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Frankfurt on the Hudson
How the fathers of Critical Theory found their way to America

By Adam Kirsch | 7:00 am August 18, 2009

It would be hard to overstate the importance of the Frankfurt School in
recent American thought. Philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists
like Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and
Max Horkheimer—to name just the best-known members of the group—helped
to develop a subtle and powerful way of thinking about the problems of
modern society. Critical Theory, as it is usually capitalized, adapted
the revolutionary impulse of Marxism to 20th century conditions, in
which mass culture and totalitarianism seemed to shut off any real
possibility of social transformation. Especially appealing to academics
is the way Critical Theory makes the analysis of culture feel like a
revolutionary act in and of itself. Reading Adorno on modern music, or
Benjamin on literature, it is momentarily possible to believe that
criticism is a weapon of liberation, rather than simply a hermetic
exercise for intellectuals.

No wonder that after the 1960s, as Thomas Wheatland writes in his
impressive new study The Frankfurt School in Exile, “ambitious young
sympathizers with the New Left” in the academy turned en masse to the
Frankfurt School, a scholarly subject that they could explore “without
having to disguise or hide their intellectual and political
orientations.” It is strange that it took until the 1960s for the
Frankfurters to make a major impact on America, however, since from 1934
to 1949 they were actually living in the United States. The Institute
for Social Research—the institutional home of the Frankfurt School
thinkers—had to uproot itself from Germany in 1933, following Hitler’s
rise to power. After a brief period in Geneva, it relocated to
Morningside Heights, where it formed an uneasy partnership with Columbia
University.

From its headquarters at 428 West 117th Street, the Institute struggled
with the intellectual and practical challenges involved in doing
European-style Critical Theory in America. While the members of the
Institute eventually scattered—Horkheimer and Adorno moved to Los
Angeles, joining the German émigré colony there, while after Pearl
Harbor Marcuse and others went to Washington, applying their skills to
the war effort—New York remained the Institute’s official home until
1949, when Horkheimer moved it back to the University of Frankfurt.

In his book, an unusually thorough blend of intellectual and
institutional history, Wheatland sheds new light on this phase of the
Frankfurt School’s existence. Wheatland is interested in the ideas of
the School, but he is also interested in the ways that less intellectual
factors—like money, personality clashes, and opportunism—shaped those
ideas’ development and reception. In a sense, Wheatland has subjected
the Frankfurt School to a genuinely Marxist analysis—he shows how the
group’s economic substructure affected its ideological superstructure.
In the process, he brings these often idolized figures back to human
scale, and offers an object lesson in the unedifying ways that
intellectual careers are made.

The Jewish dimension to this story is only occasionally Wheatland’s
explicit subject, but it is absolutely central nonetheless. After all,
the reason the Institute had to leave Frankfurt in the first place was
that, in addition to being radicals and Marxists, the members of the
group were almost all Jewish. The Institut für Sozialforschung was
created by Herman Weil, a German Jew who had made a fortune importing
grain from Argentina, and his son Felix, who like many young men was
radicalized after Germany’s defeat in World War I. In 1923, still in the
early days of the Weimar Republic, the Weils created the Institute as an
independent think tank with a lavish endowment. Their plan was to bring
together scholars from different fields, who would work together to
develop comprehensive new theories about how modern society functioned
and how it might be transformed.

Not coincidentally, as Wheatland shows, almost all the Institute’s hires
were, like the Weils, highly assimilated Jews from bourgeois families.
Max Horkheimer, the philosopher who became head of the Institute in 1931
and guided it for the next several decades, was the son of a textile
manufacturer from Stuttgart; his relationship with his father was
destroyed when the son married the father’s Christian secretary. Theodor
Wiesengrund-Adorno, the most brilliant thinker associated with the
Institute, was the son of a Jewish wine merchant and a Catholic woman
from Corsica. (He eventually dropped the Jewish half of his last name
and went simply by Adorno.) Erich Fromm, a sociologist turned
psychoanalyst, was unusual in being raised in an Orthodox family; he
“maintained a strong religious identity into adulthood,” Wheatland
writes. Similar stories could be told of most of the scholars who came
to work at Frankfurt.

Among the tidal wave of academic refugees from Hitler’s Germany, the
members of the Institute were actually very lucky. Horkheimer, with a
prescience all too rare among German Jews, had already shifted the
Institute’s endowment out of German banks and shipped its library out of
the country. The scholars reassembled in Geneva, but this could only be
a temporary respite, since most of them could not get permanent Swiss
visas. As Wheatland shows in the first of the book’s four sections,
Horkheimer embarked on a well-thought-out campaign to find a new home
for the Institute in the United States, sending out a pamphlet with
testimonials to sociology departments at American universities.

Wheatland makes clear just why Columbia took the bait. Robert MacIver,
the head of Columbia’s sociology department, was looking for a way to
establish a social research bureau, which would provide quantitative
data to support the work of theorists. In 1929, MacIver had applied to
the university for $50,000 to create such a bureau, writing in his
proposal that “the situation with reference to research through
quantitative measurement may really be described as a crisis. If this
crisis is not met in a large way, achievement on the part of
universities cannot be expected.” But the Depression made such an
expensive program impossible. When the Institute for Social Research
came calling—with its private endowment, and its experience doing field
research and surveys—it seemed like a perfect match for Columbia’s needs.

In fact, as Wheatland goes on to show, the fit was not ideal, and grew
even less so over time. The Institute did design and fund several
important research projects, including a study of the effect of
unemployment on family life in Newark, New Jersey, and a study of
adolescent attitudes toward authority. But these studies were not really
what Horkheimer cared about. Rather, he was interested in developing a
total theory of late-capitalist society, which would encompass politics,
economics, culture, and society. This would eventually bear fruit in
Horkheimer and Adorno’s magnum opus, Dialectic of Enlightenment.

To keep the Institute running, however, Horkheimer needed American
allies and funders, who were mainly interested in empirical
problem-solving. This dilemma became acute in the later 1930s, when a
series of bad investment decisions cost the Institute a large chunk of
its endowment, and forced Horkheimer to lay off a number of associates.
As Wheatland shows, this process was handled badly, with Horkheimer
antagonizing Erich Fromm, the most popular member of the Institute among
its American patrons. (Fromm would eventually go on to write bestselling
psychology books like The Art of Loving.) In fact, Horkheimer comes
across in Wheatland’s account as a ruthless academic infighter, not
afraid to use his money and power to punish his enemies. The contrast
between the Frankfurt School’s dreams of social liberation and its
actual dependence on such all-too-human motives is a melancholy and
ironic one.

In subsequent sections of The Frankfurt School in Exile, Wheatland shows
how the Institute came into contact with two important segments of the
American Jewish community. The first were the New York Intellectuals,
who were in many ways the perfect American counterpart to the
Frankfurters: Jewish radical intellectuals with an interest in politics
and culture. While the two groups never engaged as deeply as they might
have—in part, Wheatland shows, due to the Frankfurters’ policy of
staying aloof from American politics—some relationships did form, and
New Yorkers like Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, and Nathan Glazer became
aware of Critical Theory.

More unlikely, on its surface, was the bond the Institute formed with
the establishment American Jewish Committee, which turned out to be the
patron the struggling exiles badly needed. In 1943, the Committee gave
the Institute a $10,000 grant to produce a report on the causes of
anti-Semitism. This eventually grew into the landmark five-volume report
Studies in Prejudice, published in 1950, which brought the Institute its
first real mainstream recognition. Wheatland notes the irony that it
should be a specifically, not to say parochially, Jewish project that
made the Institute’s name in America.

After all, it is possible to see the whole endeavor of Critical Theory
as being a way for these brilliant German Jews, assimilated to German
culture yet rejected by Germany itself, to imagine a place for
themselves outside of Jewishness and Germanness. Yet “the anti-Semitism
project,” as Wheatland writes, “suggested an abandonment of
revolutionary utopianism and the temporary adoption of American
liberalism.” His important book ought to bring new attention to this
highly suggestive part of the Frankfurt School’s story.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author
of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish
Encounters book series.