Empirical research was used to avoid judging whether labour’s ideas still held

Evidence

In the introductory chapter to the Mannesmann study, and in Horkheimer’s newspaper article, cautious references were made to broader topics: only stubborn dogmatism could deny that since the present catastrophic phase began, i.e. forty years ago, much has changed in the nature of the workforce and in its position and function within society as a whole'; unquestionably, many of the old ideas of the labour movement’ had been deprived of their meaning as a result of their degradation by Russian despotism into instruments of power'; but an empirical study such as ours’ could under no circumstances presume' to discern whether this has affected their real content, the concept itself’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 517

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows the Institute’s operative boundary between studying attitudes and adjudicating concepts — a defining move of its postwar empirical work.
• XREF: connects to: Empirical social science findings are dismissed as mere opinion; The Mannesmann study avoided business ideology despite not enlightening workers — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2095; Subjectivity-only workplace studies conceal the labor-capital conflict of interest — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2094 (+2 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Empirical social science findings are dismissed as mere opinion; The Mannesmann study avoided business ideology despite not enlightening workers — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2095; Subjectivity-only workplace studies conceal the labor-capital conflict of interest — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2094 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Subjectivity-only workplace studies conceal the labor-capital conflict of interest #complicates (0.78) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2094
• Theories must be tested by their political function, not retracted #complicates (0.71) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 857