Presenting socialism to the lower classes crossed a decisive academic acceptability threshold.

Evidence

Grünberg’s self-confidence sprang from his experiences in Austrian Social Democracy, within whichin contrast with Germanythere was room for communist positions. It sprang, too, from his belonging to an academic subject-area in which there had for decades been considerable scope for the discussion of social-reformist and socialist views. There had been socialist academics since the middle of the nineteenth century, even though they had had to struggle for recognition. However, a decisive threshold was crossed when someone began to present socialist systems and demands not as academic theories to be discussed among the learned, but as doctrines and programmes directed at the `lower classes’. After the First World War, membership of the Social Democratic Party no longer meant exclusion from government-paid posts (Berufsverbot). But membership still meant being made an outsider and suffering hostility from colleagues. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 103

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to the class-coded boundary logic seen in other German institutional histories and in Weber’s value-freedom debates.