The Institute’s postwar output crisis stemmed from its leaders’ divided commitments and absent attention

Evidence

Since Adorno was absent, and Horkheimer hardly had any time either for the Institute with his job as rector and his unrelenting teaching duties, Plessner’s part-time help was not even sufficient to get done what was absolutely necessary. In Horkheimer’s view, the Institute of Social Research needed above all to get out publications, but these should certainly uphold to some extent the standards set in the Institute’s glorious past. The two most important projects they might be able to publish, the German version of Studies in Prejudice and the group study on West German political awareness, were nowhere near ready for publication, and no one was giving consistent attention to them. Faced with all these problems, Horkheimer was once again torn between plans for a quick retreat with no loss of face and a slow retreat trailing glory. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 483

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier account of Horkheimer’s rector duties and the Institute’s struggle to complete the Studies in Prejudice series.
• SEED: An essay on how institutional decline is often an attention problem, not a funding problem — the Frankfurt Institute as a case study.