On rare occasions in literary history a new publication appears, not as a result of long, conscious planning, not a product of particularistic ambitions, but a spontaneous generation within a dominant circle of circumstances. Social Research is such a spontaneous growth. Political revolution on the European continent had expelled from their usual orbits of activity scores and hundreds of the ablest scholars, to whom the scientific world had turned for light upon the problems that harass the whole of mankind. These scholars, representing collectively an important fraction of the world’s thinking power, had been divorced from their customary avenues of expression. Magazines published in their countries of origin, if not formally closed to them, were practically closed. Nothing could be more natural than the emergence of a new organ of publication at the New School, where the largest organic grouping of continental scholars abroad has been established as a Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science.
Source
Social Research 1.1/4 (1934): 1-2. Related archival materials: https://library.newschool.edu//archives/findingaids/NS010101.html