ABSTRACT
When Marx Horkheimer took over the position as director of the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt in 1931, he and his fellow members of the institute soon began to focus on the intertwining of theory and individual sciences. Based on the belief that philosophical reflection was no longer capable of providing any kinds of wider systems, but should rather refer to results of empirical research, the institute's task, according to Horkheimer, was
to organize investigations stimulated by contemporary philosophical problems in which philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians, and psychologists are brought together in permanent collaboration to undertake in common that which can be carried out individually in the laboratory in other fields. In short, the task is to do what all true researchers have always done: namely, to pursue their larger philosophical questions on the basis of the most precise scientific methods to revise and refine their questions in the course of their substantive work, and to develop new methods without losing sight of the larger context. 1
