of cultural standards, and his participation in the arcane musical discussions of the Viennese avant-garde only reinforced his predisposition in that direction. Never during the remainder of his life would Adorno abandon his cultural elitism.
In another way as well, the Vienna years were significant in his development. Many years later Adorno would admit that one of the attractions of the Schönberg circle had been its exclusive, coterie-like quality, which reminded him of the circle around Stefan George in Germany.66 One of his disappointments during his three years in Austria was the dissolution of the circle’s unity, which followed after Schönberg’s new wife isolated him from his disciples. If this had not happened, it can at least be conjectured, Adorno might not have chosen to return to Frankfurt. Once there, of course, the same cliquish qualities drew him into the orbit of Horkheimer and the younger members of the Institut.
Adorno had known Horkheimer since 1922, when they were together in a seminar on Husserl directed by Hans Cornelius. Both men also studied under the Gestalt psychologist Gelb. In 1924 Adorno had written his doctorate for Cornelius on Husserl’s phenomenology.67 When he returned from Vienna, however, Cornelius had retired and had been replaced in the chair of philosophy by Paul Tillich,68 after a short interlude during which Max Scheler had held the position. Tillich was a close friend of Horkheimer, Lowenthal, and Pollock, belonging with them to a regular discussion group that included Karl Mannheim, Kurt Riezler, Adolph Löwe, and Karl Mennicke. The Kränzchen, as it was called—an old-fashioned word which means both a small garland and an intimate gathering—was to continue in New York for several years, after most of its members were forced to emigrate. Adorno, when he returned to Frankfurt, was welcomed into its company. With Tillich’s help he became a Privatdozent in 1931, writing a study of Kierkegaard’s aesthetics as his Habilitationsschrift.69
By this time the Institut had undergone significant changes. Grünberg’s health after his stroke in 1927 had not appreciably improved, and in 1929, in his sixty-ninth year, he decided to step down as director. He was to live on until 1940, but without any further role in Institut affairs. The three original members of the group were now old enough to be considered for a professorship at the university, the prerequisite for the directorship written into the Institut’s charter. Pollock, who had served as interim head of the Institut in all but name before Grünberg came and after Grünberg’s illness, was satisfied to remain occupied with administrative affairs. Weil, as noted earlier, had remained a Privatgelehrter (private scholar) without being “habilitated” as Privatdozent or “berufen” as professor.70 Although continuing to guide the Institut’s financial affairs and occasionally contributing an article to Grünbergs Archiv,71 his interests turned elsewhere. In 1929 he left the Institut to move to Berlin, where he worked with two publishing houses, the left-wing Malik Verlag and the more scholarly Soziologische Verlagsanstalt, as well as contributing to the radical Piscator Theater. In 1930 he sailed from Germany for Argentina to tend to the family business, of which, as the oldest of Hermann Weil’s two children, he was made the primary owner after his father’s death in 1927, a responsibility he very reluctantly assumed. In any event, from 1923 Weil had not been at the center of the Institut’s creative work, drawn as he was more to practical than theoretical questions. In later years he would sporadically return to the Institut and faithfully continue to help it financially, but he was never really a prime candidate for its leadership, nor did he intend to be.
Horkheimer was therefore the clear choice to succeed Grünberg. Although he had not been a dominating presence at the Institut during its first few years, his star clearly rose during the interim directorship of his friend Pollock. In 1929, with the support of Tillich and other members of the philosophy department, a new chair of “social philosophy” was established for Horkheimer, the first of its kind at a German university. Weil had convinced the Education Ministry to convert Grünberg’s chair in political science, which his father had endowed, to its new purpose. As part of the bargain he promised to contribute to another chair in economics, which Adolph Löwe, a childhood friend of Horkheimer, left Kiel to fill. The Origins of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History,72 a study of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Vico, and other early bourgeois philosophers of history, served as Horkheimer’s scholarly credentials for his new position. With the accession of Horkheimer, then only thirty-five, to its directorship in July, 1930, the Institut für Sozialforschung entered its period of greatest productivity, all the more impressive when seen in the context of the emigration and cultural disorientation that soon followed.
In January of 1931, Horkheimer was officially installed in his new post. At the opening ceremonies, he spoke on “The Current Condition of Social Philosophy and the Task of an Institute of Social Research.”73 The differences between his approach and that of his predecessor were immediately apparent. Instead of simply labeling himself a good Marxist, Horkheimer turned to the history of social philosophy to put its current situation in perspective. Beginning with the grounding of social theory in the individual, which had at first characterized classical German idealism, he traced its course through Hegel’s sacrifice of the individual to the state and the subsequent breakdown of the faith in an objective totality, which Schopenhauer expressed. He then turned to more recent social theorists, like the neo-Kantians of the Marburg school and the advocates of social totalism like Othmar Spann, all of whom, he argued, had attempted to overcome the sense of loss accompanying the breakdown of the classical synthesis. Scheler, Hartmann, and Heidegger, he added, shared this yearning for a return to the comfort of meaningful unities. Social philosophy, as Horkheimer saw it, would not be a single Wissenschaft (science) in search of immutable truth. Rather, it was to be understood as a materialist theory enriched and supplemented by empirical work, in the same way that natural philosophy was dialectically related to individual scientific disciplines. The Institut would therefore continue to diversify its energies without losing sight of its interdisciplinary, synthetic goals. To this end Horkheimer supported the retention of Grünberg’s noncollegial “dictatorship of the director.”
In concluding his remarks, Horkheimer outlined the first task of the Institut under his leadership: a study of workers’ and employees’ attitudes towards a variety of issues in Germany and the rest of developed Europe. Its methods were to include the use of public statistics and questionnaires backed up by sociological, psychological, and economic interpretation of the data. To help collect materials, he announced, the Institut had accepted the offer of Albert Thomas, the director of the International Labor Organization, to establish a branch office of the Institut in Geneva. This proved to be the first of several such branches established outside Germany in the ensuing years. The decision to act on Thomas’s offer was influenced by more than the desire to collect data, for the ominous political scene in Germany gave indications that exile might be a future necessity. Pollock was thus given the task of setting up a permanent office in Geneva; Kurt Mandelbaum, his assistant, went with him. Once the office was firmly established in 1931, the lion’s share of the Institut’s endowment was quietly transferred to a company in a neutral country, Holland.
Other changes followed Horkheimer’s elevation to the directorship. With its guiding spirit incapacitated, Grünbergs Archiv ceased publication, twenty years and fifteen volumes after its initial appearance in 1910. The Archiv had served as a vehicle for a variety of different viewpoints both within and outside the Institut, still reflecting in part Grünberg’s roots in the world of Austro-Marxism. The need for a journal more exclusively the voice of the Institut was felt to be pressing. Horkheimer, whose preference for conciseness was expressed in the large number of aphorisms he wrote during this period, disliked the mammoth tomes so characteristic of German scholarship. Although a third volume of the Institut’s publications series, Wittfogel’s Economy and Society in China,74 appeared in 1931, the emphasis was now shifted to the essay. It was through the essays that appeared in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, some almost monographic in length, that the Institut presented most of its work to the world in the next decade. Exhaustively evaluated and criticized by the other members of the Institut before they appeared, many articles were almost as much collective productions as individual works. The Zeitschrift, in Leo Lowenthal’s
