Five scholars around Horkheimer formed the Institute’s core achievement.

Evidence

The sense of a shared fate and common purpose that strikes the observer as one of the Institut’s chief characteristics especially after Horkheimer became director —was transferable to the Institut’s new homes partly because of its financial good fortune. It had been the intent of the founding members to create a community of scholars whose solidarity would serve as a microcosmic foretaste of the brotherly society of the future. The Zeitschrio, as mentioned earlier, helped cement the sense of group identity; and the common experience of forced exile and regrouping abroad added considerably to this feeling. Within the Institut itself, a still smaller group had coalesced around Horkheimer, consisting of Pollock, Lowenthal, Adorno, Marcuse, and Fromm. It is really their work, rooted in the central tradition of European philosophy, open to contemporary empirical techniques, and addressed to current social questions, that formed the core of the Institut’s achievement. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 161

Categorization

• XREF: Names the inner-circle roster — Horkheimer, Pollock, Lowenthal, Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm — useful when cross-referencing Against Postmodernism and other Frankfurt treatments. — connects to: Horkheimer conceived the Institute as a homogeneous group defined by shared attitudes — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 435

Broader Connections

• Horkheimer conceived the Institute as a homogeneous group defined by shared attitudes #expands (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 435