Horkheimer blocked Habermas’s Habilitation to drive him out of the Institute

Evidence

But Horkheimer, like the king in the fairy-tale who does not want to give away his daughter in marriage, imposed the condition that Habermas must first of all do a study of Richter. This would have taken him three years. Habermas gave in his noticeand Horkheimer had achieved what he wanted: to get rid of someone who in his opinion had incited the Institute’s staff into a kind of class struggle in a teacup, and about whom he had remarked, `He probably has a good, or even brilliant, career as a writer in front of him, but he would only cause the Institute immense damage.’ — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2359

Habermas had started work on an analysis of changes in the structure and function of the bourgeois public sphere, which he would have liked to use as his Habilitation thesis in Frankfurt. Adorno, who was proud of him, would also have liked to accept the thesis proposal. But Horkheimer, like the king in the fairy-tale who does not want to give away his daughter in marriage, imposed the condition that Habermas must first of all do a study of Richter. This would have taken him three years. Habermas gave in his noticeand Horkheimer had achieved what he wanted: to get rid of someone who in his opinion had incited the Institute’s staff into a kind of class struggle in a teacup, and about whom he had remarked, `He probably has a good, or even brilliant, career as a writer in front of him, but he would only cause the Institute immense damage.’ — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 583

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader story of the Frankfurt School’s postwar internal politics and how institutions ejectively shape theory careers. — connects to: Horkheimer forced Habermas out of the Institute by imposing a three-year study — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2359; Horkheimer suppressed the Institute’s most successful empirical study by denying Habermas its institutional label — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2358; Horkheimer blocked Habermas’s Habilitation, forcing him to publish elsewhere. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2383 (+3 more)
• SEED: Article angle: how the Frankfurt School’s founding text on the public sphere was nearly stillborn because of an institutional turf war.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2359; Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 583

Broader Connections

• Horkheimer blocked Habermas’s Habilitation, forcing him to publish elsewhere. #corroborates (0.95) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2383
• Habermas left Frankfurt because the Institute blocked interdisciplinary theory work #qualifies (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2748