An analysis of the contribution of Max Weber and the early critical theorists (eg, Erich FROMM and Max Horkheimer) to the development of empirical social psychology. Unlike rationalists, for whom rational action is axiomatic, Weber and his successors realized that social actors may be deeply ambivalent in their impulses. They were led to this realization by concern about the uncertain loyalties of contemporary social classes. Indeed, Max Weber's seminal and still-neglected research on the psychology of rural east Prussian laborers gave empirical survey research its first fateful stimulus and led to a succession of later studies by Marie Bernays, Adolf Levenstein, and others. Perhaps the most notable was a survey of the working class in Weimar Germany, 1929-1931, carried out by FROMM and Horkheimer. Results of this survey led the authors to realize that even avowed democrats may be unconsciously ambivalent about democracy, with an admixture of democratic and authoritarian tendencies. This realization led to a cycle of important studies culminating in Theodor W. Adorno's, R. N. Sanford's, Else Frenkel-Brunswick's, and Daniel J. Levinson's The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950), which even its detractors agree was a major intellectual and technical milestone in the history of empirical social psychology.