Institute research projects often served tactical legitimacy-building aims rather than pure science
Evidence
The research project on the effect of unemployment on the authority structure in American families was conceived of by the Horkheimer Institute mainly as a means of demonstrating that it had some knowledge of the country in which it was a guest. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 688
Categorization
- QUESTION: Worth checking whether the authority-and-unemployment project’s published findings actually reflected genuine research or mostly the tactical framing Fromm describes.
- XREF: connects to: Overseas military labs build influence and are not purely scientific; The Institute ran contract research for survival alongside its own topic projects — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2110; Research funding subordinates truth to the goal of performativity — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 342 (+4 more)
Broader Connections
- Overseas military labs build influence and are not purely scientific
#expands(0.85) - Research funding subordinates truth to the goal of performativity
#corroborates(0.85) — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 342 - Industries used proxy institutes to secretly fund biased research
#expands(0.82) - The Institute ran contract research for survival alongside its own topic projects
#expands(0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2110 - Scientific projects are always part of larger social projects rather than separate from them
#expands(0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1599 - Science’s value-freedom dismantled normative barriers to genocidal co-operation
#corroborates(0.78) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 315 - Ideological scientificality overrides factual reality in totalitarian action
#corroborates(0.75)