The Institute chose authority’s relation to economic cycles as its research theme.

Evidence

In a text handed out by Horkheimer at the beginning of 1937 at an Institute lunch for Columbia University’s Sociology Faculty, he wrote: The first two years of my activity at the Institute were given to experiments in this type of collaboration [between the various branches of science and between theoretical and empirical sciences]. … The theme finally adopted as most fruitful to our type of cooperative research was that of the relation of the cultural phenomenon of authority to the alternation of normal economic life and depression periods. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 157

Categorization

• DEFINE: States the Institute’s core interdisciplinary research problematic: authority as a cultural phenomenon tied to the alternation of prosperity and depression.
• XREF: Connects to the Institute’s Studies in Prejudice and the broader Frankfurt program on the authoritarian character. — connects to: The Institute’s theory-empirical synthesis peaked with the Studies on Authority — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 625

Broader Connections

• The Institute’s theory-empirical synthesis peaked with the Studies on Authority #expands (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 625