Change of Scene: Surveying the Ruins 339(1912–84). Relations with König, who had emigrated to Switzerland
during the Nazi years, were friendly well into the 1960s. With Schelsky,
on the other hand, who had been a registered member of the Nazi Party
and had acted as adviser on matters of academic policy, relations were
rather cooler and tense despite feelings of distanced respect.
In the early 1950s, Adorno’s intention was if not to try and coordinate
sociological research between the three principal centres of sociological
research in West Germany – Frankfurt, Cologne and Hamburg – then
at least to achieve agreement on questions of future academic training.
In consequence, despite their differing approaches to their subject, he
was in constant contact with René König and planned to bring out
a joint handbook and instruction manual on the methods of empirical
social research.^44 Adorno had hopes of recruiting König as an ally for
his conception of a critical approach to social research that would aim
to be more than administrative research or market research. König him-
self was rooted in the Durkheim tradition; politically, he was noted for
his uncompromising attitude towards Nazis who were attempting, from
1949 at the latest, to resume their academic careers.^45 He was as critical
of the restorative, anti-intellectual tendencies of the Adenauer era as
Adorno and Horkheimer, with whom he also shared the experience of
exile. For this reason among others, König considered moving from
Cologne to Frankfurt so as to strengthen the consolidation and profes-
sionalization of sociology as a discipline. Such an alliance would have
taken place at the expense of Schelsky and his circle, whose influence
was very powerful at the time.^46 The conditions for an alliance between
the former émigrés were not unfavourable. Horkheimer took steps to
organize the transfer of König from Cologne to Frankfurt. For his part,
König approved of The Authoritarian Personality as well as the projects
recently launched by the institute, such as the local-government study
and a further study of the political consciousness of West Germans.
Adorno’s relations with Schelsky developed quite differently. Schelsky
was part of the Leipzig group whose spokesmen were Arnold Gehlen
(1904–76) and Hans Freyer (1887–1969), both of whom sympathized
with the idea of a ‘conservative revolution’ and whom Adorno thought
of as belonging to the ‘counter-revolution’ as late as the 1950s.^47 Schelsky
had been teaching since 1949 at the Hamburg Akademie für Gemein-
wirtschaft, where he attempted to give the emerging discipline of
postwar sociology the stamp of a strictly anti-Marxist science of inter-
pretation. Although his politically conservative conception of sociology
was evidently concerned to contribute to the stabilization of social con-
sciousness in West Germany as a consciousness beyond class society,^48
Adorno tried to enlist the support of this former National Socialist.
Neither Adorno nor Horkheimer shrank from cultivating professional
and to some extent even personal relations with former Nazis. The
sociologist Heinz Mauss, during the time he was attached to the insti-
tute, announced his intention of publishing a critique of Schelsky and