Empirical social-psychological research cannot reveal revolutionary prospects in the working class
Evidence
On the other hand, if Fromm hoped (in contrast to what the psychoanalytic social psychology which he supported would suggest) that his research would provide confirmation for the view that the majority of the working class was pressing for revolution, revealing unconscious emotional impulses and psychic structures was not necessarily the best way of going about this. Would a social-psychological analysis of those who took part in the Russian Revolution or in the Munich or Hungarian Soviet Republics, for example, have shown that most of those involved were in favour of raising their children without corporal punishment, that they were in favour of married women having jobs, or that they held other views which proved that their attitudes were deeply anti-authoritarian? The fact that such questions spring to mind at once shows how absurd the idea was that an empirical research project, no matter how sophisticated, would be able to reveal the prospects for revolution. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 230
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s critical-theory reading on the limits of empirical social research — the methodological split in the Frankfurt School between empirical psychoanalytic surveys and a critique of their diagnostic power. — connects to: Empirical attitudinal surveys cannot reveal revolutionary prospects. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 230; Subjectivity-only workplace studies conceal the labor-capital conflict of interest — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2094; Market relations are real yet structurally unable to express the underlying social labor (+1 more)
Broader Connections
- Market relations are real yet structurally unable to express the underlying social labor
#expands(0.72) - Working-class people define ‘lower class’ by visible daily-life markers not income
#responds-to(0.72) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2225