The German Genius

beschädigten Leben ( Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life ), he examined—again—how capitalism and marketing vulgarized experience, where the media attach almost equal weight to all events, the political being regarded as no more important than, say, the death of a soap-opera character. 43 This he saw as a form of psychological damage, so too with television and film, where sentimental music often does the thinking for the audience, so that its responses are conditioned not by the objective situation but by the way a score is manipulated. Direction, presentation, staging, on this account, are a form of coercion, of bullying even, rather than a form of enlightenment or education. 44
    However, the main center of the social sciences, for the German refugees in the United States, was not the Frankfurt Institute but, as should already be clear, the New School for Social Research in New York, where the University in Exile had become the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science. Alvin Johnson, one of the founders of the New School, had encountered—and been impressed by—many German scholars in the course of editing Columbia’s New International Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences . He personally raised money for the exiles and, from his encyclopedia activities, knew who was likely to need help.
    Exiles began arriving in 1933 and the graduate school soon acquired its own dean, Hans Staudinger, once a distinguished German civil servant and secretary of state in the Prussian Ministry of Commerce. Two journals were conceived, Social Research and Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft , the latter being published until the outbreak of World War II and indicating, says Lewis Coser, that the scholars were not too concerned to build strong bridges to their new location. 45 In a variety of fields, such as phenomenology or econometrics, the New School offered pioneering courses. A number of members of the faculty—among them Hans Speier and Gerhard Colm, who had served in government institutions such as the Office of War Information during the war—helped to conceive the postwar German currency reform that was to prove such a success.
    Paul Lazarsfeld (1901–76) stood out as the man most responsible for the introduction of sociological survey research into America. Born in Vienna to a mother who was a psychoanalyst, he arrived in America in 1933 and, following developments in Austria and the outlawing of the socialist party, he extended his stay, then made it permanent. His first eye-catching study was a survey of the effects of radio on American society, and this brought him into contact with the Harvard social scientist Hadley Cantril, who offered Lazarsfeld a job as director of the Office of Radio Research at Princeton, an outfit that moved to Columbia in 1939 and evolved five years later into the now-famous Bureau of Applied Social Research. 46 This bureau institutionalized a new approach to research, studying “aggregate behavior,” how people make up their minds when voting, why people don’t vote, why they buy some things and not others. Overall, as Coser has pointed out, Lazarsfeld revealed gradually the latent social structure of American life, new ways of understanding how people are grouped, beyond class structure, which was to have a significant effect on market research and political focus groups. 47 Lazarsfeld’s influence was felt on a generation of famous American social scientists, including Seymour Martin Lipset, Alvin Gouldner, David Riesman, and Robert Merton.
    A N EW S TAGE IN I NDUSTRIAL C IVILIZATION
     
    Among a whole raft of economists who were influential after their arrival in the United States (Fritz Machlup, Gottfried von Haberler, Alexander Gerschenkron, Paul Baran, Karl Polanyi, Fritz Redlich), there were a handful whose names became very familiar. Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) was known for his work in his native Austria when he arrived in 1940 and became a guest of the National Bureau of Economic Research, eventually becoming a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Business Administration at New York University. He had begun by being interested in business cycles, which stimulated in him a belief in strict laissez-faire. While Keynesian economics held the day after World War II, Mises’s approach was not popular but in the 1970s, as he was joined in his views by Hayek and Milton Friedman, he was listened to more and more.
    Oskar Morgenstern,