Horkheimer’s plan for interdisciplinary economic collaboration failed for lack of capable collaborators

Evidence

Since the others, who might take the burden from our shoulders, are absent, not even the lack of talent the lot of you use from time to time to rationalize your resignation is a respectable argument … My idea was that Fritz and you should in future spend at least four or five months here every year, working the larger part of the year in New York carrying out the theoretical programme. While you were here, you would take part in identifying and shaping the main parts of the work, and while over there you would elaborate the economic parts in detail, so that after a couple of years our interpretation of the current phase would be ready. It would be nonsense for me, even working together with Teddie, to try to give the work the precision and concreteness needed. It has to be filled to bursting point with historical and economic detail, or else it will look like speculation. … So far as Pollock and Weil were concerned, it was to remain a vision. They had both shown that they were unsuited to tasks of this sort. Neither the essay on economics for Studies on Authority and the Family, nor an issue of the journal on economics for the 1937 anniversary of the publication of Marx’s Capital, nor any leading essays on economics for the ZfS, had been produced. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1318

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Institute’s long-running pattern of Pollock and Weil failing to deliver on economics essays, a theme already seen across the Institute’s history in earlier chapters. — connects to: Frankfurt School’s interdisciplinarity failed to yield divergent analytic output — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 573; Horkheimer rejected pure philosophical work in favor of expert-assisted collaborative research — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1329; Horkheimer’s contempt for systematic empirical analysis undermined collaboration with Kirchheimer — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 976 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Horkheimer’s contempt for systematic empirical analysis undermined collaboration with Kirchheimer #corroborates (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 976
• Horkheimer rejected pure philosophical work in favor of expert-assisted collaborative research #complicates (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1329
• Leading orthodox economists could not agree on the crisis’s actual causes #corroborates (0.80) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 809
• Horkheimer scrapped a planned publication after deeming its research papers inadequate #exemplifies (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1962