372 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
be active in a trade union, an organization. It simply did not fit into his
image of the world.’^21
At this time, Adorno gave his support to a plan to publish a second
series of books with S. Fischer Verlag, alongside the Frankfurter Beiträge
zur Soziologie. This new series would be devoted to important writings
of American sociologists in German translation. Among them would
be texts by William Graham Sumner, Thorsten Veblen, Robert Lynd,
John Dewey and Robert K. Merton, as well as extracts from the Studies
in Prejudice. But nothing came of this any more than of the idea
of publishing Enlightenment texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, together with commentaries, by writers ‘who were swimming
against the tide’.^22
In the mid-1950s, given the varied nature of the institute’s research
projects, it was very difficult to come by a sufficient number of qualified
sociologists who could also satisfy the theoretical ambitions of the two
directors. The hopes that Adorno and Horkheimer placed in the
appointment of the young Ralf Dahrendorf in July 1954 were corres-
pondingly great. Their intention was that he should take over a survey
of the political attitudes of students as well as their attitudes towards
their studies, their own education and their future careers. This study
had been started as early as 1951–2 and had been further developed
by Helmuth Plessner. Dahrendorf recalled twenty-five years later how
Adorno had welcomed him in the institute.
He gave me a detailed account of the work of the institute, all of
which seemed to me to come within the normal scope of social
research. The institute had initiated a number of surveys of the
attitudes of German students to university and society. Now there
would be a meeting of the Conference of Rectors at which a report
had to be given. This was of great importance for the institute and
he expected me to submit a report on this research (which was
entirely unknown to me at the time) within three weeks.^23Having received the offer of a chair in Saarbrücken, Dahrendorf
resigned his post in the institute in the same year. Adorno wrote about
it to Horkheimer, who was in Chicago at the time as guest professor.
Adorno felt some regret at Dahrendorf’s departure: although he was
‘a very talented man, when it comes down to it, he hates everything
we stand for.’ The fact that ‘our work together failed’ was proof of the
thesis ‘that after us, strictly speaking, there will be nothing.’^24 In his
reply, which he sent to Locarno where Adorno was spending the sum-
mer with his wife in the Hotel Reber au Lac, Horkheimer sought to
cheer him up: ‘everything you tell me about the institute makes it clear
that everything is going well. That is a great comfort to me. We need
shed no tears over Dahrendorf. If he runs after a better offer we will
not have lost anything of great importance. We have not grasped just