Personal quarrels and practical losses suppressed publication of a prescient study

Evidence

Despite the prescience of its conclusions - the German working class was, in fact, to accept Nazism without any real resistance --- the study was never actually published by the Institut. As late as 1939 plans were still afoot to have it appear as The German Workers under the Weimar Republic,” but with Fromm’s departure from the Institut went a major reason for its publication. In later years, Pollock suggested that it was never published because too many of the questionnaires were lost in the flight from Germany. Fromm, however, disputed this claim and argued that Horkheimer and he differed over the value of the work, a quarrel that, in fact, contributed to their break. Some of the project’s findings were, however, worked into subsequent studies of authoritarianism, such as Escape from Freedom. And the questionnaire it had developed was incorporated into the next major Institut project, the Studien uber Autoritdt and Familie (Studies on Authority and Family). — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 393

Categorization

• SEED: Potential angle: how intellectually important research gets suppressed by personal and bureaucratic politics, not scientific merit.
• XREF: Connects to the later Fromm-Horkheimer rupture and the general history of the Institute’s internal splits. — connects to: The broadcast industry suppressed findings of its own violence effects report; The workers’ inquiry findings were suppressed partly for their politically damaging implications — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 475; Reviews restricted to peer-reviewed publications miss unpublished findings. — Didier Caluwaerts et al., Deliberation and Polarization: A…, 36

Broader Connections

• The broadcast industry suppressed findings of its own violence effects report #exemplifies (0.85)