246 Part III: Emigration Years
Paul Lazarsfeld had been born in Vienna into an assimilated Jewish
family of left-wing views. Two years Adorno’s senior, he had worked
in his home town as a social researcher since the late 1920s. He made
his name with a study he had undertaken in 1930 with Marie Jahoda
and Hans Zeisel, Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Com-
munity. In 1933, the Rockefeller Foundation, which had helped to finance
this project, offered Lazarsfeld the opportunity of a study trip to the
United States in order to learn about the methodology of empirical
surveys. Because of political developments in his native country, where
the Socialist Party with whom he had personal contacts was banned
in 1934, Lazarsfeld decided to apply for American citizenship. Having
participated in the Studies on Authority and the Family, he was in con-
tact with Horkheimer’s Institute of Social Research. Since he had helped
with the statistical evaluation of questionnaires, he was listed in the
institute prospectus as a ‘research associate’.
The radio research project was Lazarsfeld’s first major research
venture in the USA, one that opened up the prospect of a future
university career as a sociologist. For although the nominal conduct
of the research was in the School of Public and International Affairs
in Princeton, the actual field research took place in Newark, where
Lazarsfeld was supposed to carry it out within the space of two years.^24
The pressure he was under is one factor explaining why he was so keen
to recruit Adorno for his team. Right from the start, however, the
collaboration between the two – the one a social researcher, the other
an intellectual – was anything but plain sailing. Adorno admitted later
on that he had enormous problems with the kind of empirical social
research that predominated in the USA, even though Lazarsfeld thought
highly of him as a theoretician and as a stimulating mind, and was
anxious to make use of him.^25 Adorno’s task in the first instance was
to develop further the interpretations of serious and popular music
contained or implied in his sociological analyses of music and to refor-
mulate them as a system of hypotheses that could be tested empirically.
At the same time, it was proposed that, insofar as these interpretations
could be verified empirically, they should be systematically broadened
into a theoretical framework for future empirical results. Since Adorno
was interested in developing alternatives to the commercial system of
a privately run radio network, he wrote to Benjamin at the start of
his own project to ask for a brief report on the ideas underlying the
so-called listening models that Benjamin had produced and tried out
in Germany in the early 1930s.^26
In March 1938, Adorno began by familiarizing himself with what
was being done in Newark in order to consider how best to translate
the aims of the project into practice. Looking back on that time, he
records that he now heard for the first time of ‘words such as “likes and
dislikes study”, “success or failure of a programme”, and so on, of which
at first I could understand little. But I understood enough to realize that