Pollock and Horkheimer had been friends since 1911 and both backed Weil’s institute plan

Evidence

With the encouragement of several friends at the University of Frankfurt, Weil’s idea of a more permanent institute, which he had conceived during the EMA, became increasingly clarified. One of these friends, Friedrich Pollock, had participated in the discussions in llmenau. Born in 1894 in Freiburg, the son of an assimilated Jewish businessman, Pollock had been trained for a commercial career before serving in the war. After its end, no longer interested in business, he became a student of economics and politics at the universities of Munich, Freiburg, and Frankfurt. He was granted a doctorate in 1923 summa cum laude from the economics department at Frankfurt with a thesis on Marx’s monetary theory. Before the war, in 1911, Pollock had become friends with Max Horkheimer, who later was to emerge as the most important figure in the Institut’s history, and who now lent his voice to Pollock’s in supporting Weil’s plan for an institute of social research. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 96