Academic freedom was inseparable from radical social aims for Gerlach

Evidence

Gerlach was one of those academic intellectuals for whom academic freedom was part and parcel of a practical interest in the complete elimination of poverty and oppression. Born in Hanover in 1886, he was the son of a factory manager, and took his Habilitation in Leipzig in 1913 with a thesis on The Importance of Protective Measures for Women Workers. … In 1922 he was offered a professorship in Frankfurt, and at the same time the opportunity to set up, together with Felix Weil, an institute which would be devoted to scientific socialism. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 52

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader Frankfurt School origin myth of ‘scientific socialism’ institutionalized inside bourgeois academia — a theme running through the whole book. — connects to: The Institute’s financial independence freed radical scholarship from the rigid German academy — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 100; Nazi rule and restoration alienated postwar Germans from utopian-social criticism; Horkheimer’s unity-of-social-sciences program revived Gerlach’s original founding vision. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 156

Broader Connections

• Horkheimer’s unity-of-social-sciences program revived Gerlach’s original founding vision. #responds-to (0.78) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 156
• The Institute’s financial independence freed radical scholarship from the rigid German academy #expands (0.75) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 100
• Nazi rule and restoration alienated postwar Germans from utopian-social criticism #complicates (0.75)