The Institute’s Marxian purpose was publicly declared but never written into its charter.

Evidence

In a long letter to the Ministry of Science, Art and Education, he emphasized that he saw the work of the Institute and his participation in it as his life’s work. Although he had not, as he had originally intended, taken his Habilitation, and had only taught a course in one semester, this was only due to the illness and death of his father, which had forced him to devote more time than he would otherwise have wished to the needs of the family firm, which was actually of no interest to him. The task of the Institute, however, was first and foremost to serve in the study and extension of scientific Marxism. Even though it is not specially mentioned in the name or in the charter of the Institute, the negotiations over its foundation, the published inaugural address by Professor Grünberg, our other publications, and the research and teaching activities of the Institute are all evidence of the fact that there is no question of it being merely an institution devoted to economics or sociology in general. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 52

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the later institutional history of Marxism in Frankfurt and to the tension between publicly avowed Marxism and formal institutional neutrality that recurs throughout the Frankfurt School’s story. — connects to: The Institute kept advertising a worker study it never actually published. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 195
• QUESTION: Why was the Marxist mission kept out of the charter while being asserted programmatically in the inaugural address? Worth tracing how this formal ambiguity later protected or constrained the Institute.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: The Institute kept advertising a worker study it never actually published. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 195