First year of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung

The Frankfurt School's Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung began publication in 1932 under the editorship of Max Horkheimer, who was also director of the Institut für Sozialforschung under whose auspices it was published.

The edition I have available is a combined edition of all of Volume 1, which covers that first year, 1932. This edition was apparently published as a single volume.

In addition to around 300 book reviews, it includes as essays:

• Max Horkheimer on the ways in which positivist theories deprive scientific thought of its social-critical function ("Bemerkungen über Wissenschaft und Krise") and the use of psychology in historical analysis ("Geschichte und Psychologie")

• Erich Fromm with two essays on the application of psychoanalysis to sociology: "Über Methode und Aufgabe einer analytischen Sozialpsychologie" and "Die psychoanalytische Charakterologie und ihre Bedeutung für die Sozialpsychologie"

• Theodor Adorno, his name appearing here as Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno, in a long essay on the sociology of music ("Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik")

• Franz Borkenau on the development of the mechanistic worldview related to the early version of manufacturing ("Zur Soziologie des meehanistischen Weltbildes"), an excerpt from his then-forthcoming book on the transition from the feudal to the capitalist (bourgeois) worldview, Der Übergang vom fedualen zum bürgerlichen Weltbild (1934).

• Henryk Grossman on economic cycles and the concept of the value-price-transformation in Marxist economics ("Die Wert-Preis-Transformation bei Marx und das Krisenproblem")

• Julian Gumperz on the American system of political parties ("Zur Soziologie des amerikanisehen Parteiensystems"), which I will discuss in a separate post

• Leo Löwenthal on using the historical setting of a literary work in literary scholarship ("Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik"). Löwenthal ende his career as a professor of sociology at UC-Berkeley.

• Friedrich Pollock on the situation at that time in the Depression and the potential benefits of a planned economy ("Die gegenwärtige Lage des Kapitalismus und die Aussichten einer planwirtschaftlichen Neuordnung")

• Andries Sternheim on the analysis of how workers use their leisure time ("Zum Problem der Freizeitgestaltung")

Grossman's essay focuses on analyzing an issue in both Marxist and capitalist (classical and neo-classical) economics. He argues that Marx understood that the labor theory of value, or the price-value scheme of analysis, which he elaborated in the first volume of Capital has to integrated with the market framework, or production-price scheme, that he discussed in Capital's third volume. Classical economics (Smith, Ricardo, Malthus) had focused on the organization of labor, and Marx's version of the labor theory of value was heavily based on that approach. Neoclassical economics (Alfred Marshall) focused more on market mechanisms. Grossman argues that neither the liberal nor the Marxist economic traditions had adequately founded the production-price schema on the price-value schema.

Grossman's essay focused on economic theory and issues, as does Pollock's. The others focus more on sociological, psychological and cultural questions. For liberals and conservatives, it was not a surprising problem that capitalism had stabilized after the Great War. But for the assumptions of the social-democrats and Marxists in the late 19th century through the First World War, the situation of a stabilized capitalism, particularly in Germany, with a parliamentary system in which the Social Democrats could lead a government but not have the power (or really even the intention!) to fundamentally alter the economic system and nationalize the means of production, in their manner of speaking, was a surprise and problem that needed to be understood in both practical-political and theoretical terms.

Andries Sternheim's look at the use of leisure time is a great example of one way the Frankfurt School was approaching the problem. Prior to the Great War, workers in Germany and western Europe normally had 10-hour days and not many leisure pasttimes available to them. This both increased the feeling of desperation for a dramatic social change. But it was the Social Democratic movement who provided urban workers with much of their alternatives in their time off work, all of which encouraged some kind of political involvement. And of course some of which was direct political involvement. (Leisure time or free time in his context means time other than that spent at work or directly connected to preparting for work and getting to the workplace, not specifically play time.)

After the war, the eight-hour day became more firmly established. And Sternheim examines some of the available information on the new ways in which workers and their families were using their leisure time: sport events, both as participants and spectators; movies; the radio; cultural programs, including theater. And he stresses that it is important to understand both the actual political effects and implications for political and/or class consciousness of such activities as they are. And also to understand how the workers' movement can make use of them for political purposes.

He didn't have the kind of data to undertake a lot of that analysis in this essay. But he does make some informed observations and speculations. And his essay makes the point that leisure activities, including film and radio, do provide important channels through which people's understanding of their society and their role in it is shaped. And which can to some extent be manipulated in ways not available at the turn of the 20th century.

Tags: critical theory, frankfurt school