The Institute’s name misled Americans about its true non-empirical mission.

Evidence

A further mistake, for which I feel partly responsible, but which may be explained by my background, is our having called ourselves an Institute instead of a Foundation or an Endowment. When we came to this country it had been our idea to devote the funds which we brought here to enable European scholars who had lost their position by the rise of dictatorship to continue their own work. When we became aware that a few of our American friends expected of an Institute of Social Sciences that it engage in studies on pertinent social problems, fieldwork and other empirical investigations, we tried to satisfy these demands as well as we could, but our heart was set on individual studies in the sense of Geisteswissenschaften and the philosophical analysis of culture. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1051

Categorization

• DEFINE: Contrasts Geisteswissenschaften (humanities-style ‘sciences of spirit’) with American empirical social research.
• ADDENDUM: The Institute’s disavowal of empirical fieldwork echoes themes of method in the institutional-history reading; tangentially connects to the graft/metaphor strand only if treating the adopted ‘Institute’ label as a grafted frame onto European Geisteswissenschaften roots.
• XREF: connects to: The name ‘Institute’ misrepresented the Frankfurt group’s humanities focus to American empiricists.; The Institute’s name misled American funders about its true nature — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1231; The Institute’s famed fusion of theory and empirical research was largely rhetorical, not actual. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 171