Writing while subjects live let Jay learn things documents could not reveal.

Evidence

My only constraint has been dictated by discretion. My access to the extremely valuable Horkheimer-Lowenthal correspondence was qualified by an understandable reluctance on the part of the correspondents to embarrass people who might still be alive. This type of control, which, to be sure, was exercised only infrequently, was the only disadvantage following from my writing about living men. It is rare for the historian to be able to address his questions so directly to the subjects of his study. By so doing, not only have I learned things which the documents could not reveal, but I have also been able to enter into the lives of the Institut’s members and appreciate in a more immediate way the impact of their personal experiences as intellectuals in exile. Although the bulk of my text concerns the ideas of the Frankfurt School, I hope that some of those experiences and their relations to the ideas are apparent. For in many ways, both for good and for ill, they were the unique experiences of an extraordinary generation whose historical moment has now irrevocably passed. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 80

Categorization

• SEED: A potential essay angle: the tradeoffs of oral history and writing about living subjects vs. dead ones — how live interviews change both evidence quality and editorial constraints.