Studies in Philosophy and Social Science is the English-language journal of the Institute of Social Research, and the 1941 issue gathered here is a working document rather than a treatise: essays, research reports, and reviews by Theodor Adorno, Paul Lazarsfeld, Herta Herzog, Harold Lasswell, William Dieterle, and Charles Siepmann, framed by Max Horkheimer’s preface. Horkheimer presents the number as the fruit of a collaboration between the Institute, then in exile in New York, and Columbia University’s Office of Radio Research, and as a first attempt to bring the Institute’s theoretical categories to bear on American mass communication. The volume moves between two poles—the empirical study of radio audiences and the critical analysis of the culture industry—and it is in the friction between them that its argument lives.
“Can man serve God and Mammon?”
Where Critical Theory Meets the Radio Listener
The Institute’s American Turn
The 1941 volume opens with a contents list that reads like a map of the Institute of Social Research’s wartime situation: essays by Paul Lazarsfeld, Adorno with George Simpson, Harold Lasswell, Herta Herzog, William Dieterle, and Charles Siepmann, alongside notes on a research project on antisemitism and a thick stack of reviews—Marcuse on Dewey’s Theory of Valuation, and notices of Wirth, Llewellyn, Baumgarten, Carr, and many others. Horkheimer’s preface explains why. The issue grew out of collaboration between the Institute and Columbia’s Office of Radio Research, and the exchanges between the two raised the question of how critical theory and empirical research might interact. One issue cannot settle so large a problem, he concedes; the essays are offered as examples of an approach that knows theory and empirical analysis need each other. He takes particular satisfaction that “our ideas” are for the first time applied to specifically American subject matters and brought into American methodological debate, crediting Lazarsfeld with translating categories developed in a highly abstract context into the concrete desiderata of current social research.
Administrative Research and Its Limits
Lazarsfeld’s contribution, “Remarks on Administrative and Critical Communications Research,” begins by noting how thoroughly mass media had been documented in two decades: audience sizes and composition, circulations, readership of stories and advertisements, language difficulty, entertainment preferences, campaign success. Sampling, interviewing, recording devices, and attitude indices had all advanced. Behind this work lies a simple notion—media are tools handled by people or agencies for given purposes, whether selling goods, raising intellectual standards, or securing understanding of government policy—and research makes the tool better known and easier to use. Such studies are commissioned by publishers, networks, foundations, and universities alike.
To show what such research can do, Lazarsfeld retells a “fable” from the discussions of 1939–40. Government leaders and broadcasters agree the public should learn the dangers of subversive aliens while avoiding anti-alien outbreaks. A popular evening radio address follows—and so do reported attacks on alien groups alluding to the broadcast, and a request from the Federal Communications Commission for the text. Remedial work requires knowing what the damage was: effects flowed through press reports, local talk, and newsreels. Stations interview listeners, especially participants in the outbreaks; university specialists study predispositions; a national poll surveys a cross-section. The findings are instructive. Innocent references to a few subversive aliens were heard as applying to aliens generally; interviewees cite racial traits, business competition, Fifth Column reports. And the audience had jumped partly because a rival program, popular with less educated listeners, had left the air for the summer. A mere counter-address seems insufficient. A social psychologist traces the shift of anti-minority feeling onto new scapegoats; an audience specialist confirms the psychologically different public and recommends pretesting on a small typical sample. Remedial materials are prepared, other speakers enlisted, effects gauged in advance—and the hostility indices decline. The moral: speaker, sponsors, and broadcasters shared their era’s predispositions, and conscious intention must be checked by objective standards. In media where instant rejoinder is difficult, more trouble should be taken to avoid mistakes.
Critical Research Against Promotion
Lazarsfeld calls this “administrative research,” done for an agency of public or private character. Critical research differs from the consumer movement, which attacks concrete advertising wrongs; for the critical approach, advertisement is only one promotional form sustaining present society, and its cultural implications matter more than its economics. Against propaganda analysis, the problem is not that people are misled about isolated facts but that they have less and less chance to develop standards of judgment of their own, since wherever they turn they are caught by some kind of promotion.
Symptoms in Everyday Life
An old newsreel of ten-year-old fashions makes a movie audience laugh. Do we avenge ourselves for having submitted to them under pressure, and gather strength to submit to present pressure? A brewery advertisement shows a man throwing aside a newspaper full of European war horrors: in times like these, peace and courage are found at your own fireside with a beer. What happens when symbols of basic human wants are falsified into merchandising slogans—why settle social problems by action and sacrifice if a new brand of beer serves the same ends? A family textbook would hardly analyze how the family maintains the authoritarian structure the economy requires, or how the father’s predominance trains the child to accept privation uncomplainingly; studying the depression family, one might instead ask whether family constellations affect the ability to find out-of-the-way jobs.
Experience as Historically Changing
Textbooks treat “experience” as a psychological concept needing little elucidation. But experience may itself change historically.
The Ambivalence of the Jitterbug
Adorno closes his essay on popular music by pressing against his own thesis. The official vocabulary of jitterbug culture—”the latest craze,” “swing frenzy,” “alligator,” “rug-cutter”—points to something beyond conditioned reflex: a fury that may first aim at the critics of the idols but can just as easily swing round against the idols themselves. Passive acceptance cannot account for this. Complete passivity would demand unambiguous acceptance, and neither the material nor the observation of listeners bears that out; giving up resistance is not the same as embracing the inescapable.
Enthusiasm, he argues, takes a decision. Listeners convert the external order they serve into an internal one, and the ego’s investment of musical commodities with libido is not wholly unconscious. Among the devoted non-experts of Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman there prevails a “switched on” attitude, a decision to “join the ranks”—conformity plus a resolve to conform, an act of will close to the surface. The fanaticism runs on a spiteful decision that must be over-forced, since natural enthusiasm would never overcome the resistance; hence the deliberate overdoing, the eyes shut and teeth gritted, the refusal of any calm view that would jeopardize the whole inflicted attitude. The jitterbug grimaces at himself, mocking his own enjoyment while pretending to enjoy it, as if secretly hoping for judgment day and exoneration from a fraud committed against himself. Humor makes everything shifty, so nothing can be pinned on him; bad taste, fury, hidden resistance and latent self-contempt are cloaked and neutralized. Scarcely any jitterbug is thoroughly fascinated—much of the hysteria is patterned on advertising slogans, an imitation, a histrionic act he can switch off as suddenly as on. The closer this willed decision and incipient self-denunciation come to consciousness, the greater the chance the mass breaks through and dispenses with controlled pleasure. These are not spineless insects; they need their will to drown the premonition that something is phony, and that surviving will may yet shake off superimposed influences. Adorno doubts the old psychoanalytic line between conscious and unconscious still holds, since mass reactions are now thinly veiled from consciousness—though the veil is almost insuperably hard to break. The frank lie no one believes increasingly replaces yesterday’s convincing ideologies, and the belief that people react like insects only serves the façade of those who prate about irrational community powers. To become an insect, a man needs the very energy that might make him a man.
Lasswell on the Psychological Program
Harold Lasswell turns to radio as an instrument for reducing personal insecurity. So long as radio reflects an individualistic society, there will be “psychological” programs. The child of that society develops acute ego consciousness, trained to compare himself with rivals and discipline his impulses for power, respect and income—”Strive and Succeed” was the motto of modern individualism. The craving for psychology approaches addiction only there, and it burns hottest among middle-class children, the quintessential climbers, whose lives concentrate cultural conflict: individual achievement set against service and loyalty, the businessman against the clergyman, ambition against ideals. In periods of social difficulty the taste flares up; those trained to appraise the ego by success take the blame for failure, grow restive, and seek escape from futility and guilt. Explanations of human nature, he notes, fall into three types—those stressing internal impulses and ideas, those stressing the external environment, and a third he is about to name.
The Broadcasts and Their Audiences
Lasswell refuses to present his own series as a model of conformity to his standards. Some broadcasts would score low on optimism—”The Dictator” offered little explicit suggestion that dictatorial tendencies could be controlled, though any balanced explanation contributes to optimism, since what can be understood can be partly directed. The series was mainly diagnostic, with a bare minimum of therapeutic suggestion, so it ranks high on restrained endorsement. One irate listener complained of case after case of neurotic aberration and demanded hope of sanity through mental hygiene, insisting psychiatrists only deepen morbid tendencies and accept the subnormal as typical. The broadcasts balance internal and external factors well but weigh too little on the prestigeful side, though the second third of the second series dealt with eminent historical figures. Effects on audiences, Lasswell insists, depend on listeners’ predispositions—Lazarsfeld’s “preselective effect,” the self-selection of programs; response is a function of environment and predisposition, and the probability of a positive response rises when past responses brought gains. He sketches the listening groups: those who talk about psychology to improve their skill and vocabulary; those aware of manipulating others—public relations men, salesmen, lawyers, receptionists, dentists—who may avoid shop talk for fear of the guinea-pig response; and the anxious and uncertain, from hospital patients and jilted suitors to the elderly and disturbed adolescents.
Hollywood’s Reckoning with the European Crisis
William Dieterle, writing from a decade inside the industry, refuses the easy cynicism that treats studio heads as hypocrites. Their alarm over the war is genuine, he argues; when they say a Hitler victory would ruin Hollywood, they mean it. The trouble is that their awakening came too late—a prudent merchant reorganizes before the storm, so Hollywood either failed to prepare or cannot. The numbers make the stakes plain: foreign markets normally supplied thirty-five percent of annual receipts, and R.K.O. alone lost $400,000 in foreign revenue in the last four months of 1939, precisely the sum that would have kept it from closing its fiscal year $180,000 in the red.
Optimists who expect Hitler to preserve American films for economic reasons misunderstand him. Dieterle insists the Führer cannot regard facts dispassionately; he has a psychopathic appetite for revenge. Hollywood snubbed his goodwill ambassador Leni Riefenstahl and filled its screens with anti-Nazi pictures, and Hitler is no Job—he will not let economics block a personal settling of accounts. Stalin, too, banned American films once in power, admitting a few Nazi titles only after the Russo-German pact. Both dictators despise the American idea of life, so capitalistic films will have no place in a Nazi-controlled Europe. Totalitarian states do not need films vitally, and Hitler can manufacture them: he already controls French studios, and should Britain fall, all of old Europe. Dieterle foresees a pan-European film union under Nazi control that would extinguish competition.
Even in defeat, Hitler leaves a ruined Europe behind. Films made for American audiences will not suit a people embittered by hell, and Hollywood cannot profitably serve two audiences at once. The statistics bear him out: of 67,030 sound-wired theatres worldwide, Europe holds 35,963 against 19,032 in the United States; in 1938 sixty-five percent of world screen time was American, and foreign markets yielded thirty-five to forty percent of gross. Britain was the most important European market—eighty-one percent of British pictures in 1938 were American, worth $35,000,000—yet even that had fallen fifty percent from its high. Germany exhibited fifty-two American films in 1937 against ninety-six of its own, with plans to cut the American quota to thirty, while the United States imported eighty-five German films.
Dieterle’s counsel is to turn inward: “Hic Rhodos, hic salta!” America’s 17,003 theatres serve 85,000,000 weekly patrons—over a third of the world’s audience—at an average admission of twenty-three cents, grossing near a billion dollars. A quarter of the box-office dollar goes to production; after supplies, interest, and taxes, net profits come to no more than $21,500,000, a sum four of the eight major studios could cover from last year’s earnings alone. Hollywood sees proportions, not possibilities. Latin America’s 5,400 theatres run seventy-six percent American films, though quotas tighten and local production rises. Even if foreign markets vanished, Dieterle maintains, Hollywood could profit, citing Macy’s and Woolworth’s as enterprises built on American trade alone. Drastic reorganization is needed: the production dollar is carved up disproportionately—cast at twenty-five percent, sets and art directors at 12.5, indirect costs at fifteen—and these shares can be trimmed without harming essential production. The industry must also reckon with its responsibility to workers, with $1,900,000,000 sunk in American film theatres.
Radio and the Public Interest
Charles A. Siepmann begins from the premise that radio is what it is because “we are what we are”—habituated to an outlook inherited from the past and partly out of date. The industry’s structure is no accident; it descends from principles embedded in American thought. Radio stands for free, competitive enterprise tied to the profit motive, which made the resources of invention available to the public, yet it was never launched purely on that basis. Unrestricted competition soon collapsed into chaos, and the industry itself sought government regulation. Herbert Hoover, then Acting Secretary of Commerce, supplied the first definition of principles: the people hold control of the channels of the air; radio activities remain largely free—free of monopoly, free in program and speech; and a moral principle, that we must “double guard the radio” because the home cannot be protected from the airwaves as it is from printed matter. The agency later created to give flesh to “the public interest, convenience and necessity” was the Federal Communications Commission, and though the phrase remained equivocal for years, its existence signals a new conception of government responsibility, matched by an emergent notion of public service as the condition of continued private enterprise. The industry, uneasy about further regulation, has partly put its own house in order with a moral code and the label “public service.”
The Prehistory of National Socialist Rule
Understanding how anti-Jewish measures took hold under National Socialism requires first grasping the Nazi social and political system. The project traces the ideological roots back through German philosophy and literature of the early twentieth century, where anti-rationalism, “community-madness,” and belief in a leader had long dominated public thinking. It also examines the political pre-history of the movement and the jingoism of the pre-war years, to which many Jews fell victim despite its anti-Semitic features, seeking the specific characteristics behind the German people’s arousal in 1914 and the war policy that followed. The decay of the Weimar Republic is traced to two political causes: the impossibility of a working parliament once the middle classes were dispossessed—Communists, Social Democrats, and National Socialists together held 55.9% of votes in December 1930—so that democratic parties accepted rule by emergency decree without parliamentary sanction; and the policy of toleration and alliance between democratic powers and the Prussian Junkers and the most backward sections of heavy industry. The Junkers’ and industry’s agreement to the Nazi seizure of power came not from love of the new system but from the weakness of democratic forces, which chose dictatorship without a clear idea of what was coming. The project will trace the stages: alliances between trade unions and Stinnes, between Ebert and Hindenburg, between the government and the fascist free corps, the acceptance of rearmament. The terrorism of the concentration camps was anticipated in the murders of Erzberger, Rathenau, and Haase; the surrender of executive powers to the Junker-loving Hindenburg, with the consent of all democratic parties, sealed the Republic’s fate.
The Vanishing Tribunal of Money
In a laissez-faire economy the entrepreneur could read in the increase or decrease of invested capital the extent to which an undertaking served society; failure was the market’s judgment, proclaimed in money. In the totalitarian state the free market is abolished and money’s ability to “declare” ceases; the government, with small groups of the German bureaucracy, determines which undertakings are useful for military and other purposes. The market, an anonymous and democratic tribunal, gives way to the command and plan of those in power, and the initiative of private entrepreneurs—particularly large and small private banks—disappears. Total deposits in German private banks fell between 1929 and 1938 from 2,300,000,000 to 950,000,000 marks, and in all large banking concerns from 12,408,000,000 to 6,804,000,000. Restrictions on new bond, share, and mortgage-bond issues reduced stock market operations to a minimum; state-directed foreign exchange control and the compulsion to sell foreign exchange, bonds, and shares to the Reichsbank further reduced banking activity, while Reich loans to be subscribed by banks were largely determined by the Reich itself. Credit as a whole was replaced by government protection, and what applied to banks applied in part to commerce. The decline of the spheres in which German Jews were chiefly engaged is the basis of their becoming superfluous; their economic existence was tied to the liberal system and its judicial and political conditions. In liberalism the unfit are eliminated by competition regardless of names or personal qualities; in the totalitarian system individuals or entire social groups can be sent to the gallows at any moment for political or other reasons. The replacement of the market by a planned economy of state bureaucracy, and the decline of money capital’s power, made possible the policy against Jews in the Third Reich.
The Propaganda Value of Anti-Semitism
These conditions alone do not explain the maintenance and intensification of anti-Semitic measures; stolen Jewish fortunes are only one factor, though a strong one. The question is what anti-Semitic propaganda achieves among social strata of other countries. While frank disgust is revealed among German masses, promises of anti-Semitism are eagerly swallowed where fascist governments have never been attempted; even where anti-Semitic sympathies are not tolerated or conscious because of democratic cultural tradition, tendencies veer in that direction and can be activated overnight. The German government is highly sensitive to this, scenting behind pro-Semitic speeches of the educated an opportunity for psychological guidance toward anti-Semitic aims, and it is a master at linking policies to existing or potential tensions abroad. As religion formerly won foreign soil for civilization and home industry, today missionaries of anti-Semitism conquer the world for barbarism and German exports.
An Experimental Approach to Anti-Semitism
The project plans to treat anti-Semitism experimentally, providing situations approximating the concrete conditions of present-day life in order to visualize the mechanism of anti-Semitic reactions realistically, develop the typology drafted earlier, and provide insight into regional and social differences. The most satisfactory method appears to be films presented to subjects of different regional and social groups, with reactions obtained partly by observation during performances, partly by interviews, partly by written reports; introspection cannot be entirely eliminated, but its flaws can be reduced by careful interpretation.
Adorno on Jazz Syncopation
T. W. Adorno, writing from New York with Eunice Cooper, takes up theories of jazz syncopation. Hobson, he finds, takes only a first step toward a theory of syncope: his psychoanalytic suggestion that the ragtime public enjoyed being moved out of the rut of the established beat misses the point, since the established beat is constantly re-established and remains effective throughout syncopation as its inherent measure. Hobson suspects that measure but pins it maliciously on the “modernists” rather than making it his own case, quoting their supposed taboo upon rhythm and their omission of perpendicular bar lines. Here the reviewer locates the insight into jazz’s merely pseudo-modern character, its false freedom, the uniformity of its supposedly multifold rhythm. Sargeant’s analyses cut deeper. His two basic types—simple syncopation and the formation of pseudo-bars—are not ultimately distinct, since even the simplest syncopation contains elementary pseudo-bars; his interpretation of syncope as mere substitution of the down beat places jazz’s fictitious character at the very center of technical procedure. Syncopation is a living “as if,” and the substitution theory gives significance to the “umpateedle” rhythm, whose punctuation reinforces the down beat and indirectly the syncope that contrasts the groundbeat. Sargeant’s law conceives syncope as a function of the strength of the groundbeat with which it does not coincide; the power of the break is drawn from the power of convention itself. The relation between groundbeat and syncope also unfolds historically: groundbeats defended themselves against the syncope, but the driving force of the malicious trick proved stronger—early rags showed reluctance to override beats, the prim four-square structure of old reels and hornpipes held out, yet polyrhythmic freedom could not be denied, and by the turn of the century the besieged strong beats began to yield. Sargeant’s final theory largely coincides with the reviewer’s: interruption of rhythmic regularity produces unrest, the listener gropes for re-orientation with stimulation, and the resumption of regularity brings relief; syncope is “rhythmic discord longing for its solution.” The ritual by which the jazz subject becomes aware of its identity with the social power of the groundbeat is identified, and with it the illusory character of the process: the fundamental rhythm is not really destroyed, the perceptive listener holds its continuation mentally, and the orchestra resumes precisely on one of these pulses. To comprehend jazz’s appeal means to be ready to find the gesture of freedom where actually there is no freedom. Sargeant compares jazz’s integration with the happy ending of the moving picture, bringing the phenomenon to the fore in musical mass communication; jazz is a “get together” art for “regular fellows,” emphasizing regularity by submerging individual consciousness in mass self-hypnotism, where individual will submits and men become virtually indistinguishable. The link between societal and aesthetic process is the technique of mechanical reproduction; jazz and radio match as if patterned in the same mold, and jazz in live performance already appears as if transmitted by radio.
Cromwell, the Diggers, Colbert, and Schumpeter’s Cycles
The remaining reviews pass to other hands. Abbott’s edition of Cromwell’s Writings and Speeches is praised as a comprehensive biography; Petegorsky’s Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War, on Gerrard Winstanley and the digger movement, is reviewed by Franz L. Neumann; Cole’s Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism and Brogan’s France fall to Otto Kirchheimer; and Schumpeter’s Business Cycles is examined at length, tracing his methodological shifts across his 1908, 1912, and 1939 works.
Grossman Against Schumpeter
Henryk Grossman, writing from New York, argues that Schumpeter’s presuppositions contradict one another. The stationary model assumes a stationary population—variations in population are counted among external factors and excluded—so no increase of production is possible at all. Schumpeter also assumes producers of consumers’ goods suffer no losses in passing to increased production, claiming the process “can go on indefinitely” so long as interest has not fallen to zero: an unproved and false assertion, since every rearrangement toward increasing production restricts consumers’ goods production and causes losses to enterprise owners. Schumpeter accepts the Tugan-Baranovski merry-go-round, demonstrated forty years earlier as theoretically untenable, believing equilibrium is reestablished because increased production-goods production replaces restricted consumers’-goods production—”The demand from the increased incomes in the machine industries steps into the place of the demand discontinued by savers.” Grossman notes he never investigates the quantitative problem of substitute demand and the time factor, never shows that missing consumption can be replaced in the same unit of time, nor that new machine-industry demand equals previous consumers’-goods demand, though machine industry occupies considerably fewer workers and creates less demand.
The Two Kinds of Communications Research
Lazarsfeld’s distinction between administrative and critical research sets the terms for the whole issue. Administrative research serves an agency—a network, a sponsor, a public body—and asks how a medium can better accomplish purposes already given: who is exposed, what they prefer, how presentation shapes effect. Lazarsfeld defends its rigor against the sponsor who trusts a good guess over data, and his fable of the radio address that accidentally stirred up anti-alien outbreaks shows what such research can do—trace the damage through press, rumor, and newsreel, find that a rival program’s summer absence had drawn a less educated audience, and pretest a remedy before broadcasting it. Critical research, by contrast, treats the promotional culture itself as the object. Its four-step operation—assume a trend, show how a phenomenon expresses and reinforces it, judge the consequences for human dignity and freedom, consider remedies—refuses to let the established procedures of fact-finding decide what counts as a relevant fact. The essay answers the charge of mere “showing up” by recalling the Victorian reformers: public consciousness had to be shocked before slum conditions could be addressed, and cultural values now need the same defense.
Standardization, Pseudo-Individualization, and the Plugged Hit
Adorno’s essay on popular music supplies the issue’s most sustained piece of theory. The popular song is structurally standardized, its composition doing the listener’s hearing; production remains a handicraft dressed up as industry, while imitation and cartelized enforcement have frozen the standards into “the immunity of bigness.” Pseudo-individualization gives mass-produced culture the halo of free choice: the improvisation is normalized, the detail is an embellishment, the name-band a trademark distinguishing the undifferentiated. Glamor, baby talk, and plugging complete the machinery, and Adorno’s account of recognition—the “jump,” the subsumption of the hit under its title, the proprietary thrill of “I know it,” the transfer of that thrill to the song itself—explains how listeners come to like what has been pre-digested for them. His closing pages refuse the easy conclusion: the jitterbug’s frenzy is a willed self-caricature, and the thinness of the veil over these mechanisms is itself the modern condition. To become an insect, he writes, a man needs the energy that might have made him a man.
What the Audience Does with What It Hears
Herzog’s study of daytime serial listeners gives the theoretical claims an empirical body. Two million women a day follow stories that mirror middle-class life; they cry, they talk back to the radio, they borrow the serial family as a model for their own. Listening offers emotional release, a remodelling of drudgery, and recipes for adjustment—yet the release is a short-lived pseudo-catharsis, and the advice is “potential,” treasured precisely because it need never be applied. The more programs a woman listens to, the longer she wants the stories to run, which Herzog reads as an index of insecurity. Radio has replaced the neighbor: the listener feels entitled to its help because she buys the sponsor’s products, and the one-sided intimacy of the medium fits her isolation. Lasswell’s broadcasts and Siepmann’s essay on radio and education extend the diagnosis—Lasswell cataloguing the anxious listeners who seek out psychology on the air, Siepmann weighing radio’s genuine achievements in news and free discussion against centralization, ballyhoo, and the “slave mentality” of promotional excess.
Anti-Semitism as the Issue’s Dark Center
The volume’s closing movement turns from communication to the Research Project on Antisemitism, and the section headings preserved in the text map its course: anti-Semitism and mass movements, anti-Semitism in modern humanism, types of present-day anti-Semites, the Jews in society, the foundations of National Socialist anti-Semitism, and an experimental section. The project belongs to the Institute’s larger inquiry into authoritarianism, and its placement here is deliberate: the same promotional culture that trains listeners to recognize and obey is the soil in which the demagogue’s scapegoat flourishes. Lazarsfeld’s fable already showed how a broadcast could release latent hostility against aliens; the anti-Semitism studies ask what happens when such hostility is organized, rationalized in humanist vocabulary, and given a movement to join.
A Journal That Argues with Itself
What makes the issue worth reading now is not any single verdict but the argument it stages between two institutions and two temperaments. Horkheimer’s preface hopes that the Institute’s abstract categories will prove themselves against American subject matter; Lazarsfeld answers with sampling, indices, and pretests; Adorno answers Lazarsfeld by insisting that the promotional frame itself must be judged. The volume does not resolve the quarrel—it prints both sides and lets the reader feel the pull. Its legacy lies in that unresolved tension: the empirical study of audiences and the critical theory of mass culture were never fully reconciled, and the essays collected here are among the first places where the attempt was made in public, in English, on American ground.
