‘How can we tell it to the children?’ A deliberation at the Institute of Social Research

Much has been written about the transmission of the Weimar intellectual legacy to the United States through the activities of the 1930s emigrants, especially to the United States. Yet it is clear that Weimar was the scene of numerous conflicts among contesting tendencies that tended to be mutually shaped by the terms of their confrontations. Its legacies were bitterly contested. Re-contextualized within the American intellectual scene, where controversies had different configurations, these contested legacies took on new meanings, if they were understood at all. Such changes could be stimulating to the exiles as well as to their hosts, but they could also lead to mystification or to loss of depth, with esotericism contending with popularization. At a general level, for example, the rich and complex German debate between the proponents of Wissenschaft and Bildung as the prime mission of academic studies was adapted to the American conflicts between the defenders of the practical orientations of land-grant universities and the upholders of liberal arts, with dubious consequences for the clarity of the American discourse and for the depth of the other, which had figured importantly in wider debates about the character of theory and the constitution of knowledge (Kettler and Lauer 2005; Kettler and Wheatland 2004). Within a narrower circle, similar discontinuities affected the attempts to translate the complex Weimar disputes about Karl Marx, whose legacy had been debated in Weimar by a generation of intellectuals exemplified by figures like Max Adler, Karl Korsch, Georg Lukács, and Karl Mannheim and whose sophisticated and antithetical readings were equally remote from the ideological simplifications of the contending Weimar political parties or the range of possibilities entertained by American ‘progressive’ thinkers. In New York, the capital of intellectual exile, the attempts to continue working through the contested legacy of Marx in a setting where the possibility of such work was in considerable measure dependent on the possibility of having it recognized if not accepted by persons influential in American universities and funding agencies, there were two centers of contrasting émigré efforts to build on Marx, the New School for Social Research and the Institute for Social Research. Both have been the subjects of much study, but there has also been much myth-making, especially in the case of the Horkheimer group and its commentators, whose retrospective accounts often underestimate the elements of internal uncertainty and conflict by the prescriptive model that portrays them as a ‘school’ (Wheatland 2009). The document we are introducing with these remarks provides a snapshot of the complex dynamics of this intellectual formation.

The Protocol of the ‘Debate about methods in the social sciences, especially the conception of social science method represented by the Institute’, held on 17 January 1941 at the Institute of Social Research in New York, documents a critical moment in the history of the Institute, as it struggled to find outside funding for research projects that would keep the group together after Max Horkheimer’s departure for the West Coast. Seen in a wider context, however, the protocol refers not only to joint deliberations on the pragmatic and tactical problems of presenting their work so as to increase their chances of gaining grants, but also to the participants’ differing understandings of the gap to be bridged between work consistent with their commonly avowed theoretical approach and the requirements of the social-scientific strategies sanctioned by American funding agencies, notably the Rockefeller Foundation.

Until the 1937 recession and the flood of new solicitations from desperate intellectual exiles after 1938, the Horkheimer group had been unique among exile scholars in being largely self-supporting, ¹ with the supplementary help of housing provided by Columbia University. Accordingly, they had felt free to carry out a program on their own terms, essentially continuous with their earlier work in Frankfurt, Paris and Geneva, and to publish their studies in their closely held German-language periodical. Within these constraints, they were eager to gain a constituency among American scholars, a number of whom allowed their names to be listed as an advisory committee; and they also cultivated as best they could their necessary Columbia connections, whose legitimation was very important (Wheatland 2009). In addition to numerous philosophical inquiries, their work included, as it had done in Europe, research projects that rested on interview materials, but the treatment of these empirical elements was not oriented to American practice, it was not reflected upon in the theoretical articles that were the mainstay of the journal, and this phase of their work had been in any case under the supervision of the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, who had been led to break with the group in 1939. The economic plight of the Institute precipitated the decisions that proved unacceptable to the member with the most extensive American connections and fewest inhibitions about joint projects with American colleagues (Wheatland 2009).

The consequences of Fromm’s loss to the Institute are implicit in the protocol to be reproduced below, as are the ambiguous marks of Franz Neumann’s effort to take Fromm’s place as promoter of research open to American scholars. By January 1941, when the debate took place, there was evidently a residual endowment sufficient to support the work of the five or six scholars closest to Max Horkheimer and a provisional plan to move the core group to California, where Horkheimer had decided to relocate in 1941, at least partly on medical advice. His prime hope was to devote himself, in collaboration with Theodor W. Adorno, to the philosophical underpinnings of the ‘critical theory’ whose maxims he had been publishing in a series of articles (see Horkheimer 1935a, 1935b, 1937a, 1937b, 1940). These writings expanded on the legacy of Weimar post-Marxist disputes, which had sought to create a philosophically grounded alternative to Reformist, Orthodox, and Communist versions of Marxism, a contest whose terms and aims were essentially unknown among American scholars and intellectuals, who addressed a quite different state of the question.

At the same time, there was also a certain conditional willingness among the members of the Institute to widen their research constituency and reputation in the United States, an impulse that was unsurprisingly strongest among those who would find themselves separated from the Institute if this could not be achieved. No one illustrates this better than Franz L. Neumann, a comparative newcomer to the group but an important figure in the 1941 debates, who had initially been brought from England to provide legal advice and related administrative tasks, and who had been given a year’s notice of cessation of his salaried status as early as September of 1939. From that moment, Neumann had been devising proposals for funded research for himself and playing a leading role in generating and promoting proposals for group research that began to be developed in the Institute in 1939. ² Certainly at one with the Institute group about the primacy of the Marxist legacy for social understanding and about his rejection of the laborist social democratic modes of appropriating Marx with which he was associated during the Weimar years, he differed precisely because he had come to this point by a quite different route and because he had a number of quite different, less philosophical questions to answer.

Unlike Fromm, whose access to American academic circles derived first of all from widespread local curiosity about the psychoanalytical approach and from his ingenuity in adapting it to questions about social change, Neumann drew strength from several sources. First, he possessed unique credentials as a result of his doctoral studies with Harold Laski at the London School of Economics, who was highly regarded by many American academics in politics and law. Second, he had rare and sought-after expertise about law and industrial organization in Germany. Above all, however, he was distinguished by his ingenious ability to turn encounters of many kinds into bargaining situations, as well as his skills as negotiator. He had been a labor lawyer before his exile from Germany, and the special character of collective bargaining in that field is that contested situations of many kinds have first to be defined as negotiable, and that the aspects to be made subject to negotiation, as well as the parties to be included, are themselves a matter for a kind of meta-negotiation before and after. Since the collectivities involved are also commonly subject to internal dissent, especially as negotiations proceed, it is also a feature of this process that the parties must intermittently negotiate among themselves to define and then to adjust their bargaining positions. The recourse to intermediaries and the management of various alliances further complicates this style of action. Neumann’s disposition to adapt the style to intellectual relations enhanced his value to the Institute, but for such core figures as Horkheimer himself and Adorno it also clashed with the deeply rooted preferences for a humanistic style that depended more on aristocratic authority to resolve conflicts. It is not far-fetched to say that if Neumann sought to import into the January discussion a model of internal bargaining preliminary to collective bargaining, notably the determination of a starting point for negotiations with ‘Americans’, as well the limits of flexibility as to what may be put ‘on the table’, most of the others preferred to see the event as a consultation of a leader with his liegemen, with the question of humanistically sanctioned authority always uppermost (Kettler 2007).

A retrospective and much simplified rendition of this bargaining dimension may be found in a lecture that Neumann gave a dozen years later on the receptions and adaptations that led to the ‘happy solution’ that the American universities provided to his cohort of émigré social scientists (Neumann 1953). Bred to history and theory, Neumann says, the German émigrés initially disparaged the empiricism and pragmatism of American scholarship, and they were confronted with a choice rather than a simple welcome. Some exiles attempted to make a total change, according to Neumann, to become intellectually like the Americans, as they saw them. Others simply maintained their previous positions and sought converts – or accepted the status of recluse. Here he may have been thinking of a characterization clearly intended to apply to the Horkheimer group that Paul Tillich proposed some years earlier, when he spoke of a ‘group [that] thinks it likely that spiritual life during the next historical period will have to be rescued by esoteric groups from destruction by liberal skepticism, anarchic disintegration, and authoritarian suppression’ (Tillich 1938). ³ From Neumann’s point of view, however, the optimal strategy had come to be one of attempted ‘integration’ between the two cultures. To explain this possibility, as it applied in the social and political sciences, he essays a historical characterization of the contested legacies from Germany.

The starting points are, first, the traditions of scholarship and, second, the great systems achieved during the long 19th century: Kant, Hegel and Marx, as well as their counter-systems in the work of Nietzsche and Freud. In the universities, however, both Kant and Hegel were transmuted into conservative stereotypes, remote from actual conditions, while Marx and Freud were simply excluded. Nietzsche was turned into his own opposite, Neumann says. The great achievements of the universities were in history and law, which could be done by book learning and speculation, without reference to social and political reality. Social and political science were thus outside the university, except for Max Weber, whose actual empirical work, like his emphasis on the social responsibility of scholars, was neglected in favor of the much more uncertain preoccupations with methodology. It is only in the United States, Neumann asserts in an aside, that Max Weber comes into his own. There were some great social and political scientists in Germany in the middle of the 19th century, whose work in fact inspired the first political scientists in America, but this Liberal current succumbed to Bismarck after unification, and Liberalism was reduced to the defense of private rights in the Rechstaat. Jurisprudence replaced the political and social science that had inquired as well into the sources of law in relations of power. In short, the émigré political scholars could find in the American universities the focus on training social and political scientists concerned with the reform of society and politics, which was missing in the German universities after Bismarck.

Neumann contends that persons like himself, trained in the German tradition, were able in turn to achieve two things. First, they brought skepticism about the ability of social science to engineer change. In making this point, Neumann does not mean to disown the radical projections of Marx and similar European trends, although he contents himself with a certain ambiguity, but to question engineering models of social transformation. Most important, he claims that the insistence by himself and his cohort on a theoretical framing of empirical research averts three capital dangers in the American pattern of social science. First, there is the overstressing of data at the expense of context and especially the historical frame. Second, according to Neumann, there is the transformation of the scholar into a functionary, constrained by the techniques of data collection. And finally, citing a consideration that played an important part in his own early life as researcher in America, there is the dependence of the scholar on funding sources. It is not only an opportunity but also an obligation, Neumann says, for the émigré scholars to bring their backgrounds to bear on minimizing these threats. In return, American social and political science teaches them a ‘concern with and analysis of the brute facts of life’. That is a mutually beneficial bargain, Neumann thinks, although he does not at this point use the language of negotiations that is elsewhere so pervasive in his discourse on these subjects. ‘Integration’ is in effect a fair deal, and the success of the intellectual emigration is the result less of an immediately compatible environment, as had been argued by Hans Speier (1952 [1937]), than of a promising setting for negotiations.

Neumann’s concept of a ‘theoretical framing of empirical inquiry’ is hardly self-explanatory, however. In the setting of a benign retrospective, he was not constrained to offer an explanation, but the difficulties in the way of any such ‘integration’ for Neumann as well as for others associated with Horkheimer’s Institute in New York appear clearly in the internal discussion whose transcript we are presenting here in translation, a unique moment of collective reflection on the relationship between the theoretical inquiries that engage the philosopher, Horkheimer and his closest associate, Theodor W. Adorno, and the ‘social research’ that belonged to the mission of the Institute, both in its institutional terms of reference and in the collective (and individual) searches for recognition in a scientific culture that required expertise, usually measured by the expansion of empirical knowledge, as a condition of legitimacy. The immediate occasion was the prospect of submitting a major funding proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation, which had never supported the Institute, although it was open to a competing group of exiled social studies investigators at the New School; ⁴ and the discussion consequently fluctuated between rhetorical questions about ways to state their case to the foundations without a demoralizing breach of trust, on the one hand, and, on the other, substantive questions about the relations between theory and ‘research’ in the view of participants. At the same time, as noted earlier, the dynamics of the event are conditioned by a certain largely tacit conflict about the kind of discussion they were having and the priority of aims that the alternatives entailed.

Horkheimer set the terms of the discussion by characterizing the small and uncertain opening he thought available for securing support from the American foundations. They are evidently no longer satisfied with ‘empiricism’ alone, he noted, but increasingly recognize the importance of ‘theoretical viewpoints’. Despite a continuing skepticism among most social scientists, accordingly, the foundations are ready to consider the theory the Institute might bring. In fact, he thinks, they are even being invited to propose a methodology that might serve as a ‘model’. Yet American social science in general – and presumably the evaluators for the foundations – also insists that theoretical claims are ‘hypotheses’ that require verification by empirical research, a methodological conception that is antithetical to that of the Institute. The primary question of the consultation is whether the group can explain its method so as to overcome this obstacle and to seize this opportunity. ⁵ Simple adaptation to American ways is not an option, although the discussion shows that there are enough ambiguities in both the shared theory and in their understanding of American practices to permit differences in the views of the boundaries that may not be crossed.

Two group projects are in the background, both designed in the course of the preceding year with a view to external funding and both subjected to signs of trouble. The first was initiated by Horkheimer and involved a kind of structural analysis of the anti-Semitic belief-system based on leading anti-Semitic texts, to be applied for identification of the character (Wheatland 2009). For obvious reasons, this project looked for its funding to Jewish organizations, notably the American Jewish Committee, and the original scheme was scheduled for a complete reworking after clear signals that it would not be supported because remote from needed and useable information. ⁶ The topic intended for the Rockefeller Foundation was an analysis of National Socialist Germany – with both genealogical and structural approaches under consideration – and the succession of project proposals devoted to this subject occupy at least six of the members of the Institute during 1940 and early 1941, as well being the principal focus of Neumann’s efforts during this time, both as planner and as promoter. ⁷ It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that the January meeting was called to discuss a project in which Neumann played the leading role, and that it was designed both to see how its funding could be facilitated and how improper compromises could be prevented. It was not a simple matter to be viewed as Fromm’s replacement as apostle to the gentiles.

Strikingly, Horkheimer’s opening statement is twice interrupted by Neumann, who would without an understanding of the context appear to be marginal to this discussion since his contributions to the Institute’s work had been rather unreflective about methodological issues. And, as noted, he was under intense pressure to find employment elsewhere, having been given a year’s notice of dismissal from the salaried staff of the Institute more than a year before the date of this meeting. Yet his early intervention and distinctive role make it clear that the discussion was very much his business. As soon as Horkheimer says that they are expected to supply an explanation of their method, Neumann interjects that the explanation must not appear Marxist, and when Horkheimer refers to the empirical testing of hypotheses expected of them, Neumann moves the discussion towards an examination of this conception, maintaining that the social scientists do not know how to discover hypotheses but see them as grounded simply in preferences. As he proceeds, however, it becomes clear that he does not consider this ‘general consensus’ to be immovable, but rather a position with regard to which there is also discontent, as witness the high regard for Veblen, as well as the writings of Max Lerner and – especially – Robert A. Lynd, whose critique of ‘positivism’ in his recent Knowledge for What? he deems especially significant, perhaps because of Lynd’s past reputation as an empirical researcher skeptical about ‘theory’ (Wheatland 2009).

Throughout the debate, Neumann is the participant who is most focused on avoiding grandiose formulations that deny all recognition of the Americans and thereby render them impossible as bargaining partners. He insists on defining the situation as a challenge to effective advocacy. At least twice, he responds to sophisticated articulations of critical theory maxims – one each by Horkheimer and Adorno – by coolly enacting the skeptical responses to be expected from Americans, as if they merited an answer, and the third time, after a proclamation of lofty principle by Hermann Weill, he insists that the task remains that of communicating their special qualities to the Americans, rather than reassuring themselves. Not surprisingly, then, Neumann is also the only participant whose statements are at times expressly opposed by others, once by Horkheimer and the other time by Adorno, although he pledges his allegiance to the common theoretical program. It seems that he was prepared to take risks in order to develop a negotiable bargaining position, focused on American proponents of ‘historical method’ rather than on sociologists, ⁸ an orientation that most of the others considered dangerous.

The third most active participant in the discussion, then, is T.W. Adorno, whose relationship to American social science and the prospects of any sort of mutual understanding are also the most antagonistic. While he concedes that the avant garde among American social scientists are no longer satisfied with merely amassing information, he also insists that their inability to comprehend genuine theory – as distinct from the hypothesis-verification model of positivism – is too deeply rooted for any mediation. The Institute’s task is to explain the pervasiveness of this uncritical and unhistorical conception and thereby to ‘roll up the postulates of positivism’. Herbert Marcuse takes an active part as well, but he appears closer to Adorno than to Neumann, who is known as his closest friend, in denying that there are any grounds for comprehension in the orientation that brings Americans to social science inquiry. They simply lack the ‘experience’ that defines the state of the question and shapes the understanding of the Horkheimer group, a characterization that Horkheimer escalates to the contention that Americans and others grounded in bourgeois society are in fact altogether incapable of experience, in any meaningful sense of the term.

The most revealing series of exchanges in the discussion opens with a surprisingly diplomatic concession by Horkheimer to the effect that there would not be a difference in kind between an explication of their own method and that of American researchers, but merely one of precision, a puzzling assertion that is immediately followed by a proposal to examine the difference between themselves and ‘someone we find especially alien’. It is hard to credit or explain this qualified opening, since the rest of the statement lays out a position that Neumann properly calls in effect incommunicable to an American who does not already share the theory to which Horkheimer refers and to which Neumann also pledges his allegiance. Horkheimer begins with the assertion that they would never posit and empirically test a hypothesis if addressed with a question that their own theory could show to be falsely posed. To illustrate his point he turns to a question on a topic that figures largely in their proposed research on Germany and that will later lead to substantive disagreements between himself and Neumann, disagreements that may have been already prefigured in their discussions. The question is whether bureaucracy is a new form of rule. While the ‘alien’ sociologist (who is an American) would turn the components of this question into a hypothesis and seek out new information to (dis)confirm it, Horkheimer and his associates would ask instead, he claims, whether something like bureaucracy could in fact exercise power when it is not and cannot be a ruling class, since it is not related to the economic relations in the way their theory shows to be decisive. The phenomena of bureaucratization have to be accounted for in relation to the historical development of the principal classes. Asserting that there would be no occasion to ‘collect an assortment of new facts’, he concludes that ‘no problem of method could occur’ because they have a well developed theory of society, which ‘the Americans’ – no talk now of only those most alien – lack.

Neumann replies, as noted, that an American, not accepting this theory, would simply ask them to show why this theory is correct. Marcuse insists that the ‘state of the question’ is grounded in the group’s ‘experience’, which no Positivist would have available. The economist Henryk Grossmann asserts their reliance on a theory of class society but then acknowledges rather naively that they are also unable to say how far this theory is true, except insofar as they call on the authority of Marx or on their historical experience. Horkheimer insists that the search for ‘evidence’ leads in a circle, presumably because the formulation of the question defines what shall count as evidence. At this point, he takes up Marcuse’s rather phenomenological – or even Heideggerian – call for understanding grounded in decisive experiences, which renders the call for proofs irrelevant. Adorno presses on with a proposal to use their theory to expose the fear at the base of the demand for evidence, and Horkheimer proposes that it is all about a profound fear that ‘humanity’ hangs in the balance if empirical criteria for truth are compromised. Adorno sums up the critical theory perspective and Neumann promptly counters in his acerbic manner: ‘That is all very interesting, but a vicious circle for an American.’ He follows this up with a proposal that they expand on their earlier public posture that they are distinctive by virtue of their effort to integrate the social sciences by adding the element of historicity, ‘which the Americans do not do’, and separating themselves from sociology. ⁹

Horkheimer rejects Neumann’s proposal as failing to reveal their ‘distinctive spirit’, and he insists that they must openly profess their view that truth cannot be verified, a position that Neumann provocatively likens to the openness of Americans to intuitions that are not falsified by the fact that they cannot be verified. Horkheimer’s categorical reply to Neumann’s overall pressure to find a way of ‘telling it to the children’ is the assertion that ‘the demand for communicability is best satisfied by Hitler’ because of the faulty structure of the ‘experiences of most humans’. Neumann’s role in the discussion effectively ends at that point, and the principal accommodation to the initial question about utilizing the seeming opening provided by the foundations has to do with the idea of working on a small topic in a way that opens a view to the ‘entire line of approach’. In the end, Horkheimer avows once again the distinctive character of their theory, which is tied to practice in a way that ‘we will not be able to say’. ‘This is what makes these people so uneasy’, he concludes proudly. In the end, the session appears to end with a profession of faith – and a certain denial of recognition to the ‘people’ with whom negotiations would have to be conducted – rather than a bargaining position. ¹⁰

When the Institute, with its studies of anti-Semitism and ‘the authoritarian personality’, did hit upon a track that gained it both funding and recognition as making a contribution to American social research, it was for work that drew more on the current that Fromm had tapped, the contested legacy of Freud, than on their unresolved collective attempts to deepen and communicate their encounters with the contested legacy of Marxism (Ziege 2009; Wheatland 2009). The contributions to the latter development in America came at a later time from the heterodox efforts of Marcuse and, to a lesser extent, Neumann, as well as from the extraordinary backwash, two decades after the debates reproduced below, of the work that Horkheimer and his closest associates did after their return to Germany.