The studies on authority and family are, alongside the Journal for Social Research, the most important collective work of the early Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. They became a foundational work in family sociology and established empirical social research in the German-speaking world. Horkheimer's program of integrating empiricism with materialist theory is paradigmatically carried out in these studies, using the family as a central instance of socialization. The studies are divided into three sections. In the first section, Horkheimer, Fromm, and Marcuse outline the general cultural-theoretical, social-psychological, and intellectual-historical dimensions of the relationship between authority and family in broad theoretical sketches. The second section documents the empirical investigations of the Institute. Here, not only are the results of individual surveys among workers, employees, youth, or the unemployed presented, but the methods used and the objectives pursued are also explained. The third section contains various individual studies and literature reports. For example, Wittfogel examines the economic-historical foundations of the development of family authority, Mayer looks at authority and family in the theory of anarchism, and Marcuse explores authority and family in German sociology up to 1933.