Systems Theory versus Critical Theory by Giorgio Bertini

Worlds Come Apart: Systems Theory versus Critical Theory. Drama in the History of Sociology in the Twentieth Century

UTA G ERHARDT

This article places an episode in the history of sociological theory into intellectual history in the twentieth century. The perspective is chronological as well as contextual. The themes are two theoretical approaches, both embedded in both American and German history, Parsonian Systems Theory and “Frankfurt School” Critical Theory. The chronology shown spanned mainly from the 1940s to the 1960s. The context of the two theories is a period that is crucial in twentieth century history. The protagonists of the two approaches were, in the 1940s, Americans and Germans exiled in the United States. In the 1950s, both approaches were affected by McCarthyism in different ways. The 1960s, however, were the culmination. The dynamics of the two approaches led into a schism which came into the open on the occasion of the 1964 German Sociology Conference in Heidelberg celebrating Max Weber. The article shows the stages in the evolution of the schism, emulating three acts in a drama. The final split was over whether Weber or Marx should be the classic whose oeuvre was to influence sociological thinking today. My aim is to exemplify how these two authoritative approaches in sociological theory, far from escaping the vagaries and vicissitudes of their times, were embedded in twentieth-century history.

The history of sociology rarely has been pictured as history. If history means time-related, chronologically, and contextually situated dynamics in accomplishments, sociology in many textbooks of social theory appears strangely ahistorical. The history of sociology, however, deserves to be taken seriously as dynamics. The earliest attempt at a history of sociological thought, Pitirim Sorokin’s Contemporary Sociological Theories (1928), took the various schools of thinking as separate, apparently unrelated approaches. In enumerative fashion, he placed social Darwinism beside the work of, among others, Thorstein Veblen and Max Weber. Each theory was treated as a universe of its own. Similarly ahistorical, to name two textbooks among many, were Robert Bierstedt’s American Sociological Theory (1981) and Dirk Kaesler’s Klassiker der soziologischen Theorie (1999). Uta Gerhardt is professor of Sociology, Institut für Soziologie, University of Heidelberg, Sandasse 7/9, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany.

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In contradistinction, Roscoe Hinkle in Developments in American Sociological Theory, 1915–1950 (1994) proceeded chronologically when he recognized interactions between different thinkers. However, he failed to link sociological developments with events or eras in American history. In the three and a half decades of the twentieth century which he analyzed, Hinkle took notice of the theories but did not recognize the history of the United States. Together with the predecessor book on the time period between 1885–1915 (Hinkle and Hinkle 1954), his book covered the period in the history of the U.S. of ascendancy from the land of immigration to world power but made nothing of this seminal change. Analyzing sociological theory during this time period, he realized that the various strands of thinking partly influenced each other, and partly existed side by side. He saw them wax and wane over time but failed to account for their origin or reception in the context of the changes in society during this all-important period of American history. Interestingly, a book on the history of survey research successfully tackled its topic under both aspects. Jean M. Converse, in History of Survey Research (1987), reconstructed chronological developments both in the oeuvres of the main protagonists and the achievements of survey research. At the same time, she managed to invoke venues of United States history as they facilitated the development of survey methodology in American sociology. The link between social theory and history, I venture, is two-pronged. For one, social thought, even so-called classic theory, is chronological. Accordingly, since not every thought in a theory would be implied in its beginnings, works that were written at a later date cannot serve as references for earlier thought. A sequence of works evolves, each a fresh effort that frequently responds to contemporary writings of other authors, while the sum total of a life’s work eventually would form an oeuvre. To give an example, Robert Merton’s distinction between latent and manifest functions, which was devised in the 1940s, answered the quasi-biological functionalism of British anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. But it should not be seen as undergirding Merton’s essay of the 1930s analyzing unanticipated consequences of purposive actions. Chronology suggests a time sequence of works when the production of these works frequently involves interaction between contemporaries. The other link between social theory and history is contextual. Embeddedness in the world of an era places a thought in the society of the times when it was originally elaborated. To give an example, Émile Durkheim’s work in the 1890s witnessed a decade of upsurge of anti-Semitism in the Dreyfus Affair, as grave tensions split French society. In response, Durkheim analyzed “l’organization des sociétés supérieures” 1 but also suicide rates in France and elsewhere, when he introduced the conception of anomie. Contextuality means that a theoretical concept may bear witness to a particular historical setting when the respective societal phenomena became visibly obvious. Max Weber was familiar with the double grounding of social theory in history. He also realized that the chronological cum contextual historicity of social thought held a danger of involuntary ahistoricity. In his classic “‘Objectivity’ in Social-Science and Social-Policy Knowledge,” he had this to say: One thing is absolutely certain: the senselessness of the idea which occasionally dominates even historians of our discipline, that it could be the aim, even a distant one, of cultural

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sciences to form a closed system of concepts in which reality would be summarized as some in whatever sense final version and from which in turn it could then be deduced. (Weber 1904/1968: 184)2

Weber’s warning might help safeguard against facile pseudo-historical endeavors. The history of sociology has often been misused to promote cultural bigotry. For instance, Fritz Ringer in The Decline of the German Mandarins, first published in the 1960s and still a bestseller in the 1990s, denounced German social science of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for arrogant nationalism that presumably foreshadowed Nazism. Likewise, Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind, first published in the 1980s and still recognized today, denounced value relativism and irrationalism that presumably dominated the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, and Sigmund Freud. These European influences, Bloom charged, were the sources for nihilism in contemporary American culture prevailing since the 1960s. Both books warned of dangers of the heritage of classic social theory. Ringer as well as Bloom saw noxious influences from classic European thought, on anti-democratic tendencies in the Germany of yesteryear, or present-day American world views. In their zest to rid American contemporary thinking from false roots, both Ringer and Bloom promoted an ahistorical conception of history. They failed to conceptualize the various theoretical approaches as chronological achievements, and they disregarded or denounced embeddedness of social theory in the dynamics of the society of the day. Against such inept uses, the history of social theory deserved better. It can achieve more than merely distinguish between right and wrong pre-judged from a standpoint of apparently ethnocentric moralism. This paper attempts to demonstrate what an historical approach should entail. My topic is an episode in the history of social theory in the twentieth century, namely, the schism between Talcott Parsons’s Systems Theory, on the one hand, and the “Frankfurt School” Critical Theory, on the other. The schism, as I try to show, emerged over a period of twenty years. One background was American history reaching from World War II in the 1940s, and McCarthyism in the 1950s, to the Kennedy era and Vietnam War in the 1960s. During the twenty years from the middle 1940s to the middle 1960s, sociology developed from research investigating, among other topics related to World War II, antiSemitism, to systems theory in the 1950s as an all-encompassing endeavor, and establishing the classic stature of the theory of Max Weber in the 1960s as authoritative until today. The other background was German history and sociology. History there reached from National Socialist rule, to democratic reconstruction in the 1950s, and a period of unrest in the 1960s ushering in thirteen years of stable Social Democratic government. Sociology had been forced into exile after 1933 but returned under American military government in the late 1940s. In the 1950s, German social scientists, among them the sociologists of the “Frankfurt School” in the reopened Institute of Social Research, warned against the return of conservatism and nationalism in any shape or color, even rejecting social systems theory in this vein. In the 1960s, under the impact of student protest challenging the universities, German sociologists frequently reverted to Marxism even though this (through Critical Theory) involved the rejection of Weberian thought.

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My argument follows the double logic of acknowledging chronology in theoretical approaches as they witness interaction between contemporary thinkers, on the one hand, and embeddedness of topics and concerns of sociology in the contexts of the American and West German societies in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, on the other. In an introductory note, I characterize Parsons and the “Frankfurt School” through their work in the 1930s and early period of World War II. Part I deals with analysis of anti-Semitism, particularly in the closing days of the war and immediate postwar period. I venture that the two diverse, even antagonistic, approaches tackled similar themes during the years when the U.S. provided a haven of tolerance for exiled scholars from Europe. Part II deals with the reception of Parsons’s systems theory on the part of the theorists of the “Frankfurt School,” notably Theodor W. Adorno, after their return to Germany. Subsequent to the reestablishment of the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, reacting to what he perceived as a threat denoting McCarthyism, Adorno perceived pro-totalitarian tendencies in American social theory and society. Eventually, Part III focuses on efforts of a small group of Americans, among them Parsons, to rescue Weber’s theory from the criticism waged against it by the theorists of the “Frankfurt School.” On the occasion of the 1964 German Sociology Conference in Heidelberg celebrating Weber’s one hundredth birthday, Parsons, together with other Americans, defended Weber against German “forgetful countrymen”—as a contemporary comment would characterize the theorists of the “Frankfurt School.” The latter event, no doubt, capped estrangement between the two theoretical approaches. The schism which broke open on the occasion of the Heidelberg Sociology Conference also marked the beginning of worldwide recognition of Weber’s theory as classic. The three parts revive the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. They epitomize the history of social theory through three decades in dramatic episodes. The relationship between Parsonian Systems Theory and the “Frankfurt School” Critical Theory witnessed how German social philosophy turned against American systems theory. In the course of some twenty years, the schism developed rendering the two approaches irreconcilable until today. My reconstruction shows how the schism emerged between the 1940s and 1960s: In the 1940s, when both Parsons and the “Frankfurt School” scholars lived in the United States, the contemporary dream of One World 3 would linger in their minds despite their different views concerning the roots of and remedies for anti-Semitism. In the 1960s, however, all ties had been severed. Not only would these protagonists of diverse theoretical paradigms live on different continents, but their intellectual worlds had come apart: Parsons embraced Weber while the “Frankfurt School” opted for Marx. In order to picture the three scenarios in sufficient detail, my essay draws on published as well as unpublished materials.4 Apart from well-known writings, I use archival sources such as letters, draft papers, notes, and memoirs, additional to contemporary press material as it mirrored the controversy. Due to such use of archival sources, my essay goes beyond the usual report of noteworthy facts in the history of our discipline and aims to reconstruct a veritable drama in twentieth-century sociology.

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Introductory Note: Two Approaches Confronting German Fascism Parsons encountered the sociology of Max Weber as an exchange student in Heidelberg, in 1925–1926. Over fifty years later, in a conference paper published posthumously, reviewing the impact of Weber on his intellectual biography, he recalled how fascinated he had been with Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: I don’t know how surprising it will be for others…that this reading had an immediate and powerful impact on me. It gripped my intense interest immediately and I read it straight through—that is, subject to the limits of library hours, since I did not yet own a copy—as if it were a detective story. (Parsons 1980, 39)

In the 1930s, as a young scholar at Harvard, he analyzed interactions between economics and social theory, arguing that the former ought to take account of the latter (Camic 1991). From 1933 onward, he came to work on his first major opus, The Structure of Social Action, which was published at the end of 1937. The book, which originally was to delineate an empirical theory of modern society, proposed a two-pronged model for the structure of systems of social action. The opposed structure types were anomie and integration, respectively. The former accounted for coercive totalitarianism as in Nazi Germany, and the latter liberal democracy in the Anglo-Saxon nations (Gerhardt 1999). Parsons explicated the two-pronged structure of society using a Weberiantype theory of action. He reconstructed four relevant theoretical approaches elaborated by “European writers,” the most important of whom was Max Weber. Parsons adapted Weber’s idea of charismatic authority, based on religious-type indoctrination and coercion, to explain anomie—the “war of all against all”— epitomizing National Socialism. Furthermore, he took Weber’s idea of rationallegal authority, based on reciprocal meaning construction between actors, to characterize modern democracy. This major work in the 1930s preceded a series of analytical pieces on Fascism and related topics which he wrote prior to The Social System (Alexander 1983, Gerhardt 1993a). One seminal text was “Max Weber and the Contemporary Political Crisis,” published early in 1942 (Parsons 1942a), and another was “Some Sociological Aspects of Fascist Movements,” first presented as a Presidential Address to the Eastern Sociological Society shortly thereafter (Parsons 1942b). The Frankfurt Institute of Social Research was established in 1923 as a venue for research into problems of modern capitalism in the Weimar Republic. In 1933, when the Nazis closed the Institute (then directed by social philosopher Max Horkheimer), a major research program was nearing completion. It investigated societal and psychological roots of fascism-prone social-personality structure which lay in the German authoritarian family. A Marxist critique of capitalism, as well as Freudian psychoanalysis, entered into the analytic approach. In Studien über Autorität und Familie (Horkheimer et al., 1936), empirical analyses dealt with unemployment, juvenile delinquency, and similarly mundane social problems, and three introductory essays attempted a theory of society. They criticized modern fascism as an offshoot of “late” (i.e., big-industry) capi-

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talism. The book was published, in two volumes, during the period of its authors’ exile from Germany. From 1935 onward, Horkheimer and his collaborators Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and other members of the exiled Frankfurt Institute, soon also Adorno, established themselves in the International Institute of Social Research at Columbia University (Jay 1973, Wiggershaus 1986). Their main analytical aim was to understand National Socialism as a developed capitalist society. Nazi antiSemitism and imperialism, forces of destruction of humanism, seemed—from their Marxian cum Freudian conceptual perspective—to belong to modern “late” capitalism. From this vantage point, liberalism was but a thin veil camouflaging capitalist exploitation, a veil that had been recently cast off as Germany revealed the true face of capitalism. Horkheimer’s articles written in exile, “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937) and “The Jews and Europe” (1939), exemplified this interest in explicating how capitalism destroyed humanism. In the early 1940s, Horkheimer and Adorno moved to Los Angeles where they lived in relative seclusion for four years as they wrote their major work, Dialectics of Enlightenment (1947). Among other things, this book warned against modern popular culture, which was characterized as a “culture industry.” The latter, together with other quasi-liberal features of modernity, presumably was but an ostentatious means of repression, not only in Nazi Germany but also in American society. Throughout their exile, the “Frankfurt School” scholars were concerned with the dangers in American society, insofar as these could be understood by analyzing German society. One pertinent topic, in this vein, was anti-Semitism. As exiles living in California, the “Frankfurt School“ scholars kept close ties with the American Jewish Committee in New York City and also with Columbia University where Horkheimer delivered a lecture series in the summer of 1944, on “Cultural Aspects of Fascism.” Part I: Anti-Semitism—Social Structure versus Social Personality The Conference on Research in the Field of Anti-Semitism, the first of two conferences sponsored by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in 1944, took place in New York City on May 20–21, 1944. Listed sponsors were psychologists Gordon Allport and Kurt Lewin, among many others. The prospectus outlined: The contents of the Conference are (sic) planned to discuss possibilities of research, and methodology for research on 1) the extent and special nature of active anti-Semitism in America, 2) measures that are being applied to combating it, 3) possible tests of the effectiveness of the measures, including proposals for experimental and demonstration activities within observable limits of time and space.5

The second day was devoted to research. The program distinguished between “Available Studies” discussed in the morning session, and “Proposed Studies” in the afternoon. The program for the session “Available Studies” to detail “extent, nature, and growth of anti-Semitism” referred to the Institute of

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Social Research, announcing in an NB note that a report on the Institute’s previous research was being made available to participants.6 Despite such explicit mention, it is uncertain whether Horkheimer and Adorno actually attended the conference. Their work formed a major concern for the AJC, and their names appeared on the official list of participants, although it seems that they were not present in New York when Parsons was.7 Parsons’s contributions to the discussions at the conference were substantial enough to be honored by John Slawson, then Executive Vice President of AJC in a letter he wrote to Parsons on May 31, 1944: Your contribution was extremely helpful. The conclusions that can be drawn from the discussions are far-reaching. We are extremely grateful to you for your efforts and interest.8

Parsons had ventured his understanding of anti-Semitism on the occasion of another conference whose first out of three meetings had taken place six weeks previously, in early April 1944. On the occasion of the Conference on Germany After the War sponsored by the War Department, dealing with postwar policy for Germany, he had argued that changes in the German institutional structure were necessary in order to overcome anti-Semitism as well as militarism and anti-modernity there. He proposed that “institutional control” of the German economy by American military government would help to convert Germany into a democratic society in the long run (Parsons 1945a). The explanation of anti-Semitism involved in this was that coercive forces in the social structure unleashing aggressiveness had made Germany and Japan belligerent nations provoking the Second World War (Parsons 1942c). The idea was that mass aggressiveness resulted from the coercive system of social control. Through ideology in accordance with government politics, such aggressiveness could be directed at designated scapegoat populations or wartime enemies. In authoritarian régimes, Parsons held, anti-Semitism served the function of displacement of aggressive attitudes that resulted from system-produced coercion, upon wilfully chosen targets for racial, religious, or political prejudice (Parsons 1945b). It appears that Parsons’s ideas remained unheard in the AJC, however. Collaboration between Slawson and Parsons did not develop subsequent to the Conference of May 1944. In December of that year, he acknowledged to Slawson that he had received a “summary of the Conference on Anti-Semitism.”9 He remarked in his letter, referring to what had gone on in the seven months since, “I shall be greatly interested to hear what specific lines of research have come out of the Conference.” Evidently, in December 1944, research was already under way whose plans derived from other discussions than those at the Conference in May. A second conference which was also sponsored by the AJC, had discussed the rationale for the research on anti-Semitism to which Parsons referred at the end of the year. The second conference on anti-Semitism was organized by the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society and took place on June 17–18, 1944. It united three groups of researchers embracing a psychological understanding of the topic. One group were psychoanalysts whose work was based on Freud’s original ideas; they were Otto Fenichel, who had just published a major study on neuroses, and Ernst Simmel, who adapted Freud’s thought to account for mass psychopathology. The second group were the scholars of the “Frankfurt

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School” whose Freudian orientation spurred their notion of anti-Semitic character structure. And the third group were psychologists from the University of California Berkeley Public Opinion Research Center who had already done empirical research; they were Else Frenkel-Brunswik and R. Nevitt Sanford, who had applied attitude measurement to an authoritarian-type personality structure (Maslow 1943, Sanford and Frenckel-Brunswik 1945). The conference proceedings appeared in 1946, under the title of AntiSemitism—a Social Disease (Simmel 1946). Horkheimer’s paper, originally entitled “The Psychoanalytic Approach to Anti-Semitism,” was published under the title “Sociological Background of the Psychoanalytic Approach.” Horkheimer explicated six types of anti-Semites. The most dangerous was “the up-to-date, streamlined fascist anti-Semite” (Horkheimer 1946, 5). He proposed that character structure of this type could account for the slogan-prone stereotyped attitude of the anti-Semite. He focused on anti-Semites’ tendency to stereotype when he suggested that anti-Semites, as they displaced their own rigidity on to “the” Jew, resembled a veritable race: The attacks have been so stereotyped, they have always followed the same pattern so closely that one is tempted to say that though the Jews, who have changed much in the course of history, are certainly no race, the anti-Semites in a way are a race, because they always use the same slogans, display the same attitudes, indeed almost look alike. This idea sounds like a joke, but is really not so much of a joke. Some preliminary psychological studies reveal that the character structures of anti-Semites are much more alike than the character structures of Jews. (Horkheimer 1946, 6)

Adorno, in his contribution entitled “Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda,” analyzed some of the material from public speeches collected mainly by another sociologist of the Institute of Social Research, Leo Lowenthal. Adorno praised the usefulness of psychoanalysis in “deciphering of the more or less rigid ritual performed in each and every fascist address” (Adorno 1946, 133), a ritual which he characterized using five propositions. Among them, the fifth proposition was that the imagery of blood and crime, waged against the Jew by the anti-Semite, mirrored the anti-Semite’s own unconscious lust for murder.1 0 Adorno ventured: The performance of the ritual as such functions to a very large extent as the ultimate content of fascist propaganda....If the assumption is correct that the overwhelming majority of accusations and atrocity stories with which the fascist propaganda speeches abound, are projections of the wishes of the orators and their followers, the whole symbolic act of revelation celebrated in each propaganda speech expresses, however much concealed, the sacramental killing of the chosen foe. At the hub of the fascist, anti-Semitic propaganda ritual is the desire for ritual murder. (Adorno 1946, 136)

Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford in their paper came closest to the research soon to be funded by the AJC as they reported on studies anticipating the “broader research project on social discrimination” (Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford 1946, 96). The new approach was, as Adorno would explain in a letter to Horkheimer in October 1944, that indirect measures were used to ascertain anti-Semitic and other latently fascist attitudes as they formed the authoritarian personality. Adorno explained to Horkheimer, four months after the San Francisco Conference:

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The idea is to identify potential and actual anti-Semites solely through indirect indices....Especially important in the investigation is the relationship between real psychological tendency and rationalization. I hypothesize that they mostly contradict each other, e.g. that a tendency toward “personalization” on the surface matches stereotypes on a deeper level, strong emphasis on masculinity repressed homosexuality, etc. Psychologically this is vieux jeu, but it would be interesting to see it confirmed quantitatively....Since our previous questionnaire will be shortened drastically, there will be room for a series of new questions. 1 1

The San Francisco Conference became the starting point for an ambitious research program into the history and dynamics of anti-Semitism in particular and fascism in general, analyzing Germany but also the United States. All empirical data were gathered from American respondents or taken from material dealing mainly with politics in the United States, but the analysis pertained predominantly to Germany, as the epitome of prejudice facilitating mass crime. Among the five research monographs in “Studies in Prejudice” funded by the AJC, The Authoritarian Personality became a memorable achievement in the history of sociology in the twentieth century (Ackerman and Jahoda 1950, Adorno et al. 1950, Bettelheim and Janowitz 1950, Lowenthal and Guterman 1950, Massing 1950). As Parsons withdrew from the AJC when “Studies in Prejudice” were under way, he left the field of study of anti-Semitism to the “Frankfurt School” and their American collaborators. However, relationships between Parsons and his exiled colleagues did not cease completely. In 1947, he sent Horkheimer an offprint of his article on the sources of aggressiveness in Western industrial societies (Parsons 1947). The article stressed Parsons’s thesis that forces in the social structure—especially coercion and insecurity—were the source for aggressiveness such as anti-Semitism. Horkheimer kept the offprint in a file together with other work of the postwar period on problems of war, peace, and nationalism.12 Although the two sociological approaches went their separate ways, professional relationships between Parsons and the “Frankfurt School” scholars continued. Together with, to name but a few, Gordon Allport, Hadley Cantril, Everett C. Hughes, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Robert Merton, Parsons signed a “Proposal for the (R)eopening of the Institute of Social Research at the University of Francfort on Main.” The proposal recommended reestablishment of the Frankfurt Institute, emphasizing: The function of the revived Francfort branch would be twofold: the planning and conduct of research projects and, perhaps more significant, the instruction of a new generation of German students in modern developments in the social sciences.1 3

A letter of thanks to Parsons and the other American supporters of the reestablishment of the Institute at Frankfurt University, signed by Horkheimer’s lifelong collaborator, Frederick Pollock, stressed what progress already had been made toward opening the Institute at the end of 1949.1 4 Horkheimer, in 1951, invited Parsons to the official reopening. In a typed addendum to the printed official invitation, he expressed feelings of esteem for Parsons. Horkheimer who wrote in English, promised that Parsons’s sociology would “form an important part in the training of our students” who were to study at the Frankfurt Institute:

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It gives me pleasure to invite you, both formally and informally, to attend the dedication of the new home of the Institute of Social Research....The invitation goes not only for November 14 th but for any time you find yourself in Frankfurt. You will see that our work forms an important part in the training of our students and I feel almost certain that you’ll like the atmosphere in this Institute which is meant to constitute a link between social science in America and Europe.1 5

To summarize: During the war and immediate postwar period, anti-Semitism was a theme both for Parsonian and Critical Theory. Parsons took a sociological standpoint. He analyzed anti-Semitism as expression of aggressiveness that resulted from structural tensions in anomie-type coercive societies, and tensions in the pluralist lifeworlds in integration-type, Western democratic societies. In contradistinction, Horkheimer and Adorno took a psychoanalytically-grounded standpoint. The “Frankfurt School” scholars analyzed anti-Semitism as a trait in the personality structure, typical of “late” capitalism. They diagnosed atavistic tendencies of the Id, displaced upon alleged enemies, that governed the attitudes of the authoritarian-type personality, the ominous follower of fascist régimes. The “Frankfurt School” theory underlay the AJC-funded research program. At the beginning of the AJC program stood two conferences. One was a venue for discussion between leading American social scientists concerned with prejudice. To this conference which took place in New York in May 1944, Parsons contributed together with a long list of well-known scholars. The “Frankfurt School” sociologists, obviously, did not attend the conference when their work was among “Available Studies” introduced there. Only three weeks later, however, they attended another conference also organized by the AJC. This time, no American sociologists or social psychologists were invited who had contributed to the earlier conference. Instead, psychoanalysts and Critical Theory scholars, together with researchers from the Berkeley Public Opinion Research Center, discussed ideas that became the program for “Studies in Prejudice.” Parsons and the other Americans involved in the May Conference, apparently did not hinder this program and withdrew from the scene subsequently. If they were aware of the intentions of the German exiles, they may have felt that the latter ought to be given a chance to prove their conjectures combining criticism of capitalism with psychoanalysis. Parsons wrote to Slawson, in December 1944, “I shall be greatly interested to hear what lines of research have come out of the Conference,” leaving unsaid that he referred not to the conference which he had attended but the one in June, to which no American sociologist had been invited. When the “Frankfurt School” scholars returned to Frankfurt under the American military government, Parsons and other American sociologists helped with a letter of recommendation. Horkheimer acknowledged such collegial help. Adorno apparently did not show appreciation of the support given by Parsons, Allport, Lazarsfeld, Merton, and other Americans. Part II: Sociology and Psychology—American versus German In 1951, the same year that the Institute of Social Research officially reopened in Frankfurt, Parsons published his seminal work, The Social System. The book drew mostly critical reviews but became a bestseller almost immedi-

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ately. Parsons conceptualized society with the two-pronged model of anomie versus integration, in a frame of reference of Weberian action theory. He proposed to analyze empirical societies with a fourfold scheme combining two of five “pattern variables” that structured action and value orientations, namely universalism in opposition to particularism, and achievement verses ascription. The empirical society epitomizing anomie-type structure was National Socialism (combining value orientations of universalism and ascription), and integration-type Anglo-Saxon democracy (combining universalism and achievement, respectively). From the immediate postwar years onward, Parsons occupied himself with Freudian psychoanalysis. He underwent psychoanalysis himself in 1946, when his analyst, Grete Bibring, a former student of Freud’s, was practicing in Boston. The American Psychoanalytic Association invited him to give a paper at their annual meeting in Washington, D.C. in 1948, to be published in Psychoanalytic Quarterly (Parsons 1950). In the early 1950s, he tackled topics related to psychoanalytic theory as well as therapy (Parsons 1952, Parsons and Fox 1952, Parsons 1953, 1954). Systems theory and psychoanalytic insights merged as he elaborated his theory of action which he revised and refined several times, until the middle 1950s (Parsons and Shils 1951, Parsons et al. 1953, Parsons and Bales 1955). This work reconciled sociology and psychology. Parsons differentiated between four levels of systems, namely a cultural and a social systems level, defining interpersonal realms, and a psychological and organic systems level, defining the scope of the person. The various systems concretized on an analytical level social as distinct from psychological forces when he analyzed value-orientation, normative, and individual dimensions of interaction. Adorno, shortly after his return to Frankfurt, published a collection of aphorisms which he had dedicated to Horkheimer on the occasion of the latter’s fiftieth birthday in 1945 (Adorno 1951). The book, entitled Minima Moralia, became a success until today. Adorno characterized the situation of the beleaguered individual in the society of “late” capitalism. Little scope was left for non-conformity in the world of dominant bureaucratization, he felt. The only glimpse of hope, pointing toward a humanized world, lay in aesthetics. To be sure, the latter included philosophical reflection in the tradition of classical, e.g., Hegelian, social philosophy. Adorno’s sociology in the early 1950s included his plea for public opinion research in the service of liberal democracy (Adorno 1952a). In this endeavor, he took no notice of American sociological theory as he praised the democratic world view of public opinion research practiced in the United States. Furthermore, in the first half of the 1950s, he prepared for publication a number of papers—most of which he had written in German during exile. Now, after his return to Germany, he assembled these papers in a collection of essays entitled Prismen (Adorno 1955a). Among them were a piece on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, one criticizing as inadequate Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, and one castigating cultural pessimism deemed “Kulturkritik” among postwar German intellectuals—the latter essay being one of the few written then recently. In the early 1950s, by and large, Parsons at Harvard and Horkheimer and Adorno at Frankfurt University went about their work in separate worlds. Par-

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sons refined systems theory and action theory, incorporating psychoanalysis into sociology when he analyzed personality as psychological system. Horkheimer and Adorno combined philosophical and psychoanalytic theories in their attempt to understand modern man caught in the fetters of “late” capitalism. Their textbook-like collection of analytic perspectives on contemporary social problems, entitled Soziologische Exkurse (Horkheimer and Adorno 1956), had chapters on prejudice, the family, the individual, culture and civilization, and sociology and empirical social research, among others. Without apparent forewarning, Adorno attacked Parsons vigorously in his contribution to the festschrift celebrating the sixtieth birthday of Horkheimer. The essay entitled “On the Relationship Between Sociology and Psychology” turned against Parsons, as Adorno favored psychology over sociology. He approached Parsons’s work as the epitome of sociology and Freudian psychoanalysis psychology, redesigning the relationship between sociology and psychology (Adorno 1955b).1 6 Adorno’s criticism against Parsons followed three lines. The first charge was that Parsons’s vision of integrated society surreptitiously emulated the utopia first pictured in Huxley’s novel published in 1932. Under the subheading of “The Price of Conceptual Harmony,” Adorno ventured: According to Parsons, the integration of society, which he tacitly assumed to be in general a good thing, can be said to have succeeded when its functional needs—as an objective social moment—coincide with the schemata of the “average superego.” This dove-tailing of the individual and the social system is elevated to the status of a norm without any investigation of the place both these ‘measures’ occupy in the overall social process and, above all, of the origin of the ‘average superego’ and its claim to normative validity; it can also be the normative expression of bad, repressive conditions. Parsons has a price to pay for his conceptual harmony: his notion of integration, a positivist version of the (idealist) identity of subject and object, leaves room for an irrational society powerful enough to shape its subjects from the outset. The coincidence of the average superego and the functional needs of a social system, namely those of its own self-preservation, is triumphantly achieved in Huxley’s Brave New World. (Adorno 1955b/1967, 66)

His second criticism against Parsons involved Weber. Under the subheading of “The Irrationality of the System,” he saw Parsons follow Weber’s methodology. The latter condoned irrationality, Adorno felt. With ideal types, Weber supposedly introduced arbitrarily constructed methodological devices as they denoted so-called frames of reference. An analytical level of abstraction became severed from the empirical level of actual, capitalist society. However, Adorno warned that the former could easily be misconstrued when divorced from the latter—which was the danger supposedly inherent in the ideal type. A duality resulted when concepts would not match empirical reality, a duality that tended to obfuscate contradictions prevailing in the objective realm of modern capitalist society. Adorno concluded: Parsons gets as far as the alternative between a rationalistic psychology and a psychologistic sociology, the choice between two forms of false consciousness, each eternally in the right against the other....Here, however, the argument is broken off. A concrete analysis of motive is replaced by the choice of ‘frames of reference’ which, like Max Weber’s ideal type, is left to academic whim. The postulate that sociological theories of motivation must tally with established findings about personality structure substitutes a harmonious object for a contradictory one in the interests of the unity of scientific explanation. (Adorno 1955b/1967, 68)

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The third criticism concerned psychoanalysis. Under the subheading of “Psychotherapy and Sickness,” Adorno identified Parsons’s approach with the standpoint of Heinz Hartmann, a psychoanalyst who had proposed ego psychology as adequate for understanding the psyche in modern industrial society (Hartmann 1939, Hartmann and Kris 1946, Hartmann 1950a). Adorno took as key text Parsons’s paper presented at the 1948 annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, which had been part of a panel discussion on social action. Hartmann had been one of the other panelists, and both their contributions were published in Psychoanalytic Quarterly in 1950 (Parsons 1950, Hartmann 1950b). According to Adorno, Hartmann—and presumably also Parsons—were of the opinion that psychoanalysis as therapy could (and did) deliver the individual from suffering, making him/her function in an obviously repressive, “late” capitalist society. Adorno held that this society should be characterized as sick, however. Proof, for him, lay in National Socialism, the most advanced form of “late” capitalism, an epitome of sick society. The madness that had pervaded Nazi society, he maintained, prevailed in Western “late” capitalism, if somewhat attenuated. In this vein, he identified psychoanalysis as therapy with that branch of psychology whose function was ideological in the modern world because its aim was to adapt the individual to society, not vice versa. In contradistinction, psychoanalytic theory represented psychology proper. Freud’s theory of personality and culture would not fit the reality of the present but could realistically delineate a human condition for the future. Adorno, distinguishing between psychotherapy, which he rejected, criticizing both Parsons and Hartmann, and psychoanalytic theory which to him was the only worthwhile psychology, envisioned a positive and a negative representation of psychology. Psychology proper was to take the side of the crank, the unadapted individual, an epitome of humane society. Psychotherapy, however, apparently opted for social integration irrespective of the fact that modern society tended toward totalitarianism. From this vantage point, Adorno denounced allegedly ideological components in the Parsonian psychoanalytic idea of integration: The subject whose psychology was largely unaffected by societal rationality was always looked on as an anomaly, a crank; in the totalitarian era his proper place is in the work or concentration camp where he is ‘dealt with’ and successfully integrated. The psychological left-overs, the people that allegedly count, retire to the top of the totalitarian hierarchies. It is within easy reach of idiots or mental defectives because their kind, the specifically psychological component, exactly matches the irrational ends, the top-level decisions, as means to which ends all the rationality of the systems (which, but for their empty rhetoric, are indistinguishable from each other) is then summoned. Even this last intact preserve of psychology which permits or directs dictators to roll on the floor, weep convulsively or uncover imaginary conspiracies is the mere mask of societal madness. (Adorno 1955b/1967, 72)

Thus, Adorno criticized Parsons for three shortcomings, namely his allegedly hermetic image à la Brave New World of societal integration, his supposedly arbitrary concepts construing an analytical level à la Max Weber’s ideal types, and, third, his psychological (psychotherapy-prone) conception of the actor that apparently suited totalitarian-type modern society where the person had to conform with dehumanizing constraints. The obvious shortcomings in Adorno’s criticism raise the question, Why would he do this? What made him adopt a stance vis-à-vis Systems Theory that was unsubstantiated while also unfair?

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To investigate the background of Adorno’s stance, two tentative suggestions may suffice. One evokes the situation of the “Frankfurt School” in West Germany‘s academic world in the 1950s. In the early years of the Federal Republic, Critical Theory had to defend itself against other less philosophical approaches. Although eventually the “Frankfurt School” would wield considerable influence on sociology in Germany in the 1960s (Albrecht et al. 1999), and already in the 1950s Horkheimer was elected Rektor of Frankfurt University, the situation of the Institute of Social Research was far from settled. The anxieties of the once disowned scholars would not disappear, despite their newly acquired prestige and honors. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the returned emigrés at the Institute of Social Research had to defend their work against colleagues elsewhere in West Germany many of whom had collaborated with National Socialism until 1945. The “Frankfurt School” scholars became intensely sensitive to anything that would smack of conservatism, considering that the latter had once led into National Socialism. Adorno’s refutation of Systems Theory was related to his rejection of theoretical and methodological approaches that appeared to lack clearcut opposition against “late” capitalism. Weber’s methodology, Mannheim’s theory of knowledge, and Émile Durkheim’s work on ethics and education, to name but some sociological ideas which, to him, appeared not sufficiently guarded against potential affinity with approaches facilitating fascism, in Adorno’s (and also Horkheimer’s) view, were to be rejected vigorously. Adorno’s critique, in the historical context, may also have had a biographical connotation. He published his essay in 1955, but worked on it in the years 1953 and 1954. That is, he began work on the first draft of what were four consecutive versions of the paper, in the fall of 1953.1 7 This was the point in time after he had escaped narrowly being targeted as a Communist in the United States, in the era of McCarthyism. At the end of a one-year sojourn in the United States, he had feared being labeled a Communist and felt persecuted by Edward A. Shils, who had collaborated with Parsons on several occasions. To tell the story in some detail: In the academic year 1952–1953, Adorno took a position at the Hacker Foundation in Los Angeles. At the time he wanted to maintain his American citizenship, as naturalized citizen, and therefore had to spend at least six months in the U.S. every three years. Near the end of his sojourn in Los Angeles, in June 1953, Marie Jahoda, Associate Director of the Research Center for Human Relations at New York University, sent him a prepublication manuscript of a book which she edited together with a colleague, Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian Personality” (Christie and Jahoda 1954). The book manuscript contained a contribution by Shils, then recent co-editor with Parsons of Toward a General Theory of Action, on The Authoritarian Personality as presumptive political statement of left-wing authoritarianism (Shils 1954). Shils’s criticism was that all four authors of The Authoritarian Personality obviously were leftist, and their political leanings non-Stalinist Leninist. He characterized the personality type of liberal, opposite to the authoritarian personality in the conception of The Authoritarian Personality, as “New Deal and more particularly those who in the late 1940s sympathized with Mr. Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party” (Shils 1954, 29). He went on to say:

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This failure to discriminate the substantially different types of outlook which could be called liberal, liberal collectivist, radical, Marxist, etc., is not just the outcome of the deficiency of the questionnaire technique in general nor does it arise from carelessness. It flows from the authors’ failure to perceive the distinctions between totalitarian Leninism (particularly in a period of Peoples Front maneuvres), humanitarianism and New Deal interventionism. (Shils 1954, 30)

Adorno, upon reading Shils’s accusations in the manuscript ready for publication, became alarmed and responded promptly. On June 22, 1953, he wrote Jahoda in defense of The Authoritarian Personality. He pointed out that the historical situation had been different in 1944–1945 when Russia had been an ally of the U.S. against Nazi Germany, and that the points which Shils criticized had to do with shortcomings of the methodological approach rather than the politics of the researchers: The fact that less attention was given in the volume to the authoritarian communist party-liner than to the potential fascist is solely due to the historical situation. At the time the questionnaire and interview schedules were set up and the material was gathered (1944–1945), the National Socialists were our enemies and the Russians our allies. In the atmosphere then prevailing, the common denominator of anti-Nazism did not yet allow the difference between autonomous thinking and its perversion by the communist dictatorship to crystallize as clearly as later on. Furthermore there were fewer, if any, communists in our sample of potential fascists. This may be due to the sample, the construction of which has rightly been criticized, although this criticism somehow misses the point because nowhere the claim of representativeness has been made.1 8

Jahoda could do nothing to make Shils alter the text of his essay in Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian Personality.” The accusation of being soft on Communism, therefore, was to stand against Adorno together with his three co-authors. Jahoda tried to placate Adorno, however. She inserted a passage into her own introductory essay for the book, asserting that “rigid low scorers” had been found among the respondents for The Authoritarian Personality; this was to verify that attitudes of leftist dogmatism had indeed been separated from rightist latent fascism in the Adorno et al. study, which Shils had doubted.1 9 In addition, she added a footnote to the Shils text. There she referred to her own introductory essay, asserting that “democrats” had indeed been distinguished from “pseudo-democrats,” thus disavowing Shils’s accusation that liberals were not differentiated from Communists.2 0 Adorno, nonetheless, feared the witchhunt directed against presumed Communists that could start as soon as the book would hit the market. He had already made arrangements to travel back to Germany in August 1953. Now he began to fear that he would be refused a passport and could not even leave the United States. He had announced termination of his appointment with the Hacker Foundation already in April and had no intention of working there a day longer than necessary. In a flood of letters to Horkheimer he expressed his anxiety about getting stuck in Los Angeles without passport or job.2 1 Less than two decades earlier, Adorno had been in a similar situation in Oxford: Exiled from Germany after the Nazis had closed the Institute and deprived Jewish scholars of their employment and citizenship, he had been unable to emigrate to the United States but could not find employment in England. The situation in 1953 appeared equally threatening. In the summer of 1953, he longed to return to Germany, not least to escape being questioned before a Board of Investigation. After two months of anxious waiting, he and

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his wife could travel back to Frankfurt where Horkheimer had been able to negotiate a secure position for Adorno, as Professor of Philosophy and Sociology. Adorno took this personal ordeal as paradigmatic for “late” capitalism in the United States, and he saw it mirrored in Parsons’s Systems Theory. Adorno’s anti-Parsonian essay “On the Relationship Between Sociology and Psychology” invoked the experiences of the paradigmatic individual being caught in the web of discrimination effecting intimidation. In the essay, he drew attention to his observation that American sociology and psychotherapy condoned repression inasmuch as they apparently accepted “late” capitalism. Adorno’s essay marked the beginning of an openly recognizable conflict between Systems Theory and Critical Theory, aroused then and there, which remains unresolved until today.2 2 Even Horkheimer, on the occasion of the Fourteenth German Sociology Conference at the end of the 1950s, turned against Systems Theory. He charged Parsons—and sociology in general—with being unable to face the contradictions of modern capitalism. Horkheimer named Parsons, together with Merton, Ralf Dahrendorf, who had turned away from the Institute after a brief appointment there, and Leopold von Wiese, a somewhat outmoded German theorist, as sociologists presumably shunning responsibility to embrace humanism. In Horkheimer’s view, philosophy followed the purpose which sociology lacked. He embraced philosophy, while castigating sociology, in his keynote address to the Fourteenth German Sociology Conference in 1959: The relationship with philosophy is constitutive for sociology....Society, which eventually has become the very monster as which Hobbes pictured it at its beginning, deters the thought that would attempt to grasp it as a totality. To think the totality would necessarily mean to influence it through thinking. (Horkheimer 1959, 35)2 3

To summarize: Sociology and psychology in the 1950s became a topic both in Systems Theory and Critical Theory. Parsons conceptualized sociology as the science analyzing social systems, distinct from and also related to cultural, personality, and organic systems. Psychology, in this vein, supplemented sociology as it took three shapes. For one, psychology meant psychoanalysis that informed Parsons’s conception of social control in general, and socialization and therapy in particular. Second, psychology meant the psychological system consisting of cognitive, cathectic, and evaluative need-dispositions—loosely constructed on the model of Freudian drives and their derivatives. Third, psychology entered into the theory of action explaining social behavior: The idea was that action orientations were internalized when they functioned along the lines of, to name one among a number of schemes of sociological analysis, pattern variables. In contradistinction, the “Frankfurt School” conceptualized sociology as a science that needed support not only from psychology but also from philosophy. Psychology, in the guise of Freudian psychoanalysis, was psychoanalytic theory but not psychotherapy; it was to supplement sociology in the pursuit of humanism, safeguarding a moral perspective for modern society. Philosophy, in the shape of Hegelian and also Marxian dialectics, was to define the image of society that was to guide sociology and also society. In the first half of the decade, the two approaches developed separately, on different continents and without taking much notice of each other. In the United

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States, Parsons, between 1950 and 1955, elaborated his action theory that incorporated psychoanalysis. In Germany, Horkheimer and Adorno taught Critical Theory that acknowledged some American accomplishments such as publicopinion research. After they had returned to West Germany (about 1950), they retained (and partly reformulated) their previous philosophical cum political commitment to humanism as an alternative to conformism in the “late” capitalist society. Adorno’s essay, published in 1955, on the relationship between sociology and psychology, waged three major criticisms against Parsons. As a general charge, he was convinced that Systems Theory was unable to incorporate into sociology the psychoanalytically grounded utopia that guaranteed humanism. The three points of criticism were: Parsons’s notion of system integration supposedly devised a hermetic society emulating Huxley’s Brave New World; Parsons’s adoption of Weber’s methodology of ideal types presumably missed the repressive quality of capitalist society; and, third, Parsons’s (and also Hartmann’s) option for psychotherapy supposedly condoned that the person, through “Ego Psychology,” would be adapted to the existing society irrespective of, as Adorno ventured, whether that society resembled a work or concentration camp. To be sure, all three charges which Adorno directed against Parsons had been discussed among the scholars of the “Frankfurt School” since the early 1940s. What was new, however, was that Adorno targeted Parsons, presumably a mouthpiece of American sociology and society in general. The arguments wielded against Systems Theory had been part and parcel of Critical Theory since the early 1940s (or even earlier). Now these arguments were directed against Parsons, the outstanding contemporary American theorist. In 1942, in sessions with other exiled Germans in California, among them poet Bert Brecht and composer Hans Eisler, the scholars of the Institute of Social Research had analyzed Huxley’s novel together. They had ventured that the theoretically crucial issue was needs: Huxley, they thought, delineated a society as it might prevail if needs were manipulated in a way that made the individual think he was free when indeed he was coerced imperceptibly into basically inhuman moulds of conduct.2 4 From this vantage point, the exiled Frankfurt scholars thought, totalitarianism could easily appear as benevolence, and repression as security. Adorno subsequently wrote an essay to be published in Prismen more than ten years later, “Aldous Huxley and Utopia.”2 5 The critique against Weber, to be sure, originally had been Horkheimer’s. In Eclipse of Reason (1947), as he sought to detect roots of fascism in both overly rationalistic and openly or clandestinely anti-rational thought, Horkheimer had castigated Weber. He had charged Weber with inability to set a goal for humankind, which presumably left the doors wide open for totalitarian régimes: Max Weber’s pessimism with regard to the possibility of rational insight and action, as expressed in his philosophy…, is itself a stepping stone in the renunciation of philosophy and science as regards their aspiration of defining man’s goal. (Horkheimer 1947, 6)

Adorno adopted Horkheimer’s criticism of Weber when he applied it to Parsons who was a staunch Weberian lifelong. The third criticism rejected so-called Neo-Psychoanalysis, to which Adorno thought Parsons adhered.2 6 Adorno might have drawn a connection between

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Hartmann and Parsons because on the occasion of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s 1948 Conference, Parsons and Hartmann had been on a panel together discussing social action; both their papers had been published in the same issue of Psychoanalytic Quarterly. Adorno’s first draft of “On the Relationship Between Sociology and Psychology,” entitled “Notices re Psychology and Society,” written in the fall of 1953, made it obvious that he drew a connection between Parsons and Hartmann. Adorno referred to page numbers in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly volume where both papers had appeared, when he charged that Hartmann and Parsons made similar mistakes (using the acronyms P and H), drafting his argument for the Horkheimer Festschrift: 386. Concerning unconscious issues sociological concepts are said not to be enough. He wants to take into account the psychological meaning of the sociological data in a systematic way....387 He, too, desires correlation. H demands implicitly the prerogative of psychology in sociology. Critisize. Critisize P and H. ‘Action analysis …primarily defined by its position in the structure of the personality’ that exactly is the crux.2 7

To recapitulate: Adorno, in this essay (written from the fall of 1953 onward), adapted three arguments developed previously among the then exiled scholars of the “Frankfurt School,” in order to target Parsons (together with Hartmann). It is not unlikely, however, that the trigger event for Adorno’s critique of Parsons was Shils’s criticism in Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian Personality.” In 1958, three years after Adorno’s essay written for the 1955 Festschrift had honored his revered mentor, Horkheimer, his accusation against Parsons was repeated by another author. In the American Journal of Sociology, Ralf Dahrendorf emulated Adorno’s strictures. Parsons had invited Dahrendorf to join him for the academic year 1957–1958 at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford University. Dahrendorf, who had worked briefly with Adorno in Frankfurt in 1954, in a polemic entitled “Out of Utopia,” now castigated The Social System for alleged similarity between Parsons’s image of society and Huxley’s ominous Brave New World (Dahrendorf 1958). Part III: Weber versus Marx On the eve of the 1960s, Parsons clarified the scope and function of sociology in modern academic life. In an era which he tentatively termed “sociological,” inasmuch as sociology after World War II had become a source of “our sociey’s ideological ‘definition of the situation’” (Parsons 1959, 553), he clarified what sociology was and was not, and sociologists could do and not do. As a science, he emphasized, sociology belonged within higher learning and depended on careful theorizing and research. Its basis was that the relationship between objectivity and adequacy of sociological work depended on the degree to which concepts and methods were laid open to the scrutiny of other scientists within the discipline. Sociology, Parsons suggested, was an emergent profession. As a profession, its fiduciary functions included responsibility for democracy-prone analysis of socio-political developments. However, he warned, this did not include political advocacy. Neither should sociology as a science involve advocacy for the disenfranchised

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and powerless in the world of today,2 8 nor would identification with “the wave of the future” be satisfactory—to quote Parsons in a speech two decades earlier.2 9 In contradistinction, German sociology, especially the “Frankfurt School,” espoused politicization. The impetus was both empirical and methodological. An empirical study conducted at the Frankfurt Institute, published in 1961, diagnosed political apathy in the majority of students and recommended their politicization, in order to preempt return to authoritarian rule in an Obrigkeitsstaat (Habermas et al. 1961). Under Adorno’s chairmanship, also in 1961, the German Sociological Society organized a workshop on concept formation in the social sciences. The focus was positivism, by which Adorno meant the tendency to ascertain and surreptitiously justify apparently self-evident facts. He saw positivism condone the status quo of “late” capitalism and thereby hinder a critical and accordingly humanistic attitude. Such skepticism as involved in the critical attitude, to be sure, strengthened humanism, as in Critical Theory. The workshop had as main speakers Adorno and Karl R. Popper. Adorno targeted Popper, whose conceptual constructivism he criticized as the epitome of positivism.3 0 The message was that only conscious politicization could save sociology from surreptitious complicity with establishment powers. Otherwise, expropriation and exploitation of millions in capitalist democracies were unwillingly applauded or even legitimized. In a paper presented at the Fifth Conference of the International Sociological Association, in 1962, Herbert Marcuse echoed Adorno. He emphasized that Critical Theory opposed positivism and therefore negated the ideological pitfalls of traditional sociology: Contemporary industrial civilization demonstrates the fact that it has reached the stage at which ‘the free society’ can no longer be adequately defined in the traditional terms of economic, political, and intellectual liberties....(T)hey demand new modes of realization…Thus economic freedom would mean freedom from the economy, that is, man’s freedom from being determined by economic forces and relationships.... Political freedom would mean liberation of the individuals from politics over which they have no effective control—the disappearance of politics as a separate branch and function in the societal division of labor. Similarly, intellectual freedom would mean the restoration of individual thought now absorbed by mass communication and indoctrination—abolition of ‘public opinion’ together with its makers.3 1

All through the 1960s, in the German Sociological Society, the “Frankfurt School” had considerable influence. As the time approached for the Fifteenth German Sociology Conference, scheduled in Heidelberg to celebrate Max Weber’s one hundredth anniversary, the scholars of the Frankfurt Institute were determined to highlight apparent (alleged) shortcomings of Weberian thought. Accordingly, Parsons became alarmed. He feared that the position critical of Weber’s presumptive positivism and acceptance of capitalism would dominate the conference in Heidelberg. As it happened, as early as 1961, Marcuse was named a keynote speaker for the Conference, and Parsons corresponded with Reinhard Bendix about the problem of how proper recognition for Weberian thought at the Heidelberg Conference could be assured. Parsons decided to have Otto Stammer, President of the German Sociological Society, invited to Washington as special guest of the International Sociological

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Association (ISA), on the occasion of the Fifth ISA Conference in September 1962. During that Conference, Parsons and Stammer met privately in the Shoreham Hotel when they declared themselves an ad-hoc Preparatory Committee for the Heidelberg Conference. They agreed to schedule three plenary sessions, each with a keynote speaker supplemented by (eventually, five) discussants, for Heidelberg. Only one of the main speakers, and the last one at that, would be Marcuse. They also decided that Parsons would be the keynote speaker in the first plenary, and that Stammer would write him a letter to that effect upon having received the okay from the German Sociological Society’s Executive Board, which Stammer did.3 2 Two American scholars joined Parsons in his preparatory activities to safeguard the Heidelberg Conference as an occasion for celebrating, not castigating, Weber. One of them, Bendix, had published the first English-language monograph on Weber’s oeuvre, Max Weber—An Intellectual Portrait, in 1960. Some three weeks before the Conference, Bendix communicated his worries to Parsons: I have the distinct impression that the centenary is being used by all and sundry to make Weber a whipping-boy of the unresolved intellectual legacies of Germany for the last half century. If you consider that Marcuse sounds not only like Lukacz but also like Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin and Wolfgang Mommsen—and Christoph Steding (I shall check this last one before I leave, he was a Nazi philosopher in the thirties), you begin to wonder. I shall make a reference to this, but then I am only a discussant.3 3

The other combatant poised for Heidelberg was Benjamin Nelson who, at the time, was working on an edited collection of essays on Weber, and he planned to enter the various translations of parts of Weber’s Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in a complete English-language edition.3 4 The plan was that Parsons would deliver the first keynote paper, on “Value Neutrality and Objectivity,” which he did. Among the discussants was a scholar who had worked at the Frankfurt Institute and now held a chair of Philosophy at Heidelberg University, Jürgen Habermas. Horkheimer was to be chairman of the discussion on Parsons’s paper, and Adorno not a scheduled speaker since he was President of the German Sociological Society. Marcuse would deliver the third keynote paper, whose second and third discussants would be Bendix and Nelson. The actual events deviated somewhat from this schedule. Parsons defended Weber’s claim for the objectivity of social science while also refuting the charge that Weber embraced positivism. He insisted that only science guided by systematic methodology could ensure objectivity. Weber, Parsons emphasized, had demanded value neutrality as a guarantor of objectivity. Parsons argued that only through restraint from political advocacy had Weber rescued sociology from ideology—although, as a person, Parsons admitted, Weber had passionately participated in the politics of his day. The message was clear when it was contradicted by Horkheimer. Horkheimer, as chair of the discussion following Parsons’s paper, instead of acting merely as chairman, seized the opportunity to give a twenty-minute speech himself. He cast doubt on Weber’s idea of value neutrality, telling his audience how he had been a student in Munich in 1919, bitterly disappointed about Weber’s sociology that to him, Horkheimer, had appeared politically inept:

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The first signs of a development leading to Stalinism in Russia, National Socialism in Germany, were visible to the attentive intellectual already at that early point in time. Now Max Weber lectured on the system of councils. The lecture hall was filled to the last seat, and there was severe disappointment. Instead of theoretical reflection and analysis whose general purpose and every single step should have been guided by the aim of contributing to a reasonable future, during two or three sessions we heard finely tuned definitions of the Russian system, sharply formulated ideal types that might adequately characterize the social order of the councils. So precise was all this, so scientifically strict, so value free, that we went home full of sadness. Even later I could not quite come to terms with the doctrine of value neutrality.3 5

Habermas as discussant echoed Horkheimer’s charges against Weber. He reminded his audience that Wolfgang Mommsen, a historian, in his then recent, seminal work Max Weber und die deutsche Politik 1890–1920 had charged Weber with nationalism (Mommsen 1959). Weber, Habermas cited Mommsen saying, had sided with imperialist circles in the German Empire, even during World War I. Habermas invoked political theorist Carl Schmitt, who in 1933 had joined the Nazis, to picture the dangers of a Weberian position in the light of sociology’s presumed political responsibility. He warned: This militant late liberalism had consequences in the period of the Weimar Republic... [We should recognize them] when we turn to Weber here and now: We cannot deny that Carl Schmitt was a legitimate disciple of Weber’s. When we look at the effect of Weber’s thought, we ought to see that the element of decisionism there did not lower its cloud of ideology but, rather, heightened it.3 6

Adorno, President of the German Sociological Society, also voiced his critical stance vis-à-vis Weber. He seized the occasion of the official reception in Heidelberg Castle in order to target Weber. Suitably attenuated to satisfy the requirements of what was a welcoming address, he nevertheless made comments on Weber’s work, to the effect that Weber had overlooked the dangers of bureaucratization in the modern world. At the end of his speech, Adorno referred to poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s famous early nineteenth century play Faust in order to invoke the faults of Weber’s notion of rationality. Rationalization, Adorno felt, was the heritage whose realization was a legacy for the future and whose presence should not responsibly be diagnosed: The idea of rationality, undoubtedly for him the most important, would have to be extended beyond the fetters of the means-end relationship in which he kept it confined. Maybe this would enable us to acquire what we inherited from him: through unperturbed reflection of his ratio to help establish a reasonable world.3 7

The fourth scholar of Critical Theory, Marcuse, delivered the keynote paper in the third plenary, “Industrialization and Capitalism.” His main argument was that Weber embraced capitalism, the culminating regime in mankind’s history of exploitation, repression, and irrationality. Weber seemingly had undeniably justified universal injustice: Reason he had sacrificed for power, and freedom for coercion. Marcuse charged Weber with proposing formal rationality when he presumably eschewed the historical possibility of a truly desirable utopia—a utopia that would denote substantive rationality instead of the meagre reasonableness of instrumental technical knowledge. Marcuse concluded, dismissing Weber: “It is difficult to see reason at all in the tightening ‘[iron] cage of serfdom,’ unless only in a merely ‘technical’ sense” (Marcuse 1965, 180).3 8

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Both Bendix and Nelson attacked Marcuse. Bendix charged that Marcuse’s criticism of Weber emulated Marxists and Neo-Marxists, namely those who were “protagonists of absolute values in the negative” which included Marxists, scholastic philosophers, liberals, and National Socialists, among them Lukácz and also Strauss, Voegelin, and Steding (Bendix 1965, 185). Nelson charged that Marcuse wrongly accused Weber of a conception of rationalization that could be identified with the ills of capitalism. He accused Marcuse of drawing a direct line between Weber’s type of rational action and the National Socialist mentality of ridding the world of Jews, through apparently industry-like murder. He maintained: All the current charges against Weber—those of Prof. Marcuse included—crumble before two irreducible facts. Weber was a pioneer in the 20th century struggle against bureaucratic and technocratic totalitarianism....Who, indeed, has explored the dilemmas of action in the 20 th century so deeply and honestly as did Weber?...To hold him responsible for the advent of 1933 or the nightmare of Auschwitz, as a number of his aroused countrymen are now doing, is to commit error and wrong at one and the same time. (Nelson 1965, 200-201)

Marcuse did not let this accusation stand. Parsons had set a precedent in the first plenary when he returned to the pulpit after the discussants had finished their statements, delivering a closing speech. Marcuse now did the same, using handwritten notes which he had prepared (and which have been preserved among his papers in the Archives of the Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek Frankfurt). He criticized both his opponents, Bendix and Nelson, but specifically targeted the latter. He read aloud a passage from the paper delivered by Nelson (which had been sent to him in advance), and then commented that Nelson was not only wrong but obviously unable to think at all. Since Nelson, Marcuse held, accepted the given as “inevitable,” his entire point became senseless: If ‘tragic reluctance’ means to view as ‘inevitable’ the ‘features’ of the socio-cultural reality of today, then this ‘tragic reluctance’ is exactly what I have and would wish that more others would have, which presumably Mr. Nelson also had once. The will is reasonable that would not see the given as ‘inevitable,’ but draws the consequences from its possibilities. If things have become so bad that it is called ‘tragic reluctance’ not to accept this ‘inevitability,’ then all thinking has become senseless; for a thinking that presupposes from the start that the given is inevitable, truly is no longer thinking at all. (Marcuse 1965, 218)3 9

There the controversy stood when the Heidelberg Conference ended. But Nelson, who was deeply offended, would not let the issue rest. In November 1964, following up on a critical review of the Heidelberg Conference in Encounter, a magazine for intellectuals, entitled “The Storm Over Weber” (Cerny 1964), Nelson sent Parsons a draft version of a letter to be sent to the editor of the New York Times Book Review.4 0 On January 3, 1965, the Letter to the Editor, entitled “Storm Over Weber,” appeared in print. Nelson began by praising Weber for having been “a brave and dedicated citizen who fought a hopeless battle against German Kaiserism,”4 1 while his “forgetful countrymen” on the occasion of the Heidelberg Conference had attacked him even for facilitating the onslaught of Nazism. Nelson targeted the “Frankfurt School” as he reported about Heidelberg: …there took place a scapegoating of Weber by a highly vocal faction of self-styled ‘progressive’ democratic ‘anti-Nazis,’ committed to the so-called ‘critical, dialectical’ (read existentialist neo-Marxist) philosophy.

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Marcuse, who was incensed, responded in a letter originally written on January 74 2 and published, together with a reply by Nelson, on February 28. Marcuse protested that Weber had not been a democrat, even quoting from Weber:4 3 The fact is that Max Weber was a convinced monarchist. When he fought against William II and demanded his abdication he did so because this Kaiser, by his stupid policies, compromised the Kaisertum and the dynasty. As late as October, 1918, less than one month before Germany became a republic, Max Weber wrote: ‘The Kaiser cannot with dignity remain on the throne and he damages the dynasty which we wish to preserve.’ And one day later: ‘No reasonable human being in Germany will expect anything to come from revolutionary and republican experiments; it is therefore absolutely vital that the dynasty be preserved…at the cost of (letting go) its representatives who have become impossible.’

Marcuse denied that he or any speaker at the Heidelberg Conference had drawn a connection between Weber and Nazism. Nelson, however, would not accept this as he clad his objection into a sequence of rhetorical questions: To what was (Professor Marcuse) referring in Heidelberg when he spoke of capitalist society’s ‘release of pent-up aggression in the form of the legitimation of medieval cruelty (torture) and the scientifically managed annihilation of human lives’? Not to Auschwitz, as I have implied in my letter? To Hiroshima? To both? To neither?...To something which had indeed not yet happened but which was now on the drawing board, above all in ‘affluent’ America?4 4

The exchange between Nelson and Marcuse of letters to the editor of The New York Times Book Review had an unintended consequence: Millions of Americans came to know about the controversy that had erupted in Heidelberg. The “Storm Over Weber,” Nelson had let this public know in his letter printed in January, had been all the more noteworthy since Germans—“Weber’s forgetful countrymen”—had criticized the “Titan of Heidelberg.” But American scholars had rescued Weber from unjustified dismissal. He stressed: that it has been American scholars, especially Talcott Parsons, who have done so much to establish Weber—along with the French thinker, Emile Durkheim—as a principal pathfinder of 20th-century sociological analysis.

In the same year as the Heidelberg Conference, Marcuse published One Dimensional Man (Marcuse 1964). This treatise on self-estrangement in the modern (hu)man under the spell of a “culture industry” driven into “false consciousness,” was a sequel to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectics of Englightenment. Marcuse targeted American capitalist culture in the 1960s, urging a political revolution. He supported the Berkeley Student Revolt and also German radicals at the Universities of Frankfurt and Berlin who advocated destruction of the University as an institution: Their political activism sought an alternative to academic knowledge that would supersede so-called bourgeois higher learning together with capitalism in general. Parsons, on the occasion of the Heidelberg Conference, had sensed the danger that lay in Critical Theory attacking Weber and endorsing Marxism instead. He was alarmed when Marcuse targeted American social reality in his book. He decided that it was time to explain to American sociologists what were the achievements of Weber, and the shortcomings of Marx. In 1964 and again 1965, on the occasion of the American Sociological Association’s

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annual conferences, he helped put on the agenda sessions that clarified what Systems Theory got right when it was grounded in Durkheim’s and Weber’s thought, and what Critical Theory got wrong when “Weber’s forgetful countrymen” endorsed Marx. In 1967, in his collection Sociological Theory and Modern Society, he had his Heidelberg paper reprinted, followed by a critique of Marxism that originally had been a presentation delivered at the 1965 ASA Conference. He argued that the merits of Marxism belonged within the nineteenth century, whereas today’s society (whose epitome was the United States) had progressed beyond that scope, invalidating Marxist categories. Durkheim and Weber, at the turn of the twentieth century, he argued, had overcome the fetters of Marx’s analysis. They had emphasized differentiation in modern society, thus superseding the categories that had mirrored the unity of economic and political processes characteristic of mid-nineteenth century industrialism. The new arena of social forces was a pluralist world, affording integrative efforts. Transcending utilitarianism, Durkheim and Weber had anticipated societal community. According to Durkheim, the integrative forces were the extra-contractual element in contractual relations, combating anomie, and according to Weber, they were also cultural, combating mechanistic materialism. With a view toward the “Frankfurt School” tenet that Weber’s methodology denoted positivism condoning societal contradictions, Parsons maintained: Consideration of the methodology of social science is the most important single basis of my contention that, judged by the standards of the best contemporary social-science theory, Marxian theory is obsolete. (Parsons 1967, 132)

He concluded, dismissing Marx as theorist of society unsuitable for the complex realities of democracy in the industrial society of the 1960s: As a theorist in the specifically scientific sense…, he belongs to a phase of development which has been superseded. In sociology today, to be a Marxian, in the strict sense that denies any substantial theoretical progress since Marx, is not a tenable position. (Parsons 1967, 135)

To summarize: In the 1960s, Parsons realized that society had developed rapidly into an ever more differentiated, pluralist world: Religion, ethnicity, and other dimensions of social inequality were relegated to relative inconspicuousness in the face of universally desirable equality of opportunity. At the same time, sociology had become professionalized inasmuch as its scope of analysis and sheer size of faculty at American universities had increased dramatically after World War II. As a profession, to be sure, sociology was bound up with Weber’s postulate of value neutrality: No political standpoint was to influence social-science analysis. In contradistinction, the “Frankfurt School” scholars advocated politicization of sociology as antidote against presumed dangers of “false consciousness.” The “formal freedom” of pluralist democracy, they felt, obliterated the chances for a revolution that would at last overcome capitalist society altogether. They advocated Marxism as a theoretical perspective, condemning the predominance of “late” capitalism and arguing for the historical necessity of a future society reconciling the contradictions of today’s world.

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The Heidelberg Conference brought the protagonists of these divergent theories into contact with each other. Both sides defended their views as solely tenable positions. On the one side was Parsons, who also influenced the program planning, assisted by Bendix and Nelson (and Yale political scientist Karl W. Deutsch, who was also present in Heidelberg). On the other side were Horkheimer and Adorno, flanked by Marcuse and Habermas. The conflict which pervaded the plenary sessions, as keynote speakers and discussants contradicted each other vigorously, persisted into the time period after the Heidelberg Conference. The New York Times Book Review was the forum for a series of letters to the editor in which Nelson and Marcuse argued pro and contra Weber. Parsons, who kept close contact with Nelson, defended Weber not only in a considerable number of articles and conference papers,4 5 but also through an essay in which he dismissed Marx as obsolete. Interestingly, the controversy triggered by the Heidelberg Conference, in the decade then to come resulted in a renewal of Weber in the United States, and Marx in West Germany. At the end of the 1960s, following on from Parsons, in his 1967 essay, holding Durkheim and Weber, as twentieth-century classics, against Marx, the nineteenth-century classic, Bendix introduced Durkheim and Weber as two authoritative approaches in sociological theory today (Bendix 1971). From then on, Weber’s work would become unprecedentedly influential, truly rendering him “Titan of Heidelberg.” In Germany, for the decade until the middle 1970s, Marx carried the day. Critical Theory denounced Weber’s theory as apparently capitalism-prone and positivist. Parsons’s Systems Theory appeared conservative, which made it as good as irrelevant. A Ph.D. dissertation supervised by Adorno (Bergmann 1967) charged Parsons with involuntarily propagating a totalitarian-type society, the epitome of one-dimensionality as analyzed by Marcuse. In the foreword of the book, Adorno repeated his charge of the 1950s that Parsons’s structural-functionalism lacked sensitivity for the human needs of the individual. Conclusion Bloom ventured, in the late 1980s, that sociology since World War II had been a powerful influence on what he analyzed as The Closing of the American Mind—the onslaught of nihilism on American university teaching. The negative impact showed only in the 1960s, Bloom argued, but derived from European influences stemming from Nietzsche, Weber, and Freud. Nietzsche, he contended, had discovered “that if we take ‘historical consciousness’ seriously, there cannot be objectivity” (Bloom 1987, 307), thus rendering scholarship a delusion. Weber, he surmised, had preached relativism, inasmuch as “(p)olitics required dangerous and semireligious value positing, and Weber was witnessing a struggle of the gods for possession of man and society, the results of which were unpredictable” (Bloom, 150). Freud, last but not least, had reduced the higher human phenomena to “only one focus in the soul, the same one as the brutes have,” thus denying that faith, conviction, or loyalty were genuine when “Freudian psychology has become a big business and entered into the mainstream of public life with a status equal to that of engineering and banking” (Bloom, 137).

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Bloom, to be sure, took a standpoint of which Max Weber had warned. Weber warned of a tendency of the “cultural sciences to form a closed system of concepts in which reality would be summarized as in whatever sense final version” (Weber 1904/1968, 184). Weber, in Bloom’s view, excluded objectivity when he recommended historicity. However, contrary to Bloom’s stated reading, Weber reconciled objectivity and historicity. He grounded sociology in both social-science methodology and historical dynamics (Gerhardt 2001). My theme has been three phases in the parallel chronological cum contextual evolution of the eventual schism between Parsonian Systems Theory and “Frankfurt School” Critical Theory. The three phases, emulating acts in a drama, were situated in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, respectively. Their culminating point was the Fifteenth German Sociology Conference in Heidelberg in 1964 that celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of Max Weber’s birth. The Heidelberg Conference brought to a head the schism between the two approaches. Subsequently, the schism became public in the United States through a series of letters to the editor of the New York Times Book Review: It has never been relinquished subsequently. My essay entered the scene in the 1930s and early 1940s, when both Systems Theory and Critical Theory analyzed National Socialism from a sociological point of view. The first act of the drama, to be sure, reconciled, rather than split, the two approaches in their interest for understanding anti-Semitism, if from different angles. Parsonian thought, in the 1940s, benefitted from some scholars of the “Frankfurt School,” namely Franz Neumann and Erich Fromm who had been members of the Institute of Social Research until after their arrival in the United States. Critical Theory, during those years, although trying to hold on to its central topic brought over from Germany, fascism, recognized what went on in the United States. The concepts and methods and also the themes of research for the five volumes of the “Studies in Prejudice” owed much to the work of contemporary American scholars (indeed, a number of coauthors of these volumes were Americans). All this changed drastically in the 1950s. Parsons became an icon of contemporary sociology in the years after 1951. Despite his stature, he was not spared from an investigation for his alleged pro-Communist attitudes in 1953–1954, the high time of McCarthyism. Critical Theory, nevertheless, turned against Systems Theory as if it were an epitome of conservatism, in the era of McCarthyism. After months of angst anticipating persecution for alleged leftist leanings on the occasion of his last visit to the United States, Adorno, in his contribution to the 1955 Festschrift for Horkheimer, turned against sociology in general, and Parsons in particular. He warned of Parsons’s Systems Theory, accusing it of envisaging a society à la Brave New World, among similarly polemic charges. Contextually, in the 1950s, Parsons’s work became the most important contribution to American sociology. Adorno, after 1950, was geared toward a German audience in the newly established Federal Republic. Parsons was occupied with American society but had looked at Germany in the 1940s. He now dealt with issues of interest in the United States—as the dangers of totalitarian charismatic rule in Germany had been “cut off short,” as he phrased it (Parsons 1951, 525). Adorno, on the other hand, severed his ties with the United States upon returning to Germany for good in 1953. He seems to have given up his Ameri-

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can citizenship. This happened approximately at the same point in time when he began to voice sharp criticism against sociology in general, and American sociology in particular. For him now, Systems Theory epitomizing sociological theory, especially that of Parsons, meant ideology—a criticism which he extended to empirical social research in the middle 1950s (Adorno 1957). He would not renounce his dismissal of Systems Theory in conjunction with survey research until the end of his life. The schism between the two approaches surfaced for the first time in Adorno’s strictures against sociology and especially Parsons. The full conflict eventually came to light in the 1960s. In the 1960s, in the United States, the Kennedy era led into the Vietnam War, and in West Germany the end of the Adenauer era meant political protest: A self-styled Extra-Parliamentary Opposition, including a radical student movement, fought for revolutionary changes. On the verge of the events which to us today signify “the sixties,” the Heidelberg Conference confronted Systems Theory and Critical Theory. Followers of Weber stood against disciples of Marx. The former emphasized obvious strongholds of Weberian sociology, while the latter pinpointed apparently undeniable shortcomings. The outcome was different on the two sides of the Atlantic: In the United States, Weber—whom Bloom strangely deems, in his book, a German Nietzschean— became the classic (eventually worldwide) he has remained until today. But in Germany, Weberian and also Parsonian thought were dismissed in sociology for a decade to come, while Marx took center stage in the sociological imagination there. In the 1960s and beyond, the “Frankfurt Schools” visibly adopted Marx instead of Weber. Their anti-Weberian and also anti-Parsonian stance taken at the Heidelberg Conference facilitated for many German sociology students of the 1960s, identification with Marxism and its apparent sequel, Critical Theory. To these students, dismissing Weber at a time when a revolution seemed near that would supersede “bourgois society,” meant the right kind of political consciousness. It took another twenty-five years, and the decline and eventual demise of Communism in the Eastern Bloc, before Systems Theory and Critical Theory made their peace. They have become equal inasmuch as they are obviously separate approaches. In the pantheon of sociological theories, today, they share the prestige of tenable positions. They represent legitimate though apparently vastly different world views. That they were not always as irreconcilable as they might appear to many scholars today, may be learned from history. The history of the relationship between the two theories, chronological and contextual, draws them closer, even as it shows how they came apart. Notes 1. 2.

Durkheim’s first of three major works of the 1890s, De la division du travail social, carried the subtitle: Étude sur l’organization des sociétés supérieures. The subtitle was omitted when the book was translated into English under the title of The Division of Labor in Society, in 1933. My translation, taken from the Ger man in: Max Weber, “Die ‘Objektivität‘ sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis,” 1904/1968, p. 184; the English translation of the passage, in Shils/Finch (1949, p. 84), appears somewhat misleading: “A

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systematic science of culture, even only in the sense of a definitive, objectively valid, systematic fixation of the problems which it should treat, would be senseless in itself.” 3. The metaphor of One World originally was the title of a book by Republican leader Wendell Wilkie whom President Roosevelt had sent on a world tour on which he reported in the book. His message in the book, which sold two million copies in less than three months, was that the postwar world would be well equipped for overcoming separatism and conflict in the endeavor to create a One World. The book was published in 1943; however, when the atom bomb was being deployed shortly before the end of the war, only few contemporaries would still harbor the hopes of One World that had engulfed Americans‘ imagination two years earlier. 4. I owe profound thanks for permission to use archival sources, to Dr. Clarke Elliott, [former] Associate Curator of Harvard University Library, Dr. Jochen Stollberg, Senior Archivist at Archivzentrum der Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main (for access to the papers of Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse), and Michael Schwarz and Dr. Rolf Tiedemann at the Theodor-W.-Adorno-Archiv, Frankfurt am Main. 5. See, invitation and program, “Conference on Research in the Field of Anti-Semitism, May 20 and 21st, Biltmore Hotel, New York City,” dated 4/27/1944, p. 1; Parsons papers, Harvard University Archives, call no. HUG(FP) – 15.2, box 4 (materials from this source will be quoted henceforth as: Parsons papers, and call number). 6. Among the Horkheimer papers preserved at Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt is a report entitled, “Studies in Antisemitism by the Institute of Social Research. A Report on the cooperative project for the study of antisemitism for the year ending March 15, 1944, jointly sponsored by the American Jewish Committee and the Institute of Social Research. August, 1944.” See, Max Horkheimer papers at Stadt- und Universitätsarchiv Frankfurt am Main, call no. IX 121b (this material will be quoted henceforth as: Horkheimer papers, and call number). 7. The list of participants preserved among the Parsons papers lists Horkheimer and Parsons among some twenty invited participants, and Adorno’s name added to the list as “Associate of Dr. Horkheimer, Institute of Social Research.” A list of participants published in the July issue of The Committee Reporter, the AJC newsletter, also mentioned Horkheimer and Adorno. (See, Horkheimer papers, X 2, 109). However, the timetable kept for Adorno by Rolf Tiedemann, editor of Adorno’s Gesammelte Schriften, for the year of 1944, shows no absence of Adorno from Los Angeles for the entire month of May 1944 (personal communication, R. Tiedemannn). Handwritten notes on the discussions at the conference kept by Parsons and preserved at Harvard University Archives, make no mention of contributions by either Horkheimer or Adorno. 8. Letter, Slawson to Parsons, May 31, 1944. Parsons papers, HUG(FP)—15.2, box 4. 9. Letter, Parsons to Slawson, December 14, 1944. Parsons papers, HUG (FP)—15.2, box 4. 10. A similar thesis was among the seven “Elements of Anti-Semitism” added to Dialectics of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno’s major opus, when they had it republished in 1947 (which is the version used until today). Incidentally, when Karl Mannheim wrote his essays on postwar planning, which Hans Gerth edited in the posthumous volume, Freedom, Power, and Democratic Planning (Mannheim 1950), he relied on the original 1944 version of Horkheimer and Adorno’s major work. 11. My translation. The original German reads: “Es handelt sich dabei um die Ermittlung von potentiellen und aktuellen Antisemiten lediglich durch indirekte Indices. ... Besonderes Interesse kommt in der ganzen Untersuchung dem Verhältnis von wirklicher psychologischer Tendenz und Rationalisierung zu. Ich gehe von der These aus, daß einer Tendenz zur ‚Personalisierung‘ in der Oberflächenschicht Stereotypie in der tieferen entspricht, der heftigen Betonung der Männlichkeit verdrängte Homosexualität usw. Psychologisch ist das vieux jeu, aber es wäre interessant, wenn man es quantitativ bestätigen könnte. ... Da ja der bisher gebrauchte Fragebogen sehr zusammengestrichen wird, so wird für eine Reihe neuer Fragen ohne weiteres Raum sein.” Letter, Adorno to Horkheimer, October 26, 1944, pp. 5-6; Horkheimer papers, VI 1 B, 207-214. 12. Among the Horkheimer papers, Parsons’s article is in the same file as Hadley Cantril, “The Human Sciences and World Peace: The Unesco Project ‘Tension Affecting International Understanding’” (mimeographed manuscript), H.V. Dicks, “The Psychological Foundations

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13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

of the Wehrmacht” (mimeographed manuscript), and Ross Stagner and Charles Osgood, “Impact of War on Nationalistic Frame of Reference,” Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 24, 1946, among others. See, Horkheimer papers, IX 20. One-page document, entitled “Proposal for the reopening of the Institute of Social Research at the University of Francfort on Main,” signed by a list of American scholars (Horkheimer papers, XI 269, 1a). The letters were dated November 25, 1949 (Horkheimer papers, XI 269, 9a). Parsons papers, HUG(FP)—15.2, box 13. The printed text of the invitation read, in German, “Institut für Sozialforschung an der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main Senckenberg-Anlage 26. Vorstand und Direktor des Instituts für Sozialforschung an der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität beehren sich, Sie zu der Eröffnung des Instituts-Neubaus am Mittwoch, den 14. November 1951, 17.15 Uhr ergebenst einzuladen. Max Horkheimer.” The work appeared in English twelve years later, under the title “Sociology and Psychology.” The latter text will be used here although it contained changes that altered the original text, such as subheadings that were inserted in 1967. Adorno, it seems, agreed with these changes. He dated the manuscript as he finished the final version on August 12, 1954. The earliest version which he began subsequent to his return from the United States in the fall of 1953, carried the title, “Notices re Psychology and Society.” Only the third version carried the title under which the essay eventually was published. The various draft versions have been preserved in the Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main. Letter, Adorno to Jahoda, dated June 22, 1953, 1-2; Horkheimer papers, VI 1E, 178-179. Marie Jahoda, “Introduction,” in: Christie and Jahoda (eds.), Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian Personality,” 11-23. The passage protecting Adorno, or rather The Authoritarian Personality, against Shils’s criticism is on 21. The footnote inserted into the Shils contribution by Jahoda is on 28. These letters comprise some forty single-spaced, typewritten pages, additional to telegrams and many telephone conversations to which the letters refer. Horkheimer replied, first with a suggestion to teach at Chicago for a while (which Adorno refused), then assurances that he would use his connections with the Secretary of Education of the Land Hessen and his Staff, and also members of the Frankfurt University Senate and Philosophical Faculty, to find a professorship for Adorno. He expressed sincere hope that the latter would be made available for Adorno upon his return (which indeed happened). See, Horkheimer papers, VI 1E, esp. 149-210. Interestingly, in the time period of 1953–1954, when Adorno feared to be targeted by McCarthyites but escaped the menace through his return to Germany, Parsons became a target of McCarthyist investigation. Papers preserved in the Harvard Archives document that he was accused of alleged pro-Communist activities in the 1930s and also a pro-Communist attitude in the late 1940s. Parsons, who was Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge when he received the summons to defend himself, had to swear an oath of loyalty when he was summoned to the U.S. Embassy in London, to answer the charges and—eventually—clear his name. See, HUG(FP)—42.8.4, box 13. See also, Gerhardt 1996 and 2002, Chapter III (Postscriptum). In German: “Die Beziehung zur Philosophie ist für die Soziologie konstitutiv... Die Gesellschaft, die am Ende zu dem Ungetüm wurde, als das sie Hobbes an ihrem Anfang beschrieb, schreckt den Gedanken zurück, der sie als Ganzes zu fassen sucht. Das Ganze zu denken wäre von der Möglichkeit, denkend auf es zu wirken, nicht abzulösen.” On the occasion of the 1942 sessions, Herbert Marcuse had presented a paper analyzing the worldview of the novel, as a baseline for the discussion. Horkheimer and also Adorno had written papers about needs which followed up on Marcuse’s analysis. Among them, only Adorno’s paper was published in his lifetime (Adorno 1955c). Horkheimer’s “Zum Problem der Bedürfnisse” (originally, 1942) was only published posthumously, in vol. 12 of his Gesammelte Schriften: Nachgelassene Schriften 1934-1949 (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1985). In the same volume of Gesammelte Schriften are also reprinted two sets of notes concerning the concept of needs, taken on the occasion of the discussions about Huxley’s novel. They are, “Diskussionen aus dem Seminar über die Theorie der Bedürfnisse. Zu einem Referat über das Verhältnis von Bedürfnissen und Kultur bei Aldous Huxley,” 571-575, and also “3. Zu Max Horkheimers ‘Zum Problem der Bedürfnisse’ und Theodor W. Adorno ‘Thesen über Bedürfnis’ (11. August 1942),” 575-579.

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25. See “Aldous Huxley und die Utopie,” first published in Adorno’s collection of essays, Prismen, in 1955. In a letter to Lucian Goldmann, dated March 7, 1969, Adorno mentioned that he had written the essay in the (late) 1940s. He said there that it was more than twenty years ago that he had written what he now referred to in his stance vis-à-vis Goldmann. The letter was reprinted in the Newsletter edited by the Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main, Theodor W. Adorno Blätter, No. 6, 2000, 98. 26. Adorno’s criticism against neo-Psychoanalysis was originally written in English, and translated into German when it was first published (Adorno 1952b). 27. Adorno, “Notizen ad Psychologie und Gesellschaft,” preserved in Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main, page no. 19 in the (first) draft version, that is Transcript (Ts) 29446 (material from this source is ordered by numbers of pages of transcripts made available to readers, instead of call numbers). The German original is: “386. Bei unbewussten Bestimmungen reiche die soziologische Begriffsbildung nicht aus. Er möchte take into account the psychological meaning of the sociological data in a systematic way....387. Auch er wünscht correlation. Er fordert implizit den Primat der Psychologie für die Soziologie. Kritisieren. P und H kritisieren. ‚Action analysis…primarily defined by its position in the structure of the personality‘ das ist es ja gerade.” The mix between English and German is original. 28. As a case in point, Parsons, in 1957, contradicted C.W. Mills’ thesis that modern American society was divided between an all-powerful élite, and a mass of powerless institutions and citizens. Instead, Parsons held, the American power structure allowed for diversification of influence in a system of checks and balances—with an important role of the judicial system which Mills failed to as much as mention in his book. Subsequently, Parsons (1963) proposed a completely revised conception of power in modern democratic society. 29. The formulation was from a speech which Parsons had made on the occasion of campaigning for Military Aid for Britain, in 1940, when he opposed “America First,” an isolationist movement, and also the Marxists who saw themselves riding on “the wave of the future.” See, for details, Gerhardt 1993b, 13-14. 30. The book containing some of the papers presented at the workshop, supplemented by contributions written subsequently, was Adorno et. al., 1969. The main papers from the 1961 Tübingen workshop had already been published in 1962, in Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie. Adorno in his writings connected with the 1961 workshop (a reply to Popper and also his long introductory essay in the 1969 book) responded to Karl R. Popper, “Die Logik der Sozialwissenschaften,” published in Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, vol. 14, 233-248 (Popper’s paper at the 1961 workshop). Another comment was Ralf Dahrendorf, “Anmerkungen zur Diskussion,” published Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, vol. 14, 264-270. 31. Herbert Marcuse, “On the Problem of Ideology in Advanced Industrial Society,” paper read at the Fifth International Sociological Association Conference, Washington D.C., September 1962, 9. The manuscript is preserved in the Herbert Marcuse Archiv, Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt a. Main, call. Number 229.00 (material from this source is henceforth quoted as: Marcuse papers, and call number). 32. The letter, dated November 22, 1962, is among the Parsons papers. Stammer, in the letter, invited Parsons officially to present the “Hauptreferat zu dem 1. Thema ‘Wertfreiheit und Objektivität’” (3). Stammer also confirmed what the three main topics would be. Parsons was scheduled speaker for the first session on “Value Neutrality and Objectivity,” Raymond Aron would be second with a session of Weber’s sociology of authority and attitude vis-à-vis power politics, and Marcuse third, on “Industrialization and Capitalism.” See Parsons papers, HUG(FP)—15.4, box 19. 33. Letter, Bendix to Parsons, dated April 9, 1964. See Parsons papers, HUG(FP)—15.4, box 4. Parsons had reviewed Bendix’ book, in American Sociological Review. 34. In 1968, Nelson’s student and collaborator in the middle 1960s, Guenther Roth, was one of the editors of the complete English-language edition, entitled Economy and Society (Weber 1922/1968). 35. My translation. The original German reads: “Die ersten Anzeichen einer Entwicklung, die in Russland zum Stalinismus, in Deutschland zum Nationalsozialismus tendierten, machten für den politisch wachen Verstand schon damals sich geltend. Nun sprach Weber in seiner Vorlesung über das Rätesystem. Der Hörsaal war zum Bersten voll. Anstatt theoretischer

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36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

Reflexion und Analyse, die nicht bloss in der Aufgabenstellung, sondern in jedem einzelnen Schritt vom Gedanken an eine vernünftige Gestaltung der Zukunft geleitet gewesen wäre, hörten wir zwei oder drei Stunden fein abgewogene Definitionen des russischen Systems, scharfsinnig formulierte Idealtypen, durch welche die Räteordnung möglicherweise zu bestimmen sei. So präzise war alles, so wissenschaftlich streng, so wertfrei, dass wir ganz traurig nach Hause gingen. Auch späterhin bin ich mit der Lehre von der Wertfreiheiheit nie ganz ins reine gekommen.” Horkheimer 1965, 65-66. My translation. In German: “Dieser militante Spätliberalismus hat in der Periode der Weimarer Zeit Folgen gehabt, die wir nicht Weber, aber uns zurechnen müssen, wenn wir Weber hier und heute rezipieren: Wir können nicht daran vorbei, dass Carl Schmitt ein legitimer Schüler Max Webers war. Wirkungsgeschichtlich betrachtet, hat das dezisionistische Element in Webers Soziologie den Bann der Ideologie nicht gebrochen, sondern verstärkt.” Habermas 1965, 81. Because Habermas was questioned subsequently about the charge that Weber had been a teacher of Schmitt’s, he altered his original statement in the printed text of the conference proceedings, in a footnote which he added: “After the fact, I think that a different wording is more adequate, if you allow for its deliberate ambivalence: Carl Schmitt was a ‘natural son’ of Max Weber.” (ibid.; my translation) My translation. In German: “…wäre freilich der Begriff der Rationalität, ihm der wichtigste, über die Schranken der Zweck-Mittel-Relation hinauszubigen, in denen er ihn gebannt hielt. So wäre vielleicht das von ihm Ererbte zu erwerben: durch unbeirrte Reflexion seiner ratio einer vernünftigen Einrichtung der Welt ein wenig zu dienen.” Adorno 1965, 102. My translation. In German: “Es ist schwer, in dem sich verfestigenden ‘Gehäuse der Hörigkeit’ überhaupt noch Vernunft zu sehen—es sei denn in einem wirklich nur ‘technischen’ Sinn.” My translation. In German: “Wenn es ein ‚tragischer Widerwille‘ ist, die ‘features’ der heutigen sozial-kulturellen Wirklichkeit als ‘unvermeidlich‘ anzusehen, dann ist dieser ‘tragische Widerwille‘ allerdings genau der, den ich habe und von dem ich nur hoffen kann, dass ihn noch mehr hätten, und den wahrscheinlich Herr Nelson auch einmal hatte. Es ist der vernünftige Wille, das Gegebene nicht als ‘inevitable,‘ als unvermeidlich anzusehen, sondern aus seinen eigenen Möglichkeiten die Konsequenzen zu ziehen. Wenn es soweit gekommen ist, dass man es einen ‘tragischen Widerwillen‘ nennt, wenn man diese ‘Unvermeidlichkeit‘ nicht anerkennt, dann ist alles Denken sinnlos geworden; denn ein Denken, das sich vonvornherein damit abfindet, dass das Gegebene unvermeidlich ist, ist nun wirklich kein Denken mehr.” For a draft of Nelson’s letter to the editor of The New York Times Book Review, dated November 24, 1964, which he sent to Parsons for comment before mailing it off to New York, see Parsons papers, HUG(FP)—15.4, box 13. The New York Times Book Review, Letters to the Editor, “Storm Over Weber,” by Benjamin Nelson, Stony Brook, L.I., January 3, 1965, 23; the next two quotations are from the same source. Two days earlier, on January 5, another letter accused Nelson of attempting to “curry favor”—presumably with Parsons. The letter a copy of which is preserved among the Marcuse papers (call no. 273) reads as follows: “Dear Professor Nelson: Your letter to the New York Times Book Review is both simply wrong and quite contemptible. It is wrong in its endorsement of [unreadable] claims that Weber fought Kaiserism. It is contemptible because when one attacks someone, there is an obligation to name the person and do one’s best to represent his views accurately. In this instance you would have to mean my old friend Professor Marcuse. The only explanation for your actions that seems to make sense is an effort to curry favor. Sincerely yours, Barrington Moore.” Moore taught political science at Harvard. He was a Marxist publishing on democracy and revolution, among other topics. “Letters to the Editor,” The New York Times Book Review, February 28, 1965, 34, signed Herbert Marcuse, Newton, Mass. The Newspaper clipping is preserved among the Marcuse papers, Call no. 273. Nelson’s reply was on pages 34 and 36 of the same issue of The New York Times Book Review, entitled “A Reply.” See, for instance, Parsons 1965b, 1965c, 1965d. Parsons published his Heidelberg paper four times, as far as I can make out. He had it published in the Social Science Journal in 1965 and entered it into Sociological Theory and Modern Society (1967), where it preceded the paper

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on Marxism. It appeared in the Proceedings of the Heidelberg Conference edited by Stammer, in German translation, and a French translation was also published.

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