Horkheimer and Adorno courted state authorities rather than the labour movement

Evidence

In contrast to Wolfgang Abendroth, one of the few professors who openly admitted to being a socialist, Horkheimer and Adorno sought support, not from the labour movement or from opposition groups, but from the ruling authorities themselves. As Horkheimer put it in a letter of thanks to the Prime Minister of the state of Hesse, Georg August Zinn, they were looking for `friends in high places, the sort of friends often hoped for in vain by academics also pursuing the practical goals of genuine education’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1846

In contrast to Wolfgang Abendroth, one of the few professors who openly admitted to being a socialist, 1 Horkheimer and Adorno sought support, not from the labour movement or from opposition groups, but from the ruling authorities themselves. As Horkheimer put it in a letter of thanks to the Prime Minister of the state of Hesse, Georg August Zinn, they were looking for `friends in high places, the sort of friends often hoped for in vain by academics also pursuing the practical goals of genuine education’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 455

Categorization

• XREF: Directly continues the earlier note that Horkheimer and Adorno sought patronage from ruling authorities rather than the left; this supplies the names and the quoted rationale. — connects to: Horkheimer and Adorno sought patronage from ruling authorities rather than the left.; Sixties radicals regarded Adorno and Horkheimer as sell-outs who betrayed revolution — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 5
• DEFINE: ‘Friends in high places’ (Zinn letter) is the conceptual formula for the Institute’s postwar strategy of securing state patronage.
• SEED: Article angle: ‘The Institute That Made Friends in High Places’ — how Critical Theory bought institutional survival with political accommodation.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1846; Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 455