The Institute of Social Research 151The contents of the first year were a reflection of Horkheimer’s own
objectives, since it was he who acted as the journal’s spiritus rector
during the nine years of its existence. These aims were ‘to acquire an
understanding of the general course of society in the present epoch’^67
through a combination of historically substantial theory construction
and empirical research.
The breadth of theory to be covered by the Zeitschrift according
to Horkheimer can be indicated by the fact that in the very first year
three out of eleven contributions were devoted to technical sociological
questions, such as the changing bourgeois image of the world, the US
party system, and the use of leisure time. Two essays, one by Henryk
Grossmann and one by Friedrich Pollock, were concerned with prob-
lems arising from Marx’s theory of economics, his theory of crises and
the planned economy as an alternative to capitalism. A contribution by
Erich Fromm outlined attempts to integrate Marxism and analytical
social psychology. Furthermore, Leo Löwenthal sketched the tasks
facing a sociology of literature, while Wiesengrund-Adorno drew on his
musical expertise and sought to develop new approaches to a critical,
Marxist sociology of music. Horkheimer inaugurated the journal with
the leading article, ‘Observations on Science and Crisis’, an article which
took up a number of ideas that Adorno had presented in the framework
of that exclusive seminar during the winter semester of 1931.^68
Despite friendly or at least professional working relations with
Horkheimer, Pollock, Löwenthal and Fromm, Adorno was not officially
a member of the institute either before or after obtaining his Habilita-
tion. His ideas diverged from those of Horkheimer and a majority of
institute members on a number of quite fundamental points. Despite
this, Adorno published regularly, if at intervals, in the Zeitschrift from
the very first issue. With these publications in the 1930s he appeared
for the first time as a sociologist. It was from a sociological point of view
that he began to develop the conceptual and methodological founda-
tions for the analysis of music. This analysis would be concerned not
with the individual composer’s intentions, but with the social content
of their works. This meant that, following in Max Weber’s footsteps, he
was making his contribution to the establishment of the sociology of
music as a special branch of sociology. Among the early contributions
to this subject in the Zeitschrift we may mention ‘The Social Situation
of Music’ of 1932, the essay ‘On Jazz’ that appeared four years later and
the essay ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of
Listening’, which appeared in 1938 and was followed a year later by the
‘Fragments on Wagner’.
In his comprehensive analysis of the social dimension of music, Adorno
relies on one premise: all music in the capitalist society of today bears
the marks of alienation and functions as a commodity that must realize
its exchange value in the marketplace. Given this background, what
decides the authenticity or inauthenticity of a piece of music is whether