Adorno

136 Part II: A Change of Scene

for large-scale field research along the lines practised in American socio-
logy, together with the use of questionnaires. ‘Each of these methods
alone is completely inadequate. But all of them together, in years of
patient and extensive investigations, may be fruitful for the general
problem.’^14
This idea of interdisciplinarity combined with a methodological plur-
alism was to prove decisive for the work of the institute in the coming
years. But in addition, under Horkheimer’s growing personal influence
in the institute, it had already begun to take on embryonic shape in the
empirical projects that were already under way. The new trend was
strengthened by the arrival of Leo Löwenthal^15 as a literary scholar,
Erich Fromm^16 as an analytical social psychologist, and, somewhat later,
Herbert Marcuse,^17 who, as a former student of Martin Heidegger, had
been recommended to the institute by the registrar, Kurt Riezler.
A few months after the lecture given by the 35-year-old director of
the Institute of Social Research, another inaugural lecture was given,
one no less programmatic in its aims, this time by Adorno, who had
qualified as a lecturer in philosophy in February of the same year. Its
title was ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’. If the audiences of the two
lectures, which must have consisted largely of the same people, had an
ear for the similarities and differences between the two speakers, they
must have noted with some astonishment that, if anything, Adorno was
sceptical about Horkheimer’s programme of a philosophy-led concep-
tion of social research.^18 His scepticism might easily be overlooked on
a superficial reading. On the first page Adorno evidently shares many of
the ideas and ways of seeing discussed by Horkheimer. For example,
in his extensive tour d’horizon of contemporary philosophy he agrees
with Horkheimer’s critique of the chaotic specialization in the different
disciplines and thinks of it as part of the crisis of modern scholarship
that has to be overcome. The two men likewise felt the same scepticism
about the revolutionary potential of the workers’ movement. Moreover,
they agreed that no way out of the crisis of the sciences would be
forthcoming either from Marxism, whether orthodox or revisionist, or
from the dominant academic philosophies in the shape of phenom-
enology, metaphysics or positivism. Nevertheless, unlike Horkheimer,
Adorno did not regard the new discipline of the social sciences as a
phoenix arising from the ashes. In his critical view, the formal shape of
the sociology that predominated in the Weimar period had not gone
beyond an abstract conceptuality. Whereas the idealist constructs of
philosophy hovered above the real world, sociology runs the risk of
distilling its concepts from the given realities in a concretistic fashion,
and this results in a merely descriptive ‘doubling’ of the given. ‘What
remains is an endless, pointless chain of determinants that does no
more than point to “this and that”, that renders nugatory every attempt
at organization through understanding, and fails to provide any critical
yardstick.’^19 As early as 1931 Adorno complained that sociology of this