Horkheimer’s hardening anti-positivism ended empirical research at the Institute itself.

Evidence

Towards the end of the 1930s, it was no longer possible for the Institute to carry out empirical research simultaneously in Europe and the USA, and it had to be restricted to America. To identify a complex of critical problems related to society which suited American conditions and at the same time fitted in with the Institute’s policy of caution required time. Horkheimer was increasingly impatient in his criticism of the various scientific disciplines, and increasingly severe in his labelling of every theoretical and philosophical tendency which was not critical of society, and which was successful in the USA, as a form of recognition and acceptance of existing conditions. This may partly explain why empirical and collaborative research ceased at the Institute altogether, why from the mid-1930s onwards it was left to Lazarsfeld, who for Horkheimer and Adorno belonged to the positivists, to represent the research methods which had been used by the Institute up till then. It may explain, too, why it was only the journal which continuedand in German. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 270

Categorization

• XREF: Direct institutional bridge to the reader’s notes on Adorno’s radio-music research with Lazarsfeld and the later Positivismusstreit.
• QUESTION: How much of the Institute’s emigration into exile was financial versus this ideological narrowing toward the journal only?