Thomas Wheatland

The Frankfurt School's Invitation from Columbia University: How the Horkheimer Circle Settled on Morningside Heights

Oddly enough, the Frankfurt Schools relationship to Columbia Uni versity has been somewhat neglected by its many historians. It is not hard to understand why the Horkheimer circle would have desired to settle at Columbia, but it is peculiar that the Frankfurt School would have received an invitation from Columbia. After all, why would Columbia Universitys conservative president, Nicholas Mur ray Butler, and its sociology department extend an invitation to a group of predominantly German-speaking social philosophers with strong links to the Marxian left? Regrettably, the one time that questions were raised about the Horkheimer circles connection with Columbia University, a debate ensued in which the focus shifted away from Morningside Heights, and the only result was a Cold War polemic regarding the motives and political leanings of the universitys Institute for Social Research. By 1980, when this controversy erupted, the Frankfurt School had become a popular topic for academic study within departments of philosophy, history, comparative literature, and German in the United States. It particularly appealed to younger scholars sympa thetic with the then-defunct New Left. Consequently, when Lewis

Contested Legacies Political Theory and the Hitler Era

Seventy years after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, political theory in Europe and America continues to find nourishment in intellectual work generated by this signal event and its horrific consequences. There have been other extraordinary political disruptions and horrors during that time, but attempts to understand them have persistently drawn on the legacy of theory bred by the German debacle. The continuing force of this experience is no doubt due in part to its coincidence with the emergence of newly professionalized social science disciplines in English-speaking countries, especially the US, so that the founding generation was tested by this challenge to the power of their new seriousness about theory, and the seminal writings and present-day classics of these disciplines are charged with this encounter.1 Yet this plausible suggestion does not take the inquiry far, unless it is extended to recognize that the challenge was primarily mediated by the cohort of emigres driven from Germany after 1933. The complexities of these mediations provide the unifying theme of the articles collected in this volume.2 The seven articles are assembled under the heading of ‘Contested Legacies’ to indicate several distinct aspects of the problem. The emigres knew themselves to be the carriers of an important intellectual and cultural legacy, whose value they could expect to be recognized, if only because of the established importance of German scholarship for the older generation of academic intellectuals in their host countries. Yet the valuation was by no means uncontroversial. The emigres themselves arrived as past partisans in vigorous disputes about the meanings and weight to be assigned to such recognized classics as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Max Weber, or to newer developments of their own times. They were not rarely confronted with independent claims by their hosts on one or another of their cultural treasures, made on terms unrelated to the introduction

‘How can we tell it to the children?’ A deliberation at the Institute of Social Research: January 1941

To introduce an archival protocol of a ‘Debate about methods in the social sciences, especially the conception of social science method represented by the Institute’, held on 17 January 1941 at the Institute of Social Research in New York, the article focuses on certain conflicts in substance and terms of discourse among members of the Institute, with special emphasis on Franz Neumann’s distinctive approaches, notwithstanding his professed loyalty to Max Horkheimer’s theory. These are seen to arise not only from Neumann’s assignment as bargaining agent for the Institute and his distinctive relations with American colleagues, but also from their different orientations to the conflicted legacies of Weimar.

“Has Germany a Political Theory? Is Germany a State?” The Foreign Affairs of Nations in the Political Thought of Franz L. Neumann

Some two years before his early accidental death in 1954, Franz L. Neumann characterised himself as a “political scholar”. During his young adult years in Germany, he had been a practising labour lawyer whose writings stayed close to technical questions about that law, as well as to broader issues about the place of labour in the German democratic constitutional scheme. In 1933, Neumann fled to England. His first years in exile were devoted to a second doctoral dissertation on the political theory of law, as well as to political writings on the defeat of the Weimar regime and the rise of National Socialism. After four years in England, Neumann emigrated to the United States, where he was first a research scholar and planner at the Institute for Social Research, then an official engaged in intelligence analysis in American government service, and finally a professor of political studies at Columbia University. Yet, Neumann’s self-identification with the more general class of intellectuals was intended not simply to bypass the need to specify a vocational category but, rather, to refer both to his subject matter and to an obligation. As Neumann uses the designation “political scholar”, he deliberately conflates the senses of the scholar who studies politics and the scholar who is political. Neumann (1961: 13) defines political scholars, first, as “those intellectuals dealing with problems of state and society … who were — or should have been — compelled to deal with the brute facts of politics”; and, second, as intellectuals who “being political … fought — or should have fought — actively for a better, more decent political system”.1