132 Part II: A Change of Scene10
A Second Anomaly in Frankfurt:
The Institute of Social Research
In 1931 Max Horkheimer became director of the Institute of Social
Research. At that point, the institute, a scientific organization with
special status at the university, was already over six years old. Charac-
teristically, it had been established thanks to a foundation set up by
Hermann Weil, a prosperous businessman.^1 His son, Felix José Weil,
was born in Argentina in 1898, and had lived in Frankfurt since he was
nine. His studies led him to concentrate on problems of the world
economy, and economics in general. Unlike his liberal-conservative
father, however, he stood on the left politically, and had a political and
scientific interest in Marxism.^2 Despite the political differences between
father and son, the latter was able to persuade Hermann Weil to give
financial backing to the project of establishing a research institute con-
nected to the university on the model of the institute in Kiel.
The negotiations between the registrar of the university and the
relevant ministry about the establishment of an Institute of Social
Research as an endowed foundation began as early as 1922. After suc-
cessful consultations, the ministry and the university finally concluded
an agreement with the Weil Foundation about setting up an auto-
nomous research institute whose financial basis should be secured by
the Gesellschaft für Sozialforschung e.V.^3 The financial framework in-
cluded provision for the construction and equipping of the institute
building, in addition to the payment of the sum of 100,000 Marks,
and the endowment of a chair in the Faculty of Economics and Social
Science to be held by the institute director. Ideas for the proposed tasks
of an institute dedicated to pure research emanated from an exclusive
group of no more than twenty young, left-leaning intellectuals. They
ranged from prominent Marxists such as Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch
to Friedrich Pollock and Felix Weil. At Whitsun 1923, this group^4
organized a so-called Marxist Study Week, to discuss the programme
and possible lines of research of the institute. What was common to all
these people, many of whom were members of the Communist (KPD)
or Independent Socialist (USPD) parties, was their rejection of the
different strands of reformist or dogmatic interpretations of Marx. They