Change of Scene: Surveying the Ruins 337haste’. He went from New York to Los Angeles, primarily to be present
at the opening of the Hacker Psychiatry Foundation in Beverly Hills.
Frederick Hacker was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with whom
the institute had entered into a working relationship. His own intention
was to transform his psychiatric clinic into an institute for training and
research.^39 He had visited Adorno in Frankfurt in May 1951 and now
offered him a position as director of research. Adorno, however, was
reluctant to commit himself, not least because Horkheimer had been
rector of the university since November 1951 and would therefore have
to be ruled out from active involvement in the Hacker Foundation.
Once again, Adorno had to substitute for Horkheimer and assume the
burden of the journey.
Once in New York, he took the opportunity to visit Leo Löwenthal
and Herbert Marcuse, but more significantly his mother, whom he found
to be ‘barely herself’. He wrote to Thomas Mann about this meeting,
which was to be their last, saying that he was conscious of the ‘definitive
nature’ of her condition. ‘With someone one loves, one is inclined to
regard even their degeneration in old age as something merely provi-
sional, and it can only be hoped that one is not mistaken in this regard.’^40
Needless to say, he knew that such hopes were baseless.
On the return journey, he stopped off in Paris, where he met the
famous art dealer and philosopher of art Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the
writer and ethnologist Michel Leiris, and the conductor, composer and
music scholar René Leibowitz. Scarcely was he back in Germany than
he had to attend a conference on opinion research. Adorno’s intro-
ductory lecture ‘The Present State of Empirical Social Research in
Germany’ was a great success. This was his first attempt to define a crit-
ical approach to social research, and he sharply distinguished his view
of it from that of the German tradition. He declared programmatically:
Sociology is not one of the humanities. The questions it is con-
cerned with are not primarily and essentially those of the con-
scious or even the unconscious nature of human beings of which
society is composed. Its questions are concerned primarily with
the interaction between man and nature and with the objective
forms of societalization that cannot be reduced to mind in the
sense of the inner constitution of men. The task of empirical social
research in Germany is to clarify strictly and without any trans-
figuration the objective nature of what is socially the case, an
objective reality that is largely hidden from individuals and even
the collective consciousness.^41Thus Adorno championed social research as a corrective to a
humanities-based obscurantism in sociology. His primary aim here was
to attack the provincialism of postwar German sociology and to lead it
back to the international standards that it had lost through its isolation