Internal bureaucracy and competing offers stripped the Institute of its empiricists.

Evidence

In 1962 Friedeburg left the Institute as well. He had more or less independently kept the day-to-day business of research going, while Adorno tended to seek Horkheimer’s advice and agreement, even over trivialities. Friedeburg had taken his Habilitation in Frankfurt in 1960, the first student of Horkheimer and Adorno to do so, with a thesis on The Sociology of the Atmosphere in the Workplace. He would have liked to combine continued work at the Institute with a professorship at Giessen. But the offer from Giessen was an unfavourable one, and the simultaneous offer he received from Berlin was highly favourable. He therefore went to Berlin. The Institute had thus lost both Habermas, the promising theoretician of society, and Friedeburg, the professional empiricist. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2386

Categorization

• XREF: Complements the earlier chapters on Pollock’s Institute administration and Adorno’s dependence on Horkheimer’s approval. — connects to: Institute members endured chronic precarity and indecision during the Columbia negotiations — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1233; Institute staff spanned rival communist factions divided by attitude to Stalinized Soviet Russia. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 128