Horkheimer saw dual professorships as converting academic quantity into real power

Evidence

I am convinced that things will continue to go well, too. If we can get this professorship, it will be the fulfilment of a dream which, a few years ago, we would have thought purely illusory. It would create the unique situation that two people as ill adjusted to reality as we are, and who for that very reason seem predestined to be powerless, should both be offered a sphere of influence of almost incalculable breadth. Because if we hold two professorships instead of one, quantity will really transform itself into quality; we will genuinely have a position of power. Not that I think, as the fools always suggest, that we could change the whole direction of movement; if neo-fascism is to appear, it will appear, and if the great flood comes, even we cannot form a dam against it. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1734

Categorization

• XREF: Horkheimer’s ‘quantity transforms into quality’ echoes the marxism-as-quantity dialectic; also his fatalism about neo-fascism connects to the chapter’s broader thesis about the Institute’s pessimism toward historical change. — connects to: Horkheimer simultaneously pursued disengaged isolation and maximum institutional establishment status — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1706