All the tensions within the German academic community which accompanied the changes in political, cultural and intellectual life in Germany since 1890 were reproduced in the Institute for Social Research from its inception in Frankfurt in 1923.¹ These changes were widely diagnosed as a "crisis in culture'.² By this very definition the "crisis' was deplored yet exacerbated. The Institute carried these tensions with it into exile and when it returned to Germany after the war and found itself the sole heir to a discredited tradition the inherited tensions became even more acute. These tensions are evident in the work of most of the School's members, and most clearly, self-consciously and importantly in the work of Theodor W. Adorno.