338 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
during the years of the Nazi regime. He declared that the methods of
collecting precise data and statistical evaluation had a useful democratic
thrust for the young republic. Moreover, they were of great practical
value in a country destroyed by war. Surveys would make it possible to
assemble information needed for reconstruction – information, for ex-
ample, about housing needs or about the social situation of the refu-
gees. The task of social research is to ‘raise the harsh facts to the level
of consciousness’ so as to be able to refute dogmatic assumptions about
social realities. He explained how this might work out in practice with
reference to assertions current at the time that farmers were naturally
traditionalist in outlook and tended to love their homeland:
We shall demand compelling proof that these assertions are true.
We shall therefore send interviewers familiar with rural life into
the countryside and ask them to keep on asking questions when
the farmers tell them that they remained on their farms from love
of their homeland and loyalty to the ways of their fathers. We
shall confront conservatism with economic facts and explore
whether technical improvements in agricultural units below a
certain size are unprofitable and hence require such a high level
of investment as to make technical rationalization irrational in a
business of that sort. We shall further inquire whether clinging
to landed property even if it does not yield much profit in strictly
bookkeeping terms may nevertheless be justified for certain farm-
ers who can achieve a greater financial yield because of the cheap
labour costs of their own family than they might achieve in the
town.^42Eager though Adorno was to defend the use of such research meth-
ods, he was equally keen to emphasize that they had only an auxiliary
function in sociology. For sociology could not limit itself to the collec-
tion of data, but had to lead to the formation of theory. At a conference
on problems of method that took place in the institute in March 1952,
he made a plea for social research that would seek out the roots of false
consciousness in people’s heads as well as socio-structural conditioning.
The sociological theory he called for had the purpose of providing
critical knowledge about the objects it investigated. This included criti-
cism of quantitative methods in sociology. Such methods tell us some-
thing about contemporary society: namely about the ‘standardization
of human beings’ in a technical civilization. Looked at in this light,
Adorno defended a particular conception of social research against its
champions by clearly defining both its scope and its limits.^43
In this mission not only was Adorno active as representative of the
research projects of the Frankfurt Institute, but contact was also estab-
lished relatively quickly with the two antipodes of German postwar
sociology, especially René König (1906–92), but also Helmut Schelsky