From Socialization to Social Research: Felix Weil, Karl Korsch, and the Political Origins of the Frankfurt School

At the age of 25, in 1923, the Argentine socialist of German-Jewish origin (Lucio) Felix (José) Weil founded the Institut für Sozialforschung with an endowment from his father, the grain merchant Hermann Weil. Felix Weil was a student of Robert Wilbrandt, a socialist professor from the University of Tübingen, who sat on the Socialization Commission along with Kautsky, Schumpeter, Hilferding, and Lederer, among others, in 1918–1919, following the German Revolution. Wilbrandt encouraged Weil to turn an essay of his on socialization into a dissertation, which was eventually published in 1921, in Karl Korsch’s book series on practical socialism, a series inaugurated by Korsch’s own 1919 booklet on socialization. Weil’s text, Socialization: An Attempt at a Conceptual Foundation, with a Critique of the Plans for Socialization, has never been translated, and almost never commented upon. In this chapter, I will discuss the content of this text, and place it in dialogue with Korsch’s book on socialization as well as the contemporaneous socialization debate of the time.