The literature on Critical Theory and the Institute for Social Research is already voluminous. Some would claim that its history and accomplishments hardly warrant added attention and that more detailed research is bound to deliver ever diminishing, even trivial, returns. Although there are moments in Thomas Wheatland's study that are repetitious and still bear marks of the dissertation syndrome, his work, as part of the growing field of transatlantic migration and the circulation of ideas, does indeed offer a new (and in some ways controversial) perspective. For this is the first systematic treatise of “The Frankfurt School in Exile,” the complex and contested dynamics of its reception and assimilation (or otherwise) as its theories and sensibilities were exported out of their German context; mediated and absorbed into, as well as resisted by, American culture; and then returned, in rather reformed fashion, to its native land.

In what he terms an institutional study of “living social networks” (p. 1), rather than a hermeneutic analysis, Wheatland posits numerous, tantalizing, “revisionist” theses surrounding what he often calls the “Horkheimer Circle.” (Given the later iconic status of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin and the relative eclipse of Max Horkheimer's fame, it is instructive to be reminded of Horkheimer's domineering, often deeply unpleasant, centrality during the years of exile.) The “Franfkurt School,” Wheatland argues, was far less—splendidly or sadly—isolated in its U.S. exile than is commonly believed. In complex and problematic ways and in various degrees of intensity, it sought and established both academic institutional ties (especially with Columbia and Chicago Universities) and contacts with American public intellectuals. This may indeed be so, but too often the evidence is rather slim (Wheatland himself regularly bemoans the absence of archival evidence, particularly regarding the Institute of Social Research's relations with Columbia University), and the contacts—even with the mainly Jewish, left-leaning New York intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s which Wheatland examines in detail—were more often than not tactical, fleeting, uncomprehending, or peripheral (Horkheimer's refugee disinclination to engage political questions of the day and to hide the school's Marxist proclivities constitutes only part of the explanation). Previous versions as to the voluntary exilic isolation of the school may have been exaggerated; leaning too far in the other direction may also be somewhat misleading.

Wheatland's intriguing chapter-long examination of “Sidney Hook and the Confrontation between Pragmatism and Critical Theory” is a case in point. Early on, there was indeed a brief exchange of letters and publications between Hook and Horkheimer, one that eventually developed into a polemic between (at that time) Hook's Pragmatic Marxism and Critical Theory. Wheatland acutely notes the similarities between these positions—a hostility toward metaphysics, Idealism, the various strands of “irrationalism,” formalist logic; a shared goal of rendering the world more rational through a Marxist sociophilosophical methodology—but also analyzes the points of significant departure: Hook's greater emphasis on praxis or action and empirical, open scientific observation and experimentation as opposed to Critical Theory's revival of, and reliance upon, Hegelian dialectic and the immanent materialist critique of social totality based on “Reason” (which putatively was able to transcend the conservative limits of both positivism and pragmatism). Hook regarded dialectical logic as a kind of elitist theology that somehow endowed all things with a kind of metaphysical system or purpose. The preference for dialectics was baseless: “We need only ask of those who deny it,” he wrote in 1937, “to point to a single case of knowledge discovered by, or explicable in terms of, the dialectic method which cannot be more simply certified by the canons of scientific method” (p. 120). In Wheatland's account, Sidney Hook turns out to be as fascinating as his Frankfurt figures, yet again, from the material he provides, their direct “confrontation” seems to have been relatively slight, Hook's slings more often aimed at other pressing political and methodological opponents.

For all that, Wheatland's account of the gradual, punctured, and differentiated percolation of Frankfurt School themes—the overarching neo-Marxist theory of advanced capitalism, the wiles and traps of mass culture, the political and social uses of psychoanalysis, the critique of positivism—into American social thought is indeed persuasive. He argues, moreover, that the influence was no one-way street. Whether out of conviction or financial and institutional pressures (I suspect the latter to be the major driving impulse), the Institute for Social Research increasingly turned to more empirical, practice-oriented social science methods—albeit maintaining, if not always revealing, their larger theoretical, neo-Marxist stance. These collective works—Studies in Authority and Family and, especially, Studies in Prejudice—were obviously influenced by the rise of Nazism and the concern about anti-Semitism (which accounted for the American Jewish Committee's funding of the latter study). Yet, this was mainly undertaken by underlings, not the central figures of the Institute. As Hannah Arendt put it in a letter dated November 1943, those who worked on the project were those unable to obtain work elsewhere and who all complained that they were not interested “in the Jews and their enemies” and that they had to devote themselves to such “‘peripheral’ and crazy things.” Wheatland is no doubt correct in upbraiding some previous researchers for somewhat neglecting the empirical social-science projects of the school (possibly, I would suggest, because cultural historians have themselves been convinced by the anti-positivist critiques of Critical Theory!). Yet, how far these studies really represent a kind of watershed in the attitude of its leading figures is open to doubt. One should also remain partially skeptical about Wheatland's contention regarding the even more profound influence of the Frankfurt School upon postwar German sociology with “the introduction of American research methods” (p. xx). After all, the returned Adorno launched increasingly strident assaults upon all branches of fact-bound, narrow “positivism” inherently tied to the status quo.

Yet Wheatland's “Americanization” thesis contains an important insight. For only Horkheimer, Adorno, and Pollock returned to Germany (and not just as repatriates but rather as thinkers influenced by exile and imbued with notions of reforming and reeducating Germany). As importantly, Erich Fromm (whose early role in the book is exceptional, precisely because his integration was more successful and his influence more palpable), Leo Lowenthal, Otto Kirchheimer, Franz Neumann, and Herbert Marcuse all remained in the United States. To be sure, each went his own way and little of the “Frankfurt School” remained, but their institutional and personal integration proceeded apace. Indeed, Wheatland's account of Marcuse's “assimilation” is illuminating and persuasive. His involvement with the New Left may have been an oppositional assimilation, his thinking still European, yet it was directly a function of American politics and culture.

Wheatland debunks the notion that Marcuse was the leading theoretical inspiration, the “guru,” of the emerging New Left; indeed, apart from a few highly intellectual exceptions, as he notes, Marcuse had far less resonance and impact than is generally assumed. (It was the mass media, seeking a tangible authority figure, that, ironically, transformed “one of the most sophisticated critics of the culture industry … into a commodity” [p. 269].) Significantly, Wheatland convincingly argues, Marcuse may well have been more influenced by the New Left than the New Left was influenced by him. Inspired by the “counterculture,” Marcuse abandoned the traditional pessimism of the Frankfurt School and its anti-utopianism, and discovered new cracks and possibilities of hope in the “totally administered society,” no longer from the hopelessly brainwashed proletariat but from antiwar protesters, hippies, Black Panthers, and Third-World revolutionaries. It was the radical politics of American youth that inspired Marcuse to move from the darkness of One Dimensional Man to the vision of unrepressed freedom, joy, and pleasure of Eros and Civilization (it was also the hopes for this counterculture—and an analysis of its establishment enemies—that gave form to his more notorious writings on “Repressive Tolerance” and An Essay on Liberation).

In June 1940 Horkheimer famously wrote, “In view of everything that is engulfing Europe and perhaps the whole world our present work is of course essentially destined to being passed on through the night that is approaching: a kind of message in a bottle” (p. 347). What Wheatland's work demonstrates is that transatlantic bottled messages may land up in strange places and undergo ironic decipherments and exegeses that provided them with unexpected meanings and new significance.