Adorno

The Institute of Social Research 133

were united by the attempt to breathe new philosophical life into a
Marxism paralysed by its own orthodoxy.^5 Weil and Pollock were
already on friendly terms before the Whitsun meeting, both having taken
their doctorates in economics at Frankfurt University. Their academic
ambitions led them to give vigorous support to the foundation of the
institute. Pollock even envisaged conducting his own research there.^6
Kurt Albert Gerlach was a left-leaning Social Democrat who was
receptive towards Marxist economic thought. He had been given a chair
at Frankfurt in 1922 and Felix Weil had at once offered him the dir-
ectorship of the future institute. However, Gerlach died unexpectedly
in October of that year, leaving the founders of the institute with the
dilemma of having to find an alternative. The negotiations with the
Berlin historian Gustav Mayer came to nothing because of irreconcil-
able views about the scope of the powers to be assigned to Felix Weil.^7
Following this setback, it became possible to recruit the so-called aca-
demic Marxist Carl Grünberg, who was a professor of political economy
in Vienna and who had made an international reputation for himself as
the editor of the Archive for the History of Socialism and the Workers’
Movement.^8 When he took up the directorship of the institute in Frank-
furt, he was also appointed to a chair in the Faculty of Economics and
Social Science. In the summer of 1924, the year Adorno obtained his
doctorate, he made a speech to celebrate the opening of the newly built
home of the Institute of Social Research. The architect, Franz Rödele,
had designed a four-storey building in Victoria-Allee 17 in the style
of the New Sobriety. In addition to the offices of the director and the
administration, it contained a library, four seminar rooms and more
than a dozen small workrooms. The rooms on the ground floor and the
first floor were put at the disposition of the Economics and Social Sci-
ence Faculty. In his inaugural lecture Grünberg insisted on the need
for fundamental scientific research, something scarcely possible in the
universities. By this he meant that the work of the institute was to be
based on Marxist methods of research, which he interpreted as meaning
that the Marxist view of history should be its theoretical foundation.
However, Marxism was not to be regarded as a fixed canon of eternal
truths, but had to prove itself through its explanatory power.^9
Grünberg was suffering from ill-health and he was unable to cope
with the burdens of the directorship while the institute was being built
up. He had a stroke in 1928 which had a lasting impact on both his
administrative and scholarly work, leaving the initiative in the hands of
the younger members of the institute. For the first eight years of its life,
the research carried out at the institute centred on questions posed
from a Marxist point of view. They included questions about the crisis
in capitalist economies, the socialization of the economy, and the nature
of planned economies. The majority of the researchers, too, examined
these questions from a Marxist standpoint. The dogmatism of the
Second and Third Internationals did indeed meet with criticism in the