The Institute’s principal research projects remained unpublished for want of staff in the 1950s

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. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1961

Categorization

• XREF: Wiggershaus’s thorough institutional history — the Institute’s post-war stagnation connects to the broader picture of Critical Theory’s marginalization in 1950s West Germany.