Adorno

336 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional

In November 1951, with the beginning of his professorial duties and
his activity as dean, Horkheimer moved into the newly built Institute of
Social Research in Senckenberganlage 26. Thanks to the substantial
financial contributions of John McCloy, the American high commis-
sioner, the City of Frankfurt and also private sponsors, the modern,
generously proportioned building was completed in a very short time.
Those working in it, apart from Adorno, included Pollock and a number
of others concerned with empirical social research (such as Ludwig von
Friedeburg, Volker von Hagen, Karl Sandemann and Dieter Osmer),
who continued the work that had been begun in 1950. The Institute of
Social Research was the first academic institute in postwar Germany
where sociology could be studied. The reopening of the institute was
marked by a ceremony in which the first movement of Schoenberg’s
F sharp major quartet, op. 10, was performed. Horkheimer gave an
address which placed the emphasis on interdisciplinarity and in which
he stressed that the institute’s particular aim was to combine German
sociology together with its theoretical bias with the empirical methods
of sociological research that had been developed in the USA. In addi-
tion, he argued against the restorative spirit of the age and, quite in
harmony with Adorno, he explained that ‘in all questions, and indeed
in the sociological attitude in general, there is always an intention that
transcends society as it is.... A certain critical stance towards the world
as it is belongs, so to speak, to the profession of the social theorist, and
it is this critical dimension that makes sociologists unpopular. To edu-
cate students... to sustain this tension with existing reality is perhaps
the most important and the ultimate goal of education as we understand
it.’^37 This speech was given in the presence of the rector, Boris Rajewsky,
the mayor, Walter Kolb, and the Hessen minister for education, Ludwig
Metzger, as well as the director of the Office of Public Affairs of the US
High Commission, Shepard Stone. Its most important programmatic
point was the idea which had already figured in his inaugural lecture of
1931, namely the idea of a synthesis of social theory and social research,
an interpretative concept of research that was designed to grasp the
deeper dimensions of the factors that condition social structures.
To elaborate this conception methodologically and to translate it into
research practice was one of the tasks that faced Adorno, who intended
to tackle it by building on his practical experience, especially of his
work on The Authoritarian Personality.

Playing an active role in postwar Germany?

The self lives only through transformation into otherness.^38

At the end of September and the beginning of October 1951, Adorno
was again in the United States for a short, six-week visit made ‘in great