The Institute’s American empirical turn traded revolutionary aims for New Deal liberalism
Evidence
On the surface, it appears as if the Studies were a radical departure from some of the basic tenets of the Critical Theory. In certain ways this was true. The caution we have seen displayed in America by the Institut on a number of occasions was unmistakably apparent in its empirical work in the forties. For example, the opposite of the “authoritarian personality” was no longer the “revolutionary,” as it had been in the Siudien uher Autoriiat and Familie, it was now the “democratic” instead. The values expressed by the various authors connected with the Studies, especially those foreign to the Institut’s ways of thinking, were invariably liberal and New Deal rather than Marxist or radical. Education for tolerance, rather than praxis for revolutionary change, was the ostensible goal of the research, which aroused the scorn of more orthodox Marxists like Brecht. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 679
Categorization
- SEED: The shift from ‘revolutionary’ to ‘democratic’ as the opposite of authoritarian personality is a crisp marker of how Cold War funding reshaped radical critique — an essay on the political economy of research grant design.
- XREF: connects to: The Institute’s psychological typology shifted from revolutionary to democratic under American influence. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 428; Raising Soviet security and New Deal aims displaced revolutionary politics in the thirties.