504 Notes to pp. 71–74
contains accounts by sixteen contemporary philosophers, including Paul
Barth, Hans Driesch, Paul Natorp, Ernst Troeltsch and Hans Faihing, in
addition to Cornelius himself.
9 Ibid., p. 8.
10 Ibid., p. 9.
11 In an essay on Cornelius, Horkheimer attempts to define what he regards
as a chief merit of his philosophy. It consists in ‘his having demonstrated
that immediate data possess qualities, so-called gestalt qualities... that are
lost... if we examine and pass judgement on individual experiences in
isolation.’ We owe to this insight the radical transformation of psychology
at the hands of Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler, whose work is
based on ‘the view of consciousness centred on the concept of gestalt or
shape’ (M. Horkheimer, ‘Cornelius’, GS, vol. 2, p. 151f.).
12 Hans Cornelius, ‘Leben und Lehre’, p. 17.
13 Ibid., p. 19.
14 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 148f.
15 Salomon-Delatour finally made something of a name for himself as the
editor of the writings of Giambattista Vico and also of Lorenz von Stein.
In addition, he wrote about the early French socialists, such as Saint-
Simon and Proudhon, as well as translating works by René Worms into
German.
16 Adorno’s Prague friend, Hermann Grab, had better luck. He was able to
obtain his doctorate under Salomon-Delatour’s supervision with a study
of Max Weber’s concept of rationality. This was published in 1927 with
the title Beitrag zu dem Problem der philosophischen Grundlegung der
Sozialwissenschaft.
17 Franz Schulz was a literary historian who had had a chair in Frankfurt since
1921–2. He was thought to have liberal views and to be in sympathy with
the circle around Stefan George, but he was hardly an outstanding repres-
entative of the discipline. Nevertheless, scholars of the calibre of Hermann
August Korff and Wilhelm Pfeiffer-Belli were able to qualify for the
Habilitation under his supervision.
18 ‘He wanted to free capitalism from the power of the monopolies and the
embargo on land sales. In the society of free and equal human beings that
he envisaged, with open access for all to the ownership of land, it would
“no more be necessary to sacrifice freedom for the sake of equality, than
to sacrifice equality for the sake of freedom”’ (Ludwig von Friedeburg,
‘Frankfurt – die Stadt und ihre Soziologie’, p. 158). See also Dieter
Haselbach, ‘Franz Oppenheimer’, p. 55ff.
Oppenheimer’s chief work was the System der Soziologie, which appeared
in eight volumes between 1923 and 1935. It was a long-winded account of
the origins and growth of the new discipline, as well as its conceptual
foundations. According to Oppenheimer, sociology was a basic science in
its own right, to be distinguished from both philosophy and economics. Its
object was society regarded as a totality that had its origins in history and
that was constantly changing. The social dynamics that informed it were a
function of the class struggles or power struggles between social groups.
The hegemony of a given group manifested itself in the state and the legal
system.
19 Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, GS, vol. 15, p. 77.