Frankfurt School’s interdisciplinarity failed to yield divergent analytic output

Evidence

Marcuse, the critic of ideology, Fromm, the social psychologist, Mandelbaum and Meyer, the economists, and Horkheimer, the social philosopher, were thus all united in their agreement with the dominant communist interpretation of that period, according to which fascism was both the logical consequence of liberalism and the form of political domination which monopoly capitalism adopted. The similarity in their basic diagnoses was all too clear. What one might have expected from interdisciplinary methods was largely lacking: the development, from the variety of materials and differing perspectives, of something which might goad them on to extend the theory further, or to differentiate it, something which might impel them towards more exact, or freshly oriented, empirical work. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 573

Categorization

• XREF: A concrete case for the standing critique that ideological conformity outweighs methodological diversity in knowledge production. — connects to: The Frankfurt circle’s interdisciplinary method failed to differentiate their fascism diagnosis; Psychoanalysis justified the Frankfurt circle’s contempt for specialized academic disciplines; Frankfurt School theory resists phase division because its internal tensions drifted unsynchronized — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 21 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Interdisciplinarity arises in the age of delegitimation that lacks any metanarrative #expands (0.75) — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 380
• Horkheimer’s plan for interdisciplinary economic collaboration failed for lack of capable collaborators #qualifies (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1318
• Interdisciplinarity’s subversive force becomes slack pluralism once institutionalized #corroborates (0.70)