568 Notes to pp. 335–339
opportunities for genuine communication and interaction.’ He pointed to
the affinities between his way of thinking and the writings of Horkheimer
and Adorno. Furthermore, he would welcome it if Adorno were to succeed
to his chair in Frankfurt. ‘I would gladly offer to use what influence
I have’ (Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, GS, vol. 18, p. 123). In 1950 Gadamer
had taken part in a radio broadcast to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary
of Nietzsche’s death. Habermas disputes the assertion that Gadamer
retained his respect for the philosophy of Horkheimer and Adorno through-
out his long life despite their disagreements. It is true that he thought well
of Horkheimer’s Critique of Instrumental Reason, but he did not regard
Adorno as a professional philosopher. Gadamer used his position in
Heidelberg to entice talented thinkers away from Frankfurt (conversation
of the present author with Jürgen Habermas in December 2001). Cf. Jean
Grondin, Hans-Georg Gadamer: Eine Biographie.
33 Horkheimer to Adorno, 9 November 1949, Horkheimer–Pollock Archive,
Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek, Frankfurt am Main.
34 This emerges from a preliminary decision about reparations on the part of
the finance committee of the university. Archive of the Dean of the Arts
Faculty of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University.
35 Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, GS, vol. 18, p. 94.
36 Ibid., p. 124.
37 Institute of Social Research, Ein Bericht über die Feier seiner
Wiedereröffnung, seiner Geschichte und seiner Arbeiten, p. 12.
38 Adorno, ‘Notes on Kafka’, Prisms, p. 262.
39 Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, GS, vol. 18, pp. 120f. and 193ff. In his letter of
2 March 1951, Horkheimer set out a detailed plan for the joint research
programme.
40 Adorno and Mann, Briefwechsel, p. 104.
41 Adorno, ‘Zur gegenwärtigen Stellung der empirischen Sozialforschung’,
GS, vol. 8, p. 481f.
42 Ibid., p. 482.
43 Adorno’s view of the value of empirical methods changed along with
his experience of the field. As a researcher on the radio research project
he had retained his scepticism, whereas he came to accept the benefits
of both qualitative and quantitative methods during his work on The
Authoritarian Personality. For this reason he came to see himself in
postwar Germany as the representative of an approach to social research
that in many respects anticipated the ‘grounded theory’ of Anselm L.
Strauss. This aims at the production of a theory without being tied
to particular types of data. (Cf. Anselm L. Strauss, Grundlagen qualitativer
Sozialforschung, p. 29f.) Where standard empirical methods such as ques-
tionnaires are treated as general panaceas, Adorno criticized the identif-
ication of sociology with the discovery of facts, the ‘hypostatization’ of the
empirical, analytical model in sociology, i.e., the dissolving of sociological
problems into hypotheses, isolated variables and measurements. See
Adorno, ‘Teamwork in der Sozialforschung’, GS, vol. 8, p. 494.
44 See König, Briefwechsel, vol. 1, p. 423. Not until the 1960s and the
so-called Positivist Dispute did the differences in approach between the
schools or paradigms emerge more clearly. Thus König distinguished
between sociology which was supposed to concentrate on the empirical