Paul F. Lazarsfeld: founder of a scientific multinational

• Autor(a) principal: Pollak, Michael
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Política & Sociedade (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/politica/article/view/2175-7984.2018v17n38p94

In this article, the author examines the social factors which determined the career of Paul F. Lazarsfeld, by attempting to determine the factors of discontinuity and those of continuity beyond discontinuity. Firstly, he analyses the youth of P.F. Lazarsfeld, in relation to the socialist and Jewish milieux of Vienna. He then proceeds to examine differential reactions to the problem of emigration, basing his study particularly on a comparison of the opposing attitudes of Adorno and P.F. Lazarsfeld. He then analyses the specific abilities which have enabled P.F. Lazarsfeld to father a new form of intellectual enterprise, relying on a rational division of labour and an almost industrial organization of intellectual output, this latter being achieved by means of a positivist methodology which enables him to segment and mechanize the various operations of the intellect. To conclude, he examines the strategies by which P.F. Lazarsfeld, supported by the policy of cultural missions, has contributed to the exportation, on the scale of Eastern and Western Europe, of American empiricist sociology, while at the same time promoting a model of the relationships between social research and economic and political agents as elaborated in the United States during the nineteen twenties and thirties, via a strategy of capturing new intellectual markets at the very time when strategies of modernisation and ideological reconquest where taking place in Europe.