kinds of things?) Oh, just killing. The police suspect her, and finally gather a lot of clues. Her inner self goes panicky and shows her to be what she is. I think the other old woman is her grandmother. She puts her up to this sort of thing. She is convicted and given the death sentence.41

Case 7 responded to other images in a similar fashion, telling stories of death—both accidental and by execution—theft, poverty, and betrayal. “I enjoyed it a lot,” the woman commented at the end of the exercise.42 This subject’s responses were not outliers. The Berkeley Group recorded response after response dealing with murder, mutilation, and imprisonment.43

41 “Thematic Apperception Test Case 7,” January 1944, 3, MHA, Box IX, File 140.2. The parenthetical remarks are original to the transcription; the square brackets are my own. Different TAT images were shown depending on the subject’s age and sex. As the “F” suggests, image 12F was shown to adult females only. See Henry A. Murray, Thematic Apperception Test (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943), unpaginated.

42 “Thematic Apperception Test Case 7,” 4.

43 See, e.g., “Thematic Apperception Test Case 4,” January 1944, MHA, Box IX, File 140.2; “Thematic Apperception Test Case 6,” January 1944, MHA, Box IX, File 140.2.

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Figure 6.1: TAT Image 12 F. Source: Murray, Thematic Apperception Test, unpaginated.

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How did Frenkel-Brunswik, Sanford, and Levinson analyze these results? Once again, they diverged from Murray’s method. It is unclear whether they scored subjects’ responses on the personality scale included in the TAT manual. (Certainly, the Berkeley Group would later do so in its work with Adorno.44) Instead, Frenkel-Brunswik told Horkheimer, students first administered the tests and then passed the results to the researchers. “We proceeded to guess, on the basis of the stories only, which of the subjects were high, which low, and which medium [on a spectrum of anti-Semitism]. To our great surprise, our guesses turned out to be almost perfect.”45 Such guessing aside, the Berkeley Group did follow Murray in submitting the responses to psychoanalytic interpretation. Case 7 and those like her, Frenkel-Brunswik wrote, evinced “the signs of mentally sick persons.”46 Specifically, Case 7 showed signs of “developing a complicated set of compulsions to defend herself against her instincts. Telephone poles and book pages [discussed in her TAT responses] are being touched and examined instead, perhaps, of her own body. The fear of being in crowds might, among other things, indicate instinctual anxiety (Triebangst) in a situation where defenses are reduced.”47

More generally, the Berkeley Group found that prejudiced-subjects’ TAT responses fit a pattern. Their stories contained “much aggression especially directed against men.” But the subjects did not express this aggression directly. Instead, they located the horrible fates that befell the men in accidents, battles, and crimes, events that did not imply “any guilt on the part of

44 See, e.g., IfS, “Minutes and Memoranda of the ‘Los Angeles Branch of the Berkeley Research Project on Social Discrimination,’” April 1946, viz., 3, MHA, Box IX, File 140.1.

45 Frenkel-Brunswik to Horkheimer, January 10, 1944, 1.

46 Ibid., 5.

47 Ibid. The German term “Triebangst” was added by hand to the original text of the letter (in Frenkel-Brunswik’s hand).

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the heroine.” More broadly, the stories consistently showed “external causation” in which

[e]verything is projected into the external constellation on which the heros [sic] are dependent.”

Unsurprisingly, crime and punishment featured heavily in the responses. According to Frenkel-

Brunswik, this trope suggested “a conventional type of superego” at work, masking the subjects’ latent aggression. Concomitant with this emphasis on crime and punishment was the frequent invocation of “religious motifs.” Again, these tropes indicated adherence to social conventions in the psyche. Conversely, the subjects often challenged—or, at least, were confused by— conventional “sex roles.” The subjects likewise demonstrated “strong ambivalence especially toward parental figures.”48

Sanford and Frenkel-Brunswik presented these preliminary findings in June 1944, at the

Symposium on Anti-Semitism organized by the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society.49 In the presentation and its subsequent publications, the Berkeley Group drew attention to the disjuncture between the subjects’ adherence to and deviation from social conventions. TAT responses revealed that the subjects had “a conventional type of conscience, one that is strict but not fully internalized, not integrated with the rest of the personality.”50 Indeed, they argued, it was precisely because the superego had not been internalized that it was so strict. Anti-Semitic subjects—such as Case 7—had at-best ambivalent relationships to parental authority. “In order to achieve harmony with parents, with parental images, and with society as a whole,” they argued, “basic impulses which are conceived as low, destructive, and dangerous, have to be kept

48 Ibid., 5–6, emphasis original.

49 The presentation was revised and published twice: Else Frenkel-Brunswik and R. Nevitt Sanford, “Some Personality Factors in Anti-Semitism,” The Journal of Psychology 20, no. 2 (October 1, 1945): 271–91, https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1945.9917259; “The Anti-Semitic Personality: A Research Report.”

50 Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford, “Some Personality Factors in Anti-Semitism,” 278.

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repressed and can find only devious expressions, as, for instance, in projections and ‘moral indignation.’”51 Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford linked this dynamic to prejudice by outlining a kind of “‘puritanical anti-Semitism.’” The repression-projection dynamic so much in evidence in the TAT results operated in anti-Semites’ psyches more generally. Put simply, anti-Semites projected onto—and used as reasons for hatred—those instincts they had repressed in themselves. “Without these channels or outlets (if they should not be provided by society),”

Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford warned, “it may be much more difficult, in some cases impossible, to keep the mental balance. Hence, the rigid and compulsive adherence to prejudices.”52

Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford argued that prejudice arose from a poorly or incompletely integrated superego. But this explanation elicited another question: why did the prejudiced subject—or, more exactly, the soon-to-be-prejudiced subject—fail to incorporate the superego into her psyche? The Berkeley Group addressed this question:

This [problem of integration] is most likely to happen when parents are too concerned and too insistent with respect to their positive aims for the child and too threatening and coercive with respect to the “bad” things. The child is thus taught to view behavior in terms of black and white, “good” and “evil”; and the “evil” is made to appear so terrible that he cannot think of it as something in himself which needs to be modified or controlled, but as something that exists in other “bad” people and that needs to be stamped out completely.53

Integration of the common superego into the individual psyche was stymied, this is to say, by excessive moralism. But if the dynamic of prejudice was a result of the “manner in which they

[i.e., the conventions] have been put across,” the content of anti-Semitism followed from the

51 Ibid., 285–86.

52 Ibid., 286.

53 Ibid., 289.

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conventions themselves.54 Anti-Semites tested in the preliminary phase of the Berkeley Group’s project showed rigid adherence to specifically middle-class norms and conventions. Anti-

Semites organized their prejudice around Jews’ perceived sexual promiscuity, social aggressiveness, violations of manners, and so on.55

Although the Berkeley Group’s explicit argument stopped at this point—with the psychoanalytically-influenced claim that prejudice arose from an incompletely integrated superego—their presentation went further, suggesting a social etiology for this psychological phenomenon. Parents were likely to moralize and emphasize middle-class values, the researchers speculated, when they were worried about their own status. “Such times,” Frenkel-Brunswik and

Sanford wrote, “arouse intense but vaguely conceived feelings of insecurity in both parents, with consequent strivings to improve or at least to maintain the social status, and these in turn give rise to unreasoning concern and overreaction in the mother and desperate aggressiveness in the father.” “A tendency to this kind of behavior, it seems to us, springs from the very nature of our society and exists throughout the middle class.”56

These methods, arguments, and speculations linked the Berkeley Group to the Institute.

Their suggestion subjects’ perception of their class membership and mobility shaped their anti-

Semitic prejudices, for example, connected the Berkeley Group to both Komarovsky’s

Unemployed Man, published at the beginning of the decade, and Massing and Gurland’s contributions to the Labor Study, which was ongoing. To be sure, both Komarovsky and

54 Ibid.

55 The researchers seemed to have found evidence for this claim not in the TAT responses but in the questionnaires and interviews. See e.g., “Interview of Case 6,” January 1944, MHA, Box IX, File 140.2.

56 Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford, “Some Personality Factors in Anti-Semitism,” 289, emphasis original.

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Massing and Gurland investigated this dynamic in American labor and argued that the working class developed anti-Semitic prejudices when they felt their upward progress to be stymied.

Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford, by contrast, came closer to the view—formulated by the

Zentralverein and adopted by the JLC—that fear of downward mobility was the chief cause of prejudice 57 But this disagreement itself gestures at the existence of a broadly shared view that social class, psychological anxiety, and prejudiced personality were interwoven and, further, that this nexus could be studied empirically.

The Berkeley Group’s psychoanalytic interpretation of the TAT results might be understood as linking their project to Fromm’s earlier social-psychological study of authority.

There were, however, key differences. First Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford did not explicitly follow Fromm in applying a psychoanalytic interpretation to the TAT results. Rather, the motivations for and guidelines of their interpretation of the TAT results followed from the instructions Murray had developed for administering the test.58 Moreover, the Berkeley Group’s argument—that anti-Semitism arose as a result of incompletely integrated superegos caused, in turn, by modes of parenting resulting from a sense of insecurity—differed from Fromm’s claims.

Fromm, it will be recalled from chapter 2, had argued that the authoritarian structure of modern society bound all members together in relationships of subordination and domination, constructing a web of authority that encouraged the development of sadomasochistic tendencies.

57 See Meyer, “Anti-Defamation Work”; Sherman, “First Meeting of CCAS”; “Second Meeting of CCAS.” See the discussion of the report of the Zentralverein in chapter 5.

58 In fact, Murray proposed a method that combined J.S. Mill’s logic of explanation and Freud’s technique of interpretation. See Murray, Thematic Apperception Test Manual, chaps. 4–5. It should be noted that Betty Aron, the researcher who analyzed the TAT tests in The Authoritarian Personality used a different method—a technique of quantitative “scoring.” In this complex, seven-step procedure, Aron ascribed numerical values to the figures and settings in the story and augmented them according to the negative or positive valences bestowed by the subject. See Betty Ruth Aron, A Manual for Analysis of the Thematic Apperception Test: A Method and Technique for Personality Research (Berkeley: Willis E. Berg, 1949), chap. 2.

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According to Fromm, pathological sadomasochism created weak egos unable to emancipate themselves from a dominating superego. For Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford, by contrast, egos remained weak because they could into integrate this superego in the first place—it remained, by virtue of its origin in adults’ social anxiety, ego alien. Indeed, the very concept of sadomasochism was strikingly absent from the Berkeley Group’s interpretation of the TAT results. Although Frenkel-Brunswik, Sanford, and Fromm concurred in their argument that weak ego-formation seemed endemic to contemporary society, this is to say, they disagreed in their assessment of the social causes and psychological etiology of this phenomenon.

Although the Berkeley Group’s psychoanalytic interpretation of the TAT findings did not connect their project directly to Fromm’s study of authority, it did link their work to ongoing research into the social psychology of anti-Semitism. Specifically, Fromm, Sanford, and Frenkel-

Brunswik followed the common pattern of selectively integrating Freudian concepts into social- psychological theories of anti-Semitism. Applications of Freud’s thought to the problem of anti-

Semitism were hardly surprising in the theoretical writings and research programs of analysts such as Otto Fenichel or Ernst Simmel, European émigrés who had been close to the sources of

Freudian orthodoxy before the Second World War.59 Fenichel, for example, argued that psychoanalytically-informed analysis of anti-Semitism would reveal that the prejudice served as a mechanism by which individuals first repressed their own rebellious impulses and destructive instincts and then projected them onto an external object. Because individuals feared their own

“bloody, dirty, dreadful character” and recognized—unconsciously—that they had not fully repressed it, anti-Semites endowed the Jews with these traits.60 It was accounts of this kind that

59 See, e.g., the contributions of Fenichel and Simmel in Simmel, Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease.

60 Fenichel, “Elements of a Psychoanalytic Theory of Anti-Semitism” viz., 29.

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Adorno would later name “the frustration-aggression thesis” and criticize for their inability to situate the problem of prejudice against the background of the “social system as a whole.”61

Decidedly more surprising, however, was the use of Freud’s thought to explain anti-

Semitism by psychologists otherwise uninterested in or antagonistic to depth psychology. The

American psychotherapist J. F. Brown, for example, positioned himself in the currents of social, personality, and “field-theoretical” psychology being developed by Gordon Allport and Kurt

Lewin, but felt it necessary to turn to “the genius of Freud” to explain the ultimate origins of anti-Semitism in the displacement, projection, and rationalization of the death drive.62 Indeed,

Brown made this suggestion in a collected volume that, although edited by Isacque Graeber, a sometime-affiliate of the Institute, aimed at eliminating prejudice through the “vital science of society” that could illuminate “the dynamic forces and factors which both motivate and control

[humankind’s] own behavior.”63 According to Brown, Freud’s drive theory explained the psychological manifestations and social implications of “certain biologically conditioned reaction forms,” including hostility.64 All this is to say that psychologists from across the disciplinary spectrum found themselves turning to Freud to explain the historical, cultural, and, especially, psychodynamic origins of anti-Semitism during the Second World War.65

61 Adorno, “Antisemitism Among American Labor as Edited by Bureau of Applied Social Research,” 4.

62 Brown, “The Origin of the Anti-Semitic Attitude,” 135–42, viz., 135.

63 Isacque Graeber and Steuart Henderson Britt, “Preview to Understanding,” in Jews in a Gentile World: The Problem of Understanding, ed. Isacque Graeber and Steuart Henderson Britt (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1942), v.

64 Brown, “The Origin of the Anti-Semitic Attitude,” 127.

65 Brown was, in other contexts, a radical and an outlier. For an overview of his career and thought, see Henry L. Minton, “J. F. Brown: Unsung Hero or Misguided Prophet in the History of Political Psychology?,” Political Psychology 9, no. 1 (1988): 165–73, https://doi.org/10.2307/3791323.

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Fenichel and Simmel attended the conference at which the Berkeley Group presented its preliminary findings. Indeed, Simmel himself organized the event.66 Also present at and contributing to the symposium were Horkheimer and Adorno.67 Close on the heels of their participation in the larger AJC summit discussed above, the June 1944 conference offered the two Institute researchers an opportunity to further elaborate their view of the role of psychology in the study of anti-Semitism. In his presentation, Horkheimer first outlined the now-familiar argument about the erosion of the individual as a result of the social forces and economic imperatives of modern society. “Since the superego no longer evolves primarily in a dialectical spiritual process between child and father, but is largely representative of all kinds of collective groups, the child today does not fear his father so much as he fears the collectivized peers of the school, of the athletic, or of the work group,” Horkheimer informed his audience. Although he did not go as far as Adorno had in his writings for the Radio Project—in one of which, it will be recalled, Adorno had argued for the existence of a “new type of human being”—Horkheimer did

66 It is interesting to note that Gordon Allport, who wrote a preface for the published proceedings of the conference, found himself in a position resembling Brown’s—revisiting his view of psychoanalysis. Allport’s view was somewhat latitudinarian: “I find it broadminded of the editor [Simmel],” he wrote, “to invite a ‘non-analytic’ psychologist like myself to write these prefatory remarks.” This view, in turn, was rooted in the conviction that “[n]o petty doctrinal differences must be allowed to divide the efforts of scientists in their common determination to preserve their scientific freedom by re-establishing personal liberty and self-respect for all men. Anti-Semitism is so contagious and complex an evil that we welcome all possibly aid in combatting it.” But Allport seemed also to recognize—indeed, to be surprised by—the psychoanalytic arguments in the essays in Simmel’s collection. Thus, “for the most part the contents of the volume are not only convincing but brilliantly arresting. There is neither preachment nor exhortation. The symposium is a piecing together of the experience of experts with the irrational and self-centered hostility that so tragically disrupts man’s relations with his human family.” See Gordon W. Allport, “Preface,” in Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease, ed. Ernst Simmel (New York: International Universities Press, 1946), vii–ix, viz., vii-ix.

67 Other attendees included Bernard Berliner and Douglass W. Orr. For an overview of the conference proceedings, see Simmel’s introduction to Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease, xlvi–xxiv.

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claim that “[t]his modification in superego formation and all the modern forms of group life lead to a radical change in the present type of man.”68

Although this radical transformation was the caused by “overwhelming historical forces,”

Horkheimer held, it could be examined, at least partially, through psychological studies.

Specifically, Horkheimer suggested that studies of the kind conducted by the Berkeley Group could lay bare the “nerve centers where social and psychological causation merge.” Otherwise put, the Berkeley Group’s speculative claim about the chain connecting economics and individuality revealed one site of confluence of social and psychological causation. Horkheimer went further, asserting that the “[r]elentless study of the instinctual dynamics of the personality may even reveal that the same social forces make for the disintegration of individual identity and for the degeneration of civilization.”69 How are such claims to be understood in the context of

Adorno’s nearly simultaneous critique of Fromm’s social psychology in his methodological writings for the Labor Study?70 Adorno would soon argue that Fromm committed multiple methodological errors by interweaving the disciplines of sociology and psychology—in searching, this is to say, for the forces that connected the “disintegration of individual identity” and the “degeneration of civilization.”

Horkheimer’s presentation at the anti-Semitism conference demonstrates that, in the summer of 1944, the Institute’s views of psychoanalysis in general and of social psychology in particular were closer to the consensus of both émigré and American researchers than their

68 Max Horkheimer, “Sociological Background of the Psychoanalytic Approach,” in Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease, ed. Ernst Simmel (New York: International Universities Press, 1946), 8–10.

69 Ibid.

70 Adorno wrote these methodological essays, it will be recalled from chapter 5, in November and December 1944— a mere six months after the anti-Semitism conference.

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subsequent methodological writings would suggest. Over time, this is to say, Horkheimer’s position would become increasingly problematic for the Institute researchers and their collaborators. Indeed, Horkheimer’s articulation of this view in June 1944—which was inimical to the argument Adorno would develop in November 1944—might suggest that Adorno developed or sharpened his critique over a few short months. Less speculatively, it can be said that this discrepancy between Horkheimer’s June 1944 position and Adorno’s November-

December 1944 critique ensured that the debate about social psychology and psychoanalysis would be at the core of the Institute’s future research into anti-Semitism and authoritarianism.

UNCOVERING THE FASCIST PERSONALITY

Adorno was extraordinarily busy during the fall of 1944 and winter of 1945. He was, almost simultaneously, drafting memoranda on the method and substance of the Labor Study and proposing new projects for an expanded study of anti-Semitism. In addition, it was during these months that Adorno began working closely with the Berkeley Group. This is to say that

Adorno’s theory and practice of empirical research—the components of which this and the previous chapter disaggregated for the sake of clarity—emerged and evolved together over the space of a handful of months. The articulation and implementation of these ideas can best be seen in Adorno’s work with the Berkeley Group on the research that would ultimately become

The Authoritarian Personality.71

71 Adorno preferred the term “character” to that of “personality.” Indeed, despite the use of the latter term in the title of the published text, Adorno used the former somewhat freely. As Warren Susman has shown, these terms cannot be conflated; each has a distinct meaning, valence, and function in American society, culture, and political economy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More research is required to determine not only the reasons for Adorno’s preference of “character” over “personality” (and the reasons for the decision to use the latter in the project’s title) but also to situate the Institute’s research within the arc Susman sketched. See Susman, “‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture.”

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Events leading to the collaboration between Adorno and the Berkeley Group began in

May 1944. Just prior to the San Francisco symposium at which the Berkeley Group presented its preliminary findings, the AJC sponsored a conference on anti-Semitism organized by

Horkheimer.72 More specifically, Horkheimer and his Institute colleagues were to present the findings of their yearlong study to the AJC and “[l]eading American anthropologists, sociologists, economists, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and public relations experts.” As the AJC informed its sponsors and supporters, these researchers—including

Lazarsfeld, Rensis Likert, Lloyd Warner, Talcott Parsons, and Alfred McClung Lee—

“responded favorably to Dr. Horkheimer’s report and its main ideas and gave him a number of practical suggestions.”73 As a result of this reception, the AJC renewed its funding of the

Institute’s study. Moreover, the AJC organized its own Scientific Research Department (SRD) in order to organize and integrate the study’s findings.74 Although Horkheimer directed the SRD, his long absences from the AJC headquarters afforded the Department’s other leaders—the

Associate Directors Marie Jahoda and Samuel Flowerman—considerable autonomy and

72 See “Minutes of Professional Staff Meeting, Report on the Conference of Social Scientists, May 20, 21,” May 25, 1944, Subject Files Collection, “Anti-Semitism,” Folder 4, AJC Archives. John Slawson, a leader of the AJC, later described the conference and Horkheimer’s contribution to it. See John Slawson, “Scientific Research on Anti- Semitism. Paper Delivered by John Slawson, Executive Vice-President, American Jewish Committee, at National Community Relations Advisory Council,” September 11, 1944, JLC Records, Part III, Box 270, Folder 10.

73 Max Horkheimer, “Report on the Department for Scientific Research,” 1945, 4, Programs and Projects File, SRD, Folder 4, AJC Archives.

74 Wheatland argues that the AJC’s stronger hand in directing the Institute’s work through the SRD resulted in “the ability [of the AJC] to intervene in the project’s trajectory,” a fact which ultimately “caused the presence of Critical Theory to be further expunged from Studies in Prejudice. Whereas the original project envisioned the entwined analyses of anti-Semitism and contemporary society, the revisions of the project resulted in a series of social- psychological studies.” My argument in the following pages complicates this argument. Already in chapter 5, I suggested that Wheatland’s distinction between critical theory and social psychology is not as clear as he asserts. See Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile, 247–48.

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influence.75 But Horkheimer and Adorno’s influence was counterbalanced by the SRD’s

Advisory Board, which consisted almost entirely of psychologists: Nathan Ackerman, Ernst Kris,

Otto Klineberg, Rudolph Lowenstein, Gardner Murphy, and Lazarsfeld. Indeed, only the anthropologist Margaret Mead and the sociologist Robert Merton represented other disciplines on the SRD board.76 Through the creation of the SRD, the AJC effectively divided the Institute’s study into theoretical and practical research (figure 6.2).77

One result of this reorganization was the formal integration of the Berkeley Group study into the AJC Project (figure 6.3).78 As Adorno wrote in a memorandum to Friedrich Pollock,

“Whereas during the first phase of this project, the Institute acted more or less in an advisory capacity, it has now been reorganized in such a way that it represents a full-fledged cooperation between both groups.”79 AJC and Institute funds totaling nearly $50,000 were disbursed to the

Berkeley Group between November 1944 and May 1946.80 Moreover, in October 1944, Adorno began to work regularly and closely with Frenkel-Brunswik, Sanford, and Levinson.

75 See Ira Younker and Samuel H. Flowerman, “Untitled Memorandum on Organization of SRD,” January 14, 1946, SRD, Box 1, Folder 14, AJC Archives. Jahoda, it will be recalled from chapter 2, had been a key figure in the ÖWF’s The Unemployed of Marienthal and Lazarsfeld’s first wife. Jahoda and Flowerman’s autonomy did not always work in Horkheimer’s favor. See, e.g., Horkheimer’s letter to Jahoda of November 28, 1945 in Max Horkheimer, A Life in Letters: Selected Correspondence, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 233–36.

76 See “Advisory Council to the Scientific Research Department,” January 6, 1945, SRD, Box 1, Folder 32, AJC Archives.

77 “American Jewish Committee. Progress Report on the Scientific Division,” June 22, 1945, Programs and Projects File, SRD, Folder 4, AJC Archives; repr. Adorno, “Progress Report June 22, 1945.”

78 For an account of the other major project Horkheimer pursued during his affiliation with the AJC, an experimental film that would test anti-Semitic reactions among American audiences, see Jenemann, Adorno in America, chap. 3.

79 Theodor W. Adorno, “Research Project on Social Discrimination, done jointly by the Institute of Social Research and the ‘Berkeley Public Opinion Study’ of the University of California,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer; Briefwechsel 1927-1969, vol. 2, Briefe und Briefwechsel 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 623.

80 See also IfS, “Statements for Berkeley Public Opinion Study Group Accounts.”

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Figure 6.2: Reorganization of the Institute's Research into Anti-Semitism following the Creation of the SRD. Source: "Progress Report of the Scientific Department,” 25.

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Figure 6.3: Ongoing Research Projects of the SRD, 1945. Source: Untitled Draft Memorandum on the SRD, 1945, 6-9 Programs and Project Files, SRD, Folder 4.

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Adorno was initially dubious about the prospects of collaboration. Recalling his experiences “du côté de chez Lazarsfeld” in a letter to Horkheimer, Adorno cautioned that the partnership might move slowly or, worse, fail entirely.81 But Adorno and the Berkeley Group quickly began producing impressive results. Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford had, as discussed above, relied on “insights and hunches” derived from psychoanalytic theory in developing their preliminary studies of anti-Semitism. Adorno supplemented these insights and hunches with theories he and Horkheimer had developed as part of their work on Dialectic of Enlightenment.

In November 1944 Adorno wrote to Horkheimer that he had begun revising the Berkeley

Group’s questionnaires using material “distilled from a kind of translation” of the “Elements of anti-Semitism” fragment of Dialectic of Enlightenment. The process, Adorno wrote to

Horkheimer, “was very fun.”82 Correspondence between the two men reveals that the process took several months. According to Adorno, the Berkeley Group was not always supportive of his efforts; he complained to Horkheimer that Frenkel-Brunswik, Sanford, and Levinson were too tied to conventional assumptions about the reactionary nature of anti-Semitism.83 Put differently, the psychologists had not yet accepted the theory put forward in the anti-Semitism fragment. The situation began to improve in December. By the middle of the month, Adorno had made progress on the transformation of the “connection among the destructive character, fascism, and anti-

81 See Adorno’s letter to Horkheimer of December 12, 1944 in Adorno and Horkheimer, Briefe und Briefwechsel, 1994, 2:386–92, at 386.

82 See Adorno to Horkheimer of November 9, 1944 in Ibid., 2:345–49, at 347.

83 Horkheimer repeatedly requested that Adorno complete the process and send him a revised questionnaire. See, e.g., his letter to Adorno of December 9, 1944 in ibid., 2:379–89, viz.382.

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Semitism” from the text into the “‘operational terms’” necessary for social-psychological experimentation.84

Concurrently, Adorno claimed to be transforming the methodology of the project.

“Originally,” Adorno explained to his Institute colleagues in 1944, “the Project was centered in

[sic] developing an instrument by which intensity of Antisemitism can be measured statistically, a ‘scale of measurement.’” Since he had joined the project staff, Adorno continued, this approach had been changed: “While the methods that have proved successful are maintained, the Project is now considerably expanded and full use is made of the Institute’s theoretical ideas as well as empirical findings, such as the Labor Study, or our analyses of fascist demagogues.”85 In addition to “the Institute’s theoretical ideas,” this is to say, Adorno saw the “empirical findings” of the Labor Study to be a signal contribution to the Berkeley Project. As argued in chapter 5, these empirical findings had a theoretical—or, at least, methodological—significance: they called into question the social-psychological paradigm developed by Fromm and suggested the need for an “almost-monadological psychology.” It is hardly surprising, consequently, that

Adorno and the Berkeley Group reformulated the preliminary questionnaires. “Early in 1945,”

Adorno promised his Institute colleagues at the end of 1944, “we shall begin to test the new questionnaire in different forms” in sample populations.86

Frenkel-Brunswik, Sanford, Levinson, and Adorno fulfilled this promise. Early in 1945,

Adorno began to travel regularly to the Bay Area, where the researchers administered the revised

84 The phrase “‘operational terms’” appeared in English in the original text. See Adorno’s letter to Horkheimer of December 18, 1944 in ibid., 2:392–95, at 393.

85 Adorno, “Research Project on Social Discrimination,” 623–24.

86 Ibid., 625.

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questionnaire to students at the University of California-Berkeley and to “professional women”

(public school teachers, social workers, and nurses). In the summer of 1945, the researchers administered questionnaires to students at the University of Oregon and to members of the

Kiwanis, Lions, and Rotary Clubs; in the fall of 1945, they expanded their pool of subjects still further, testing patients at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Clinic of the University of California and inmates of San Quentin Prison. Smaller numbers of subjects were recruited from the

California Labor School, the United Electrical Workers, the Longshoremen and Warehousemen, the Alameda School for Merchant Marine Officers, the United States Employment Service for

Veterans, the Parent-Teachers’ Association, the Unitarian Church Group, and the League of

Women Voters.87 Adorno and the Berkeley Group researchers were assisted by Betty Aron,

William R. Murrow, and Maria Hertz Levinson in the distribution, collection, and analysis of

2099 questionnaires.

Researchers did not ask subjects about their conscious beliefs and professed attitudes.

Both Adorno and, more recently, Lowenthal had done much to discredit this polling approach.88

But neither did the Berkeley Group employ the “screened interview” method devised by

Lowenthal, Massing, and Gurland in the Labor Study. Instead, the researchers crafted containing statements “designed as to serve as rationalizations for irrational tendencies.” At the same time,

“care was taken in each case to allow the subject a ‘way out,’ that is to say, to make it possible

87 See Table 1(I) in Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 21–22. For an example of a more detailed schedule of interviews, see “Record of Questionnaires” in IfS, “Minutes and Memoranda of the Los Angeles Branch of the Berkeley Project.”

88 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 3–5. See Horkheimer’s letter to Adorno of January 23, 1945 in Adorno, Briefe und Briefwechsel, 3:34–36, at 35. On Adorno’s critiques of this method, see chapter 5. For Lowenthal’s critiques, see Lowenthal, “Critical Remarks on Various Polls”; “Critical Remarks on Various Polls for Measuring Changes in Antisemitic Attitudes”; cf. Samuel H. Flowerman and Marie Jahoda, “The Study of Man: Polls on Anti-Semitism,” Commentary Magazine, April 1946; Horkheimer, “Fortune Polls and the Danger of a New Antisemitism.”

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for him to agree with such a statement while maintaining the belief that he was not ‘prejudiced’ or ‘undemocratic.’”89 Items on the survey used to determine subjects’ degree of “political- economic conservatism” included, for example:

1. A child should learn early in life the value of a dollar and the importance of ambition, efficiency, and determination.

5. Depressions are like occasional headaches and stomach aches; it’s natural for even the healthiest society to have them once in a while.

9. Most government controls over business should continue after the war.

13. America may not be perfect, but the American Way [sic] has brought us about as close as human beings can get to a perfect society.

20. The artist and the professor are of just as much value to society as the businessman and the manufacturer.

63. It is a fundamental American tradition that the individual must remain free of government interreference, free to make money and spend it as he likes.

78. Character, honesty, and ability will tell in the long run; most people get pretty much what they deserve.90

Responses to these prompts were scored according to method of the Likert Scale: the researchers delimited six degrees of response, ranging from strong disagreement with the statement (-3) to strong agreement with the statement (+3); neither a neutral nor a “‘don’t know’” category were used.91 Next, responses were converted into scores: strong disagreement (-3) was worth one point; moderate disagreement (-2) was worth 2 points; disagreement (-1) was worth 3 points;

89 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 15.

90 Ibid., 158, 163. This numbering is original to the text; it is a result of the fact that the questions reproduced in The Authoritarian Personality were not in the same order in which the researchers devised and grouped them during the study itself.

91 Ibid., 71–72. For Lazarsfeld’s critique of this method and argument for the use of a “‘don’t know’” category, see Lazarsfeld and Robinson, “Properties of the Trichotomy ‘Like, No Opinion, and Dislike.’”

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agreement (+1) was worth 5 points; moderate agreement (+2) was worth 6 points; strong agreement (+3) was worth 7 points.92 In its final form, for example, the anti-Semitism questionnaire contained 52 items, meaning that subjects’ scores could range between 52 and 364 points. The researchers emphasized assessments of individual subjects were not made through the simple tabulation of total points but through the calculation of their mean scores.93

Quantification of this kind was not incidental or superfluous. It was not, this is to say, an attempt to appease those in the “research racket” who fetishized numbers and tables. Subjecting the collected scores to statistical analysis allowed the researchers to determine whether the questionnaire met “rigorous statistical standards.” High correlations—around, that is, 90 percent

(or, in the calculations themselves, 0.9)—suggested that the questionnaire was an accurate tool for measuring prejudices. “More specifically,” in the case of the anti-Semitism questionnaire, for example, “it may be claimed that the higher an individual’s score, the greater his acceptance of anti-Semitic propaganda and the greater his disposition to engage in anti-Semitic accusations and programs of one form or another.”94 Further, high degrees of correlation among the subsidiary groups within each questionnaire “indicate that people are relatively consistent in their responses.” Thus, “[a]n individual’s stand with regard to one of these issues tends to be very similar in direction to his stand with regard to the others.”95 Remarkably high correlations among the items on the original anti-Semitism scale caused the researchers to speculate that the

92 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 72.

93 Ibid. This is to say that the total score was divided by the number of questions (52). In this case, the theoretical median score would be 208.

94 Ibid., 73–74.

95 Ibid., 74–75.

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prejudice was in fact an “ideology” consisting of “nuclear ideas” that “pull in” and organize thoughts, emotions, and experiences.96

Adorno and his Berkeley Group colleagues had identified the existence of just such a connection between ideology and personality. Indeed, this argument lay at the very core of the

Berkeley Project. Ideology, the researchers wrote in the introduction to The Authoritarian

Personality, named “an organization of opinions, attitudes, and values—a way of thinking about man and society.” But, they emphasized, these ideologies “have an existence independent of any single individual; and those which exist at a particular time are results of both historical processes and of contemporary social events.” More important, “ideologies have for different individuals, different degrees of appeal, a matter that depends on the individual’s needs and the degree to which these needs are being met or frustrated.”97 As the invocation of “need” suggests, the researchers turned to—or, at least, gestured at—behavioral and developmental psychology to explain individuals’ cathexis to ideologies.98 “The forces of personality,” they wrote, “are primarily needs (drives, wishes, emotional impulses) which vary from one individual to another in their quality, their intensity, their mode of gratification, and the objects of their attachment, and which interact with other needs, in harmonious or conflicting patterns.” Needs, therefore, formed the nexus between ideology and personality: “[s]ince it will be granted that opinions, attitudes, and values depend upon human needs, and since personality is essentially an

96 Ibid., 92–93. On the interconnection among the items on the anti-Semitism scale, see Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford, “Some Personality Factors in Anti-Semitism.”

97 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 2.

98 As discussed in chapter 1, the idea of psychological need played an important role in the work of Karl and Charlotte Bühler—the psychologists who trained not only Lazarsfeld but also Frenkel-Brunswik. See Hetzer, “Anteil an der Forschung im Wiener Institut”; Ash, “Die Entwicklung des Wiener Psychologischen Instituts 1922- 1938.”

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organization of needs, then personality may be regarded as a determinant of ideological preferences.” Personality, in this sense, “lies behind behavior and within the individual.” Its components “are not responses but readiness for response.”99 When the Berkeley Group researchers claimed—as the quantitative evidence supplied by their questionnaire suggested— that anti-Semitism was an ideology, they were, by extension, arguing that it followed from their subjects’ personalities and, further, originated in their needs. If this were the case, the researchers speculated, then the same “personality trends” could be detected in other “ideological areas.”100

To test this theory, Adorno, Sanford, Levinson, and Frenkel-Brunswik developed further scales of ideology. After the initial success of the anti-Semitism (or “A-S”) scale, the researchers formulated items for an “ethnocentrism” (or “E”) scale and a “political-economic conservatism”

(or “PEC”) scale. Results obtained from the statistical analyses of both the E and PEC questionnaires were not as clear as those produced by the A-S scale. Relatively low correlations among the subscales of the E questionnaire—which, in this case, assessed respondents’ bias against different groups—suggested that ethnocentric subjects were far less consistent in their prejudices than anti-Semites. Respondents who viewed one group with contempt might regard another group with respect. Further, subjects’ overall E-scale scores could not be used to predict their specific prejudices.101 Adorno and the Berkeley Group continued to identify ethnocentrism as an ideology, but they conceded that it might be understood better as “a general way of thinking about groups.”102 Specifically, ethnocentric subjects evinced “outgroup rejection”

99 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 5, emphasis original.

100 Ibid., 101.

101 Ibid., 145–46.

102 Ibid., 146.

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across their thinking. Like an ideology, this “social thinking” filled a psychological need: “it is as if the ethnocentric individual feels threatened by most of the groups to which he does not have a specific sense of belonging; if he cannot identify, he must oppose; if a group is not ‘acceptable,’ it is ‘alien.’”103 Unlike an ideology, however, this attitude penetrated deep into the mind, disallowing experience, inducing stereotypy and “illogicality.”104

Similar were the findings of the PEC-scale questionnaires. “That political and economic forces play a vital role in the development of ethnocentrism, in both its institutional and individual psychological forms,” the researchers wrote, “is no longer questioned by social scientists or even most laymen.”105 While the ostensible goal of the PEC scale was to find the

“patterns of politico-economic ideology [that] are related to ethnocentric and anti-ethnocentric

‘group relations’ ideology,” it had a more ambitious—and diffuse—task: “[t]he problem was to get behind the specific issues, to move, so to speak, from a purely political to a more psychological level, as a means of differentiating these two broad patterns of social thought.”106

Statistical analyses of the PEC-scale questionnaires showed both statistical reliability and internal consistency, suggesting, “on the one hand, that liberalism and conservatism are relatively organized and measurable patterns of current politico-economic thought; and, on the other hand, that within each of these broad categories there is considerable subpatterning, inconsistency, and simple ignorance.”107

103 Ibid., 147.

104 Ibid., 148–49.

105 Ibid., 152.

106 Ibid., 152–53.

107 Ibid., 175–76. As Peter Gordon has pointed out, the PEC scale did fail to produce an at-best loose correlation with the A-S scale, But, as this chapter argues below, the researchers made use of the PEC-scale findings through 378

Examining these findings in the light of social theory convinced the researchers that not the scale but its terms must be adjusted. Conventional ideas of left- and right-wing, of liberal and conservative ideology, no longer obtained. Instead, the PEC questionnaire showed that “genuine conservatives”—those who are “seriously concerned with fostering what is most vital in the

American democratic tradition”—were few and far between; they could be recognized by high

PEC-scale scores but low E-scale scores:

He believes in the crucial importance of the profit motive and in the necessity of economic insecurity; but he wants the best man to win no matter what his social background. He is resistant to social change, but he can be seriously critical of the national and political ingroups and—what is more important—he is relatively free of the rigidity and deep-lying hostility characteristic of ethnocentrism.108

More common were those scoring high on both the PEC and E scales: “pseudoconservatives.”

Although these subjects claimed “to represent the democratic tradition” they in fact demonstrated the “greatest potential for antidemocratic change.” Thus: “For the pseudoconservatives are the pseudo-democrats [sic], and their needs dispose them to the use of force and oppression in order to protect a mythical ‘Americanism’ which bears no resemblance to what is most vital in

American history.”109 What disposed individuals to this contradictory revolutionary conservatism? Again, the researchers turned to the psychology of needs and the structure of the

theoretical interpretation. Analyses of the PEC scale did, however, produce suggestive correlations with the E scale. As Levinson wrote, “strong political liberalism is a pretty good indicator of anti-ethnocentrism, but political conservatism is less consistently related to ethnocentrism” (181). See Peter E. Gordon, “The Authoritarian Personality Revisited: Reading Adorno in the Age of Trump,” in Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory, ed. Peter E. Gordon, Wendy Brown, and Max Pensky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 45–84.

108 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 182.

109 Ibid.

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personality: “ideology regarding each social area must be regarded as a facet of the total personality and an expression of more central (‘subideological’) psychological dispositions.”110

Creating these first questionnaires and scales might seem to have been a recursive loop— an endless cycle created by the interrelation between prejudice, ideology, personality, and psychology. Yet, this process should be understood as an application of the methods of research described by the ÖWF, refined by Leichter and Lazarsfeld, and named by Adorno. According to this methodology, concepts, metrics, questionnaires, and scales were interconnected through a process of definition, refinement and revision. Or, as Adorno put, it these “experiments in theory” sought to create a virtuous circle between critique and evidence, theory and research.111

Adorno and the Berkeley Group went further, however, by trying to condense this circular process into a single scale—a scale that contained and summarized all the intermediate steps of analysis and revision. “Would it not be possible,” they asked, “to construct a scale that would approach more directly these deeper, often unconscious forces? If so, […] would we not have a better estimate of antidemocratic potential than could be obtained from scales that were more openly ideological?” 112 Such a questionnaire that would measure the prejudiced personality directly, without detouring through ideology. Put in the terms of empirical social science, the researchers intended to formulate a scale that would predict subjects’ positions on the A-S, E, and PEC scales.

To formulate this “fascism” (or “F”) scale, Adorno and his colleagues transformed the

“hypothetical constructs” developed in the interpretation of the A-S, E, and PEC ideologies into

110 Ibid., 207.

111 Leichter and Lazarsfeld, “Erhebung bei Jugendlichen über Autorität und Familie,” 358–59.

112 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 223.

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questionnaire items.113 For example, the researchers turned the concept of “conventionalism”— which had been used to explain the structure and content of anti-Semitism, ethnocentrism, and conservatism—into a variable.114 This process was repeated for a total of nine variables: authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy, power and “toughness,” destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and attitude towards sex.

Uniting these disparate variables was a theory of the personality. Building on the Berkley

Group’s preliminary study of anti-Semitism, the researchers argued that prejudice arose from a disjuncture between “the moral agencies by which the subject lives and the rest of his personality.”115 Consequently, the researchers tailored three of the variables to test the strength of the ego itself and three to assess the integration of the superego into the psyche (table 6.1).116

113 Ibid., 225.

114 Ibid., 227–28. Conventionalism had been a central concept in the Berkeley Group’s preliminary study of and conclusions about anti-Semitism. See Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford, “The Anti-Semitic Personality: A Research Report.”

115 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 232–35, at 234.

116 Ibid., 228–41.

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Variable Example Questionnaire Item Area Tested “Although leisure is a fine thing, it is good hard Conventionalism Ego-Alien Superego work that make life interesting and worthwhile.” “Sex crimes, such as rape and attacks on children, Authoritarian Aggression deserve more than mere imprisonment; such Ego-Alien Superego criminals ought to be publicly whipped.” “Obedience and respect for authority are the most Authoritarian Submission Ego-Alien Superego important virtues children should learn.” “There are some things too intimate or personal to Anti-Intraception Ego Weakness talk about even with one’s closest friends.” “Although many people may scoff, it may yet be Superstition & Stereotypy Ego Weakness shown that astrology can explain a lot of things.” “Too many people today are living in an unnatural, Power and “Toughness” soft way; we should return to the fundamentals, to a Ego Weakness more red-blooded, active way of life.” “Human nature being what it is, there will always Destructiveness & Cynicism Normalized Aggression117 be war and conflict.” “To a greater extent than most people realize, our Projectivity lives are governed by plots hatched in secret by Ego-Alien Id politicians.” “The sexual orgies of the old Greeks and Romans are nursery school stuff compared to the goings-on Attitude towards Sex Ego-Alien Id in this country today; even in circles where people might least expect it.”

Table 6.1: Variables, Items, and Areas Tested by the F-Scale Questionnaire

117 Adorno and the Berkeley Group researchers did not—as they did with the first six variables—assign specific functions to these variables. The ascription of “Area Tested” in this table follows from the researchers’ elaboration of variable.

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Although linked to the A-S, E, and PEC scales, the F scale different in significant ways.

Adorno and the Berkeley Group had, for example, emphasized that all of the questionnaires must be indirect, but, they insisted, the F-scale questionnaire must attain “a maximum of indirectness, in the sense that it should not come to the surface of overt prejudice and it should be as far removed as possible from our actual interest.”118 There were, to be sure, practical reasons for such an approach: as Adorno had cautioned in the context of the Labor Study—and as other researchers had suggested as far back as Marienthal—the Berkeley Group recognized that subjects recognizing the intention of the questionnaire would evade or dissimulate. But in the F- scale questionnaire must also be indirect because it sought to measure not ideology but personality. Similar was the researchers’ argument for attaining “a proper balance between irrationality and objective truth” in each questionnaire item. “Each item had to have some degree of rational appeal, but it had to be formulated in such a way that the rational aspect was not the major factor in making for agreement or disagreement.”119 Again, with this questionnaire the researchers sought to test not the coherence or rationality of ideological convictions but the interplay of irrational unconscious needs and conscious rationalizations. Questions on the F-scale survey were closely intertwined. Multiple questions addressed each variable and, simultaneously, each question pertained to multiple variables.120 Further, the researchers maintained that no single item or variable could determine the results of the F-scale test. Concomitantly, each item on the questionnaire and each variable in the scale must contribute to the overall unity of the study. These restrictions ensured, according to Adorno and his colleagues, that individuals’

118 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 241.

119 Ibid.

120 Ibid., 230 et passim.

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responses to particular items could be interpreted within the theory of the antidemocratic personality.121

Multiple revisions to the F-scale questionnaire yielded better-than-hoped-for results.

Computing the statistical regressions of responses to the late versions of the survey revealed reliability above eight-five percent.122 Within certain subsets of the experimental population— chiefly those studied by the Los Angeles branch of the study—reliability exceeded ninety percent.123 Further, regression analysis of the questionnaire revealed statistically significant correlation with both the E and PEC scales.124 Especially illuminating were the survey items on the punishment of sexual crimes, the obedience of children, and the fate of the human condition.125 According to the researchers:

This item [on sex crimes] represents rather well the ideal to which we aspired in formulating items for the F scale. Not only is there a wide distribution of responses, with a mean fairly near the neutral point, but the item combines, apparently in a very effective way, several ideas which according to the theory have crucial roles in prejudice: the underlying interest in the more primitive aspects of sex, the readiness for all-out physical aggressiveness, the justification

121 Ibid., 242. Put in terms of quantitative social science, the F-scale questionnaire was weighted so that extreme responses within one variable could not sway the overall results. For example, if a subject strongly agreed with one item (+3) but disagreed (-1) or moderately disagreed (-2) with all the others in a particular variable, he could be characterized as scoring high on the variable. At the same time, Adorno and his colleagues put a methodological prohibition on casting out such outlying results. They must, as stated above, be interpreted within and through the theory of the antidemocratic personality.

122 See Table 5 and Table 8 in ibid., 252, 258, respectively. The revised versions of the surveys were Form 40 and Form 45.

123 See Table 8 and Table 12 in ibid., 258, 266, respectively.

124 See Table 10 in ibid., 263. Overall correlation between the F and PEC scales was 0.52 (although some iterations of the form correlated as little as 0.34). Although statistically significant, this correlation is not particularly strong. Overall correlation between the F and E scales was 0.73—a significant and strong correlation.

125 Specifically, these questions were: “Sex crimes, such as rape and attacks on children, deserve more than mere imprisonment; such criminals ought to be publicly whipped, or worse.”; “Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn.”; and “Human nature being what it is, there will always be war and conflict.” Ibid., 248.

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of aggression by an appeal to moralistic values. More than this, the item seems to be sufficiently free of any logical or automatic connection with overt prejudice.126

Incisive questionnaire items, according to this characterization, met empirical, methodological, and theoretical requirements and aims. Such items satisfied the standards of quantitative sociology, connected the multiple components of the scale to one another and to the study as a whole, and turned the research process towards the task of theoretical interpretation.

In its final iteration, the F scale successfully identified potentially antidemocratic personalities without the need for psychological testing or psychoanalytic interviews.

Nevertheless, the Berkeley Group researchers and Adorno continued to use these techniques in the Adult Study.127 Betty Aron conducted the Thematic Apperception Tests—familiar from the

Berkeley Group’s preliminary study of anti-Semitism—to understand the underlying motives of prejudiced subjects.128 Daniel Levinson deployed “projective” or “indirect” questioning more broadly to add detail and nuance to questionnaire items.129 Further, Levinson used clinical- interview material to paint a comprehensive portrait of high- and low-scoring subjects in the opening chapter of The Authoritarian Personality.130 These descriptions of “Mack” and Larry”

126 Ibid., 246.

127 On Adorno’s integration of the projective-test results into his own work for the Berkeley project, see “Minutes of the Meeting of the Los Angeles Branch of the Berkeley Research Project on Social Discrimination,” in IfS, “Minutes and Memoranda of the Los Angeles Branch of the Berkeley Project.”

128 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, chap. 14.

129 As Levinson describes it, projective testing in this sense uses a method resembling the psychoanalytic practice of free associations and, further, psychoanalytic interpretation within a framework of quantitative, experimental psychology. This description suggests that Adorno was referencing the projective-question method when, in the context of “Anti-Semitism among American Labor,” he wrote of the new interest among behavioral and experimental psychologists in the free-association technique. See Ibid., chap. 15; IfS, “Memorandum on the Project on Antisemitism,” 15.

130 By so doing, Levinson was avoiding the critique of the use of interview material in “Anti-Semitism among American Labor” Adorno was developing at that time. See Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, chap. 1; cf. Adorno, “Evaluation of Participant Interviews.”

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aimed “to give a general impression of the totality which is to be analyzed and, in so far as is possible, generalized.”131

As Frenkel-Brunswik emphasized, these interviews were conducted and interpreted using the techniques of psychoanalysis, but they were not psychoanalytic in orientation or conclusion.132 Whereas Freud and his followers had tried to locate the origins and map the evolution of unconscious elements of the mind, Frenkel-Brunswik and her colleagues intended to

“establish the dynamic interrelationships of the significant factors for each individual” in order to find “a basis of generalizations” and thereby “to come to grips with the social and psychological trends typical of the highly prejudiced and of the unprejudiced.”133 Although she did not say so explicitly, Frenkel-Brunswik described the researchers’ use of psychoanalysis in a way consistent with Horkheimer and Adorno’s critiques of revisionist psychoanalysis: it was not a technique for gaining insight into the individual but a method for generalizing about classes of subjects. To this end, Frenkel-Brunswik wrote, the Berkeley Group researchers had “decided to attempt some kind of quantification within groups” of prejudiced and unprejudiced subjects.134

Subjects’ responses were scored in approximately ninety categories. Importantly, this scoring differed from that used in the A-S-, E-, PEC-, and F-scale questionnaires in that a neutral score was employed.135 Further, the clinicians ascribed “intuitive over-all ratings,” stating “their

131 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 31.

132 See, e.g., Frenkel-Brunswik’s description of the clinicians’ questions and approaches in ibid., 302–5.

133 Ibid., 291.

134 Ibid., 293.

135 Ibid., 326–27. One possible reason for this difference could be Frenkel-Brunswik’s proximity to the methods of the ÖWF, in which this neutral score was used. See Lazarsfeld and Robinson, “Properties of the Trichotomy ‘Like, No Opinion, and Dislike,’” and, more broadly, chapters 1 and 2 of this dissertation.

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conclusive impression as to whether the subject involved was prejudiced or not.”136 This procedure culminated in the sorting of subjects into categories or “personality patterns,” presented as binaries: repression versus awareness, externalization versus internalization, conventionalism versus genuineness, and rigidity versus flexibility.137 Again, Frenkel-Brunswik emphasized that, “[a]lthough these categories were to a considerable extent inspired by psychoanalysis, they should not be considered psychoanalytic in the narrower sense of the word, since classification of our material is done primarily on the basis of the present personality structure rather than on the basis of psychogenetic data.”138

Adorno followed this procedure by identifying the psychological need met by prejudice.

First, he claimed that prejudice originated in and through the mental development of the child.

Children have an innate “primary hostile reaction […] directed against foreigners per se, who are perceived as uncanny.” Initially contentless, “infantile fear of the strange is only subsequently

‘filled up’ with the imagery of the specific group, stereotyped and handy for this purpose.”139

Adorno did not, contrary to the line of thinking suggested by this account, argue that prejudice filled a psychological need for a sense of safety. Instead, Adorno stressed the role of stereotypes in the psyche and personality. Adorno—like Horkheimer and his Institute colleagues—held that the “objectification of social processes” and the rise of “intrinsic supra-objective laws” effectuated by the capitalist economy and its attendant social structure caused “intellectual

136 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 328.

137 Ibid., chap. 13. For an example of interview scores, see “Record of Interviews by E. Gruen” in IfS, “Minutes and Memoranda of the Los Angeles Branch of the Berkeley Project.”

138 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 326.

139 Ibid., 610.

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alienation” and “disorientation, with concomitant fear and uncertainty.”140 Adorno claimed that these conditions and phenomena created “anxiety on the ego level that ties in only too well with childhood anxieties.” As a result, he argued, adults suffered a “retrogression” to the “infantile patterns” of stereotypy.141 Thus:

The individual has to cope with problems which he does not actually understand, and he has to develop certain techniques of orientation, however crude and fallacious they may be, which help him feel his way through the dark, as it were. These means fulfill a kind of dual function: on the one hand, they provide the individual with a kind of knowledge, or with substitutes for knowledge, which makes it possible for him to take a stand where it is expected of him, whilst he is not actually equipped to do so. On the other hand, by themselves they alleviate psychologically the illusion of some kind of intellectual security, of something happening he can stick to even if he feels, underneath, the inadequacy of his opinions.142

To summarize and clarify: Adorno argued that prejudice did not arise directly from a psychological need but instead originated in stereotyped thinking; it was these stereotypes that strove to satisfy the psychological need for understanding and orientation in “a cold, alienated, and largely ununderstandable world.”143

In arguing that stereotypes provided the masses with political knowledge, social orientation, and psychological security, Adorno built on the contemporaneous work of Massing,

Gurland, and Lowenthal and the earlier account of Walter Lippmann.144 But Adorno did not concur with Lippmann entirely. Importantly, whereas Lippmann held that stereotypes were

140 Ibid., 618.

141 Ibid., 663–64.

142 Ibid. On the Institute’s argument elsewhere about the use of stereotypes as sources of opinion, see chapter 5.

143 Ibid., 608, 613, 617.

144 Lippmann, Public Opinion, 79–94.

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successful in aligning individuals with the economy, society, and culture in which they found themselves, Adorno argued that stereotypes are always “inadequate to reality.”145 As Adorno explained:

There stereotype, while being a means of translating reality into a kind of multiple-choice questionnaire where every issue is subsumed and can be decided by a plus or minus mark, keeps the world as aloof, abstract, “nonexperienced,” as it was before. Moreover, since it is above all the alienness and coldness of political reality which causes the individual’s anxieties, these anxieties are not fully remedied by a device which itself reflects the threatening, streamlining, process of the social world.146

As a consequence of this insufficiency, Adorno argued, stereotypy engendered its opposite: personalization, or “the tendency to describe objective social and economic processes, political programs, internal and external tensions in terms of some person identified with the case in question rather than taking the trouble to perform the impersonal intellectual operations required by the abstractness of the social processes themselves.” Like stereotypes, however, personalizations were “inadequate” to the “abstractness” and “‘reification’ of a social reality which is determined by property relations and in which the human beings are, as it were, mere appendages.”147 Adorno argued, this is all to say, that stereotypes (and personalizations) arose from—but could not satisfy—the psychological needs for information and orientation called forth by capitalist modernity. “Our stereotypes,” Adorno wrote with uncharacteristic directness,

“are both tools and scars.”148

145 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 665, emphasis original; Lippmann, Public Opinion, 3–34.

146 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 665.

147 Ibid.

148 Ibid., 664.

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Although ultimately insufficient, stereotypes and personalizations did not fade away.

Instead, charged with the psychological energy of unconscious needs and infantile responses, they tended to “‘run wild,’ that is to say, to make themselves completely independent from interaction from reality.”149 How did this break occur? Once introduced into the mind, Adorno argued, stereotypes unfolded according to a logic “much closer to associational transitions than to discursive inferences” arising from their “archaic nature.”150 As Massing, Gurland, and

Lowenthal had argued in the Labor Study, stereotypes acted as a “sluice,” down which thought slid into irrationalities.151 Adorno went further, arguing that stereotypes not only undermined the position of rational thought but also turned rational thought against itself: “[i]t is as if the internal powers of prejudice, after the defeat of the countertendencies, would consummate their victory by taking the opposing energies, which they have defeated, into their own service. The superego becomes the spokesman of the id, as it were […].”152 Adorno argued that this psychological process bore a more-than-passing resemblance to the social system of authoritarianism:

The extremely prejudiced person tends toward “psychological totalitarianism,” something which seems to be almost a microcosmic image of the totalitarian state at which he aims. Nothing can be left untouched, as it were; everything must be made “equal” to the ego-ideal of a rigidly conceived and hypostatized ingroup. The outgroup, the chosen foe, represents an eternal challenge. As long as anything different survives, the fascist character feels threatened, no matter how weak the other being may be. It is as if the anti-Semite could not sleep quietly until he has

149 Ibid., 613.

150 Ibid., 633. Adorno’s evidence for this interpretation came not only from the Berkeley study but also from his work, with Leo Lowenthal, on the rhetoric of fascist agitators. See Adorno, “Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda”; Lowenthal and Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator; Theodor W. Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda (1951),” in Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gephardt (New York: Continuum Books, 1987).

151 Massing, Gurland, and Lowenthal, “Antisemitism among American Labor,” 781.

152 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 630. As Adorno further noted, this “dynamic configuration” was “not altogether new to psychoanalysis.”

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transformed the whole world into the very same paranoid system by which he is beset: the Nazis went far beyond their official anti-Semitic program.153

The “Elements of Anti-Semitism” fragment clearly guided this interpretation. But Adorno also drew inspiration from the work of the American psychologist mentioned above: J. F. Brown.

Specifically, Adorno followed Brown in naming this psychological degradation into paranoia

“stereopathy.” “Where the rigidly compulsive nature of the stereotype cuts off dialectics of trial and error,” Adorno wrote, echoing Brown’s Marxist idiom, “stultification enters the picture.”154

Although Brown, writing a memorandum to Adorno and his colleagues in 1946, urged greater attention to the depth-psychological origins of stereopathy, he largely concurred with Adorno’s ascription of the term to the phenomenon uncovered in the Berkeley study.155

153 Ibid., 632.

154 Ibid., 665; cf. Brown, “The Origin of the Anti-Semitic Attitude.”

155 See J. F. Brown, “Comments on Dr. Adorno’s Qualitative Analysis of the Interview Data” in “Minutes and Memoranda of the Los Angeles Branch of the Berkeley Project.”

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Type/F-Scale Description Psychological Etiology Example Score “The subject achieves his own social “Over-all picture of Authoritarian Sadomasochistic resolution of the adjustment only by taking pleasure in the high scorer” on (Highest) Oedipus complex obedience and subordination.” the F scale Characterized by “irrational and blind hatred of all authority, with strong Masochistic transference to authority Rebel/Psychopath destructive connotations, accompanied kept at the level of the unconscious; National Socialist (High) by a secret ‘readiness’ to ‘capitulate’ resistance to authority takes place at Stormtroopers and join hands with the ‘hated’ conscious level strong.” Type uses prejudice as “means to escape acute mental diseases by The “lunatic fringe” collectivization,” builds Inability to accept the “reality who believe in the Crank “pseudoreality against which their principle” results in denial of validity of the (High) aggressiveness can be directed without obligation imposed from the outside Protocols of the any overt violation of the ‘reality Elders of Zion. principle.’” This type demonstrates “a kind of compulsive overrealism [sic] which Members of the Etiology difficult to determine; Manipulator treats everything and everyone as an labor aristocracy, exhibits “extreme narcissism and a (High) object to be handled, manipulated, Heinrich Himmler, certain emptiness and shallowness.” seized by the subject’s own theoretical Carl Schmitt and practical patterns.” Parental authority replaced by Christians, Rigid Absence of prejudice follows from “image of some collectivity” in the “progressive” (Low) dogmatic faith in political ideology. vein of Freud’s “brother horde.” Democrats

Subject F127, a “They ‘protest’ out of purely moral Sublimation of the “father idea” student who has a reasons against social repression or at together with hostility against the hostile relation to Protestor least against some of its extreme father, resulting in “rejection of her father, concerned (Low) manifestations, such as racial heteronomous authority instead of its about poverty and prejudice. […] acceptance.” indignant about “unfairness.”

“They certainly do not think in “libertines,” “actors, Impulsive stereotypes, but it is doubtful to what Id impulses not integrated into ego or circus folk, and (Low) extent they succeed in superego. vagrants” conceptualization at all.” Type “inclined to ‘live and let live,’ The “genuine ‘folk’ while at the same time their own Id is not repressed but sublimated; element as against Easy-Going desires seem to be free of the superego well developed; absence of rational civilization” (Low) acquisitive touch. […] They can give traumatic experience often found in themselves up without being afraid of lower-middle-class losing themselves.” Subject F515, who Type has “a strong sense of personal believes that “‘there autonomy and independence. He should only be Genuine Liberal cannot stand any outside interference Balance “between superego, ego, and individuals, and they (Lowest) with his personal convictions and id, which Freud deemed ideal.” should be judged beliefs, and he does not want to according to the interfere in those of others either.” individual. Period!’”

Table 6.2: Typology of “Stereopaths.” Adapted from Adorno et. al., The Authoritarian Personality, 759-783. 392

Stereopathy, Adorno believed, took many shapes and forms. Indeed, there were so many manifestations of the condition that it became necessary to develop a typology of stereopaths.

During the late summer and early fall of 1945, Adorno used the data gathered from the F-scale questionnaires to develop a system for classifying stereopaths—and non-stereopaths (see table

6.2). In its final form, completed in September 1945, the typology had nine categories. Despite their many and varied differences in etiology and description, these the high-scoring types,

Adorno insisted, all suffered from the same condition: stereopathy. “It is one of the outstanding findings of the study,” he wrote, “that ‘highness’ is essentially one syndrome, distinguishable from a variety of ‘low’ syndromes. There exists something like ‘the’ potentially fascist character, which is by itself a ‘structural unit.’” For Adorno, this is to say, three terms named the same condition: stereopathy, high-scoring, and fascist character.156

How did Adorno develop this typology? On the one hand, Adorno followed the procedure—used by Massing, Gurland, and Lowenthal in the Labor Study—for distilling classificatory categories from empirical data itself. As argued in previous chapters, the Institute researchers encountered this ‘American’ method in the work of Paul Lazarsfeld, who, in turn, had adopted it from American psychometricians such as Rensis Likert and L. L. Thurstone. On

156 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 751. Adorno was not entirely consistent in his usage of the terms “type” and “syndrome.” Further, he also identified a “conventional syndrome” and a phenomenon of “surface resentment” that operated through different psychological and social mechanisms and which, consequently, must be discussed be analyzed on a different “logical level.” In the former syndrome, “stereotypy comes from the outside, but which has been integrated within the personality as part and parcel of a general conformity.” As Adorno went on to elaborate, prejudice of this kind “does not fulfill a decisive function within the psychological household of the individuals, but is only a means of facile identification.” Subjects said to have surface resentment also “accept stereotypes of prejudice from outside” but for a more specific purpose: “to rationalize and—psychologically or actually—overcome overt difficulties” arising from economic and social status. “Here belongs the discontented, grumbling family father who is happy if somebody else can be blamed for his own economic failures,” Adorno wrote by way of example.

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the other hand, Adorno used insights from social theory to formulate the categories. As demonstrated in the preceding chapter, Adorno argued for the necessity of theory to empirical research in his memoranda on the Labor Study. The Institute researchers must inform the JLC, he had written, “that the problem of anti-Semitism […] cannot simply be treated in terms of

‘unbiased’ social research but only through particular reference to a theory of society.”157

Specifically, as Adorno wrote to Horkheimer in September 1945, the theory of society he had used in developing the typology of stereopaths was, once again, that of the “Elements of Anti-

Semitism” fragment.158

By taking this dual approach—using both empirical research and social theory—to the typology of stereopaths, Adorno satisfied the goals he had outlined in his Labor Study memoranda. Moreover, he conducted the kind of “experiment in theory” called for in his methodological critiques of the Radio Project. In contrast to the “vicious circle” of American social science, this research, as Frenkel-Brunswik put it, had “a theoretical orientation right from the outset.” Horkheimer, who received Adorno’s typology enthusiastically, summarized the accomplishment by informing his friend that the typology represented not only “one of the most important steps in the Berkeley study” but also an advance “in our general theory” itself.159

Although historians have interpreted the Berkeley Project as a supplement to critical theory,

Horkheimer’s remarks make clear the fact that the typology at its heart was, in fact, a product of both critical theory and empirical research.

157 Adorno, “Write-Up of Final Report,” 2.

158 See Adorno to Horkheimer, September 19. 1945; Horkheimer to Adorno, September 29, 1945; and Adorno to Horkheimer, September 29, 1945 in Adorno, Briefe und Briefwechsel, 3:146–51.

159 Ibid., 3:154–61.

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PSYCHOLOGY PRESUPPOSING ITS OWN END

Else Frenkel-Brunswik devoted an entire chapter of The Authoritarian Personality—the published text of the Berkeley Project—to introducing and describing the interview methods that yielded the evidence so vital to Adorno’s interpretation. Under her leadership, a team of graduate students and social workers conducted extended interviews with approximately one hundred of the study’s high- and low-scoring subjects.160 Frenkel-Brunswik advised readers of The

Authoritarian Personality that the team’s approach had been based in the methods, terms, and theories of psychoanalysis, but that it in no way attempted an orthodox psychoanalytical interpretation.161 Only one member of the team was a practicing psychoanalyst—although four others had undergone analysis. Moreover, the researchers interviewed each subject for only three-and-a-half hours—far short of the amount of time required to come to an analytical conclusion.162 Most important, however, was the fact that the researchers were not interested in the genesis and roots of the subjects’ psyches but in the “present personality structure” of each subject.163 Although there was a defined “interview schedule,” researchers were not required to ask specific questions in a particular order but were tasked with eliciting information about general topics through whatever means seemed most apposite to the interviewee’s presentation.

Through this method, the researchers aimed to gather both “direct” and “categorial” evidence—

160 On the interviewers’ background, see Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 301–2.

161 Two of the other subsidiary studies associated with the Institute’s AJC project adopted a more explicitly psychoanalytical approach. See Nathan Ward Ackerman and Marie Jahoda, Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation (New York: Harper, 1950); Bruno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz, Dynamics of Prejudice: A Psychological and Sociological Study of Veterans (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).

162 For an overview of the course of the interviews, see Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 302–3.

163 Ibid., 326.

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material about a known or connection psychology, personality, and prejudice or about a link that, while manifest, was not yet clearly defined.164

For Frenkel-Brunswik, this method’s advantage lay in the “freedom” it afforded to interviewees. Given the opportunity to speak without constraint and interruption, subjects offered a wealth of detail:

The major advantage of the interview technique lies in the scope and freedom of expression it offers to the person being studied. Thus we may learn what he thinks about himself, about his hopes, fears, and goals, about his childhood and his parents, about members of the other sex, about people in general. It is through careful and critical evaluation of sources of this kind that an adequate view of the total personality can perhaps be approximated.165

This emphasis on the advantage—indeed, necessity—of freedom should be understood in two ways. First, it must be understood as a continuation of Lowenthal’s efforts to replace the

“interview situation” with the “Psychoanalytical Situation.” Lowenthal’s application of these methods in the Labor Study, chapter 5 argued, was not only a correction to superficial polling methods but an extension, definite but perhaps unrecognized, of methods, stretching back through Unemployed Man and Authority and the Family to Marienthal, used to capture the totality of a socially situated personality. Second, and relatedly, Frenkel-Brunswik’s emphasis on subjects’ freedom to narrate their experiences followed from the techniques used by Karl and

Charlotte Bühler, Lazarsfeld, and the ÖWF in their developmental- and economic-psychological studies. Indeed, Frenkel-Brunswik gestured at this affinity when she claimed that such interviews would all subjects to fully express their “needs”—a key concept in the Bühlers’ theoretical paradigm and research program. Otherwise put, Frenkel-Brunswik revived an established-but-

164 Ibid., 304–25. For the complete interview schedule and instructions to the interviewer, see Appendix B of this dissertation.

165 Ibid., 291.

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settled methodological connection between the Institute’s ongoing research and decades-old techniques of the ÖWF and, by extension, the Institute’s early empirical studies.

Frenkel-Brunswik worried that the clinical-interview method entailed a serious methodological problem. The wealth of detailed generated by the interviews lent itself to presentation in case studies of individual patients—a method used by psychoanalytic therapists and theorists alike.166 But the Berkeley Project was an explicitly social or, as Horkheimer,

Adorno, and their Institute colleagues put it, “anthropological” project that required evidence about a great number of subjects. How, Frenkel-Brunswik wondered, could the researchers elucidate “richness, flexibility, and spontaneity” in the individual interview without overwhelming the study’s readers with information? Further, although the preservation “of all this uniqueness and flavor” allowed “the reader to form his own impressions and draw his own conclusions,” a full reproduction of the evidence would impose an unbearable “burden of interpretation” on him.167 Put simply, Frenkel-Brunswik described the Berkeley Group as at an impasse, torn between the desire to present their interview material in all its complexity and the impossibility of doing so feasibly.

In developing this position, Frenkel-Brunswik connected the Berkeley Group’s project to a series of methodological debates stretching back, through Komarovsky and Lazarsfeld to the

ÖWF, about the best ways to capture, organize, and present rich, complex, and valuable material gathered from psychological research. Unlike her predecessors, Frenkel-Brunswik did not articulate a solution to this problem. Instead, after raising the methodological question, she offered the vague comment that “it was decided to attempt some kind of quantification within

166 Ibid., 325.

167 Ibid., 292.

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groups.”168 While Frenkel-Brunswik’s attempts to use representative material from individual cases to illustrate general conclusions might be seen as an application of Komarovsky’s technique of discerning, it was not so rigorous. Indeed, the Berkeley Group’s methodology resembled nothing so much as the ÖWF’s economic psychology prior to its mid-1930s program of logical clarification and technical systematization.

Ultimately, it fell to Adorno to take up and answer this methodological problem. As demonstrated in the previous section of this chapter, Adorno devoted considerable effort to and made extensive use of a typology of stereopaths. And yet, he acknowledged in his methodological reflections on this system in The Authoritarian Personality, “[h]ardly any concept in contemporary American psychology has been so thoroughly criticized as that of the typology.” Researchers of all disciplines and approaches critiqued the typological method, he went on:

Since “any doctrine of type is a halfway approach to the problem of individuality, and nothing more,” any such doctrine is subject to devastating attacks from both extremes: because it never catches the unique, and because its generalizations are not statistically valid and do not even afford productive heuristic tools. From the other viewpoint of general dynamic theory of personality, it is objected that typologies tend towards pigeonholing and transform highly flexible traits into static, quasi-biological characteristics while neglecting, above all, the impact of historical and social forces. Statistically, the insufficiency of twofold typologies is particularly emphasized. As to the heuristic value of typologies, their overlapping, and the necessity of constructing "mixed types" which practically disavow the original constructs, is pointed out. At the hub of all these arguments is aversion against the application of rigid concepts to the supposedly fluid reality of psychological life.169

168 Ibid., 292–94, at 292.

169 Ibid., 744. Adorno quoted Gordon W. Allport, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1937), 13–14.

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Some American researchers—chiefly personality psychologists—objected to typologies for their perceived reification of highly individual, essentially mutable psychological states into preexisting categories. Similarly, other researchers—certain historians and qualitative sociologists—critiqued typologies in the terms of the debate between idiographic and nomothetical methods delineated in the debates among late-nineteenth-century German historicists. Even quantitative sociologists objected to typologies not for their inability to produce statistically significant results as for their seemingly inevitable recourse to “mixed” or

“borderline” types. At their cores, many of these critiques echoed Frenkel-Brunswik’s anxiety about presenting interview material, albeit in a different register. Like Frenkel-Brunswik, personality psychologists, historians, and historically-minded sociologists worried that typologies eliminated that which was unique to each individual, thereby undercutting meaningful interpretation.

Adorno certainly sympathized with this view. In their Dialectic of Enlightenment, he and

Horkheimer had developed the philosophical argument that “Enlightenment reason” subsumed the particular by under the concept: “Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities. For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into number, and into one, is illusion […]. In their transformation the essence of things is revealed as always the same, a substrate of domination.”170 For Horkheimer and Adorno, this tendency to equivalence was born in scientific thought—the same levelling thought at work in typologies: “Representation gives way to universal fungibility. An atom is smashed not as a representative but as a specimen of matter, and the rabbit suffering the torment of the laboratory is seen not as a representative but,

170 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, 4.

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mistakenly, as a mere exemplar. Because in functional science the differences are so fluid that everything is submerged in one and the same matter, the scientific object is petrified […].” 171

In The Authoritarian Personality, however, Adorno underscored not the theoretical but the political dimensions of typologies. “It cannot be doubted,” he wrote, “that the critique of psychological types expresses a truly humane impulse, directed against that kind of subsumption of individuals under the pre-established classes which has been consummated in Nazi Germany, where the labeling of live human beings, independently of their specific qualities, resulted in decisions about life and death.”172 Adorno’s point was not hypothetical: he pointed to Erich

Jaensch, a one time-sociologist and, in the 1940s, a National Socialist pseudoscientist, whose categorization of human types had excluded European Jews, labeling them an “anti-type”

(Gegentypus). For Adorno, such “empirical” findings paved the way for mass murder.173

Invoking the results of his own typology, Adorno noted that the propensity to think in types, categories, and kinds was much in evidence in high-scoring subjects. “To express it pointedly,” he wrote, “the rigidity of constructing types is itself indicative of that ‘stereopathic’ mentality which belongs to the basic constituents of the potentially fascist character.”174 Put

171 Ibid., 7. Adorno later elaborated this argument further in his Negative Dialectics (1966). See Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London and New York: Routledge, 1973), viz., 11-12.

172 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 745–46.

173 For Jaensch’s typological method, see Eidetic Imagery and Typological Methods of Investigation; Their Importance for the Psychology of Childhood, the Theory of Education, General Psychology, and the Psychophysiology of Human Personality (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1930). Adorno was likely referring to Jaensch’s Studien zur Psychologie menschlicher Typen (Leipzig: Verlag von Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1930). Adorno here cited Allport, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation; David P. Boder, “Nazi Science,” in Twentieth Century Psychology: Recent Developments in Psychology, ed. Philip Lawrence Harriman (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946), 10–22.

174 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 745.

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straightforwardly, Adorno worried that the Berkeley Project committed the same error as those it sought to analyze.

The Berkeley Project’s reliance upon typologies had the potential to produce two troubling consequences. First, it suggested that the Berkeley Project might share something in common with politics of right-wing decisionism and practices of racial pseudoscience it was intended to combat. Second, it pointed to a kind of methodological circularity, in which the methods used reappeared in the conclusions reached. As one historian has aptly described it, the

Berkeley Project was potentially trapped in a “vicious circle or self-referential paradox where the principle that animates the study becomes trapped in its own diagnostic.”175

Adorno sought to defend The Authoritarian Personality against both of these charges.

First, he argued against general critiques of the typological method on pragmatic, methodological, and political grounds. Psychoanalytic theorists and therapists, Adorno wrote, had used typologies to great effect, deducing from them a number of neuroses and psychoses that, in fact, led to effective treatment. Researchers in the Berkeley Project needed to develop a typology of stereopaths, Adorno claimed, because the goal of the AJC project and of The

Authoritarian Personality was the development of weapons for combatting “the fascist mentality.” Although all high-scoring subject suffered from stereopathy, the different presentations of the syndrome necessitated different treatments, for “[a]n over-all defense would move on a level of such vague generalities that it would in all probability fall flat.”176

175 Peter E. Gordon, “The Authoritarian Personality Revisited: Reading Adorno in the Age of Trump,” Boundary2 44, no. 2 (2017): 40.

176 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 748–49.

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Against the implicit charge that the Berkeley Project strayed close to the stereopathy evident in the work of Jaensch and those like him, Adorno insisted that these pseudoscientists lacked a real understanding of the typological method, misusing its similarity to “synesthesia,” which innately sought to “rebel against reification,” to enforce “an entirely administrative ideology.”177 Methodologically, the Berkley Group’s typology differed from Jaensch’s in that it did not apply a preconceived difference to a body of evidence but drew the categories from this body of evidence itself. As Adorno put it, “[n]ot all typologies are devices for dividing the world into sheep and buck, but some of them reflect certain experiences which, though hard to systematize, have, to put it as loosely as possible, hit upon something.”178 Although inchoate,

Adorno’s description echoed his memoranda for the Labor Study, in which he had emphasized the interrelation of theoretical critique and empirical research in elucidating the categories of the study’s typology.

Researchers in the Berkeley Group, according to Adorno, had developed a “critical typology.” This approach differed from Jaensch’s insofar as it “comprehends the typification of men itself as a social function.”179 Building on the arguments proposed as early as the Princeton

Radio Research Project, Adorno argued that sorting subjects into groups, types, and classes did not vitiate their unique individuality because they had no such individuality.180 According to

Adorno:

People form psychological “classes,” inasmuch as they are stamped by variegated social processes. This in all probability holds good for our own standardized mass

177 Ibid., 746.

178 Ibid.

179 Ibid., 749, emphasis original.

180 See, e.g., Adorno, “The Problem of the New Type of Human Being” and chapter 3 of the dissertation.

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culture to even higher a degree than for previous periods. The relative rigidity of our high scorers, and of some of our low scorers, reflects psychologically the increasing rigidity according to which our society falls into two more or less crude opposing camps. Individualism, opposed to inhuman pigeonholing, may ultimately become a mere ideological veil in a society which actually is inhuman and whose intrinsic tendency towards the “subsumption” of everything shows itself by the classification of people themselves. In other words, the critique of typology should not neglect the fact that large numbers of people are no longer, or rather never were, "individuals" in the sense of traditional nineteenth-century philosophy. 181

Adorno located the origin of this insight in the work of Émile Durkheim, but he insisted that it was not a point of social theory but an observation of empirical reality: “[t]here is reason to look for psychological types because the world in which we live is typed and ‘produces’ different

‘types’ of persons.”182 This is to say that Adorno’s argument in this chapter of The Authoritarian

Personality was the culmination and demonstration of the methodological critique of empirical research he had been developing for more than a decade. Only by disabusing themselves of the ideology of individuality could researchers recognize the empirical reality of the disappearance of the individual as such.

According to this interpretation, the potential methodological and political problems of the Berkeley Project followed not from its use of types as from its reliance upon psychology in general and psychoanalysis in particular. This approach, which Adorno recognized pervaded the

Berkeley Project to the extent that it “structurally predetermined” the results, rested upon and reinforced the ideology of individuality disproved by the study’s empirical findings.183 Adorno

181 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 747. Adorno’s reference to the absence of “individuals […] in the sense of traditional nineteenth-century philosophy” echoed his assertion, in conversation with Horkheimer, that there no longer existed—if ever there had—individuals like the heroes of nineteenth-century novels. See Horkheimer and Adorno, “Ursprung und Ende des Individuums,” viz., 441.

182 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 747.

183 Ibid., 750–51, cf. 316–17.

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maintained that the depth and extent of psychoanalytic methods and thinking in the Berkley

Study meant that could not be deracinated; doing so, he insisted, would be an act of social- scientific bad faith.184 But how could the Berkeley Project make use of psychoanalysis without falling into the empirically misleading and politically reactionary ideology of individuality?

Adorno’s varied responses to this question—in The Authoritarian Personality and in presentations, memoranda, and occasional writings between 1947 and 1949—demonstrate that the problem vexed him and that the solution eluded him.

During a speech to members of the Y.M.C.A. branch at the University of California-Los

Angeles in 1948, for example, Adorno developed two distinct justifications for the Institute’s reliance upon psychology. After opening with an innocuous overview of the Institute’s ongoing research, Adorno adopted a defensive tone: “[y]ou may now start wondering,” he told the audience, “whether our studies do not exaggerate the psychological angle and tend to neglect economic determinants.”185 First, Adorno insisted that researchers seeking to combat fascism

“ought to keep away from the kind of dichotomous thinking which in itself is a symptom so characteristic of the totalitarian trends of our time.”186 Psychological and economical explanations, according to this explanation, were not so distinct as might first be supposed.

While such a position might seem to be in keeping with the Institute’s overall emphasis on dissolving the scholarly division of labor, it also existed in tension with Adorno’s claim—in his memoranda on the Labor Study—that psychological and sociological approaches must not be integrated but pushed to their extremes. As if recalling this claim, Adorno changed direction and

184 Ibid., 759–751.

185 Ibid., 534.

186 Ibid., 535–36.

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argued that the psychological study of the fascist character offered a unique perspective: “We may say that, actually, the social system makes itself felt more strongly in the character of the prospective fascist than in overt and conscious economic interest: he is the child of our social system and we can estimate its full impact upon him only if we understand the deepest layers of repression within him.”187

Two years later, in The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno made a different claim.

Describing the “authoritarian” presentation of stereopathy, Adorno argued that psychoanalysis provided a “pattern for the translation” of social forces into subjective psychology.188 On this basis, Adorno claimed that authoritarian stereopaths presented the psychical structures and pathologies Erich Fromm had identified as part of the “sadomasochistic resolution of the

Oedipus complex” in his social-psychological contribution to Authority and the Family. As

Adorno summarized it, Fromm’s description of the sadomasochistic personality rested on the twisted formation of the ego in which “[l]ove for the mother, in its primary form, comes under a severe taboo” and the “resulting hatred against the father is transformed by reaction-formation into love.” 189 Adorno had, however, spent much of the previous decade arguing against

Fromm—if not against his specific insights then against his social-psychological method itself.

In The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno sought to redeploy Fromm’s psychodynamic etiology of sadomasochism as an interpretive “pattern” that illuminated social dynamics. Sadomasochism

187 Ibid., 536.

188 Ibid., 759.

189 Ibid. As demonstrated in chapter 5 of the dissertation, Adorno followed his Institute colleagues in developing a harsh critique of Fromm for his revisions to Freudian orthodoxy. While this critique makes Adorno’s citation of Fromm in The Authoritarian Personality noteworthy, it should be pointed out that his reference was to one of Fromm’s earlier—and, therefore, more orthodox—texts and not to his more recent works—those which the Institute found objectionable. Specifically, Adorno cited Fromm, “Sozialpsychologischer Teil.”

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in the full, psychoanalytic sense outlined by Fromm could not exist, this is to say, but the logic of the condition still held and, moreover, proved apposite to explaining social conditions:

In order to achieve ‘internalization’ of social control which never gives as much of the individual as it takes, the latter’s attitude towards authority and its psychological agency, the superego, assumes an irrational aspect. The subject achieves his own social adjustment only by taking pleasure in obedience and subordination. This brings into play the sadomasochistic impulse structure as both a condition and as a result of social adjustment. In our form of society, sadistic as well as masochistic tendencies actually find gratification.190

Adorno, this is to say, held that psychoanalytic concepts may have outlived their utility as diagnoses but remained useful as heuristic devices for interpreting society.191 “In psychoanalysis,” Adorno wrote in 1951, “nothing is true but its exaggerations.”192

Did Adorno’s repurposing of Fromm’s psychoanalytic concept of sadomasochism as a metaphor meet the standards of the “almost-monadological psychology” Adorno described in his contribution to the Labor Study? Moreover, did Adorno’s reorientation align with the critique of

Fromm’s social-psychological methodology developed by Leichter and Lazarsfeld—a critique, chapter 5 argued, upon which Adorno drew in formulating his own position? Leichter and

Lazarsfeld, it will be recalled, inveighed specifically against the interpretive use of psychoanalytic theory in sociological research—precisely the use, this is to say, to which Adorno was now putting Fromm’s theory. Adorno’s shifting position in this period suggests that he was unable to solve the problem of the place of psychoanalytic theory in social research.

Psychoanalytic methods, concepts, insights, and arguments were woven into the fabric of

190 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 759.

191 Adorno would go on to develop this point in his Minima Moralia (1951), a set of aphorisms dedicated to Horkheimer. See Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1951), 96–100, 104–7 et passim. 192 Ibid., 77.

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Authoritarian Personality; their existence could not be denied, and their contributions could not be undone. Ultimately, this seemingly intractable position led Adorno to embrace a paradox: only a psychology that assumed its own impossibility could contribute to social research.

Adorno focused most extensively and intensely on the methodological and theoretical problems raised by the use of psychology in the Berkeley Project in his unpublished “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality.”193 Drafted in 1948, the essay opened by acknowledging that the Berkeley Project remained confined to the task of analyzing ideology and drew conclusions only about the “subjective” manifestations of authoritarianism. Rehearsing the now-familiar critiques of existing empirical techniques—including his own challenges to the Princeton Radio

Research Project and Lowenthal’s indictments of polls and surveys—Adorno insisted that

American methods were to blame for this narrow focus: because American researchers, suffering from a “democratic bias,” assumed the existence of autonomous subjects independent from economic imperatives and social pressures, their studies precluded any consideration of the

“objective” forces behind authoritarianism.194 As he had done in earlier and contemporaneous texts, Adorno claimed that empirical research disproved the existence of such individuals:

Our high-scoring subjects do not seem to behave as autonomous units whose decisions are important for their own fate as well as that of society, but rather as submissive centers of reactions, looking for the conventional “thing to do,” and riding what they consider “the wave of the future.” This observation seems to fall in line with the economic tendency towards gradual disappearance of the free market and the adaptation of man to this slowly emerging new condition.195

193 Peter E. Gordon developed an insightful reading of these “Remarks” in his recent reexamination of The Authoritarian Personality. It should be noted that this chapter of the dissertation was written at the same time as, but without influence from, Gordon’s original essay. See Gordon, “The Authoritarian Personality Revisited.”

194 Adorno, “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality,” 2.

195 Ibid.

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Adorno went on to make plain the Institute’s view that this empirical fact invalidated the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Freud and his followers, Adorno wrote, predicated psychoanalysis on the possibility of genuine “experience,” but it was precisely such experiences which the decline of true individuality and the rise of standardized subjectivity disallowed.196 As both the Labor Study and the Berkeley Project had demonstrated, the stereopathy so prevalent in modern subjects prevented experience from breaking through reification. “To look for such experiences,” Adorno wrote in 1948, “brings analysis dangerously close to methodological phantasies.”197 Adorno carried this argument to its logical conclusion, recognizing that the

Institute’s empirical documentation of the decline of individuality and concomitant rejection of psychoanalysis meant that the Berkeley Project “comes close to the behaviorists’ concept of man as a bundle of conditioned reflexes.”198 Adorno’s path through empirical research, this is to say, led him back to the same paradigm he had rejected upon arriving in the United States.

But Adorno’s remarks did not disavow psychoanalysis. Early in the text, Adorno affirmed that the Berkeley Project rested upon “psychoanalysis in its more orthodox, Freudian version.”199 In concluding the document, Adorno went further, asserting that psychoanalytic concepts and practices enabled researchers to see how “objective social forces” impact the subject “not only from the outside but actually within it.”200 How did Adorno resolve the manifest contradiction between such statements and his own argument? Returning to the line of

196 Ibid., 26–28.

197 Ibid., 27.

198 Ibid., 29.

199 Ibid., 7.

200 Ibid., 26.

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thinking begun in his memoranda on the Labor Study, Adorno insisted that psychoanalytical and sociological approaches be kept distinct from one another. In the Berkeley Project, no attempt was made to “sociologize psychology” but instead “the psychology of the anti-Semite was carried to the extreme,” terminating in a contradiction.201 The psychoanalytic study of individual anti-Semites, this is to say, would reveal that there were no longer individuals as such. Such a procedure was the immanent critique of individuality for which Adorno and Horkheimer had called as early as 1938; it formed the cornerstone of Adorno’s critiques of the Princeton Radio

Research Project and of his methodological writings on the Labor Study. In his remarks on The

Authoritarian Personality, Adorno described this imminent critique as an empirical method: “the psychology of the contemporary anti-Semite” that “presupposes the end of psychology itself.”202

CONCLUSION

In many respects, critical theory reached its apotheosis during the 1940s. Across texts such as Minima Moralia (1944-1949), Eclipse of Reason (1947), and, especially, Dialectic of

Enlightenment (1944), Horkheimer and Adorno transformed the Institute’s earlier accounts of contemporary capitalism and bourgeois culture into an account of Western modernity.203

Collaboration between Adorno and Horkheimer on the “dialectical-logic project” both expanded the scope and increased the intensity of critical theory. In their now-famous opening to Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer declared that “the wholly enlightened earth is radiant

201 Ibid., 27.

202 Ibid., 28.

203 See Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben; Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason.

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with triumphant calamity.”204 Broadly, this account operated from the premise that “[m]odern society is a mass society” in which pervasive instrumental reason reduced individuals to objects of administration.205 According to this view:

The whole pattern of present-day culture is moulded [sic] in such a way that it takes care of the masses by “integrating” them into the standardized forms of life which are built after the model of industrial mass production, and by actually or vicariously satisfying their wants and needs. Today’s huge increase of social control over the masses equals the pressure potentially exercised by the masses over the social structure. Populations are treated en masse because they are no longer “masses” in the old sense of the term. They are manipulated as objects of all kinds of social organizations, including their own, because their being mere objects has become problematic since they reached—through technical civilization—a stage of enlightenment which would enable them to become true subjects if the control mechanisms would be superseded at any point. […] The masses are incessantly moulded [sic] from above, they must be moulded [sic], if they are to be kept at bay.206

Adorno developed this vivid description of the “totally administered society” not in Dialectic of

Enlightenment or Minima Moralia but in his unpublished comments on The Authoritarian

Personality. Not only theoretical meditations, this is to say, but also empirical research yielded insight into modernity.

The resonance between The Authoritarian Personality and Dialectic of Enlightenment is hardly surprising. After all, as Frenkel-Brunswik noted, the Berkeley Project “was guided by a theoretical orientation that was present at the start.”207 But many historians of the Institute and scholars of critical theory might think this resonance founded on the pathbreaking arguments of

204 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, 1. Earlier editions of the text translated the sentence in even stronger terms: “the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.” Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (Verso, 1997), 3.

205 Adorno, “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality,” 30.

206 Ibid.

207 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 225.

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Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno himself claimed that he had translated the account of anti-

Semitism he and Horkheimer had developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment into the “operational terms” with which it could be deployed in the Berkeley Project.208 In to this view, the

Horkheimer and Adorno’s evolving critical theory grounded, authorized, and justified the

Institute’s empirical research projects.

In this chapter, I complicated this view by reconstructing the Berkeley Project. Although

Adorno aimed to implement Horkheimer’s long-desired combination of “European concepts” and “American methods” by operationalizing the arguments of Dialectic of Enlightenment, the

Berkeley Project also relied on eminently empirical techniques. I demonstrated that Adorno did so both because such techniques were necessary to organize and present an otherwise- overwhelming amount of empirical evidence and because these methods. But Adorno’s intentions were not purely instrumental. In fact, Adorno held that these objectifying, dehumanizing methods were suited to the task of analyzing the reified social totality of postwar

America. This is to say that The Authoritarian Personality was as shaped by Adorno’s longstanding aim of developing “experiments in theory” that would uncover the ideology of individuality as by his and Horkheimer’s account of dialectical logic.

Further, I showed that Adorno applied techniques, concepts, and arguments developed in the Institute’s two-decade-long reflection on the methodology of empirical social research. The

Authoritarian Personality was not built upon Dialectic of Enlightenment alone, this is to say, but upon a two-decades old debate about the meaning and methods of empirical research. This methodological program for empirical research, as Adorno wrote in his unpublished remarks on

208 The phrase “‘operational terms’” appeared in English in the original text. See Adorno’s letter to Horkheimer of December 18, 1944 in Adorno and Horkheimer, Briefe und Briefwechsel, 1994, 2:392–95, at 393.

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The Authoritarian Personality, uncovered the “kind of details, which, as a rule, can be expected only from empirical investigations.”209 Alongside the insights developed in Dialectic of

Enlightenment, these details shaped Horkheimer and Adorno’s strikingly pessimistic view of the totally administered society.

209 Adorno, “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality,” 22.

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CONCLUSION

EXPERIMENTS IN THEORY

ARGUMENTS AND INTERVENTIONS

Under what conditions and for what reasons did the Institute for Social Research begin conducting empirical, social-scientific studies? In what ways did these projects change during the following decades? How did the Institute, as an organization that carried out sociological, psychological, and social-psychological studies, relate to and differ from other interwar research centers? How—and why—did the Institute progress from conducting individual studies to developing a coherent program of empirical research? What were the axioms, methods, and findings of this program? Which Institute members encouraged this program’s development— and which members argued against it? How did empirical research connect to the Institute’s inimitable critical theory?

Such questions lie at the heart of this dissertation. Although frequently implied in the vast secondary scholarship on the Institute, these questions are directly raised only infrequently. In this project, I argued that these topics should be raised explicitly and explored systematically.

Each chapter of the dissertation documented a segment the Institute’s empirical-research program; taken together, they offer a preliminary account of the evolution of this program between 1930 and 1950.

In the opening chapters of the dissertation, I demonstrated that the Institute began to pursue social-psychological research through its interaction with other organizations and the individuals comprising them. The Austrian Economic-Psychological Research Center (ÖWF) and its leader, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, I showed in chapter 1, introduced the Institute to the possibility

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of using social-psychological research to gauge the transformation of the existing working class into a model proletariat. Across the dissertation, I argued that these concerns remained central to the Institute’s social-psychological studies in Europe and the United States. In chapter 2, for example, I traced the continuation of this view in the writings of Hilde Weiss, who imbued the

Institute’s study of German workers with her conviction that the research process itself must contribute to consciousness-raising among workers. In chapters 3 and 5, I uncovered this

Austrian impulse in the studies conducted by Mirra Komarovsky, Paul Massing, and A. R. L.

Gurland. Like Lazarsfeld and his ÖWF colleagues, I argued, these Institute-affiliated researchers believed that the working class stood at a crossroads—it could become either a revolutionary proletariat or a reactionary mob. Social-psychological research, both the ÖWF and the Institute held, could provide the tools for effectuating and evaluating the remaking of the working class.

Throughout the dissertation, I reconstructed central methodological debates among the

Institute members and their collaborators. Over two decades and on both sides of the Atlantic, these researchers raised a number of interrelated questions. What were the logical foundations, empirical implications, and ideological consequences of different empirical and analytical techniques? Was it possible to develop a methodology suited to the conditions of late-stage- capitalist production and its attendant cultural products and social forms? In what ways could empirical research and theoretical critique be interwoven?

Researchers retained by the Institute, I argued, raised these questions, posing them both implicitly and explicitly in studies they conducted for Horkheimer and his colleagues. In chapter

2, I explored the unfolding of this process in Authority and the Family (1936)—the Institute’s expansive study of recent changes of patriarchal authority within the nuclear family. Käthe

Leichter and Lazarsfeld, I showed, developed an incisive critique of the method of “structural

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statistics” formulated by Erich Fromm. According to Leichter and Lazarsfeld, Fromm’s application of theoretical concepts to empirical data through an opaque process of

“interpretation” distorted analysis. In chapter 3, I examined Lazarsfeld’s interwar methodological essays and Komarovsky’s The Unemployed Man and His Family (1940), describing their alternative to Fromm’s “structural statistics.” Lazarsfeld and Komarovsky attempted to derive categories from the empirical material itself through typological classification (“substruction”) and analyzed evidence through rigorous clarification (“discerning”). Over the ensuing decades,

Institute members responded to these critiques and, further, integrated these techniques into their own evolving program of empirical research.

Borrowing a phrase from Theodor W. Adorno, I described this program as the design and execution of “experiments in theory.” In chapter 4, I reconstructed Adorno’s conceptualization of these experiments in his work for the Princeton Radio Research Project (1938-1939). Hired by

Lazarsfeld to apply a “European approach” to psychological research, Adorno spent his time at the Radio Project formulating cutting critiques of the “American” methodology he considered theoretically naïve and ideologically suspect. Although he inveighed against empirical research—and, in strikingly personal terms, empirical researchers—Adorno did not call for the abandonment of this approach. Rather, he developed the methodology of conducting experiments in theory—a procedure that, by combining empirical research and theoretical critique, would interrogate the culture industry and social totality of contemporary capitalism.

In Chapter 5, I traced the Institute’s development of this nascent approach in its ambitious study, “Antisemitism Among American Labor” (1941-1945). This project represented the confluence of many earlier influences on the Institute’s empirical-research program. Massing and Gurland, for example, revived Weiss’ conception of social research as a technique of

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worker-education. More broadly, the Institute affiliates deployed the techniques of gathering and analyzing evidence the ÖWF and its successors designed in the previous decades. Importantly, I showed, Adorno adapted the critiques of Fromm’s “structural statistics” developed by Leicther,

Lazarsfeld, and Komarovsky. By so doing, Adorno refined his conception of experiments in theory, describing the method as a dialectic in which theoretical concepts and empirical categories were connected by a continuously renewed process of critique and research.

Adorno deployed his experiments-in-theory approach in the Institute’s most well-known empirical project: the study of the “fascist character” (1943-1948), ultimately published as The

Authoritarian Personality (1950). Working with the Berkeley Public Opinion Study Group,

Adorno endeavored to explore the structure of fascist ideology in the minds of ordinary

Americans. Although the underlying theory for the project followed from Adorno’s work, with

Max Horkheimer, on the project that would become Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), it was also a continuation of the Institute’s decades-long program of empirical research. In its motivations, I argued, The Authoritarian Personality echoed The Unemployed of Marienthal; in its methods, it followed The Unemployed Man and “Antisemitism Among American Labor.”

This is to say that, alongside the practice of immanent critique, Adorno applied the techniques of substruction and discerning. This process of reinscribing empirical methods within the Institute’s paradigm was rife with seeming contradictions. But, I argued, Adorno embraced this paradoxical mode of empirical research as well-suited to the contradictions of the culture and society of late- stage capitalism.

Questions about individuality were bound up with the program of experiments in theory.

Across the dissertation, I traced researchers’ evolving conceptions of individuality—from the

ÖWF’s association of bourgeois norms and behaviors with true individuality to the Institute’s

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critique of individuality as an ideological “theater” or “appearance.”1 For many of the researchers discussed in the dissertation, expressions of individuality served as an index for political reliability. Not only Lazarsfeld, Leichter, and Komarovsky but also Fromm, Massing, and Gurland measured and observed experimental subjects’ independence and iconoclasm to place them on the revolutionary-reactionary spectrum. Adorno’s understanding of individuality was more complex and variable.2 On the one hand, in his writings for the Research Project,

Adorno critiqued “American” empirical methods for their perceived role in subtending the ideology of individuality. On the other hand, in The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno followed his interlocutors in identifying the true individual—or the “democratic personality”—as the strongest bulwark against authoritarianism. Originally intended to subvert the ideology of individuality embedded in empirical techniques through immanent critique, Adorno’s method of experiments in theory ultimately arrived at an impasse. Adorno, as I argued in chapter 6, could neither allow nor eliminate the concept of the individual in social research. Adorno developed the eminently dialectical view that social-psychological research could proceed only by assuming the nonexistence of the individual, by assuming its own impossibility.

One vector along which the dispute about individuality unfolded was the simultaneous debate about the role of psychoanalysis in social research. Lazarsfeld, Leichter, and

Komarovsky, I showed in the first three chapters of the dissertation, argued against Fromm’s interpolation of psychoanalytical concepts into the social-research process. Horkheimer and

Adorno, meanwhile, articulated a critique of psychoanalysis as a tool of the ideology of

1 Horkheimer and Adorno, “Ursprung und Ende des Individuums,” 450.

2 As I noted in the introduction, the dissertation extends and complicates a line of thinking recently traced by Eric Oberle. See Oberle, Theodor Adorno and the Century of Negative Identity, chaps. 3–4.

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individuality. As I argued in chapter 5 of the dissertation, Adorno eventually deployed aspects of

Lazarsfeld, Leichter, and Komarovsky’s methodological critique against Fromm. But Adorno’s position was not as straightforward as it may have seemed. Just as he had been unable to fully eliminate or allow the concept of individuality in social research, Adorno could neither expiate nor embrace the techniques of psychoanalysis in social psychology. Once again, as I argued in chapter 6, Adorno embraced a dialectical solution, claiming that the experiments-in-theory methodology must become a social psychology that “presupposes the end of psychology itself.”3

Adorno was hardly the only researcher in this period to struggle with the role of psychoanalysis in social and psychological research. To reiterate: Lazarsfeld, Leichter, and

Komarovsky argued against the use of psychoanalytic concepts and techniques in social research. Moreover, they devoted many years (and many pages) to developing alternative methods for conducting social-psychological studies. And yet, psychoanalytic concepts and techniques frequently reappeared throughout these projects. In 1940, at the height of his critique of American “nose-counting” techniques and development of a “European” method of social- psychological research, Lazarsfeld relapsed into psychoanalytic argot. As he explained to his readers, subjects had “repressed” the real reasons why they thought and acted as they did, covering over these motivations with “screens.”4 Even earlier, Lazarsfeld had described the market researcher’s task as similar to the analyst’s objective: to overcome the subject’s

“psychological resistance” and introduce ego to psychical realms dominated by id.5 Adorno’s

3 Adorno, “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality,” 28.

4 Smith and Suchman, “Do People Know Why They Buy?,” 677.

5 Kornhauser and Lazarsfeld, Techniques of Market Research, 66.

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colleagues at the Berkeley Public Opinion Study Group, R. Nevitt Sanford and Else Frenkel-

Brunswik, followed a similar course.

Although they aimed to develop an approach entirely distinct from psychoanalysis, they frequently returned to psychoanalytic techniques and explanations—a process most evident in their interpretations of the Thematic Apperception Test results of American anti-Semites. All this is to say that the psychoanalytic paradigm persisted in midcentury social psychology despite many of its practitioners’ best attempts to avoid or eliminate it. In this sense, I have traced what could be described metaphorically as the return of the repressed in social psychology itself.6

CONTRIBUTIONS AND LIMITATIONS

As I noted in the introduction, I aimed not to “debunk” existing scholarship on the

Institute and its critical theory but to “unfreeze” many of its longstanding interpretations and their attendant assumptions.7 Within this remit, I made preliminary contributions to several ongoing lines of inquiry, which, taken together, complicate what one historian has called the

“Frankfurt School industry” in historical scholarship.8

Most broadly, I called attention to the Institute’s often-overlooked social- and human- scientific studies of European and American society, culture, economics, and individuals.9 Key concepts of critical theory—from alienation to authoritarianism—developed, at least in part,

6 I am indebted to Peter E. Gordon for this felicitous metaphor.

7 See Introduction, 28. I borrow this distinction from Lazarsfeld. See Lazarsfeld, Oral History (1962), 264.

8 Thomas Haakenson, review of Review of The Frankfurt School in Exile, by Thomas Wheatland, German Studies Review 33, no. 2 (2010): 466.

9 To avoid repetition, I have not, in the following discussion, cited the scholarship to which passing reference is made. For a full discussion of these literatures, see Introduction, 9-28.

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through the processes of identification, study, and analysis carried out in empirical research projects. I did not seek to overturn longstanding scholarship on the Institute’s well-known engagement with Hegelian philosophy and Marxist political economy in the formation of its critical theory but to expand the universe of influences and interactions through which the

Institute’s distinctive paradigm took shape. To continue this process, I will link the experiments- in-theory methodology described in this dissertation to broader practices of social-scientific research and discourses of social theory embodied in the works of Max Weber, Wilhelm Dilthey,

Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Simmel, and others.

With this recovery and reconstruction, I connected the Institute to scholarship focusing on the transatlantic movement of interwar intellectuals and ideas. Historians have long recognized the role the Institute affiliates played in the “intellectual migration” from Europe to the United States. Indeed, their history is one chapter in the larger story about émigrés who brought European ideas and styles of erudition to America. Across the chapters of the dissertation, I argued that the Institute members were transnational actors before, during, and after their emigration. Through their empirical research, the Institute members were in conversation with counterparts in countries from Austria to America. Moreover, I suggested that the Institute’s empirical research should be situated in international contexts. Projects such as

Authority and the Family emerged alongside other studies of European society conducted by international research organizations. Situating the Institute in these transatlantic and international contexts will yield new insights into the histories of both critical theory and interwar internationalism.10

10 Much more research remains to be done in this area. The dissertation’s attempt to situate Authority and the Family in the context of interwar Geneva is both preliminary and provisional. On a personal note, I would like to mention 420

Relatedly, I contributed to recent studies that complicate longstanding assumptions about the distinctions between “European” and “American” patterns of thinking within and beyond the academy. By recovering the Institute’s many and varied empirical research projects, I made two interrelated additions to this literature. I uncovered one instance in which intellectuals actively created and hardened distinctions between “European” and “American” thought: Lazarsfeld’s initial identification and Adorno’s subsequent contestation of the “European approach” to social research. Further, by documenting the deep involvement of Adorno in the refinement of the

Institute’s empirical methodology, I contested later insistence on the irreconcilability of

“European” critical theory with “American” social research: the distinction between the

Continents would become a persistent theme in disciplinary memory.

Through this history of the Institute’s program of empirical research, I join scholars across the humanities and social sciences in reconsidering the relationships between critical theory and other period discourses. Philosophers have, for example, revived the “disrupted debate” between logical empiricism and critical theory by reconsidering the “confrontation” between the Frankfurt School and the Vienna Circle. Likewise, historians have reevaluated the

Institute’s involvement in American thought from pragmatism to technocracy and Adorno’s relationship to the existentialist philosophers of bourgeois interiority. To these literatures, I offer an account of the Institute’s mutual imbrication with empirical paradigms from the ÖWF’s sociography to the Berkeley Group’s behaviorism. Alongside these other scholars, I suggest that debates about the relationship of the Institute and its critical theory to other organizations and their paradigms are perhaps not as settled as scholars have imagined them to be.

that I will be presenting on the relation between Authority and the Family and other interwar studies of childhood at the 2019 meeting of the German Studies Association.

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I also respond to recent calls for scholars of German intellectual history to broaden the scope of their research by looking beyond the familiar figures who reappear in numerous studies of interwar Europe and its afterlives. To be sure, the dissertation remains a study of the Institute for Social Research—the organization that served as the intellectual home for many of the best- known thinkers of interwar and midcentury Germany. Yet, I call attention to lesser- or little- known figures within the Institute, foregrounding contributions of peripheral Institute members and loosely affiliated researchers. Lazarsfeld, Leichter, Komarovsky, Weiss, Gurland, and

Massing, I argued, made important-but-overlooked contributions to the Institute’s program of empirical research and, consequently, to its incisive critique of contemporary society and culture.

Although significant, this argument is underdeveloped. In its present form, the dissertation emphasizes the decades-long dialogue between Lazarsfeld and Adorno over the aims, methods, and implications of social and psychological research. The reasons for this focus are several. As I have shown across the chapters of the dissertation, Lazarsfeld played a central role in the Institute’s evolving empirical-research program—not only as an accomplished psychologist and pioneering sociologist but also as an organizer and facilitator. Lazarsfeld brought Leichter, Komarovsky, and Frenkel-Brunswik together with Adorno, Horkheimer, and

Fromm; he helped carry out the fieldwork for studies of adolescents in Switzerland and workers in Newark; he facilitated the Institute-in-exile’s affiliation with Columbia University and secured employment for Adorno at the Radio Project. In his own words, Lazarsfeld was an “institution man” in both Europe and the United States and a “connection cog” between researchers on the two continents.11 Like other historians of this period and subject, I focused on Lazarsfeld because, “[i]n a region and period marked by dramatic ruptures and discontinuities, biography

11 Lazarsfeld, “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir,” 271, 302.

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can be a particularly useful tool for uncovering scientific histories against the grain.”12 Further, I concentrated on Lazarsfeld’s career and contributions because of the orientation of existing scholarship: sociologists and historians have recovered the roles of Massing, Gurland, and other less-famous members of the Institute, but no similar study of Lazarsfeld has appeared.13

Through the process of researching, writing, and editing the dissertation, however, I realized that credit for the development of the experiments-in-theory methodology could not be given to Adorno alone—nor could it be given to the productive confrontation between Adorno and Lazarsfeld over the “European approach” to social research. In future iterations of this project, I hope to recover more of the contributions made by sociologists and psychologists designated “research assistants” and “consultants” in the acknowledgements to the Institute’s studies. Included on this list would be not only Weiss, Leichter, and Komarovsky but also

Andries Sternheim, Ernst Schachtel, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Marie Jahoda, and others. Perhaps further research will enable me to write the history of the Institute’s experiments in theory without reliance on Lazarsfeld’s “connection cog.”

Concomitant with this introduction of other, less-heard voices, I hope to deepen the project’s consideration of the American ideas the Institute encountered and the contexts in which its members worked. In the introduction, I described my goal as documenting the patterns of international, transatlantic intellectual exchange that bound the Institute researchers to their contemporaries in Europe and the United States. In the pursuit of this goal, I have been only

12 Lebow, Mazurek, and Wawrzyniak, “Making Modern Social Science,” 4.

13 See, e.g., McLaughlin, “Origin Myths in the Social Sciences”; Amidon and Worrell, “A. R. L. Gurland, the Frankfurt School, and the Critical Theory of Antisemitism”; Worrell, “Es Kommt Die Nacht”; Thomas Wheatland, “Franz L. Neumann: Negotiating Political Exile,” in German Historical Institute Bulletin Supplement 10, ed. Jan Logemann and Mary Nolan, vol. 10 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 111–38.

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partially successful. Across chapters 2-6, I described the Institute’s engagement with American sociology, psychology, and market research; I argued that the researchers introduced a distinction between the “American” and “European” approaches to social research—a distinction that served as a rhetorical device and methodological impediment. But more work remains to be done. As in many studies of the Institute, the varieties of American thought remain a background in this dissertation. In future iterations of the project, I hope to strengthen this aspect of my historical account and better describe the connected-but-variegated universe of midcentury social theory and empirical research.

Although members of the Institute traded ideas, arguments, and methods with their counterparts in the United States—and vice versa—it should not be assumed that this exchange was direct or unproblematic. As I signaled in the introduction to the dissertation, Horkheimer,

Adorno, Fromm, and their colleagues often deployed the same terms as their interlocutors but with different, even divergent, meanings. Leichter, Lazarsfeld, Fromm, and Adorno, for example, all spoke of and wrote about “interpretation” at various points in the interwar decades.

What they took “interpretation” to mean and, consequently, how they thought it should be carried out varied. But this divergence, I argued, was covered over by the superficial similarity of the term itself. Although problematic, the existence of these deeper differences beneath apparent agreement need not be disruptive to my historical reconstruction and argument. Indeed, these discursive situations constituted moments of potential creative appropriation and productive misunderstanding. Leichter and Lazarsfeld’s interpolation of new content into Fromm’s method of “interpretation,” for example, became central to the Institute’s later critique of Fromm and, more important, to its conception of “experiments in theory.” As I continue this project, I will

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analyze these moments of obscured divergence in more detail in order to assess both the intentions behind them and the effects of them.

Although focused on the history of the Institute’s program of empirical research, evidence and arguments in this dissertation pointed towards several philosophical questions.

First, by demonstrating that abstract concepts central to the Institute’s critical theory—such as authoritarianism—were fashioned in and through empirical research, I invoked the considerable body of scholarship that explores how scientific phenomena and theories are constructed through the tools, techniques, and operations of the research process itself.14 While much of this literature has been centered on the history of the physical sciences, scholars have recently begun to apply its findings to the social and human sciences.15 In future iterations of this project, I will make my contribution to this literature, which, in the dissertation, remains somewhat haphazard, more sustained and direct.

Second, I gestured at a philosophical question that has been posed by the likes of

Aristotle, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill: how does the instance relate to the class, the individual to the kind?16 More recently, this question has been raised by the likes of Michel

Foucault, Ian Hacking, and John Forrester, among others. Foucault, Hacking, and Forrester have not only called attention to the normative implications of the issue but also to its striking connection to the social and human sciences.17 Broadly put, these thinkers ask how the categories

14 See, e.g., Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 15 For an astute application of this approach to the history of the social sciences, see Isaac, “Tool Shock”; Working Knowledge, chap. 3.

16 I would like to thank Elizabeth Lunbeck for encouraging me to consider the links between my historical research and these philosophical questions. 17 See, inter alia, Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 2013); The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990); Ian Hacking, “Making Up People,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, 425

created in social- and human-scientific research affect the subjective experiences and, in many ways, the objective conditions of those who fall within them. How, to borrow Hacking’s well- known formulation, have these sciences, entangled with bureaucratic administration, created

“human kinds” reinforced through “looping effects?”18

Arguments and insights from critical theory have largely been absent from these debates.

But, through their empirical studies and attendant methodological writings, Institute members offered oblique answers to its central questions. Adorno’s insistence that the unsophisticated social psychology used in the Princeton Radio Research Project reinforced the ideology of individuality, for example, contests Hacking’s claim that such research creates “human kinds.”

Quite the opposite, Adorno suggested, was the case: social and human science reinforces the demonstrably false belief in the existence of the “individual” as such. In the Labor Study and the

Berkeley Project, Institute-affiliated researchers suggested that the categorizing mind itself was an artifact of Western rationality, capitalist modernity, and, in its most extreme form, authoritarian personalities. But Adorno and his colleagues did not suggest that social and human science be abandoned. Rather, they argued that “experiments in theory” be used in order to subject both the concept of individuality and the practice of categorization to simultaneous, immanent critique. Provisionally, the Institute might be understood to have posed a question

Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 222–36; “The Looping Effect of Human Kinds,” in Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate, ed. Dan Sperber, David Premack, and Ann James Premack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); John Forrester, “If P, Then What? Thinking in Cases,” History of the Human Sciences 9, no. 3 (August 1996): 1–25, https://doi.org/10.1177/095269519600900301. Foucault, whose focus fell on those disciplines which are frequently termed the “human sciences,” made the connection between his line of reasoning and the social sciences (as analyzed in this dissertation) clear in an interview. See his “The Political Technologies of Individuals” in Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 145–62 viz., 162. For an argument related to mine made about a similar time and context, see Sarah E. Igo, The Averaged American. Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 18 Hacking, “The Looping Effect of Human Kinds.”

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implied by, but unasked in, the works of Hacking and his colleagues: how ought social and human scientists conduct research in light of insights into the processes and ramifications of categorization? As I continue to study the Institute’s empirical-research program, I intend to refine and answer this question by putting Horkheimer, Adorno, and their colleagues into conversation with Foucault, Hacking, and Forrester.

As I noted in the introduction, the dissertation is a promissory note—a statement of intentions about research to be undertaken into the dialectical relationship between the Institute’s empirical social research and critical social theory. Ultimately, this research will situate the

Institute’s program of empirical research in the broader theory-practice dialectic of Marxist thought but also the deeper currents of transatlantic social thought and research. In the remainder of the conclusion, I will outline two further potential frameworks for future research into the

Institute’s empirical-research program. One considers the sometimes-surprising links between the Institute affiliates and other midcentury researchers; the other identifies connections between interwar, wartime, and postwar research, using these links to explore the Institute’s refoundation in the Federal Republic of Germany. Through both frameworks, I hope to make good on the promises of this dissertation.

STRIKING AFFINITIES AND UNLIKELY CONNECTIONS

In his “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality” (1948), Adorno triangulated the recently completed, but still-unpublished, study between the academic disciplines and intellectual discourses of the immediate postwar period. Authoritarian Personality, Adorno wrote, could not be reduced to psychology (and, especially, psychoanalysis) or sociology as currently practiced in either Europe or the United States. The project did not extend either the “economic explanations”

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or the “religious theses” of anti-Semitism and authoritarianism. Still less was Authoritarian

Personality a work of “community” or “action research.”19

Although Adorno intended his “Remarks” to distinguish Authoritarian Personality from its counterparts, his essay also identified a number of striking similarities between the project and other studies of prejudice. In fact, Adorno opened his “Remarks” by pointing readers to

Eugene Hartley’s Problems in Prejudice, which provided “corroboration of the adequacy of the underlying concepts” of Authoritarian Personality.20 Adorno suggested, for example, that the

Institute’s study bore a certain resemblance to Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944), although he claimed that Authoritarian Personality was a more self-consciously psychological work than Myrdal’s book.21 Further, like the recent work of Nathan Glazer, the Institute and the

Berkeley Group “stressed the problem of […] the alienation of modern man” in Authoritarian

Personality.22 Alienation as theorized by Glazer and investigated by the Institute and the

Berkeley Group, Adorno wrote, “affects the very structure of anti-semitic attitudes.”23 In a

19 For Adorno’s distinction between the project and sociological and psychological research, see Adorno, “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality,” 15–18, 25–30. For Adorno’s discussion of the “economic explanations” and “religious theses,” see 12-15 and 19-21. For Adorno’s critiques of “action” and “community” research—by which he meant works like Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown (1929)—see 8-10.

20 Ibid., 1; cf. Eugene Leonard Hartley, Problems in Prejudice (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1946) viz., chap. 4.

21 As Adorno noted, Herbert Aptheker criticized Myrdal’s study for abstracting the question of race relations from its socio-economic context and treating it as a matter of “what is in white people’s minds.” Adorno and the Berkeley Opinion Group, as chapter 6 argued, wrestled with the problem of the relation between sociology and psychology. In his “Remarks” Adorno went on to explain the Institute’s distinctive approach to this problem in Authoritarian Personality. Adorno, “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality,” 25; cf. Herbert Aptheker, The Negro People in America: A Critique of Gunnar Myrdal’s “An American Dilemma” (New York: International Publishers, 1946). As Wiggershaus notes, Horkheimer had intended volumes in the Studies in Prejudice series to be on par with Myrdal’s work. See Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 377.

22 Adorno, “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality,” 9; cf. Nathan Glazer, “The Alienation of Modern Man,” Commentary 3 (April 1947): 378–85.

23 Adorno, “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality,” 9–10. As noted in chapter 6, the Institute varied its capitalization of “anti-Semitism” and its correlates; I have not identified each nonstandard usage or variation.

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similar vein, Adorno noted that the Institute’s project echoed and endorsed Shlomo Bergman’s

“purely logical” parsing of the phenomenon of anti-Semitism.24 In sum, although Adorno carefully qualified his observations, he nevertheless identified a “considerable affinity” between

Authoritarian Personality and other works of the immediate postwar era.25

Doubtless the most surprising link Adorno identified was between Authoritarian

Personality and Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Portrait of the Anti-Semite” (1946).26 “Of all the philosophical discussions of the problem known to us,” Adorno wrote, “this study comes the closest to our own interpretation of the anti-semite.”27 Like Adorno and the Berkeley Group,

Sartre concluded that anti-Semites lacked access to real experience, that they were not fully convinced of the views they espoused, that they treated others as mere objects, that their conformity and hatred of difference was rooted in sadomasochism, and that they sought refuge in a false collectivity. As Adorno put it: “[t]hough his terminology is different from our own, the nucleus of [Sartre’s] insights is almost the same.”28 This shared “nucleus” consisted in the insight that “‘[t]he anti-semite is afraid of discovering that the world is badly made.’”29

24 Ibid.; cf. Shlomo Bergman, “Some Methodological Errors in the Study of Antisemitism,” Jewish Social Studies 5, no. 1 (1943): 43–60.

25 Adorno, “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality,” 1.

26 It seems that Adorno was referencing Sartre’s essay in Partisan Review, which became the first part of his short monograph¸ Anti-Semite and Jew, published in France in 1946 and translated into English in 1948. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Portrait of the Anti-Semite,” trans. Mary Guggenheim, Partisan Review 13, no. 2 (Spring 1946): 163–78.

27 Adorno, “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality,” 21.

28 Ibid., 22.

29 Ibid.; cf. Sartre, “Portrait of the Anti-Semite,” 171; Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 28. The full quotation Adorno cites is as follows: “The anti‐Semite is afraid of discovering that the world is ill‐ contrived, for then it would be necessary for him to invent and modify, with the result that man would be found to be the master of his own destinies, burdened with an agonizing and infinite responsibility.”

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Adorno’s surprise at discovering such links between Authoritarian Personality and Anti-

Semite and Jew arose from the fact that the he and other Institute affiliates were, at times, highly critical of existentialism.30 Horkheimer, Adorno, and, especially, Marcuse condemned existentialism as the culmination of the long-developing bourgeois ideology, an irrational credo that brought to its conclusion the doctrines of individualism and positivism and, in so doing, created twisted worship of “reality” not unlike fascist ideology.31 In his “Remarks,” Adorno did not relent from this critique of existentialism. Rather, he suggested that Sartre’s theory of anti-

Semitism was so effective that it defied his existentialist framework. Sartre’s claims, Adorno argued, were so insightful as to “render powerless the ideological element of the philosophy [i.e., existentialism] to which he subscribes.”32 According to Adorno, the basis of Sartre’s insight was his participation in “the tradition of French ‘psychology,’” by which he meant not Alfred Binet or Pierre Janet but the likes of Stendhal and Proust. At the same time, Adorno also identified the importance of Sartre’s empirical research. Authoritarian Personality and Anti-Semite and Jew were bound together, ultimately, by “exceedingly concrete details, the kind of details which, as a rule, can be expected only from empirical investigations.”33

30 As Peter E. Gordon has astutely argued, there is ample cause for revisiting this longstanding view. To return to a point made in the introduction, I suggest that Gordon’s insight, “that Adorno did not and could not reject the philosophies of bourgeois interiority, since the idea of mere rejection fails to convey what he considered most instructive in this canon,” could apply, mutatis mutandis, to my characterization of Adorno’s relationship to the category of empirical social psychology. Like Gordon’s concept of the “philosophies of bourgeois interiority,” “empirical social psychology” may serve as a useful frame with which to examine recurring patterns within Adorno’s decades-long philosophical project. See Gordon, Adorno and Existence, 6. For Gordon’s insightful reconstruction of Adorno’s views of Sartre, in particular, see 139-142.

31 See, e.g., Theodor W. Adorno, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit: zur deutschen Ideologie (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1964); and, especially, Herbert Marcuse, “Existentialism: Remarks on Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Etre et Le Neant,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8, no. 3 (1948): 309–36, https://doi.org/10.2307/2103207.

32 Adorno, “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality,” 23.

33 Ibid., 21.

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Adorno’s “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality” suggests at least three interrelated paths for future research into the connections suggested by the Institute’s program of empirical social research. Orienting itself according to the affinities Adorno identified—and the further connections these links entailed—such research would examine the Institute’s involvement in studies of prejudice, contributions to the idea of alienation, and relationship to existentialism.

These paths extend recent literature reconsidering the Institute’s links to contemporaneous social-scientific discourses and philosophical paradigms.

In the years after the end of the Second World War, the phenomenon of racial prejudice became a subject of social-psychological investigation. Hartley’s Problems in Prejudice (1946), to which Adorno likened Authoritarian Personality, was the first in a wave of projects culminating in a series of social-psychological studies, coauthored by Kenneth B. Clark, Mamie

Clark, Stuart W. Cook, and Isidor Chein, that influenced the decision in Brown v. Board of

Education (1954).34 Historians have long recognized the impact of Authoritarian Personality on postwar sociologists and psychologists.35 Future research might well trace the influence this text—and its interview methods and scalar techniques—exerted on postwar studies of prejudice in general and on the Clarks, Cook, and Chein in particular.36 Such research might begin with the distinctive view of “prejudice” I described in chapter 3 of the dissertation. It would also examine the Institute’s Studies in Prejudice series, most notably Bruno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz’s

34 For an introduction to this rise of social-psychological studies of prejudice and of their role in Brown v. Board of Education, see John P. Jackson, Social Scientists for Social Justice: Making the Case against Segregation (New York: NYU Press, 2001), chaps. 3, 7.

35 See, e.g., Jay, “Positive and Negative Totalities,” 1985, 41; Jos Meloen, “The Fortieth Anniversary of ‘the Authoritarian Personality.,’” Politics and the Individual 1, no. 1 (1991): 119–27; Samelson, “Odyssey of a Problem.”

36 John P. Jackson references the influence of the Institute in his comprehensive study of this movement, but more research remains to be done. See Jackson, Social Scientists for Social Justice, 52–54, 111–12.

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Dynamics of Prejudice (1950). Central to such a history would be the archives of the American

Jewish Committee, which funded both the research of the Institute affiliates, as I showed in chapters 5 and 6, and of the Clarks, Cook, and Chein. Framed in the terms I developed in this dissertation, such research would document the manifestations of the concept of prejudice within and between “European” and “American” social psychology.

In 1961, Daniel Bell interviewed Lazarsfeld about topics ranging from his childhood friendship with Friedrich Adler to his fraught relationship with C. Wright Mills. Lazarsfeld, in the course of defending himself against Mills’ charge that he embodied the “abstract empiricism” characteristic of contemporary American sociology, made a striking claim about the orientation and aims of the postwar social sciences:

Bell: [Mills’ critique was] [t]hat you should be asking questions about the nature and the degree of alienation in American society, and evolving methods for measuring the degree of alienation.

Lazarsfeld: Well it so happens that I have developed methods, what is probably the fraction that I could… Look I don’t want to answer that. In addition[,] there are probably at least a dozen studies on alienation—my guess is, in every other issue of the [American Sociological] Review there is a new alienation scale.37

Lazarsfeld’s estimate was quite accurate. Between 1950 and 1960, a mere 66 articles on alienation appeared in the Review; between 1960 and 1970, the number rose above 275. Interest in alienation was not restricted to sociologists. Journals were replete with studies conducted by researchers in fields ranging from political psychology to human relations.38

37 Lazarsfeld, Oral History (1962), 152–53. The ellipsis is original to the transcription.

38 One review of studies on alienation ran to fifteen pages. See Prakash C. Sharma, “Social Alienation: A Research Bibliography (1930-1972),” International Review of Modern Sociology 3, no. 1 (1973): 83–98.

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According to the prevailing understanding, alienation was an eminently theoretical concept—an idea that originated in German philosophy, grew in Western Marxist social theory, and spread through existentialist literature. But, through his refutation of Mills, Lazarsfeld inadvertently gestured at a genre of interdisciplinary social-scientific research: empirical studies of alienation. Setting out from Adorno’s identification of a link between Authoritarian

Personality and Glazer’s writings on alienation, future research might examine the Institute’s role in formulating and disseminating empirical tools for identifying and assessing alienation.

Such research would look forward in time, linking the Institute’s empirical projects to writings on alienation by postwar American intellectuals, including Glazer, Erving Goffman, Lewis

Feuer, and Bell, and, further, to works like Robert Blauner’s Alienation and Freedom (1964).39

How, such research would ask, did Blauner’s Marxist-aligned, industrial-sociological study of alienation among industrial workers draw from the theories, methods, and findings of the

Institute’s empirical projects?40 By conceptualizing the Institute’s studies as a waypoint in the development of empirical studies of alienation, such research would contribute to a history of this concept in twentieth-century social thought and research.

Finally, scholars of twentieth-century European though would be remiss not to consider

Adorno’s remarkable suggestion of a link—founded on empirical research—between

39 See, inter alia, Glazer, “The Alienation of Modern Man”; Erving Goffman, “Alienation from Interaction,” Human Relations 10, no. 1 (February 1957): 47–60; Daniel Bell, “The ‘Rediscovery’ of Alienation: Some Notes along the Quest for the Historical Marx,” The Journal of Philosophy 56, no. 24 (1959): 933–52; Lewis S. Feuer, “What Is Alienation, the Career of a Concept,” in Sociology on Trial, ed. Maurice Stein and Arthurt Vidich (Engelwood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1963), 121–47; Robert Blauner, Alienation and Freedom: The Factory Worker and His Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). Such research would also include a consideration of Rahel Jaeggi, Entfremdung: Zur Aktualität eines sozialphilosophischen Problems, Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie und Sozialphilosophie 8 (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2005).

40 Projects conducted by the Institute after its reconstitution in postwar Germany, which would be central to such research, are discussed below.

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Authoritarian Personality and Anti-Semite and Jew, between, this is to say, critical theory and existentialism. Sartre’s text has attracted no small amount of scholarly attention, much of it decidedly negative.41 Recent commentators have found his central thesis—that the category or identity of “Jew” is thrust upon subjects by others—to be outdated or even retrograde.42 Situating

Anti-Semite and Jew alongside Authoritarian Personality might suggest new contexts in which

Sartre’s thesis might be reconsidered.

Sartre’s work was not, to be sure, empirical in the same sense or to the same degree as

Adorno and the Berkeley Opinion Group’s project. Nevertheless, Adorno’s description of

Sartre’s work suggests that the text may have been in conversation with the social psychology of prejudice in general and of anti-Semitism in particular. Sartre need not have been aware of this participation—readings like Adorno’s could well have pulled Anti-Semite and Jew into such conversations and, beyond them, into a network of social theory and research concerned with the origins of and solutions to the problem of prejudice. Historians have been correct, this is to say, to consider Sartre’s text as bound to the “sociohistorical context” of its production and reception, but they may have conceived this context too narrowly.43 Considerable research would be required to trace the links between the social psychology of prejudice and existentialist philosophy. If successful, such research would reveal a “considerable affinity,” as Adorno would

41 Much of this scholarship appeared in the late 1990s, around the fiftieth anniversary of Sartre’s text. An overview can be found in Michael Walzer’s introduction to a new edition of the text from this era. See Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, v–xxvi. See the essays collected in “Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘Anti-Semite and Jew,’” in October 87 (Winter 1999).

42 See, especially, Susan Suleiman, “Rereading Rereading: Further Reflections on Sartre’s ‘Réflexions,’” October 87 (1999): 129–38.

43 Naomi Schor, “Anti-Semitism, Jews, and the Universal,” October 87 (1999): 108. For an overview of the context of Sartre’s text, see Michel Rybalka, “Publication and Reception of ‘Anti-Semite and Jew,’” October 87 (1999): 161–82.

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have described it. Such an affinity would be of the sort that “as a rule, can be expected only from empirical investigations.” 44

INTO THE COLD WAR

Horkheimer and Adorno left the United States for Germany in 1949. Their decision to return to Frankfurt am Main was far from easy or straightforward.45 Yet, as Horkheimer explained in a letter to Adorno in December 1949, “Germany will be very stimulating for us and also provide the chance for us to begin writing.” Horkheimer conceded Adorno’s position—that there was something “unreal and indistinct” about returning to Germany in the aftermath of the

Second World War—but he held that the move would serve as inspiration rather than an impediment to critical theory: “I’m ready to accept the consequence of a lonely existence that would result from this and could imagine that this insight can become theoretically and practically very productive to us.”46 Horkheimer’s claim proved prescient—at least in Adorno’s case. Between 1949 and his death in 1969, Adorno undertook two theoretical projects that defined his philosophical legacy and shaped postwar European philosophy: Negative Dialectics

(1966) and Aesthetic Theory (1970).47

44 Adorno, “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality,” 21.

45 See Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 381–407; Clemens Albrecht, “‘Das Allerwichtigste ist, dass man die Jugend für sich gewinnt’: Die kultur- und bildungspolitischen Pläne des Horkheimer-Kreises bei der Remigration,” in Die intellektuelle Gründung der Bundesrepublik: eine Wirkungsgeschichte der Frankfurter Schule, ed. Clemens Albrecht (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus Verlag, 1999), 97–131.

46 Horkheimer to Adorno, December 29, 1949 in Horkheimer, A Life in Letters, 274–76 viz., 275.

47 Aesthetic Theory, it should be noted, was published posthumously. Horkheimer did not complete as many projects during this period, doubtless because his energies were largely devoted to running the reestablished Institute.

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Although these works cast a long shadow on the evolving reputation of the “Frankfurt

School,” the Institute did not abandon empirical social research.48 From the early-1950s through the late-1960s, at least, the Institute designed and conducted several remarkable empirical studies. As early as 1948, Horkheimer had participated in an international symposium of social scientists who came together under the auspices of UNESCO to consider the possible contributions of their research to worldwide peace.49 Between October 1950 and September

1951, Horkheimer surveyed the field of postwar German sociology and published his findings under the auspices of the Library of Congress. Horkheimer called special attention to the important role of empirical methods, which “together with social psychology and social ecology are rapidly gaining influence in the universities” of the new Federal Republic.50 As late as 1968,

Manfred Teschner, a member of the so-called second generation of the Frankfurt School, completed a “sociological analysis of political education” in German secondary schools.51

During the two decades separating these studies, the Institute carried out sociological and psychological studies, many of which focused on the organization and atmosphere of the modern workplace.52

48 On this evolving conception, see Albrecht, “IfS zur Frankfurter Schule.”

49 See, Max Horkheimer, “The Lessons of Fascism” in Hadley Cantril, ed., Tensions That Cause Wars (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950).

50 Max Horkheimer, Survey of the Social Sciences in Western Germany: A Report on Recent Developments (Washington, D. C.: Library of Congress, Reference Department, European Affairs Division, 1952), viii. Horkheimer’s erstwhile colleague, A.R.L. Gurland, produced a similar study. See A. R. L. Gurland, Political Science in Western Germany; Thoughts and Writings, 1950-1952 (Washington: Library of Congress, Reference Dept., European Affairs Division, 1952).

51 Manfred Teschner, Politik und Gesellschaft im Unterricht. Eine soziologische Analyse der politischen Bildung an hessischen Gymnasien, Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie 21 (Frankfurt a. M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1968).

52 See Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Dirks, eds., Betriebsklima. Eine industriesoziologische Untersuchung aus dem Rurhgebiet, Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie 3 (Frankfurt a.M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1955); Friedrich Pollock, Automation. Materialien zur Beurteilung der ökonomischen und sozialen Folgen, Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie 5 (Frankfurt a. M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1956); Ludwig von Friedeburg and Friedrich Weltz, 436

The most ambitious of the Institute’s postwar empirical projects was Group Experiment

(1955), an extensive study, organized by Friedrich Pollock in the mid-1950s, of lingering sympathies for National Socialism among the citizenry of West Germany. Under the auspices of the Office of Military Government of the United States for Germany, public-opinion researchers had been conducting surveys since 1946, attempting to determine how Germans felt about legal, social, and economic changes effectuated under Allied occupation.53 The Institute theorized the existence of two sorts of opinion: a “public opinion” disseminated through government organizations and media outlets and accepted by social institutions and a “non-public opinion” held “like the coins of a second currency” by citizens.54 Pollock, Adorno, and their colleagues argued that survey-respondents were alive to this difference, even if they did not know it. When polled, subjects simply repeated the contents of the “public” rather than the “non-public” opinion.55 The attitudes comprising the “non-public” opinion remained unvoiced and unrecorded.

Consequently, the Institute researchers designed a new research method: a series of small-group conversations in which respondents were provoked by the “controlled stimulus” of a letter in which an occupying soldier explained his views of the German character to his hometown

Altersbild und Altervorsorge der Arbeiter und Angestellten, Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie, Sonderheft 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1958); Georges Friedmann, Grenzen der Arbeitsteilung, Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie 7 (Frankfurt a.M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1959); Werner Mangold, Gegenstand und Methode des Gruppendiskussionsverfahrens; aus der Arbeit des Instituts für Sozialforschung, Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie 9 (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1960); Ludwig von Friedeburg, Soziologie des Betriebsklimas. Studien zur Duetung empirischer Untersuchungen in industriellen Grossbetrieben, Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie 13 (Frankfurt a.M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1963).

53 See the surveys collected in Anna J. Merritt and Richard L. Merritt, Public Opinion in Occupied Germany: The OMGUS Surveys, 1945-1949 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970).

54 Franz Böhm, “Geleitwort,” in Gruppenexperiment: Ein Studienbericht., by Friedrich Pollock, Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie 2 (Frankfurt a. M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1955), xi emphasis original.

55 Ibid., xi–xiii; Pollock, Gruppenexperiment, 17–25.

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newspaper. (Unbeknownst to the subjects, the letter was fictional.) Investigators believed that this stimulus would delve beneath public opinion to reveal the non-public opinion that usually remained inaccessible to social research.56

Through this method, the Institute found that it was relatively easy to evoke anti-Semitic and anti-democratic sentiments in the focus groups.57 Even after a decade of occupation, non- public opinion was far more resistant to de-Nazification than public opinion might suggest.

Moreover, the Institute concluded that the acceptance of ideology was, to a considerable degree, determined not by rational thought or even personal conviction but by local contexts and social forces.58 As sociologists seeking to revive Group Experiment have noted, the project deployed a trenchant critique of polling methods common in the United States—methods that social scientists attached to the American occupation force had brought with them and used to gauge the German “public” and postwar “attitudes.”59 But Group Experiment did not emerge, fully formed, in this postwar context. Situating the project among the studies I explored in this dissertation, Group Experiment appears as an amplification of the Institute’s decade-old critiques of polls on methodological and ideological grounds. Simply put, Group Experiment carried the project of designing experiments in theory into the Cold War.

Indeed, Group Experiment was perhaps more scientific—more experimental—than the studies the Institute had conducted in the United States. Or, at least, the Institute took great pains to present the project in this light. Pollock devoted much of the published text to explaining the

56 For an overview of the Institute’s method, Pollock, Gruppenexperiment, 38–41.

57 For the Institute’s results, see ibid., chap. 4.

58 See the discussion in ibid., 457–73.

59 For an overview of this scholarship, see Olick and Perrin, “Translators’ Introduction.”

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Institute’s complex methodology and presenting it findings in detailed charts (e.g., figure 7.1).60

But, behind the graphs, charts, and diagrams, Group Experiment deployed the methodological tools and logic developed by Lazarsfeld, Leichter, and Komarovsky and refined by Adorno— substruction and discerning—to create “profiles” of statistical groups, each of which connected to a specific “attitude type.”61 Once again, the Institute’s approach bespeaks not only an ongoing dialogue with the techniques of postwar American social science but also a continuation of methodological debates from the transatlantic social research of the interwar era.62

60 In the words of two recent, otherwise enthusiastic, commentators, the Institute authors effectuated “a careful, at times tedious, recitation” of quantitative evidence. See ibid., xiii.

61 See Pollock, Gruppenexperiment, 97–116, 129–33.

62 In this sense, research into the Institute’s postwar empirical studies would complement the recent work of Udi Greenberg on Weimar political thought. See Greenberg, The Weimar Century.

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Figure 7.1: "Discussion Participation according to Statistical Groups and the Seven Main Themes." Reproduced from: Pollock et. al., Gruppenexperiment, 270-271.

Group Experiment has not suffered scholarly neglect. Historians and sociologists have situated the text in the contexts of postwar social science in both America and Germany.

Nevertheless, as the foregoing conversation suggests, Group Experiment was not merely a conversation with postwar social science but a continuation of interwar social research. The most direct and, perhaps, vital continuation of the research done in this dissertation is the systematic

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examination of the Institute’s postwar studies—not only Group Experiment but also the other projects in which the Institute deployed the same methods of research and analysis—in relation to the methodological and research program it developed between 1930 and 1950. Such research would illuminate both continuities and changes within this empirical program. It would help describe the role the Institute played in the intellectual rebuilding of postwar Germany.63

Moreover, it would identify a vector through with the still-emerging field of the history of Cold

War social science might be written.

Sometime in these years, some member of the Institute typed a brief note. Only a few lines long, the note was unsigned, untitled, and undated. It does not seem to have been part of a larger essay, memorandum, or letter. Indeed, the fragment is so succinct that it may be quoted in full: “Essential Task of the Institute: to unify the historical-humanistic tradition of German sociology with modern empirical methods. It shall overcome the capriciousness of speculation as much as the nonconceptual blindness of the mere mastery of facts and will work towards a theory of society founded strongly in material.”64 Perhaps Adorno wrote the note—although it is far more likely the work of Horkheimer or Pollock.65 Regardless of its author, the fragment expresses with striking brevity and clarity the centrality of empirical social research to the

Institute. Its anonymous author could just as easily have written that “experiments in theory” comprised part of the Institute’s “essential task.”

63 See, e.g., Clemens Albrecht, “Vom Kosens der 50er zur Lagerbildung der 60er Jahre: Horkheimers Institutspolitik,” in Die Intellektuelle Gründung der Bundesrepublik: eine Wirkungsgeschichte der Frankfurter Schule, ed. Clemens Albrecht (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus Verlag, 1999), 132–68.

64 “Wesentliche Aufgabe des Instituts,” n.d., MHA Box IX, File 87 (661).

65 The fragment is located in the archives of Max Horkheimer, but other documents in this file were the work of Friedrich Pollock. Although this amounts to little more than speculation, it may the case that, based on these other documents, the note was written sometime between 1953 and 1958.

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WORKS CITED

ARCHIVAL SOURCES & ORAL HISTORIES

AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE ARCHIVES (AJC ARCHIVES*) New York, NY USA

American Jewish Committee Programs and Projects Collection American Jewish Committee Subject Files Social Research Division Collection

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR ORAL HISTORY New York, NY USA

Reminiscences of Paul Felix Lazarsfeld, 1975. Interview by Ann K. Pasanella, February 1975. (Oral History 1975) Reminisces of Paul Felix Lazarsfeld: Oral History, 1962. Interview by Joan Gordon and Daniel Bell, November 1961. (Oral History 1962)

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY New York, NY USA

Bureau of Applied Social Research Records, 1944-1976 (BASR Records) Paul Felix Lazarsfeld Papers, 1930-1976, Series I (PFL Papers)

JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE-UNIVERSITÄT ARCHIVZENTRUM Frankfurt, a.M., Hessen, Germany

Institut für Sozialforschung an der Goethe-Universität, 1934-1979 (IfS Archives) Nachlass Herbert Marcuse (Marcuse Archives) Nachlass Max Horkheimer (MHA)

THE TAMIMENT LIBRARY AND ROBERT F. WAGNER LABOR ARCHIVES New York, NY, USA Jewish Labor Committee Records, Part I, Series I (JLC Papers)

* Abbreviations used in the text of the dissertation given in parentheses.

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NEWSPAPERS, PERIODICALS, & JOURNALS

NEWSPAPERS ACADEMIC AND TRADE JOURNALS Acta Psycholgica Die Arbeiter Zeitung American Journal of Orthopsychiatry Die Frau American Journal of Sociology Der Kuckuck American Sociological Review Der Morgen Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Science PERIODICALS Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik Archivio italiano di psicologia Antioch Review Blätter für das Wohlfahrtsweser Bildungsarbeit Character and Personality Columbia Review Der Kampf Commentary Human Factor Common Ground Human Relations Die Quelle Imago: Zeitschrift für Anwendung der Die sozialistische Erziehung Psychoanalyse und auf die Natur- und Dissent Geisteswissenschaften Harvard Business Review International Journal of Ethics Klassenkampf Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology Time Journal of Applied Psychology The Atlantic Journal of Consulting Psychology The Compass Journal of Philosophy The Nation Journal of Psychology The New Yorker Journal of Social Psychology

Kölner Vierteljahrshefte für Soziologie Marx-Studien National Marketing Review Personnel Journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Psychoanalytische Bewegung Psychotechnische Zeitschrift Social Research Social Work Sociological Review Sociometry The Journal of Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Applied Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie Zeitschrift für Entwicklungspsychologie und Pädagogische Psychologie Zeitschrift für Psychoanalytische Pädagogik Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung/Studies in Philosophy and Social Science

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