Fromm’s worker study was the Institute’s first empirical application of Critical Theory

Evidence

Although never actually completed satisfactorily, this was the first real effort to apply Critical Theory to a concrete, empirically verifiable problem. Erich Fromm was the project’s director; in later years, Anna Hartock, Herta Herzog, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Ernst Schachtel all contributed to the attempt to complete the study. Approximately three thousand questionnaires were distributed to workers, asking their views on such issues as the education of children, the rationalization of industry, the possibility of avoiding a new war, and the locus of real power in the state. Adolf Levenstein had been the first to use an interpretive questionnaire in 1912,14 but Fromm’s psychoanalytic training allowed him to develop a more sophisticated characterology based on the modified Freudian types he developed in the Zeirschrift. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 390

Categorization

• DEFINE: Marks the transition point where the Institute moved from purely theoretical toward empirical work, via Fromm’s psychoanalytic characterology.
• XREF: The move to empirical questionnaires anticipates the Institute’s wider empirical turn and later American exile work with Lazarsfeld. — connects to: Fromm saw the workers questionnaire as a methodological proving ground — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 698