S C I E N T I F I C E X P E R I E N C E S OF A

E U R O P E A N SCHOLAR IN AMERICA
by T H E O D O R W . A D O R N O
translated by Donald Fleming

C
O M P L I M E N T A R Y and friendly as the invitation was to
write something about my contribution to American science
and American intellectual life, I have asked to modify the sub-
ject somewhat. For it is not for me to say anything about that contribu-
tion, if any—only Americans could do that. Nor would I really be
capable of it right now, for I have not been in America for fourteen
years and have no proper perspective. Instead, I ask for the freedom to
attempt something that I may be able to do—to formulate something
about the scholarly, and more generally intellectual, experiences that I
had in and of America. From this perhaps something can be indirectly
deduced concerning the direction of my aims in the long years when I
was working first in New York, then in Los Angeles. Perhaps I shall
not be too great a burden upon the American public by such an attempt;
for I represent an extreme case, which, because it is extreme, sheds a
little light on something seldom expounded. I consider myself European
through and through, considered myself as such from the first to the last
day abroad, and never denied it. Not only was it natural for me to pre-
serve the intellectual continuity of my personal life, but I quickly be-
came fully aware of it in America. I still remember the shock that a
housemaid, an emigrant like ourselves, gave me during our first days
in New York when she, the daughter of a so-called good home, ex-
plained: "People in my town used to go to the symphony, now they go
to Radio City." In no way did I want to be like her. Even if I had
wanted to, I wouldn't have been capable of it. By nature and personal
history, I was unsuited for "adjustment" in intellectual matters. Fully as I
recognize that intellectual individuality can only develop through proc-
esses of adjustment and socialization, I still consider it the obligation and

338
 Adorno : Α European Scholar in America 339
at the same time the proof of mature individuality to transcend mere
adjustment. Through the mechanisms of identification with images of
authority, one must emancipate one's self from this very identification.
This relationship between autonomy and adjustment was recognized
by Freud long ago and has since become familiar to American scholar-
ship. But for a refugee going to America thirty years ago, this was not
yet true. "Adjustment" was still a magic word, particularly for those
who came from Europe as persecuted people, of whom it was expected
that they would prove themselves in the new land not to be so haughty
as to insist stubbornly on remaining what they had been before.
The direction prescribed for my development up to the age of thirty-
four was thoroughly speculative in the ordinary pre-philosophical sense
of the word, though in my case inseparable from philosophical endeav-
ors. I considered it to be my fitting and objectively proffered assignment
to interpret phenomena—not to ascertain, sift, and classify facts and
make them available as information. That corresponded not only to my
idea of philosophy but also of sociology. T o the present day I have
never rigorously separated the two disciplines, although I well know
that the necessity for specialization in one or the other cannot be an-
nulled by a mere act of the will. The article " Z u r gesellschaftlichen Lage
der Musik," which I published as a privatdozent at Frankfurt in the
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in 1932 and which was related to all my
later researches in the sociology of music, was already thoroughly theo-
retical in orientation. It was founded on the conception of an inherently
contradictory totality, whose contradictions also "appear" in art and by
which art is to be interpreted. A type of sociology, for which such a
mode of thought could at best supply hypotheses but never knowledge,
was utterly alien to me. On the other hand, I hope at any rate that I
went to America completely free from nationalism and cultural arro-
gance: I was much too much aware of the dubiousness of the traditional
(particularly German) conception of culture in the sense of Geistesge-
schichte. The spirit of enlightenment also in relation to cultural prob-
lems, in the American intellectual climate a matter of course, had the
greatest attraction for me. Moreover, I was full of gratitude for deliver-
ance from the catastrophe that was looming up as early as 1937; as
determined to do my part, on the one hand, as I was not to give up m y
340 The Intellectual Migration
o w n individuality. The tension between these t w o impulses may in
some degree define h o w I related to m y American experience.
In the fall o f 1937 I received a telegram from m y friend M a x Hork-
heimer, since pre-Hitler days director o f the Institut für Sozialforschung
at the University o f Frankfurt, which was n o w being continued in
connection with Columbia University in N e w Y o r k . There was a pos-
sibility for m y speedy emigration to America if I were prepared to col-
laborate on a "radio project." After a brief deliberation, I agreed by
telegraph. T h e truth was that I didn't k n o w what a "radio project" was;
the American use o f the word "project," which is n o w translated in
German by Forschungsvorhaben, was unknown to me. I simply thought
that m y friend would not have made the proposal unless he was per-
suaded that I, a philosopher by calling, could handle the j o b . I was only
slightly prepared for it. In three years in Oxford, I had learned English
autodidactically but fairly well. Then in June 1937, on the invitation o f
Horkheimer, I had been in N e w Y o r k for a couple o f weeks and gained
at least an initial impression. In the Zeitschriftfür Sozialforschung in 19361
had published a sociological interpretation o f jazz, which to be sure
suffered severely from a lack o f specific American background but at
any rate dealt with a theme that could pass as characteristically American.
It was likely that I could quickly and intensively gain a certain k n o w l -
edge o f American life, particularly musical conditions; that presented
f e w difficulties.
The theoretical core o f the article about jazz was fundamentally re-
lated to later socio-psychological investigations that I undertook. Much
later I found that many o f m y theories were confirmed by American
experts such as Winthrop Sargeant. Nevertheless, that article, though
closely tied to the musical facts o f the case, had the defect according to
American conceptions o f sociology o f being unproven. It remained in
the realm o f materials acting upon the listener, the "stimulus," with no
possibility that I could or would have proceeded to the "other side o f
the fence." I thereby provoked the objection that I was not to hear for
the last time: " W h e r e is the evidence?"
A certain naivete about the American situation was more important.
I certainly knew what monopolistic capitalism and the great trusts were;
yet I had not realized h o w far "rationalization" and standardization had
 Adorno : Α European Scholar in America 341
permeated the so-called mass media and thereby jazz, in whose produc-
tion they had such a great role. I actually still considered jazz to be a
spontaneous form of expression, as it so gladly represented itself, and
did not perceive the problem of a calculated and manipulated pseudo-
spontaneity, a second-hand kind, which then dawned on me in my
American experience and which I later, tant bien que mal, endeavored to
formulate. When I had the paper "Über Jazz" reprinted almost thirty
years after its first appearance, I was very far removed from it. I was
therefore able to note, apart from its weaknesses, what merits it pos-
sessed. Precisely because it did not perceive an American phenomenon
with the obviousness that it had for Americans, but rather, as one says a
little too glibly in Germany nowadays, approached it from an "alien-
ated" point of view, the article "Über Jazz" pointed out features that are
all too easily lost sight of owing to familiarity with the jazz-idiom, yet
may be essential to jazz. In a way, this lack of involvement on the part
of an "outsider" and freshness of judgment are maintained in all of my
writings on American themes.
When I moved from London to N e w York in February 1938, I
worked half-time for the Institut für Sozialforschung, and the other
half for the Princeton Radio Research Project. The latter was directed
by Paul F. Lazarsfeld, with Hadley Cantril and Frank Stanton, then
research director of the Columbia Broadcasting System, as co-directors.
I myself was supposed to direct the so-called Music Study of the Project.
Because of my membership in the Institut für Sozialforschung, I was
not subjected to the unmitigated competitive struggle and the pressure
of externally imposed demands as was then customary. I had the possi-
bility of my own goals. I sought to do justice to my twin commitments
by a certain combination of activities. In the theoretical texts that I then
wrote for the Institut, I formulated the points of view and experiences
which I then wanted to employ in the Radio Project. In the first in-
stance, this applies to the essay "Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik
und die Regression des Hörens," which had already appeared in the
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in 1938, and can now be read in the little
volume Dissonanzen·, and also to the end of a book begun in London
in 1937 on Richard Wagner, of which we put several chapters in the
Zeitschriftfür Sozialforschung in 1939. (The whole book was published in
342 The Intellectual Migration
1952 by Suhrkamp Verlag.) The gulf between this book and orthodox
publications in the empirical sociology of music may appear very con-
siderable. Nevertheless, it belonged in the general framework that then
occupied me. The Versuch über Wagner undertook to combine socio-
logical, aesthetic, and technical analyses of music in such a fashion that
analyses of Wagner's "social character" ("Sozialcharakter") and the
function of his work would shed light upon its internal structure. On
the other hand, and this seemed to me more essential, the internal
technical findings should be interpreted as hieroglyphs of social signifi-
cance. The paper on musical fetishes, however, was intended as a draft
of the concept of the new musico-sociological experiences I had in
America and to sketch something like a "frame of reference" for the
specific researches to be carried out. At the same time, the article repre-
sented a sort of critical reply to an article of my friend Walter Benjamin,
published in our periodical, on the work of art in the age of technical
reproducibility. The problems of production in the culture-industry and
the related behavioral patterns were critically underscored, whereas
Benjamin seemed to me to take an all too positive attitude toward
cultural industry, due to its technological potentialities.
The Princeton Radio Research Project had its headquarters at that
time neither in Princeton nor in New York, but in Newark, N e w
Jersey, and indeed, in a somewhat pioneering spirit, in an unoccupied
brewery. When I travelled there through the tunnel under the Hudson
I felt a little as if I were in Kafka's Nature Theater of Oklahoma. I was
very much taken by the lack of embarrassment about the choice of a
site that would scarcely have been conceivable by the lights of the
European academic community. M y first impression of the researches
already in progress there was not exactly marked by any great under-
standing. At Lazarsfeld's suggestion, I went from room to room and
spoke with colleagues, heard words like "Likes and Dislikes Study,"
"success or failure of a program," of which at first I could make very
little. But this much I did understand: that it was concerned with the
collection of data, which were supposed to benefit the planning depart-
ments in the field of the mass media, whether in industry itself or in
cultural advisory boards and similar bodies. For the first time, I saw
"administrative research" before me. I don't now recall whether Lazars-
 Adorno : Α European Scholar in America 343
feld coined this phrase, or I myself in my astonishment at a practically
oriented kind of science, so entirely unknown to me. In any event,
Lazarsfeld later defined the distinction between such administrative re-
search and critical communications research in the sense of our Institut.
He did this in an article that introduced a special volume of our Studies
in Philosophy and Social Science 1941.
Naturally there appeared to be little room for such critical social re-
search in the framework of the Princeton Project. Its charter, which
came from the Rockefeller Foundation, expressly stipulated that the in-
vestigations must be performed within the limits of the commercial
radio system prevailing in the United States. It was thereby implied
that the system itself, its cultural and sociological consequences and its
social and economic presuppositions were not to be analyzed. I can-
not say that I strictly obeyed the charter. This was not in the least
motivated by the desire to criticize for the sake of criticism, which
would have been unbecoming in a person whose first task consisted
in familiarizing himself with the cultural climate in which everything
that it was incumbent upon him to study had its place. I was dis-
turbed, rather, by a basic methodological problem—understanding the
word "method" more in its European sense of epistemology than in
its American sense, in which methodology virtually signifies practical
techniques for research. I was perfectly willing to go to the famous
"other side of the fence," and still recall how pleased I was and how
much I learned when I personally, for my own orientation, conducted
a series of certainly very random and unsystematic interviews. On the
other hand, it appeared to me, and I am still persuaded today, that in the
cultural sphere what is regarded by the psychology of perception as a
mere "stimulus" is in fact, qualitatively determinated, a matter of "objec-
tive spirit" and knowable in its objectivity. I oppose stating and measur-
ing effects without relating them to these "stimuli," i.e., the objective
content to which the consumers in the cultural industry, the radio listen-
ers, react. What was axiomatic according to the prevalent rules of social
research, namely, to proceed from the subjects' reactions as if they were
a primary and final source of sociological knowledge, seemed to me
thoroughly superficial and misguided. Or, to put the matter more pru-
dently: research had still to determine how far the subjective reactions
344 The Intellectual Migration
of the persons studied are actually as spontaneous and direct as the sub-
jects suppose; and how far not only the methods of dissemination and
the power of suggestion of the apparatus, but also the objective implica-
tions of the material with which the listeners were confronted, are in-
volved. And finally, it had still to be determined how far comprehensive
social structures, and even society as a whole, came into play. But the
mere fact that I proceeded from art as from something objective in itself,
instead of from statistically measurable listener-reactions brought me in-
to a certain conflict with prevailing habits of thought.
Furthermore, something specifically musical impeded my progress
from theoretical considerations to empiricism—namely the difficulty of
verbalizing what music subjectively arouses in the listener, the utter
obscurity of what we call "musical experience." I hardly knew how to
approach it. A small machine which enabled a listener to indicate what
he liked and didn't like by pushing a button during the performance of
a piece of music appeared to be highly inadequate to the complexity of
what had to be discovered; and this in spite of the seeming objectivity of
the data supplied. In any event, I was determined before I took the field
to pursue in depth what could perhaps be called musical "content analy-
sis," without confusing music with program music. I still recall how
bewildered I was when my late colleague Franz Neumann of the Institut
für Sozialforschung, the author of Behemoth, asked me whether the
questionnaires for the Music Study had already been sent out, when I
still hardly knew whether the questions that I regarded as essential could
be done justice to by questionnaires. To tell the truth, I still don't know.
O f course, and herein lay my misunderstanding (as I didn't realize until
later), insights into the relationship between music and society were not
espected of me, but rather information. I felt a strong inner resistance to
meeting this demand by turning myself inside out. As Horkheimer
comforted me, I probably couldn't have done it even if I had wanted to
more than my intellectual orientation made possible.
Certainly that was all determined in considerable degree by the fact
that I approached the specific field of sociology of music more as a mu-
sician than as a sociologist. Yet a genuine sociological impulse came into
play, which I could not account for until much later. In having recourse
to subjective attitudes toward music, I came up against the question of
 Adorno : Α European Scholar in America 345
spontaneity. This concern was awakened by the fact that the apparently
primary, spontaneous reactions were insufficient as a basis for sociologi-
cal knowledge because they were themselves conditioned. On this score,
one could point out that in the so-called motivation-analysis of the
form of social research primarily concerned with subjective reactions
and their generalization, a means is at hand for correcting this appear-
ance of spontaneity and penetrating the pre-conditions of the subjective
reactions through additional detailed, qualitative case studies. Y e t aside
from the fact that empirical social science was not as intensively con-
cerned with the techniques of motivation research as later, I felt and still
feel that even such a procedure, however much it appeals to "common
sense," is not entirely adequate. For it still remains necessarily in the
subjective realm: motivations exist in the consciousness and uncon-
sciousness of individuals. It could not be established through motivation-
analysis alone whether, and how, reactions to music are determined by
the so-called cultural climate and over and above this through structural
factors in society. O f course, objective social factors also become evident
indirectly in subjective opinions and behavior. Moreover, the opinions
and behavior of subjects themselves are always something objective, are
" g i v e n . " They are important for the tendencies of development of the
entire society, if not in the same degree as in a sociological model that
absolutely equates the rules of parliamentary democracy, the volonte de
tous, with the reality of the living society. Generally, objective social
factors illuminate subjective reactions, even in their concrete details.
From the subjective material one can argue backwards to the objective
determinants. The exclusive claims of empirical methods find support
insofar as subjective reactions are more easily determined and quantified
than the structures of the total society, which resist direct empirical
treatment. It is plausible that one could proceed from the data derived
f r o m subjects to the objective social factors, as well as vice versa, except
that, in the measure that sociology begins with the determination of
these data, one feels on firmer ground. In spite of all this, it remains
unproven that one can really proceed from the opinions and reactions of
individuals to the social structure and the social essence. Even the statis-
tical average of these opinions is still, as Dürkheim already perceived, an
epitome of subjectivity:
346 The Intellectual Migration
Moreover, there is another reason for not confusing the objective response and the
average response: it is that the reactions of the average individual remain individual
reactions. . . . There is no essential difference between the t w o propositions "I like
this" and "a certain number of us like this." 1

It is hardly an accident that the representatives o f a rigorous empiricism

impose such restrictions upon the construction o f theory that the recon-
stitution o f the entire society and its laws o f action is impeded. A b o v e
all, h o w e v e r , the choice o f the frames o f reference, the categories and
techniques e m p l o y e d b y a science, is not as neutral and immaterial w i t h
respect to the content o f the object to be studied, as a philosoply m i g h t
suppose w h o s e essential ingredients include a sharp distinction between
method and object. W h e t h e r one proceeds f r o m a theory o f society and
interprets the allegedly reliably observed data as mere epiphenomena
upon the theory, or, alternatively, regards the data as the essence o f
science and the theory o f society as a mere abstraction derived f r o m the
ordering o f the data—these alternatives have far-reaching substantial
consequences for the conception o f society. M o r e than any specific
bias or "value j u d g m e n t , " the choice o f one or the other o f these frames
o f reference determines whether one regards the abstraction " s o c i e t y "
as the most fundamental reality, controlling all particulars, or o n ac-
count o f its abstractness considers it, in the tradition o f nominalism, as a
mere flatus vocis. These alternatives extend into all social judgments,
including the political. Motivation-analysis does not g o m u c h b e y o n d
the impact o f selected factors upon subjective reactions; but those fac-
tors, in the overall context o f the cultural industry, are only m o r e or
less randomly isolated f r o m a totality that not only operates upon people
f r o m w i t h o u t but has l o n g been internalized.

Behind this lie far m o r e important issues for communications re-

search. T h e phenomena w i t h w h i c h the sociology o f the mass media
must be concerned, particularly in America, cannot be separated f r o m
standardization, the transformation o f artistic creations into consumer
goods, and the calculated pseudo-individualization and similar mani-
festations o f w h a t is called Verdinglichung—"reification"—in German.
It is matched b y a reified, largely manipulable consciousness scarcely
capable any longer o f spontaneous experience. I can most simply illus-
l . E m i l e D ü r k h e i m , Sociologie et Philosophie (Paris, 1963), p p . 1 2 1 - 1 2 2 .
 Adorno : Α European Scholar in America 347
träte what I mean, without resorting to any detailed philosophical
explanation, by drawing upon an actual experience. Among the fre-
quently changing colleagues who came in contact with me in the Prince-
ton Project was a young lady. After a few days she came to confide in
me and asked in a completely charming way, "Dr. Adorno, would you
mind a personal question?" I said, "It depends on the question, but just
go ahead." And she continued, "Please tell me: are you an extrovert or
an introvert?" It was as if she was already thinking, as a living being,
according to the pattern of the so-called "cafeteria" questions on ques-
tionnaires, by which she had been conditioned. She could fit herself into
such rigid and preconceived categories, as one can often observe in Germa-
ny when, for example, in marriage advertisements the partners character-
ize themselves by the signs of the Zodiac that they were born under:
Virgo, Aries. Reified minds are in no way limited to America, but are
fostered by the general tendency of society. But I first became aware of
this in America. Contemporary Europe, in harmony with the economic-
technological trend, is following close behind. In the meantime the
complex has long since penetrated the general consciousness in America.
In 1938 one met with strong resistance for daring to use even the con-
cept of reification which has since been worn out by use.
I was particularly disturbed by the danger of a methodological circle:
that in order to grasp the phenomenon of cultural reification according
to the prevalent norms of empirical sociology one would have to use
reified methods as they stood so threateningly before my eyes in the
form of that machine, the program analyzer. When I was confronted
with the demand to "measure culture," I reflected that culture might
be precisely that condition that excludes a mentality capable of meas-
uring it. In general, I resisted the indiscriminate application of the prin-
ciple "science is measurement," which was then little criticized even
in the social sciences. The prescriptive right-of-way given to quantita-
tive methods of research, to which both theory and individual qualita-
tive studies should be at best supplementary, precisely postulates that
one must tackle that paradox. The task of translating my reflections into
research terms was equivalent to squaring the circle. I am certainly not
the right person to decide how much of this is to be laid to my personal
equation. But the difficulties are certainly of an objective nature also.
348 The Intellectual Migration
They have this basis in the inhomogeneity of the scientific conception of
sociology. No continuum exists between critical theorems and the em-
pirical procedures of natural science. They have entirely different histor-
ical origins and can be integrated only with the greatest effort. Much
later, back in Germany, I dealt with this discontinuity, opposing the
views of Talcott Parsons in methodological articles of which I may
mention "Soziologie und empirische Forschung." It is now in Sociolo-
gica II by Horkeimer and myself, in the series Frankfurter Beiträge zur
Soziologie edited by the Institut für Sozialforschung. My doubts on this
score piled up thirty years ago to such an extent that I immersed myself
in observations of American musical life, especially the radio system,
and set down theories and hypotheses about it; but I could not construct
questionnaires and interview-schemes that would get to the heart of the
matter. Of course, I was somewhat isolated in my endeavors. The un-
familiarity of the things that concerned me had the effect of inducing
skepticism rather than cooperation from my colleagues. Interestingly
enough, the so-called secretarial workers were immediately attracted to
my ideas. I still remember most gratefully Rose Kohn and Eunice Coop-
er, who not only copied and corrected my numerous drafts but also
encouraged me. But the higher up in the scientific hierarchy the more
unpleasant the situation became. Thus I once had an assistant of Men-
nonite lineage, whose ancestors had come from Germany long before,
who was supposed to help me, particularly in research on popular
music. He had been a jazz musician, and I learned a great deal from him
about the technique ofjazz as well as the phenomenon of "song hits" in
America. But instead of helping me to transfer my formulations of the
problem into strategies for research, however limited, he wrote a sort of
protest memorandum in which he contrasted, not without emotion, his
scientific conception of the world with my idle speculations (as he
regarded them). He had hardly grasped what I was after. A certain
resentment in him was unmistakable: the type of culture that I brought
with me and about which I was genuinely unconceited, critical of so-
ciety as I already was, appeared to him to be unjustifiable arrogance. He
cherished a mistrust of Europeans such as the bourgeoisie of the eight-
eenth century must have entertained toward the emigre French aristo-
crats. However little I, destitute of all influence, had to do with social
 Adorno : A European Scholar in America 349
privilege, I appeared to him to be a kind of usurper. Without in the
least glossing over my own psychological difficulties in the Project,
particularly the inflexibility of a man who was already set in his pur-
poses, perhaps I may cite several recollections demonstrating that these
difficulties did not arise entirely out of my own limitations. A colleague
who was highly qualified in his own field, which had nothing to do
with the sociology of music, has long since achieved high office and
esteem. He asked me to make several forecasts for a survey on jazz:
whether this form of light music was more popular in the city or the
country, with younger or older people, with those affiliated with a
church or with "agnostics" and the like. I answered these questions,
which lay well within the bounds of the problems I dealt with in the
sociology of jazz, with simple "horse sense," just as an unprejudiced
person, unintimidated by science, might answer them. My prophecies,
not exactly profound, were confirmed. The effect was surprising. My
young colleague did not attribute the conclusion to my common sense,
but rather to a sort of magical capacity for intuition. I thereby earned an
authority with him which I certainly hadn't deserved for knowing that
jazz fans are more commonly found in big cities than in the country.
The academic training which he had completed had obviously had the
effect of eliminating for him any considerations that were not already
covered by strictly observed and recorded facts. Indeed, I was later
confronted with the argument that if too many ideas are developed as
hypotheses before empirical investigations, one may succumb to a bias
that might endanger the objectivity of the findings. My very friendly
colleague preferred to regard me as a medicine man rather than make
room for something that lay under the taboo of speculation. Taboos of
this nature have a tendency to spread beyond their original sphere.
Skepticism toward the unproven can easily turn into a veto upon thought.
Another equally qualified but already established scholar considered my
analyses of light music as "expert opinion." He entered these on the side
of the reactions rather than of the analysis of the actual object (i.e., the
music), which he wanted to exclude from analysis as a mere stimulus.

I met this argument time and again. Obviously it is very difficult in

America, outside the special sphere of the liberal arts, to comprehend
 350 The Intellectual Migration
the notion of the objectivity of anything intellectual. The intellect is
unconditionally equated with the subject who bears it, without any
recognition of its independence and autonomy. Above all, organized
scholarship scarcely realizes to how small a degree works of art can be
understood in terms of the mentality of those who produce them. I once
observed this carried to a grotesque extreme. For a group of radio-
listeners, I was once assigned the task, I forget why, of giving a musical
analysis in the sense of the structural elements to be heard. To begin
with something familiar and corresponding to the popular taste, I chose
the famous melody that forms the second main theme of the first
movement of Schubert's B-Minor Symphony, and demonstrated the
chain-like, interwoven nature of the theme which accounts for its par-
ticular impressiveness. One of the participants in the meeting, a very
young man whom I had noticed because of his extravagantly colorful
dress, raised his hand and said roughly the following: what I had said
was all very well and convincing. But it would have been more effective
if I had put on a mask and costume of Schubert's, as if the composer
himself was giving information about his intentions and developing
these thoughts. Something emerged in experiences of this sort that Max
Weber had diagnosed almost fifty years ago in the prolegomena to his
theory of bureaucracy, and which had already fully developed in Amer-
ica of the 1930's—the opposition between the expert technician and the
European "intellectual," the "gebildete Mensch." Whether and to what
extent the division between intellectual and expert still exists and
whether the latter has in the meantime become more open to self-reflec-
tion would be worthy of sociological analysis in itself.
I received my first real help in connection with the Princeton Radio
Research Project when Dr. George Simpson was assigned to work with
me. I gladly take the opportunity to thank him publicly. He was thor-
oughly informed theoretically and familiar as a native American with
the sociological criteria observed in the United States and with the
European tradition as well, as the translator of Durkheim's Division du
travail. Time and again I have observed that native Americans were
more open-minded, above all more willing to help, than European
immigrants. The latter, under the pressure of prejudice and rivalry,
often showed the tendency to be more American than the Americans
 Adorno : Α European Scholar in America 351
and were also quick to consider every newly arrived fellow European as
a kind of threat to their own "adjustment." Officially, Simpson func-
tioned as "editorial assistant." In fact, he did a great deal more by mak-
ing the first attempts to transform my distinctive efforts into American
sociological language. This process was accomplished in a way that was
very surprising and instructive for me. Like the burnt child that dreads
the fire, I had developed an exaggerated caution and hardly dared to
formulate my ideas as undisguisedly and emphatically as required to
make them stand out. But it appears that such caution is not appropriate
to a philosophy as remote from trial and error as my own. Now Simp-
son not only encouraged me to write as radically and uncompromising-
ly as possible, he also gave his all to make it succeed.
In the Music Study of the Princeton Radio Research Project from
1938 to 1940,1 completed four larger treatises in which Simpson collab-
orated; without him, they would probably not exist. The first was called
" A Social Critique of Radio Music." It appeared in the Kenyon Review
for Spring 1945. It was a lecture that I presented in 1940 to my col-
leagues in the Radio Project, and which developed the basic viewpoints
of my work—a bit crudely, perhaps, but clearly. Three concrete studies
applied these insights to the data. One, "On Popular Music," printed in
the communications volume of the Studies in Philosophy and Social Sci-
ence, presented a sort of social phenomenology of hit tunes, particularly
the theory of standardization and pseudo-individualization, and the
sharp differentiation between serious and light music to be inferred
from this. Perhaps it would not be entirely without interest if I point out
that the discovery of the phenomenon of pseudo-individualism fore-
shadowed the concept of personalization that later played a significant
role in The Authoritarian Personality, and indeed attained some impor-
tance for political sociology in general. Then there was the study of the
N B C Music Appreciation Hour, whose extensive English text unfortu-
nately remained unpublished at the time and certainly today would be
too outdated in many respects to have any effect in America. What I
regarded as essential, I later inserted in German, with the kind permis-
sion of Lazarsfeld, into the chapter "Die gewürdigte Musik" of Der
Getreue Korrepetitor. It had to do with critical content analysis, with
simply and strictly demonstrating that the "Damrosch Hour," highly
352 The Intellectual Migration
regarded and w i d e l y listened to as a non-commercial contribution p r o -
m o t i n g musical culture, was propagating false information about music
as w e l l as a deceptive and untrue conception o f it. T h e social bases o f
such inaccuracy w e r e sought in c o n f o r m i t y to the views o f those w h o
w e r e responsible for this "appreciation h o u r . " Finally, the text o f " T h e
Radio S y m p h o n y " was completed and printed in the v o l u m e Radio Re-
search 1941. T h e thesis was that serious symphonic music, as trans-
mitted b y radio is not w h a t it appears and that consequently the claim
o f the radio industry to be bringing serious music to the people is
spurious. This essay immediately met w i t h strong resistance. Thus the
w e l l k n o w n music critic Β . H . H a g g i n polemicized against it and la-
belled it as the kind o f nonsense that foundations fell f o r — a reproach
w h i c h certainly did not apply in m y case. I incorporated the gist o f this
paper also in the Getreuen Korrepetitor in its last chapter " Ü b e r die musi-
kalische V e r w e n d u n g des Radios." Certainly one o f the ideas has be-
c o m e obsolete: m y thesis that the radio s y m p h o n y was not a s y m p h o n y
at all, a thesis derived f r o m the technologically produced alterations in
sound, the prevailing distortion, in radio at that time, w h i c h have since
been o v e r c o m e b y the techniques o f high fidelity and stereophonies.
Y e t I believe that this does not affect either the theory o f "atomistic
listening" nor that o f the peculiar " i m a g e " o f music o n the radio, w h i c h
have survived the actual distortion o f sound.

In contrast to w h a t the Music Study actually should have a c c o m -

plished at least in outline f o r m , these four papers w e r e fragmentary, or
in American terms, the result o f a "salvaging action." I did not succeed
in presenting a systematically executed sociology and social p s y c h o l o g y
o f radio music. T o w h a t extent the later G e r m a n b o o k Einleitung in die
Musiksoziologie meets such a need is not for m e to j u d g e . Examples w e r e
supplied rather than the plan o f the w h o l e that I felt called upon to
produce. This shortcoming m a y have derived essentially f r o m the fact
that m y transfer to audience research was unsuccessful. Such research
w o u l d have been absolutely essential, i f only for the refinement and
revision o f m y propositions. It is an open question, to be answered only
empirically, whether and to w h a t extent the social implications o b -
served in the content analysis o f music are understood b y the listeners
themselves, and h o w they react to them. It w o u l d be naive to take for
 Adorno : Α European Scholar in America 353
granted an identity between the social implications to be discerned in
the stimuli and those embodied in the "responses." It would certainly be
no less naive to consider the two things as totally uncorrelated with
each other in the absence of conclusive research on the reactions. If
in fact, as was deduced in the study " O n Popular Music," the stand-
ards and rules of the popular music industry are the congealed results of
public preferences in a society not yet fully standardized and technologi-
cally organized, one can still conclude that the implications of the objec-
tive contents do not completely diverge from the conscious and uncon-
scious awareness of those to whom they appeal—otherwise the popular
would hardly be popular. Bounds are set to manipulation. On the other
hand it should be considered that shallow and superficial material which
from the beginning is supposed to be received as a form of entertain-
ment leaves relatively shallow and superficial reactions to be anticipated.
The ideology projected by the music industry need not necessarily be
the same as that of its audience. T o cite an analogy, the popular press
in many countries, including America and England, often propagates
extreme right-wing views without any great consequences to date for
the shaping of the popular will in those countries. M y own position in
the controversy between empirical and theoretical sociology, so often
misrepresented, particularly in Europe, I may sum up by saying that
empirical investigations are not only legitimate but essential, even in the
realm of cultural phenomena. But one must not confer autonomy upon
them or regard them as a universal key. Above all, they must themselves
terminate in theoretical knowledge. Theory is no mere vehicle that
becomes superfluous as soon as the data are in hand.
It may be noted that the four articles on music from the Princeton
Project, along with the German article on music as a fetish, also con-
tained motifs of the Philosophie der neuen Musik, not completed until
1948. The viewpoints that I had brought to bear in the American essays
upon the reproduction and consumption of music were to be applied to
the sphere of production itself.
The work on the Music Study was by no means entirely confined to
what appeared under my name. There were two other investigations,
one strictly empirical, which could at least be regarded as stimulated by
my work without my having the direction of them—I was not among
354 The Intellectual Migration
the editors of Radio Research 1941. Edward Suchman, in "Invitation to
Music," has made the only attempt to date to examine a thesis of the
"Radio Symphony" on listener reactions. He established the difference
in capacity for musical appreciation between people familiar with live
serious music and those who were only initiated by radio. The nature of
the problem was related to my own in that mine also concerned the
difference between live experience and the "reified" experience gained
from mechanical means of reproduction. My thesis may have been con-
firmed by Suchman's investigation. The taste of people who had heard
live serious music was superior to that of those who were acquainted
with serious music only through the New York station W Q X R that
specialized in it. The question certainly remains open whether this
difference was really attributable entirely to the modes of apprehending
musical experience set forth in my theory and probably implicit in
Suchman's conclusions, or whether, as seems probable to me now, a
third factor entered in: that those who generally go to concerts already
belong to a tradition that makes them more familiar with serious music
than the "radio fans" and indeed have a more specific interest in it than
those who confine themselves to listening over the radio. Furthermore,
in this study, with which I am understandably satisfied, my reluctance to
treat the problem of the reification of consciousness by methods reified
themselves became fairly concrete. In keeping with the familiar tech-
nique of the Thurstone Scale, a panel of experts decided on the quality
of the composers who were to serve for discriminating the standards of
those who had become acquainted with music through live perform-
ances and through radio. These experts were largely chosen for their
prominence and authority in the musical world. In this connection,
the question arose whether these experts were not themselves imprinted
with the same conventional notions included in the reified consciousness
that really constituted the object of our researches. The high ranking
of Tchaikowsky in the scale seemed to me to justify such misgivings.
The study by Malcolm McDougald on "The Popular Music Indus-
try" in Radio Research 1941 helped to demonstrate the theory of the
manipulability of musical taste. It was a contribution to a knowledge of
the conditioning of the seemingly spontaneous, in that it described in
detail how "hits" were made. By the methods of "high pressure" pub-
 Adorno : Α European Scholar in America 355
licity, the most important outlet for the popularization of song hits—
the bands—were cultivated, so that certain songs were so often played,
particularly on the radio, that they had a chance of being taken up by
the masses through the sheer power of incessant repetition. Thus Mc-
Dougald had the merit of giving the first circumstantial demonstration
of such mechanisms in the musical world. Yet even here I did not feel
entirely at ease. I would suggest that the facts on which he insisted be-
long to an earlier era than that of the centralized radio technology and
the great oligopolists in the mass media. In this study, the manipulation
of the popular taste still appears to be essentially the work of frantically
eager "agents," if not indeed the result of bribery and corruption. In
fact, however, the objective system and in considerable measure the
new technological conditions had long since taken this work over. To
this extent, McDougald's investigation needs to be repeated today, to
inquire into the objective mechanisms for popularizing the popular,
rather than the machinations and intrigues of the garrulous types whose
"spiel" McDougald described so vividly. In the light of the present
social reality, it easily stands out as old-fashioned and therefore, as it
were, appealing.

In 1941 my work at the Princeton Radio Research Project, from

which the Bureau of Applied Social Research developed, came to an
end and we moved to California, where Horkheimer had already gone.
He and I spent the next years almost entirely in Los Angeles with our
joint work on the Dialektik der Aufklärung. The book was completed in
1944 and the last additions were made in 1945. Until the fall of 1944 my
contact with American research was interrupted, and only then re-
sumed. While we were still in New York, Horkheimer, under the
impress of the gruesome things happening in Europe, got investiga-
tions under way on the problem of anti-Semitism. Together with other
members of our Institut, we had outlined and published the program of
a research project to which we often reverted. It contained among other
things a typology of anti-Semites, which then recurred, substantially
modified, in later studies. Just as the Music Study at the Princeton Radio
Research Project was conditioned on the theoretical side by the article
4
'Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens,
35<5 The Intellectual Migration
written in German, so the chapter "Elemente des Antisemitismus" in
Dialektik der Aufklärung, w h i c h Horkheimer and I collaborated o n in the
strictest sense, literally dictated together, anticipated m y later investiga-
tions w i t h the Berkeley Public O p i n i o n Study G r o u p published in The
Authoritarian Personality. T h e reference to Dialektik der Aufklärung, w h i c h
has not y e t been translated into English, does not seem superfluous to
me, because that b o o k most readily obviates a misunderstanding that
The Authoritarian Personality encountered f r o m the beginning and in
some degree invited because o f its emphasis—namely, that the authors
had attempted to account for anti-Semitism and b e y o n d that fascism in
general o n a purely subjective basis, thus subscribing to the error that
this politico-economic phenomenon is primarily psychological. W h a t I
pointed out concerning the conception o f the Music Study o f the
Princeton Project m a y suffice to s h o w h o w little that was intended.
"Elemente des Antisemitismus" theoretically placed racial prejudice in
the context o f an objectively oriented, critical theory o f society. T o be
sure, w e did not, in contrast to a certain economic o r t h o d o x y , put up a
stiff-necked resistance to p s y c h o l o g y , but assigned it a proper place in
our scheme as an explanatory factor. Nevertheless, w e never questioned
the primacy o f objective factors over psychological. W e adhered to
w h a t I believe to be the plausible consideration that in contemporary
society the objective institutions and trends o f development have achieved
such dominance over individuals that the latter in ever-increasing n u m -
bers b e c o m e mere agents o f the tendencies developing o v e r their heads.
Less and less depends upon their o w n conscious and unconscious being,
their inner life. In the meantime, the psychological as w e l l as the socio-
psychological explanation o f social phenomena has become in m a n y
w a y s an ideological camouflage: the m o r e people depend on the entire
system the less they can do about it, hence the m o r e they are intention-
ally and unintentionally led to believe that everything depends on them.
" M a n is the ideology o f dehumanization." Therefore the socio-psy-
chological questions that have been raised in connection w i t h the Freud-
ian theory, above all those concerning depth psychology and character-
o l o g y , are b y n o means inconsequential. A s early as the long introduction
to the 1935 v o l u m e o f the Institut für Sozialforschung, Autorität und
Familie, Horkheimer had spoken o f the " c e m e n t " that held society t o -
 Adorno : Α European Scholar in America 357
gether, and had developed the thesis that in view of the discrepancy
between what society promises its members and what it actually gives
them, the machinery could hardly function unless it remade the people
inwardly to conform to itself. Once the bourgeois epoch, with the
growing need for free labor, produced men who corresponded to the
demands of the new methods of production, these men, generated, as it
were, by the socio-economic system, later constituted the additional
factor that ensured the continuation of the very conditions that had
shaped the inner man after themselves. Social psychology as we now
knew it dealt with the conditioning of the subjective by the objective
social system, without which the subject could hardly have been held
to the task. In these theories, a certain affinity manifested itself between
our views and subjectively oriented methods of research as a corrective
for the rigidity of abstract thought, in which invoking the supremacy of
the system becomes a substitute for insights into the concrete relationship
between the system and its components. On the other hand, the sub-
jectively oriented analyses have their value only within the objective
theory. In The Authoritarian Personality, this is repeatedly emphasized. It
was probably owing to the intellectual situation that the fact that that
book focussed upon subjective impulses was construed to mean that
social psychology was being employed as the philosopher's stone. The
book was simply trying, according to a famous formula of Freud's, to
add something new and complementary to what was already known. I
welcome another opportunity to make this point perfectly explicit.
Horkheimer had made contact with a group of investigators at the
University of California at Berkeley, above all Nevitt Sanford, Else
Frenkel-Brunswik, now dead, and Daniel Levinson. I believe the first
point of contact was a study initiated by Sanford of the phenomenon
of pessimism, which then recurred in a greatly modified form in the
wide-ranging investigations in which the destructive impulse was
shown to be one of the decisive dimensions of the authoritarian char-
acter, only no longer in the sense of an "overt" pessimism but often-
times as reaction formation to it. In 1945 Horkheimer took charge
of the Research Division of the American Jewish Committee in N e w
York, and thereby made it possible for the scientific resources of the
Berkeley group and of our own Institute to be pooled, so that w e were
358 The Intellectual Migration
able over a period o f years to conduct extensive researches connected
w i t h our c o m m o n theoretical reflections. Horkheimer is not only re-
sponsible for the overall plan o f the contributions that were collected
in the series o f Studies in Prejudice published b y Harper's, but without
h i m the specific content o f The Authoritarian Personality is also unthink-
able. For his philosophical and sociological reflections and m y o w n have
long been so thoroughly integrated that it w o u l d be impossible for us to
say w h a t came f r o m one and what f r o m the other. T h e Berkeley Study
was so organized that Sanford and I served as directors, w i t h Mrs.
Brunswik and Daniel Levinson as our principal associates. B u t f r o m the
beginning, everything was done b y perfect "team w o r k " without any
hierarchical restrictions. T h e fact that the title The Authoritarian Person-
ality gives equal credit to all o f us thoroughly expresses the actual
state o f affairs. This kind o f cooperation in a democratic spirit that does
not get b o g g e d d o w n in formal political procedures and extends into
all details o f planning and execution, I found to be not only extremely
enjoyable but also the most fruitful thing that I became acquainted
w i t h in America, in contrast to the academic tradition in Europe. T h e
current efforts to democratize the inner life o f the German university
are familiar to me f r o m m y American experience, and I truly feel it to
be the continuation o f a tradition to which I belonged in America to
w o r k as hard as I can for a similar democratization in Germany. T h e
cooperation in Berkeley k n e w no friction, no resistance, no rivalry
among scholars. A t a great sacrifice o f time, D r . Sanford edited stylisti-
cally all the chapters written b y me in the kindest and most meticulous
w a y . O f course, the reason for this easy cooperation had to be not
only the American atmosphere o f "team w o r k " but also an objective
factor—our c o m m o n theoretical orientation toward Freud. T h e four o f
us were agreed in neither tying ourselves inflexibly to Freud nor in
diluting h i m after the manner o f the psychoanalytical revisionists. A
certain measure o f deviation f r o m h i m was indicated b y the very fact
that w e were pursuing a specifically sociological concern. T h e inclusion
o f objective factors, above all those o f the cultural environment, was not
entirely compatible w i t h the Freudian conception o f sociology as mere-
ly applied psychology. There was also a certain contrast to Freud in our
postulating quantification as a desideratum, since for h i m the essence o f
 Adorno : Α European Scholar in America 359
research consists in qualitative investigations, "case studies." Nevertheless
we took the qualitative factor seriously throughout. The categories
that underlay the quantitative researches were themselves of a qualita-
tive character and derived from an analytical characterology. Further-
more, w e had intended from the beginning to compensate for the danger
of the mechanistic element in quantitative investigations by supplemen-
tary qualitative case studies. The deadlock that purely quantitative deter-
minations seldom arrive at the genetical depth mechanisms, whereas
qualitative results can easily be accused of being incapable of generaliza-
tions and thereby lose their objective sociological value, we sought to
surmount by employing an entire series of different techniques, which
we only related to one another in terms of the underlying categories.
Mrs. Brunswik made the remarkable effort to quantify the findings of
strictly qualitative clinical analysis attained in the area reserved to her,
against which I raised the objection that through such quantification
one could only lose again the complementary advantages of qualitative
analysis. Through her early and tragic death we were never able to
pursue this controversy. So far as I know, the issue is still open.
The investigations of the authoritarian personality were widely dis-
persed. While the center was in Berkeley, where I went once every
fortnight, a study group was organized simultaneously in Los Angeles,
by Frederick Pollock, in which the social psychologist C . F. Brown, the
psychologist Carol Creedon, and several other people participated. At
that time contact had already been established with the psychoanalyst
Dr. Frederick Hacker and his collaborators, and discussions of a seminar
type frequently took place among interested scholars in Los Angeles. The
idea of a major literary work comprising the individual investigations
only slowly emerged, and almost involuntarily. The heart of the com-
mon achievement was the F-scale, which of all parts of The Authori-
tarian Personality seems to have had the greatest influence. Applied and
revised countless times, it later supplied (adapted to local conditions)
the foundation for a scale used to measure the authoritarian potential in
Germany, on which the Institut für Sozialforschung, re-established in
Frankfurt in 1950, hopes to publish a report in 1969. Certain tests in
American magazines, as well as unsystematic observations of several
acquaintances, suggested to us the idea that without expressly asking
36ο The Intellectual Migration
about anti-Semitic and other fascistic opinions, one could indirectly
determine such tendencies by establishing the existence of certain rigid
views, of which one can be fairly certain that in general they accompany
these particular opinions and constitute with them a characterological
unity. Thus we developed the F-scale at Berkeley in a spirit of freedom
of invention that deviated considerably f r o m the conception of a pe-
dantic science carefully scrutinizing its every step. The explanation for
this is what might be called the "psychoanalytic background," particu-
larly the familiarity with the method of free association, among the
four persons responsible for the study. I emphasize this, because a w o r k
like The Authoritarian Personality, which, though much criticized, has
never been charged with lacking familiarity with American materials
and American procedures, was published in a fashion that did not at-
tempt to conceal itself behind the customary facade of positivism in
social science. The conjecture is scarcely too far-fetched that The Author-
itarian Personality owes to that freedom whatever it has to offer that is
original, unconventional, imaginative, and directed toward fundamen-
tal issues. The playful impulse that I would like to regard as necessary for
all intellectual productivity was certainly not lacking in the develop-
ment of the F-scale. W e spent hours thinking up entire dimensions,
variables, and syndromes, including particular questionnaire items, of
which we were all the prouder the less they betrayed their relationship
to the main theme, anticipating as we did for theoretical reasons correla-
tions with ethnocentrism, anti-Semitism, and reactionary politico-eco-
nomic views. Then we checked these items in standard pretests and
thereby achieved the technically requisite limitation of the question-
naire to a length that would still be reliable, eliminating those items
that proved to have insufficient "discriminatory power."
O f course in the process we had to water our wine a bit. For a number
of reasons, among which the impact of educational factors played no
small role, we often had to abandon precisely the items that we our-
selves regarded as the most searching and original, and to give the pref-
erence to those that owed their greater discriminatory power to lying
closer to the surface of public opinion than factors grounded in depth-
psychology. Thus we simply had to abandon the dimension of the
hostility of authoritarian types toward modern art, because this hostility
 Adorno : Α European Scholar in America 361
presupposed a certain level of culture, namely that of actually having
encountered such art, which the vast majority of our subjects had been
denied. While we believed that by a combination of quantitative and
qualitative methods we could overcome the antagonism between that
which lends itself to generalization and that which is specifically rele-
vant, this problem caught up with us in the midst of our endeavors. It
seems to be the defect of every form of empirical sociology that it must
choose between the reliability and the profundity of its findings. Never-
theless, we could still work with the Likert form of operationally
defined scales in a fashion that often enabled us to kill several flies with
one swat, that is, to get simultaneously with one item at several dimen-
sions, which in our theoretical scheme of the authoritarian personality
were characteristic of the "highs" and their opposite numbers, the
"lows." In view of Gutmann's critique of the previously conventional
methods of scaling, the conception of our F-scale would be hardly
conceivable. It is difficult for me to avoid the suspicion that the increasing
precision of methods in empirical sociology, however impeccable the
arguments for them may be, often restrains scientific productivity.
W e had to prepare the work for publication relatively fast. It came
out almost exactly at the time when I returned to Europe at the end of
1949, and I was not a witness to its impact in the United States in the
next years. The pressure for time under which we found ourselves had a
paradoxical result. The English joke is well-known about the man who
began a letter by saying that he did not have the time to be brief. It was
that way with us: simply because we could not arrange for a complete
overhaul of the work, in order to shorten the manuscript, the book be-
came as bulky and capacious as it now stands. Nevertheless, this deficien-
cy, of which we were all aware, may be compensated for in some degree
by the variety of more or less independent methods and the materials
gained by these. What the book loses by a lack of disciplined rigor and
unity may perhaps be made good in some degree by the fact that a
great many concrete insights converge from many directions upon the
same principal themes, so that what is unproven by the strictest criteria
gains in plausibility. If The Authoritarian Personality made a contribution,
this is not to be sought in the absolute validity of the positive insights,
even less in statistics, but above all in the posing of the issues, which
362 The Intellectual Migration
were motivated by a genuine social concern and related to a theory
that had not previously been translated into quantitative investigations
of this sort. What is essential is not that which is measured but the
development of methods, which, after being improved, permit measure-
ment to take place in areas where this had hardly been possible before.
Since that time, surely not without the influence of The Authoritarian
Personality, people have often tried to test psychoanalytical theorems by
empirical methods.
It was not our main intention to determine present opinions and in-
clinations, and their distribution. W e were interested in the fascistic
potential. On this account, and to counteract it. we included in the
investigation, as far as possible, the genetic dimension, the development
of the authoritarian character. W e all regarded the work, in spite of its
considerable size, as a pilot study, more an exploration of possibilities
than a collection of irrefutable findings. Yet our results were significant
enough to justify our conclusions: not just as prejudices but as simple
statements of fact. Else Frenkel-Brunswik paid particular attention to
that in her part.
As in many other investigations of this sort, a certain difficulty lay
in the nature of the sample, and we did not gloss it over. It used to be a
chronic ailment of empirical sociology in American universities, and
not only there, that they have to make do with students as subjects far
more than could be justified according to the principles of a representa-
tive sample of the entire population. Later, in Frankfurt, we tried to
obviate this difficulty in similar researches by experimenting with the
organization of "contacts" expressly designated for this purpose, test-
groups arranged by quotas from the most varied segments of the popu-
lation. Nevertheless, it must be said that we were not aiming at really
representative samples in Berkeley. W e were interested instead in key
groups: not so much as might perhaps have been desirable in the "opin-
ion leaders" that have been so much discussed in later years, as in groups
that we assumed to be particularly "susceptible," like prisoners in San
Quentin—they were actually "higher" than the average—or inmates of
a psychiatric clinic. From knowledge of the pathological, we anticipated
information about the "normal."
A more substantial objection, particularly raised by Jahoda and Chris-
 Adorno : Α European Scholar in America 363
tie,2 was that of circularity: that the theory, which was presupposed by
the means of research, had to be confirmed by them. This is not the
place to go into this objection. Only this much may be said: we never
regarded the theory simply as a set of hypotheses but as in some sense
standing on its own feet, and therefore did not intend to prove or dis-
prove the theory through our findings but only to derive from it con-
crete questions for investigation, which must then be judged on their
own merit and demonstrate certain prevalent socio-psychological struc-
tures. O f course, the criticism of the F-scale is not to be gainsaid, that to
establish tendencies indirectly that cannot be got at directly owing to fear
of censoring mechanisms coming into play, presupposes that one has first
confirmed the existence of the tendencies that one assumes the subjects
hesitated to proclaim. To this extent, the charge of circularity is justified.
Y e t I would say that one should not push one's challenge on this score
too far. After a connection between the overt and the latent has once
been established in a limited number of pretests, one can pursue this
connection in the main tests in entirely different people who are undis-
turbed by any overt questions. The only possible difficulty was that,
since people who were consciously inclined toward anti-Semitism and
fascism hesitated to express their opinion in 1944 and 1945, the original
correlation of the two types of questions could have led to excessively
optimistic results, and overestimation of the potential of the "lows."
Y e t the criticism that was made of us pointed in the opposite direction:
w e were reproached for using techniques that were biased toward the
"highs." These methodological problems, which are all structured on
the model hypothesis-proof-conclusion, later helped to elicit the philo-
sophical criticism of the scientific concept of the absolutely Primary
that I employed in my books on the theory of knowledge (Metakritik
der Erkenntnistheorie, 1956).
As in the case of the Radio Project, other investigations crystallized
out of The Authoritarian Personality: for example, the "Child Study"
that Mrs. Brunswik and I paved the way for, and whose execution
actually fell to her. Unfortunately, this study remained uncompleted:
only partial results have been published. A certain mortality of individu-

2. Richard Christie and Marie Jahoda, eds., Studies in the Scope and Method of "The
Authoritarian Personality" (Glencoe, 111., 1954).
364 The Intellectual Migration
al studies in large-scale research projects is unavoidable. Nowadays,
since social science is so much given to self-consciousness, it would be
well worth .while to investigate systematically why so much that is
started is never completed. The Child Study applied the fundamental
categories of The Authoritarian Personality. Remarkable and totally
unexpected results were achieved thereby. They refined the conception
of the distinction between conventionality and the authoritarian tem-
perament. It emerged that precisely the "good," i.e., conventional,
children are freer from aggression and therefore from one of the most
fundamental aspects of the authoritarian personality, and vice versa. In
retrospect, this appears to be quite obvious; but not a priori. From this
aspect of the Child Study I began to understand for the first time where-
in, quite independently, Robert Merton discerns one of the most im-
portant justifications for empirical research—that virtually all findings
can be explained theoretically once they are in hand, but not conversely.
Seldom have I experienced so profoundly the legitimacy and necessity
of empirical research that really answered theoretical questions.
Even before the collaboration with the Berkeley group began, I my-
self wrote a larger monograph on the socio-psychological technique of a
fascist agitator who had recently been active on the American West
Coast, Martin Luther Thomas. This was completed in 1943. It was a
content analysis of the more or less standardized and by no means nu-
merous stimuli that fascist agitators employ. Here again the conception
that lay behind the Music Study of the Princeton Research Project came
into play— to treat types of reactions as well as objective determinants.
N o further reconciliation and unification of the two "approaches" was
achieved in the framework of the "Studies in Prejudice." It certainly
remains to be said that the calculated influence of agitators on the "luna-
tic fringe" is by no means the only and probably not even the most im-
portant objective factor promoting a fascistically inclined mentality
among the masses. This susceptibility reaches deep into the structure of
society itself and is generated by society before demagogues deliberately
come to its aid. The opinions of the demagogues are by no means as
restricted to the lunatic fringe as one may at first, optimistically, sup-
pose. They occur in considerable measure in the utterances of so-called
"respectable" people, only not as succinctly and aggressively formu-
 Adorno : Α European Scholar in America 365
lated. The analysis of Thomas supplied me with a good deal of stimula-
tion for items that were useful in The Authoritarian Personality. The study
must have been one of the first critical and qualitative content analyses
to be carried out in the United States.

In the late fall of 1949 I went back to Germany and was completely
absorbed for an entire year in the reconstruction of the Institut für
Sozialforschung, to which Horkheimer and I then devoted our whole
time, and by my teaching activity in the University of Frankfurt. After
a short visit in 19$ 1, I finally returned in 1952 for about a year to Los
Angeles as scientific director of the Hacker Foundation in Beverly Hills.
The situation which I faced there was entirely different from that of the
Princeton Project or The Authoritarian Personality. From the beginning
it was established that I, neither a psychiatrist nor a therapist, must focus
my endeavors upon social psychology. On the other hand, the workers
in Dr. Hacker's Clinic, to which the Foundation was attached, were
psychiatric social workers. Whenever we collaborated, it went well.
But my colleagues had little time for research, and I for my part, as
research director, did not have the authority to involve the clinicians in
investigations. The upshot was that the possibilities for accomplishment
were necessarily more limited than either Dr. Hacker or I had antici-
pated. I saw myself forced into the situation of a "One Man Show"—to
use a good Americanism—obliged to carry out the scientific work of
the Foundation, as well as the arrangement of lectures and a certain
amount of publicity, almost single-handed. Thus I again found myself
thrown back upon the analysis of "stimuli." I got two content studies
well under way. One was on the astrology column of The Los Angeles
Times, which was actually published in English under the title of "The
Stars Down to Earth" in the Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien for 1957 and
then later formed the basis for my German article "Aberglauben aus
zweiter Hand" in Sociologica II. My interest in this material dated back
to the Berkeley investigations, particularly to the socio-psychological
significance of the destructive impulse that Freud had discovered in
Civilization and Its Discontents and which at any rate so far as the masses
are concerned seems to me to be the greatest potential danger in the
present political situation. The method which I adopted was that of
366 The Intellectual Migration
putting myself in the position of the popular astrologer, who by what
he writes must supply his readers with a kind of personal satisfaction
and finds himself continually confronted with the difficulty of giving to
people whom he knows nothing about apparently specific advice adapt-
ed to each individual. The result is a strengthening of conformist views
through commercialized and standardized astrology, as well as the
appearance in the columnist's technique, above all in his "biphasic ap-
proach," of certain contradictions in the mentality of the audience,
traceable to social contradictions. I proceeded qualitatively, though not
failing to count at least in a very crude way the frequency of the basic
devices that recurred in the material that I had chosen (stretching over a
period of two months). It is a justification of quantitative methods that
the products of the culture industry, second-hand popular culture, are
themselves planned from a virtually statistical point of view. Quantita-
tive analysis measures them by their own standard. Differences in the
frequency with which certain "tricks" are repeated arise out of a semi-
scientific calculation of the effect on the part of the astrologer, who in
many respects resembles the demagogue and agitator, although avoiding
openly political themes. Moreover, in The Authoritarian Personality we
had already run into certain tendencies of the "highs" to accept super-
stitious statements eagerly, particularly of a threatening and destructive
nature. Thus the astrology study linked up with what I had done in
America earlier.
That also applies to the study "How to Look at Television," pub-
lished in the Hollywood Quarterly ofFilm, Radio and Television for Spring
1954, later also used for the German article "Fernsehen als Ideologie" in
the volume Eingriffe. It required all of Dr. Hacker's diplomacy to obtain
for me a certain number of television scripts, with which to analyze
their ideological implications, their intended ambiguities. Both articles
belong to the realm of research on ideology.
In the fall of 1953,1 returned to Europe and in addition to my activity
in the Institut für Sozialforschung received a full chair of philosophy
and sociology in the University. Since then I have not been back to the
States.

I should like to summarize briefly what I hope I learned in America.

 Adorno : Α European Scholar in America 367
The first thing to be mentioned would be something sociological in
itself and infinitely important for jne as a sociologist—that in America,
and even to a certain extent during my English stay, I was constrained
no longer to regard as natural the circumstances that had developed his-
torically in Europe— "not to take things for granted." My now depart-
ed friend Tillich once said that he was first de-provincialized in America;
he probably had something similar in mind. In America I was liberated
from a certain naive belief in culture and attained the capacity to see
culture from the outside. To clarify the point: in spite of all social
criticism and all consciousness of the primacy of economic factors, the
fundamental importance of the mind—"Geist"—was quasi a dogma
self-evident to me from the very beginning. The fact that this was not a
foregone conclusion, I learned in America, where no reverential silence
in the presence of everything intellectual prevailed, as it did in Central
and Western Europe far beyond the confines of the so-called educated
classes; and the absence of this respect inclined the intellect toward criti-
cal self-scrutiny. This particularly affected the European presuppositions
of musical cultivation in which I was immersed. Not that I renounced
these assumptions or abandoned my conceptions of such culture; but it
seems to me a fundamental distinction whether one bears these along
unreflectingly or becomes aware of them precisely in contradistinction
to the standards of the most technologically and industrially developed
country. In saying this, I by no means fail to recognize the shift in the
center of gravity of musical life effected by the material resources of the
United States in the intervening period. When I began to concern my-
self with the sociology of music in America thirty years ago, that was
still unimaginable.
More fundamental, and more gratifying, was my experience of the
substance of democratic forms: that in America they have penetrated
the whole of life, whereas in Germany at least they were never more
than formal rules of the game and I am afraid are still nothing more. In
America I became acquainted with a potential for real generosity that is
seldom to be found in old Europe. The political form of democracy is
infinitely closer to the daily life of the people themselves. There is an
inherent impulse in American life toward peaceableness, good-natured-
ness, and generosity, in the sharpest contrast to the dammed-up malice
368 The Intellectual Migration
and envy that exploded in Germany between 1933 and 1945. America is
certainly no longer the land o f unlimited possibilities, yet one still has
the feeling that anything would be possible. If one encounters time and
again in sociological studies in Germany expressions such as " W e are
still not mature enough for democracy," such expressions o f the lust for
power coupled with self-contempt are scarcely conceivable in the alleg-
edly much "younger" N e w W o r l d . B y this I do not mean to say that
America is entirely immune from the danger o f an upset in the direction
o f totalitarian forms o f domination. Such a danger is inherent in the
trend o f modern society per se. But probably the power o f resistance to
fascistic currents in America is still greater than in any European coun-
try, with the possible exception o f England, which in more respects
than w e are accustomed to recognizing forms a link between America
and continental Europe.
W e Europeans are inclined to see the concept o f "adjustment" as a
purely negative thing, an extinction o f the spontaneity and autonomy
o f the individual. But it is an illusion sharply criticized by Goethe and
Hegel that the process o f humanization, o f becoming civilized, neces-
sarily proceeds from within out. Basically it is accomplished precisely
through what Hegel calls "alienation." In this view, w e do not become
free human beings by realizing ourselves in isolation but rather by
transcending ourselves, entering into relations with others, and in a
certain sense surrendering to them. W e do not first define ourselves as
individuals by watering ourselves like plants in order to become univer-
sally cultured personalities. A man w h o under external constraints or
through his egotistical interest behaves in a friendly manner may achieve
genuine humanity in his relationships with other people easier than a
person who, in order to preserve his o w n identity—as if this identity
were always desirable—pulls a nasty glum face and gives one to under-
stand from the outset that one doesn't exist for him and has nothing to
contribute to his o w n inwardness—which oftentimes doesn't even exist.
W e in Germany, in venting indignation upon American superficiality,
must be careful not to become superficially and undialectically rigid in
turn.
T o such general observations must be added something that concerns
the specific situation o f the sociologist or, less technically, thatof anybody
 Adorno : Α European Scholar in America 369
who regards the knowledge of society as central for and indivisible from
that of philosophy. Within the total development of middle-class civili-
zation, the United States has undoubtedly arrived at one extreme. She
displays capitalism in a state of almost complete purity, without any
pre-capitalistic remnants. If one accepts, in contrast to a very widely held
opinion, that the other non-communist countries outside the so-called
"Third W o r l d " are moving toward the same condition, then America
precisely offers the most advanced observation post for anybody who
would escape from a naive posture toward either America or Europe. In-
deed, the returnee finds many things confirmed in Europe, or sees them
in the process of coming to pass, that first struck him in America. What-
ever a serious cultural criticism might have to say when confronted with
American conditions since Tocqueville and Kiirnberger, one cannot
avoid in America the question whether the concept of culture, in which
one was brought up, has not itself become obsolete. One is further led
to wonder whether this is not the result of the general tendency in
contemporary culture toward self-castigation for its failures, the guilt it
incurred by holding itself aloof in a separate sphere of the intellect,
without manifesting itself in social reality. Certainly this did not happen
in America either but the prospect of such effectiveness is not as obstruct-
ed there as in Europe. With respect to quantitative thinking in Amer-
ica, with all of its dangers of lack of discrimination and apotheosis of the
average, Europeans must raise the deeply disturbing question how far
qualitative differences matter in the present social world. Already the
airports are interchangeably alike in all parts of Europe, America, and
the countries of the Third World; already it is hardly a matter of days
but of hours to travel from one country to the remotest reaches of the
world. The differences not only in living standards but in the distinctive
character of peoples and their forms of existence assume an anachronis-
tic aspect. To be sure, it is still uncertain whether the similarities are
decisive and the qualitative differences merely recessive, and above all
whether it might not be that in a rationally ordered world the qualita-
tive distinctions, which are today suppressed by the unity of a technolog-
ically oriented spirit, would again come into their own. Yet reflections
of this sort are hardly conceivable without American experience. It is
scarcely an exaggeration to say that any contemporary consciousness
370 The Intellectual Migration
that has not appropriated the American experience, even if in opposi-
tion, has something reactionary about it.
In conclusion, perhaps I may add a word about the particular signif-
icance of scientific life in America for me personally and for my think-
ing. My speculations deviate considerably from"common sense." But
Hegel, thereby displaying his superiority to all later forms of irrational-
ism and intuitionism, laid the greatest emphasis upon the principle that
speculative thought is not absolutely distinct from the so-called healthy
common sense but consists essentially in its critical self-reflection and
self-scrutiny. Even a mind that rejects the idealism of the total Hegelian
scheme must not stop short of this insight. Anybody who goes as far in
criticizing common sense as I have done must meet the simple require-
ment of having common sense. He must not claim to have transcended
something whose discipline he was never able to satisfy. In America I
truly experienced for the first time the importance of what is called em-
piricism, though I was guided from youth on by the conviction that
fruitful theoretical knowledge is impossible except in the closest con-
tact with its materials. Conversely, I had to recognize with respect to
the form of empiricism applied in scientific practice in America, that
full scope of experience is fettered by empirical rules excluding anything
that is inherent in the concept of direct life experience. By no means the
worst characterization of what I had in mind would be a kind of vindica-
tion of experience against its translation into empirical terms. That was
not the least important factor that led me to return to Germany, along
with the possibility of following my own purposes without hindrance
for a time in Europe and contributing something toward political en-
lightenment. This, however, did not in the least alter my gratitude,
including intellectual gratitude, toward America, nor do I ever expect
to forget as a scholar what I learned there.