Concrete historical and economic detail is what distinguishes theory from speculation.

Evidence

My idea was that Fritz and you should in future spend at least four or five months here every year, working the larger part of the year in New York carrying out the theoretical programme. While you were here, you would take part in identifying and shaping the main parts of the work, and while over there you would elaborate the economic parts in detail, so that after a couple of years our interpretation of the current phase would be ready. It would be nonsense for me, even working together with Teddie, to try to give the work the precision and concreteness needed. It has to be filled to bursting point with historical and economic detail, or else it will look like speculation. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 338

Categorization

• XREF: Horkheimer’s insistence on ‘filling to bursting point’ with detail maps onto Adorno’s later definition of materialism as the interpretive reorganization of minute details. — connects to: Drawing on economic detail rather than production tendencies raises evidentiary stakes — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 215; Economic abstractions are historically determined, not universal or extra-historical; Historical change forces theorists to invent new, more concrete concepts (+1 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The organizing conviction behind the Institute’s whole interdisciplinary program: that abstraction only earns authority when saturated with empirical material.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Drawing on economic detail rather than production tendencies raises evidentiary stakes — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 215; Economic abstractions are historically determined, not universal or extra-historical; Historical change forces theorists to invent new, more concrete concepts (+1 more)