Political repression destroyed the Institute’s planned European comparative research

Evidence

In parallel research projects in Vienna and Paris, the Institute’s European branches were to collaborate with the institutes of Marie Jahoda and Otto Neurath. Jahoda, who had been an assistant of Lazarsfeld’s in Vienna and was his first wife, was the main author of The Unemployed in Marienthal, and an active Social Democrat. After Lazarsfeld’s departure, she had become director of the Vienna Economic and Psychological Research Group. Horkheimer hoped to maintain the international character of the Institute’s work, without undue expense, through the co-operation planned with the Vienna group. But the parallel European research never came about. In 1936 Marie Jahoda was arrested for working illegally for the Socialists, and in 1937 she was expelled from Austria. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 691

Categorization

• XREF: Jahoda’s Marienthal study is a foundational empirical sociology text; links to the Institute’s broader empirical program discussed across the book. — connects to: Critical empiricism failed through fear of diverging from the established research system. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2120; Stalin’s purge trials finally destroyed the Institute’s hopes for the Soviet Union — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 136