The Rockefeller Foundation terminated Adorno’s radio music study over his destructive critique.

Evidence

In an interoffice memorandum' of January 1940, John Marshall, who was the Rockefeller Foundation official responsible for the Princeton Radio Research Project, wrote that Adorno seemed psychologically engaged at the moment by his ability to recognize deficiencies in the broadcasting of music to an extent that makes questionable his own drive to find ways of remedying them’. Productive work could be expected from Adorno `only if he had the collaboration of someone representative of the present system, but tolerant enough of Adorno’s position to see what was useful in it and interpret that for people certain to be intolerant’. But Lazarsfeld’s assurance that exactly this would take place, and a personal visit by Lazarsfeld and Adorno to Marshall in June 1940, were not able to persuade him to change his decision to bring the financing of the music study to an end. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1014

Categorization

• XREF: The funder’s assessment that Adorno was all critique and no remediation strikingly parallels the general reception of Frankfurt School critical theory as diagnosing without proposing solutions.
• SEED: Possible essay angle: how the Frankfurt School’s insistence on totalizing critique made it institutionally un-fundable — the tension between radical theory and philanthropic research funding.