Gaining Recognition for Critical Theory 369a career in Frankfurt, you had only to be a Jew and a protégé of
Horkheimer. Horkheimer was present at the meeting. He accused Ritter
of anti-Semitism and left the room, slamming the door. He then applied
to the ministry in Wiesbaden for early retirement. Following this out-
burst, the faculty passed a resolution expressing its regrets that such an
incident could take place, and ‘that any utterances against Jewry and
specifically against our Jewish colleagues could occur in our meetings.
We condemn this statement as incompatible with the spirit that has
guided and informed our faculty and university, and repudiate it as
a stain on our academic community.’^14 Ritter was called upon by the
faculty to apologize formally, and Horkheimer was asked not to send
off his application for retirement, since the faculty ‘placed decisive value
on his continued activity in our faculty... towards the reconstruction of
which Mr Horkheimer has devoted a major part of his life’s work.’^15 For
Adorno himself, the whole affair was gravely embarrassing. He was
very conscious of the problematic nature of the reparations regulations
in the universities. He was very keen to obtain an appointment to a
chair in his home university independently of the third set of amend-
ments to the Law for Reparations for National Socialist Injustice, an
appointment based purely on his qualifications and his actual functions
in the disciplines of philosophy and sociology.
As things turned out, Horkheimer’s early retirement did go through
in 1958 and Adorno took over the direction of the institute completely.
This meant a significant strengthening of his position despite the debate
that had been triggered by the uproar over his chair. As institute direc-
tor his duties increased considerably and occupied most of his time. His
plan to revive the old journal proved unviable, but ever since his return
he had worked on the idea of publishing a book series, the Frankfurter
Beiträge zur Soziologie. The first volume was the collection of essays
entitled Sociologica (1955), which was dedicated to Horkheimer on his
sixtieth birthday. Then came the Gruppenexperiment, edited by Pollock.
A further volume was the study of work satisfaction among the blue-
collar and white-collar workers in Mannesmann; this appeared with
the title Betriebsklima. Volume 4 of what was to become a celebrated
series of texts was edited by Adorno and Walter Dirks. This was the
Soziologische Exkurse. This textbook-like anthology was intended as
an introduction to the fundamental concepts of ‘sociology’, ‘society’, the
‘individual’, the ‘group’, the ‘family’, etc. At the same time, the book
was designed to build a bridge to empirical social research and its meth-
ods, whose applications were explained in the fields of research on
prejudice, sociology of the community, and research on ideology. In his
teaching Adorno constantly resisted the canonization of the twelve
thematic fields of sociology contained in the book and urged that they
should not be regarded as the be-all and end-all of sociology. Students
duly noted his efforts to play down the Exkurse, but the chapters in this
slim volume soon came to be regarded as, if not a sufficient foundation