Not-Such-Odd Couples: Paul Lazarsfeld and the Horkheimer Circle on Morningside Heights

Abstract

We have inherited an almost mythic image of the relations between members of the Horkheimer Circle and Paul Lazarsfeld. Although both parties exemplified the kind of professional cooperation that exile at times necessitated, traditional accounts depict these two sociological entities as, at most, strange bedfellows. Especially among the scholars and partisans of Critical Theory, Lazarsfeld typified the empirical while the Horkheimer Circle embodied the theoretical (or cultural, or critical) approach to social science. Lazarfeld represented the culmination of applied mathematics in a corporate model of sociology, and the Horkheimer Circle remained the heirs of Bildung in their aspirations to fashion a comprehensive theory of contemporary society particularly oriented toward the transformation of the existing social order. Ultimately this awkward relationship has been personified in the antipathies between Paul Lazarsfeld and Theodor W. Adorno that are given prominence in so much of the literature regarding these two figures.¹