Democracy and Political Theory : a Participatory Interpretation of the Adorno/Lazarsfeld Debate

In 1938, Theodor W. Adorno was invited by Paul F. Lazarsfeld (then head of the Office of Radio Research at Princeton University) to join a research project on radio in Newark. The Austrian social scientist (Lazarsfeld) who had recently immigrated to the United States hoped that the young German philosopher (Adorno) would translate his arguments on culture into empirically verifiable hypotheses which would then be tested within the project. However, the collaboration between Adorno and the team working in Newark did not go well. In their respective contributions to The intellectual migration : Europe and America, 1930-1960 (ed. Bernard Bailyn and Donald Fleming, 1969) Lazarsfeld and Adorno came back on this failed collaboration. The debate they had in 1938 and their accounts of it in 1969 reflect opposing views of the epistemology of the social sciences in relation with normative political theory. Lazarsfeld stressed the importance of dynamic fieldwork in working out concepts describing ever-changing social phenomena whereas Adorno defended the necessity of a prior understanding of social structures to conduct relevant fieldwork. They both attacked each other's commitment to democracy. Adorno accused Lazarsfeld of conducting fieldwork that could only further the views of industrial proponents of a hierarchical, anti-democratic society, as it was based on the concepts they provided. Lazarsfeld then blamed Adorno for using conceptual frameworks anchored in a traditional academic language as inegalitarian as the one stemming from industrial research. In this paper, I ultimately argue that one of the theoretical outcomes of this debate may actually be the necessity of the blurring of the line between observers and observed. If one takes seriously the criticism they waged at each other’s methodology, one may defend that a normative political theory committed to democracy has to be grounded in participatory research.