Horkheimer positioned the Institute as universal social analysis to avoid threatening specialist sociology.

Evidence

Horkheimer’s achievement in the field of academic politics was that he gave the work of the Institute of Social Research a distinct identity and at the same time protected it from defensive reactions among those who felt that their intellectual property was being threatened by the Institute’s reorientation. Vis-à-vis the Frankfurt public, Horkheimer played up the greater relevance to reality of his project, and his command of a great empirical research apparatus'. At the same time, he distanced himself in this way from humanistic and metaphysical tendencies in German sociology. With regard to specialized sociology and its defenders, he emphasized that he did not claim to represent a specific specialist subject, but merely’ the project of analysing social processes as a whole. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 461

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of how intellectual institutions carve out identity through strategic self-presentation, as seen in other institutional histories in this library. — connects to: Horkheimer sought applied topics that could present his theory as expert social knowledge — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1338

Broader Connections

• Horkheimer sought applied topics that could present his theory as expert social knowledge #corroborates (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1338