The Frankfurt School in Exile (review)

The writings of the Frankfurt School have had a deep influence on the way in which we think about modernism, and not just in the obvious sense that much of the cultural theory produced over the last forty years has been affected by works such as Benjamin’s Illuminations, Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, or Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. These texts have been formative also because they themselves seem to be readily legible as modernist artifacts, offering both specimen cases and analytics of high cultural life at mid-century. Benjamin’s aphorisms and Adorno’s self-enfolding sentences not only present thoughts, they stage them in a manner not at all unlike that to be found in some of the literary texts that these critics admired: Beckett’s Endgame, say, or Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. The fact that the Frankfurt School theorists were quite literally “thinkers out of time,” who wrote under constant (and in Benjamin’s case fatal) pressure from totalitarian and late-capitalist institutions, has undoubtedly added to their influence.

One of the most important achievements of Thomas Wheatland’s new study of the Frankfurt School’s American exile, then, is to underscore that the Institute for Social Research of the 1930s and 40s was a rather different place than cultural critics weaned primarily on Benjamin and Adorno are liable to imagine it to have been. It was, for starters, a place of rigorous quantitative empirical research, and its ground-breaking investigations into such topics as American family structures or the origins of middle-class anti-Semitism were carried forward by a wide array of social scientists, whose ranks included Friedrich Pollock, Paul Lazarsfeld, Otto Kirchheimer, and Franz Neumann. Theodor Adorno was, at this stage of his career, respected largely as a sociologist of music while Walter Benjamin was already dead, having committed suicide after an unsuccessful attempt to flee from Vichy France. The Institute for Social Research, led by its director Max Horkheimer, was also a place whose everyday operations, like that of any research center or think tank, were deeply affected by the more humdrum aspects of academic existence: by committee meetings and personal power politics, by endowment crises and hiring fiascos. The Frankfurt School, in other words, was an institution like any other, and Wheatland has given it its long-overdue institutional history.

To use the term “long-overdue” in this context may seem inappropriate, because the Frankfurt School has, after all, attracted an overwhelming number of prior studies, of which at least two—Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination (1973) and Rolf Wiggershaus’s The Frankfurt School (1986)—rightly deserve to be called “modern classics.” But these were primarily intellectual histories, written furthermore by scholars who knew many of the actors involved personally and for whom the Institute for Social Research was thus a living legacy. Wheatland’s new book is partly an intellectual history as well, but he focuses on the material and organizational underpinnings that made this intellectual life possible and, working from the perspective of a different generation, approaches the Frankfurt School as a historical archive. His main thesis is that the Institute for Social Research was never quite as cut off from its American surroundings as its later followers believed it to, and that these later followers, furthermore, reinterpreted important components of Frankfurt School thought to suit their own agenda.

Wheatland’s narrative begins with the arrival of the German émigré scholars in the United States, where they would find a first institutional home at Columbia University. The question as to why Horkheimer and his circle chose New York City over any other residence and why, even more importantly, Columbia’s president extended his invitation has never been satisfactorily answered. Some decades ago, the conservative social scholar Lewis Feuer ignited a minor controversy when he claimed that the Frankfurt School had made a concerted effort to infiltrate U.S. academic life, duping gullible liberals and communist fellow travelers at Columbia into sponsoring a...