Lazarsfeld’s methodological collaboration helped the exiled Frankfurt Institute enter American academia

Evidence

Co-operation became particularly close during Lazarsfeld’s period in Newark. He and his assistantsin particular Herta Herzog, who had already worked with him in Vienna and was to become his second wifeadvised the Institute on questions of methodology and assisted with technicalities connected with data. The Institute listed Lazarsfeld in its prospectuses as one of its research associates. In 1938 Lazarsfeld, who had been asked the year before by the Rockefeller Foundation to undertake a large-scale `radio research project’, told Horkheimer he was interested in offering the directorship of the musical part of the project to Adorno. He thus gave Horkheimer the chance to bring Adorno to New York. Lazarsfeld became a professor at Columbia University in 1940 and moved his research group there, and the mutual co-operation between him and Horkheimer continued into the 1940s, when they agreed on a common strategy for dealing with their financial sponsors. During the Institute’s period of exile in the United States, Lazarsfeld served as a mediator between it and the academic environment there. Equally, Lazarsfeld’s collaboration with an institute of Critical Theorists from Frankfurt gave him the feeling that he had not entirely betrayed his Austrian Marxist past, even now that he was fully integrated into the American academic scene. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 687

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the Prattian connection between empirical social research and Critical Theory; links to the Institute needing to survive American academic institutions. — connects to: The Frankfurt Institute subsidized Lazarsfeld’s Newark research group via contract work — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 682; Lazarsfeld blamed the Institut’s German-language publishing for isolating it from American academia — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 657; Lazarsfeld’s methodological flexibility allowed reconciliation of radical research with institutional demands — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1000 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Lazarsfeld’s methodological flexibility allowed reconciliation of radical research with institutional demands #expands (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1000
• Lazarsfeld blamed the Institut’s German-language publishing for isolating it from American academia #complicates (0.75) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 657
• American cold-war occupation policy funded the Frankfurt School’s first postwar empirical study #expands (0.72) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1865
• The Frankfurt Institute suppressed its labor study over methodological disagreements with Lazarsfeld #contradicts (0.70) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1563
• The Institut planned to teach Americans social science techniques to counter German speculation #expands (0.70) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 846