While Marcuse dreamed of utopia in America, Adorno despaired in Europe. ‘No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one that leads from the slingshot to the megaton bomb’,1 he wrote in Negative Dialectics, the book he published in 1966 under the long shadow of Auschwitz and the threat of nuclear Armageddon. The Holocaust imposed what he called a ‘new categorical imperative’ that human beings arrange their thought and action so that ‘Auschwitz would not repeat itself, [that] nothing similar would happen’. In Adorno’s corner of Frankfurt, there was no future in Marcuse’s Californian dreaming. Negative Dialectics is an untimely meditation – anti-systemic, anti-utopian and devoid of hope. ‘There can be few works of philosophy that give such an overpowering sense of sterility as Negative Dialectics’, wrote Kołakowski in Main Currents of Marxism.2 Marcuse may have thought that utopia could be realised in this world and soon, but Adorno’s implicit counter suggestion in Negative Dialectics was that it could only be realised in art, and there by definition only imaginatively.
‘Negative dialectics flouts tradition’, he wrote in the book’s preface. ‘As early as Plato, dialectics meant to achieve something positive by means of negation … This book seeks to free dialectics from such affirmative traits without reducing its determinacy.’3 Before Plato, Heraclitus had proposed that the world is constantly in flux. The dialectical imagination takes this thought and tries to impose order on the change: for dialecticians, and Adorno was a lifelong member of that dialectical club, the question is, if the world essentially involves change not stasis, then where is that change heading?
The suggestion from Plato onwards was that change, and in particular historical change, has a goal or telos. Hegel’s idea was that history unfolds through dialectical process. The paradoxical German term ‘aufheben’, which means three different and contradictory things – to preserve, to elevate and to cancel – and which, in its philosophical usage, is usually translated as ‘sublate’, is important here. The translator and philosopher Walter Kaufmann wrote: ‘Hegel may be said to visualise how something is picked up in order that it may no longer be there just the way it was, although, it is not cancelled altogether but lifted up to be kept on a different level.’4 Crucially for Hegel, nothing is discarded in this process – everything is taken up from one historical age to the next. For him, history is the unfolding of human freedom towards the Absolute and, what is the same thing, the expression of the Weltgeist, or world spirit. For Hegel ‘everything that is real is rational’, by which he means that everything has its place in the unfolding dialectical process. The result is that there is an ‘identity of identity and non-identity’. History, thus conceived, is like a cosmically large recycling project in which nothing is allowed to become mere landfill. For Hegel, consequently, the whole is the true. For Adorno, in a typically perverse aphorism, the opposite is the case: ‘The whole is the false.’5
Throughout his writings Adorno is suspicious of those philosophies that offer harmonious reconciliations. He was doubtful, as Martin Jay put it, of the young Lukács’s vision of epic wholeness in ancient Greece, of Heidegger’s notion of a fulfilled being now tragically forgotten, and of Walter Benjamin’s faith in a prelapsarian oneness of name and thing.6 But in Negative Dialectics, he was chiefly concerned, not with deconstructing such regressive fantasies, but with opposing the idea that dialectical historical processes had to have a goal. In particular, he rejected the idea that the narrative of history was destined to conclude with a happy ending. Thus, in opposition to Hegel’s ‘identity of identity and non-identity’, Adorno proposed the even more baffling notion of ‘the non-identity of identity and non-identity’. In making this suggestion, Adorno was asserting that the object does not go into its concept without remainder. And yet an object has to be subsumed without remainder if identity thinking is to make sense. If the object does not go into its concept without remainder then, because all thinking is conceptual, all concepts misrepresent their objects and all thinking involves an act of brutality to its object. Such, at least, was Adorno’s inference.
Effectively, Adorno was deploying Marx’s account of the exchange principle retrospectively to put holes in Hegelian identity philosophy: in achieving identity, Adorno suggested, Hegelian philosophy asserts the equivalence of what is not equivalent.7 Instead of such brutal identity thinking, Adorno tentatively proposed a different approach to knowledge, what has become known as a constellational theory, borrowing the term ‘constellation’ from Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Constellational thinking rejects the identity thinking that understands an object by subsuming it under a concept. To understand an object, for Adorno, was not to subsume it under concept but to set it in dialectical historical relationship with a constellation of other objects. In this sense, there is a strong parallel between constellational thinking and Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image. This use of the term constellation bears affinities with the devices of modernist art and literature that appealed to Benjamin – such as cinematic montage, cubist collage, Baudelaire’s correspondances or Joyce’s epiphanies.
In particular, Benjamin’s constellations were akin to Proust’s notion of involuntary memory. When he tastes a madeleine, the narrator of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu involuntarily brings his whole childhood to life. These sudden flashes of insight were what Adorno hoped for in his constellational theory of knowledge. Through such changing constellations and such evanescent flashes, the truth about an object would emerge to the sympathetic observer. Adorno unveiled this approach to cognition in his inaugural lecture at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in 1931 to be greeted with incomprehension by his listeners. In Negative Dialectics, he tried to expound a new version, using an analogy that made him sound like a combination of a safe-cracker labouring in a bank’s vault after working hours, a Buddhist virtuoso of mindfulness, and a quantum physicist aware that his investigation is going to change the nature of what he’s investigating. He wrote:
The history locked in the object can only be delivered by a knowledge mindful of the historic positional value of the object in its relation to other objects – by the actualisation and concentration of something which is already known and is transformed by that knowledge. Cognition of the object in its constellation is cognition of the process stored in the object. As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers.8
Insight, if it was to be attained at all, was to be reached by adepts who had transcended identity thinking. But even then insight was only to come in flashes – constellations. These, like mobile armies of metaphors, were always changing, flickering in and out of the beholders’ grasp. But the corollary of Negative Dialectics was that such flashes of insight were the only means by which we could step outside what was otherwise a total system of delusion.
This is all quite tough stuff and, even for adepts of critical theory, hard to swallow. Indeed, it was the very evanescent quality of the non-identity thinking proposed in Negative Dialectics that made Adorno’s young colleague Jürgen Habermas draw back. In a 1979 interview he said he no longer agreed with ‘the premise that instrumental reason has gained such dominance that there is really no way out of a total system of delusion in which insight is achieved only in flashes by isolated individuals’.9
If the foregoing sounds maddeningly abstruse, it is worth pointing out that Adorno was drawn to theorise non-identity thinking in order to ‘lend a voice’ to suffering that was otherwise silenced. ‘The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject.’10 The suffering Adorno had in mind was that unseen in our one-dimensional world – that caused by the inhuman oppression of others. But, if all thought involves brutality since it is inherently conceptual, it’s difficult to understand how Adorno could even frame his critique of identity thinking, since to do so involves using the concepts that he disdained. Habermas wrote that Adorno was quite aware of the performative contradiction in his philosophical writing.11 That, in a sense, was the crazy nature of the Frankfurt School’s notion of immanent critique, whereby the ideology that was deconstructed was demolished with its own tools. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, he and Horkheimer raged that reason had become instrumental during the Enlightenment and thus yielded to power. In so doing it had lost its critical force. But, as Habermas noted in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity in 1985, Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique was odd since ‘it denounces the Enlightenment with its own tools’.
In Negative Dialectics, Adorno remained faithful to this paradoxical philosophical strategy – to take the corpse of reason and make it speak of the circumstances of its own death. According to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy:
Adorno does not reject the necessity of conceptual identification … nor does his philosophy claim to have direct access to the nonidentical. Under current societal conditions, thought can only have access to the nonidentical via conceptual criticisms of false identifications. Such criticisms must be ‘determinate negations’, pointing up specific contradictions between what thought claims and what it actually delivers.12
The utopian dreaming that Marcuse was tempted to do in the 1960s was not for Adorno.
It was not only Hegel’s philosophy that Adorno attacked in Negative Dialectics; Marx, too, was a target. Marx substituted class struggle for the Hegelian World Spirit while retaining the dialectical conception of history. The telos of history’s dialectical process was, for Marx, the liberation of humanity in communist society. That utopia is realised in the proletarian revolution that abolishes the ruling class. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno turned his back to the future, rejecting Hegel and Marx’s conception of history as moving dialectically towards a happy ending. But that did not mean, as one critic wrote, that Adorno was involved in the ‘diabolisation of history’ nor that Negative Dialectics replaced the history of salvation with the history of damnation: ‘What was condemned in Hegel is once more turned on its head: radical evil – Evil as such is promoted to the status of the World Spirit.’13
But there is no World Spirit in Negative Dialectics. There is no necessity for things to turn out a certain way, although German philosophers had often supposed they would. Marx, for instance, had hoped that theory and practice could be reunited by means of revolution. For Adorno it had failed in that task. Hence the opening statement of his introduction: ‘Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realise it was missed … the summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world, that resignation in the face of reality had crippled it in itself, becomes a defeatism of reason after the attempt to change the world miscarried.’14
When Gershom Scholem read Negative Dialectics, he wondered if critical theory now amounted to Marx’s analysis of capitalism without the class struggle. If so, that could equally be said of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. But while Marcuse spent the 1960s looking for a revolutionary subject to replace the proletariat, Adorno’s philosophy was a reversal of Marxism: it could never help change the world, but only interpret it more profoundly. If it had a role, it was to reduce the systems of other philosophers to rubble and thus help cure the faithful of their delusions.
In his 1964 book Jargon of Authenticity, for instance, Adorno attacked the post-war tendency in German philosophy to find delusive succour in subjective inwardness. That kind of existential turn in philosophy – which he had critiqued in his pre-war works on Husserl and Kierkegaard – he found especially intolerable in the writings of Heidegger, Martin Buber and Karl Jaspers. He took their works to be self-mystificatory. Each in their own way devised elitist philosophies with abstruse terms in order to avoid confronting social realities, basking in the purported glow of such words as angst and leap, and thereby distracting themselves from the darkness of the times. What Wittgenstein said of his mission was also true of Adorno’s in Jargon of Authenticity: ‘This sort of thing has got to be stopped. Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It’s my job to put them out of business.’15
IN 1961, ADORNO met Karl Popper in Tübingen at the German Sociological Association. Both were principal speakers at a symposium to debate the methodology appropriate to social science research. It should have been a bruising encounter, a prize fight between two representatives of hostile philosophical positions or a Cold War era confrontation between the representatives of the rival ideologies of liberal democracy and Marxism.16
In the blue corner was the Viennese-born Popper, professor of logic and scientific method at the University of London, of whom his British disciple Bryan Magee once said: ‘He puts me in mind of a blowtorch.’17 Popper was the defender of the Open Society against various forms of totalitarianism, champion of scientific method, acerbic excoriator of what he called pseudo-sciences such as psychoanalysis, and insistent that the dialectical thinking in which the Frankfurt School specialised was not only false but dangerous.
In the red corner was Adorno, a man whom even his dedicated and sympathetic follower Martin Jay found painfully capable of the ‘withering rant’.18 Adorno doubted that the liberal, putatively open society that Popper extolled against totalitarianism was so very different from the latter. He, like other Frankfurt School critical theorists, had been impressed by Freudian psychoanalysis. Most significant, as the two men squared up, was that Adorno was sceptical about the pretensions of scientific method to be an objective means of establishing truth. ‘The idea of scientific truth cannot be split off from that of a true society’, Adorno wrote.19 The corollary being that, given that we do not live in the latter, the former is beyond us. This conception of scientific truth was to have ramifications, not just for the natural sciences, but for the topic of the symposium – namely how sociology should work.
For the Frankfurt School, the sciences, be they natural or social, had become tools used by capitalism’s oppressors to keep the true society from coming into being. Philosophy too, by abandoning a critical perspective on social reality, became a tool of oppression rather than liberation. This perspective was most punchily expressed in a chapter in One-Dimensional Man in which Marcuse excoriated what he called ‘one-dimensional philosophy’.20 Formal logic, the linguistic turn of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, and the analysis of ordinary language by philosophers such as Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, were all designed, Marcuse argued, ‘to coordinate mental operations with those in the social reality’ and so had an ‘intrinsically ideological character’. Formal logic therefore wasn’t so much a way of ordering our thoughts to ensure we don’t collapse into philosophical error or illusion as a tool of domination. ‘The idea of formal logic itself is a historical event in the development of the mental and physical instruments for universal control and calculability’, wrote Marcuse. In this, his views on formal logic were akin to Adorno’s critique of identity thinking developed in Negative Dialectics. At best, for the Frankfurt School, positivism was quietistic: as practised in Vienna, Oxford, Cambridge and certain American colleges, philosophy had become an absorbing game that distracted philosophers from rational criticism of an irrational society. Science was hardly exempt from this critique: rather, scientific method was the foremost means of both dominating nature and human beings.
This was hardly a new thought; it was a fundamental commitment of the Frankfurt School of critical thinking, developed by Max Horkheimer first in his 1937 paper ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, and then in lectures at Columbia University in 1944 which became the basis for his 1947 book Eclipse of Reason. The German title of Horkheimer’s book Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft (On the Critique of Instrumental Reason), gives a better flavour of what, by 1961, was the unshakeable commitment of the Frankfurt School. Horkheimer’s book was a critical description of how reason collapses into irrationality through its emphasis on instrumental concerns. Instrumental reason was devoted to determining the means to a goal, without reasoning about ends in themselves. Horkheimer distinguished between subjective and objective reason (or in German between Vernunft and Verstand): the former is only concerned with means, the latter with ends.
But why is the former called subjective? Because, Horkheimer, thought, it was concerned with the subject’s self-preservation, while objective reason seeks to root truth and meaning in terms of a comprehensive totality. Horkheimer once wrote: ‘Social philosophy is confronted with the yearning for a new interpretation of a life trapped in its individual striving for happiness.’21 The task facing the Frankfurt School was to free oppressed, suffering humanity from that trap, from a mindset that ensnared individuals in the pursuit of happiness rather than questioning why they sought such an end. Because there was no critical reflection on the irrationality or otherwise of such ends, Horkheimer thought, the project of Enlightenment became self-defeating. Enlightenment was supposed to involve the use of reason to help humans free themselves from myth and superstition; instead, it replaced one form of myth with another.
In the same year as he published Eclipse of Reason, he and Adorno wrote at the beginning of Dialectic of Enlightenment: ‘Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.’22 But what do these thoughts about the nature of Enlightenment have to do with scientific method and formal logic? For Horkheimer, all parts of nature that cannot be calculated and formalised fall out of the Enlightenment’s scientific picture of the world. In effect, the Enlightenment creates a world the better to fit its scientific picture of it. But that created world is a distortion. The inexorable drive of instrumental reason – including scientific method, mathematics and formal logic – causes this distorted picture to be seen as the only true picture of the world. We have a false sense of connectedness with the world that gives us a limited sense of how the world can be. In other words, we know some things only at the expense of others.23 What seems to be a project dedicated to freeing humans from delusion can better be understood as exchanging one set of mental shackles for another. In Marcuse’s gloss on this thought, we had become one-dimensional men and women, more or less drones in advanced industrial societies and happy with our lots.
While Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse comprehended scientific method as part of a triumphant calamity and the leading means by which capitalists achieve their domination of nature and oppress humanity, Karl Popper was working on his defence of scientific method. He argued that there can, should be, and was progress in science. It was as though he had never read Dialectic of Enlightenment or, if he had, thought it beneath contempt. In his first speech at the Tübingen conference, he ended with a quotation from Xenophanes that made his vision of scientific progress plain:
The gods did not reveal from the beginning,
All things to us; but in the course of time,
Through seeking we may learn, and know things better …24
But, crucially for Popper, that project of knowing things better, which he thought was the basis of science,
does not start from perceptions or observations or the collection of data or facts, but it starts, rather, from problems. One might say: No knowledge without problems; but also, no problems without knowledge. But this means that knowledge starts from the tension between knowledge and ignorance. Thus we might say not only, no problems without knowledge; but also, no problems without ignorance.25
That said, Popper’s views about science were as challenging to scientific orthodoxy as to the Frankfurt School. His 1934 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery followed the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume who had pointed out that there is a contradiction in the notion that all knowledge is derived from experience and that general statements, including scientific laws, are verifiable by reference to experience. This notion was the foundational commitment of empiricism and indeed of positivism. And yet, Hume argued, no scientific hypothesis could be finally confirmed and so no scientific law could be definitively true.26 For example, if all the swans we have seen are white, that doesn’t mean the proposition ‘All swans are white’ is true. This was the problem of induction, and yet, Hume suggested, we cannot help but use inductive reasoning even if we cannot justify its results as knowledge.
Hume’s scepticism about the rational basis of induction was inspiring to Popper because it challenged the prevailing view that only what can be proved by reason and experience can be accepted. This perspective on how science worked, called justificationism, and forming the rhetorical basis for much of science’s endeavour to understand the world (the better, as the Frankfurt School would argue, to dominate it), was opposed by Popper. Like the Frankfurt School, if for utterly different reasons, he sought to clip the wings of science, to undermine its pretensions. For him, the progress of science did not so much expand the frontiers of human knowledge as reveal the vast empire of our ignorance. As he said at Tübingen, ‘Indeed, it is precisely the staggering progress of the natural sciences … which constantly opens our eyes anew to our ignorance, even in the field of the natural sciences themselves.’27
For Popper, every test of a scientific hypothesis involves an attempt to refute or to falsify it, and one genuine counter-example will falsify the whole theory. He argued that the same scientific method of testing hypotheses did not apply in the case of psychoanalysis or Marxism. Rather, because there was no evidence that could count as false in either theory, he thought, nothing could refute them. Both psychoanalysis and Marxism were for Popper akin to astrology: by refusing to countenance any counter-examples they made themselves unfalsifiable and therefore superficial.
To be sure, Popper’s account of the logic of scientific discovery is hardly uncontroversial and it was questioned by later philosophers of science, in particular the American Thomas Kuhn, who pointed out that scientists are more loath to give up cherished hypotheses than Popper suggested. Instead of taking one counter-example to spell doom for a hypothesis, scientists tend to shore it up with auxiliary hypotheses. This so-called ‘conventionalist stratagem’ makes a lot of sense, not least if you have spent a lot of time, intellectual effort and money testing a beloved hypothesis. Scientists, and this is something readily forgotten in the philosophy of science, are human too.
Indeed, Kuhn argued in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that science involves competing paradigms, each of which consists of a core theory and auxiliary hypotheses.28 The latter change but the former remains constant until that upsetting moment when it proves impossible to support the core theory through modified hypotheses. Then something unusual happens, which Kuhn called a ‘paradigm shift’, wherein the core theory is abandoned or radically changed. That often happens, he thought, when the old guard who defended the core theory retire or die. Kuhn’s account, apart from anything else, is a refreshing antidote to the Frankfurt School’s perspective on science as an efficient tool for the despoilation of nature and the domination of human beings. It also makes science seem less overtly rational than Popper’s vision of it.
Popper’s perspective on how science worked is important because his 1961 meeting with Adorno was heralded as the start of the Positivmusstreit or Positivism Dispute that rumbled on until the end of the decade at a series of conferences in German universities. The name of the dispute might suggest a clash between the Frankfurt School and the defenders of the hubristic scientific project that arose during the Enlightenment, premised on submitting the world to human understanding and control, but the truth is more complicated. In fact, the Positivism Dispute is really a misnomer. Popper, for all that he had written for the Vienna Circle in the 1930s, was no positivist, or at least refused the description. Indeed, Otto Neurath had called Popper the official opposition to the Vienna School. Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery, republished in an updated English language version only two years before the Tübingen symposium, included an eviscerating attack on the very basis of logical positivism, namely the verification principle, which asserts that a proposition is only cognitively meaningful if it can be definitively and conclusively determined to be either true or false, that is, either verifiable or falsifiable. It was a principle that applied a blowtorch to vast tracts of human discourse: if the verification principle held, then the judgements of ethics and aesthetics were meaningless, perhaps most charitably construed as more or less grunts of approval or disapprobation. And any talk of religion was similarly devoid of sense.
Popper would have none of this. He applied his own blowtorch to the principle, arguing that instead of verificationism what was needed was falsificationism. The latter meant, as we have seen, that hypotheses can be accepted as probable but never utterly confirmed. Human knowledge, he argued, is never conclusive but only conjectural, hypothetical, aspiring to certainty perhaps but achieving only probability. Human knowledge in Popper’s perspective was like the British Empire or the Third Reich – it may have seemed to its most blinkered supporters that its borders were conclusively established, that once territory was captured it need never be surrendered, but the truth was that it was provisional and liable to change.
But if Popper was no positivist, that didn’t stop Adorno and his acolytes during the dispute from describing him and his supporters, including the German philosopher Hans Albert, as such. ‘It must be restated in advance here’, wrote Adorno in a footnote to his introduction to a book about the dispute published in German in 1969 after hostilities had ceased, ‘that Popper and Albert distance themselves from the specific position of logical positivism. The reason why they are nevertheless regarded as positivists should be evident from what follows.’29 What was evident was that Adorno called Popper and Albert positivists because they disdained to do what the dialecticians of the Frankfurt School did, namely to question the authority of science.30
Popper, for his part, described himself as a critical rationalist, which makes drawing up the battle lines in Tübingen a marvellously challenging business. Adorno, after all, described himself as a critical theorist. But what is the difference between a critical rationalist and a critical theorist? Horkheimer in his essay ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ distinguished between the Savant who doesn’t realise that the economic (and thus currently capitalist) structure of society shapes scientific work, and the critical theorist who does. For the Frankfurt School, a self-styled critical rationalist like Popper was just as much a Savant in that sense as other self-declared positivists were. But how did Popper understand the term critical rationalist? He made his own distinction between critical rationalism and ‘uncritical or comprehensive rationalism’. The latter was really another term for positivism, at least as the latter pertained to philosophy and science. It maintained that information derived from sensory experience, interpreted through reason and logic, forms the exclusive source of all authoritative knowledge.
In his opening address at Tübingen, Popper had set out twenty-seven theses and invited Adorno to support or dissent from them. He argued that the social sciences, just as much as the natural ones, could be and often were devoted to the pursuit of truth through objective procedures. But his eleventh thesis declared that it was a mistake to assume that the objectivity of a science depends upon the objectivity of the scientist. Popper doubted, then, Mannheim’s notion of the free-floating intellectual who could rise above class or other interests, just as much as, if for different reasons, the Frankfurt School did. ‘We cannot rob the scientist of his partisanship without also robbing him of his humanity’, argued Popper, ‘and we cannot suppress or destroy his value judgments without destroying him as a human being and as a scientist. Our motives and even our purely scientific ideals, including the ideal of a disinterested search for truth, are deeply anchored in extra-scientific and, in part, in religious evaluations. Thus the “objective” or the “value-free” scientist is hardly the ideal scientist.’31 But Popper thought that science rose above such value judgements and class interests: ‘What may be described as scientific objectivity is based solely upon a critical tradition which, despite resistance, often makes it possible to criticise a dominant dogma.’ That critical tradition consisted in ‘the social result of [scientists’] mutual criticism, of the friendly-hostile division of labour among scientists, of their co-operation and also of their competition.’32 The objectivity of science, be it natural or social, and the disinterested pursuit of truth was guaranteed by the existence of such a flourishing critical tradition.
But this was precisely what Adorno, in his reply, denied existed, at least in sociology. He argued that the founder of sociology, the nineteenth-century Frenchman August Comte, was also the man who had devised the discipline of positivism. Both disciplines, Adorno argued, originated to help serve class interests as capitalism took hold. Each seemed, though, that they had a more innocent purpose: namely to aid human enlightenment by pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. In his reply to Popper, Adorno said:
If in Comte, the outline of a new discipline was born out of the desire to protect the productive tendencies of his age, the unleashing of productive forces, that is, from the destructive potential which was emerging in them at that time, then subsequently nothing has altered in this original situation unless it has become more extreme, in which case sociology should take this into account.33
In Adorno’s view, sociology must turn critical if it was not merely to help uphold the status quo or, worse, provide the groundwork for totalitarianism. ‘In view of the nakedly emergent coercive force of relations’, he added, ‘Comte’s hope that sociology might guide social force reveals itself as naïve except when it provides plans for totalitarian rulers.’34
The conflict between the two men boiled down to a difference of perspective on the nature of the advanced industrial western nations in which they had lived and worked throughout their lives. Popper conceded that the critical tradition necessary for scientific objectivity may not exist in some societies. ‘The existence of that tradition depends’, he argued in his opening address, ‘on a number of social and political circumstances which make this criticism possible.’35 In his books The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and The Poverty of Historicism (1957), Popper defended open societies (by which he included liberal democracies such as the US, the UK and West Germany) against closed societies such as the one Plato called for in the Republic and which, he argued, characterised twentieth-century totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. It was only open societies, Popper thought, that preserve reason, that is, criticism. As a consequence, it is only open societies that can be civilised, only they can engage in the rational pursuit of scientific truth, or rather the falsification of scientific error, because only in such societies is that quest objectively guaranteed by competition between scientists, mutual criticism and free discussion.
This, he thought, was equally true of the social as much as the natural sciences. ‘The method of the social sciences, like that of the natural sciences, consists in trying out tentative solutions to certain problems: the problems from which our investigations start, and those which turn up during the investigation.’36 This, Adorno countered, was a naive universalisation of the scientific method. He cited what Marx wrote in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.’ Adorno took this to be important for science and the social sciences: what look like neutral investigations are nothing of the kind. What this meant for sociology was that the social existence of the scientist, social scientists in particular, determined their mindset, what they chose to investigate and how they investigated it. Adorno was profoundly sceptical about Popper’s idea that this social existence could be overcome in the name of scientific objectivity through mutual criticism and open discussion. Peer review was no panacea for Adorno, particularly if a discipline was in the service of existing, oppressive society.
And that was just what Adorno thought sociology was. Whether the kind of reason Popper extolled here is that of Vernunft or Verstand is unclear, but Adorno certainly took sociology to have collapsed into the latter – never questioning the ends to which reason, instrumentally, was put. He feared that sociology had abandoned ‘a critical theory of society’ and so was ‘resignatory’. This was the unaddressed, central difference between Popper and Adorno: the latter thought that advanced industrial western societies involved ‘conditions of unfreedom’; Popper thought that it was in such open societies that the freedom existed for the scientifically objective pursuit of truth to take place.
At the end of round one in the Positivmusstreit, many had the impression of two boxers failing to connect. ‘One must doubt’, said Ralf Dahrendorf, then professor of sociology at Tübingen and the symposium’s rapporteur, ‘whether Popper and Adorno could even agree upon a procedure with the aid of which their differences could be decided.’37 The dispute, though, was a tag match in which Adorno and Popper were replaced by their more waspish juniors. In 1963, during a Festschrift für Adorno, Jürgen Habermas accused Popper of political and intellectual naivety in his framing of the nature of scientific and social scientific research, especially during a period of increasing social unrest. Habermas asserted the superiority of the Frankfurt School’s ‘dialectical’ critique over what they took to be Popper’s critical rationalism. This prompted Popper’s followers to demonise Adorno’s followers as irrationalists and totalitarians.38 Hans Albert, for instance, damned the Frankfurt School’s assumption of intellectual superiority over Popperian critical rationalism: ‘The dialectical cult of total reason is too fastidious to content itself with “specific” solutions. Since there are no solutions which meet its demands, it is forced to rest content with insinuation, allusion and metaphor.’39
Adorno, very sensibly, waited until he came to edit the book containing these vituperative speeches to deliver his judgement on Albert’s outburst. He argued that dialectical theory ‘does not indulge in a cult of total reason; it criticises such reason. But whilst arrogance towards specific solutions is alien to it, it does not allow itself to be silenced by them.’40 But after the dispute was over, none of the tag teams seemed to have learned much from each other. Certainly the Frankfurt School was never tempted into sharing Popper’s vision of science as a kind of marketplace where, thanks to intellectual competition and mutual criticism, the worst hypotheses are falsified. Instead, as Adorno put it, the School considered itself to be on the right path. ‘Dialectics remains intransigent in the dispute since it believes that it continues to reflect beyond the point at which its opponents break off, namely before the unquestioned authority of the institution of science.’41
ON 5 APRIL 1969, Marcuse wrote from his office at the University of California at San Diego to Adorno in Frankfurt. ‘Dear Teddy, I find it really difficult to write this letter, but it has to be done and, in any case, it is better than covering up differences of opinion between the two of us.’42 The differences were over the student protests at the time sweeping Europe and America. In particular, Marcuse was scandalised that Adorno had called in the police to evict a group of protesting students from the Institute for Social Research’s building in January of that year. Marcuse had written to his old friend, expressing disappointment that he had chosen the wrong side in the struggle: ‘I still believe that our cause (which is not only ours) is better taken up by the rebellious students than by the police, and, here in California, that is demonstrated to me almost daily (and not only in California).’
It was the latest in an exchange of letters between the two men that would end only in August that year with Adorno’s death. This remarkable correspondence shows each man responding very differently to what both recognised as an attempted patricide by student protesters. ‘We cannot abolish from the world the fact that these students are influenced by us (and certainly not least by you) – I am proud of that and am willing to come to terms with patricide, even though it hurts sometimes’, Marcuse had written to Adorno. The leading lights of the Frankfurt School had rebelled against their fathers and now their students were similarly challenging the authority of their symbolic fathers.
The student movement opposed America’s imperialist war in Vietnam, Cold War militarisation and the threat of nuclear Armageddon, while supporting Third World liberation movements and using sit-ins to demand the democratic restructuring of education. The question of how critical theory should respond to the protests was a vexed one. Habermas suggested that it might involve ‘a strategy of hibernation’ – keeping their heads down while everyone else was, apparently, losing theirs. Marcuse, by contrast, thought critical theory’s cause was really the same as those of the protesters. If he was right, then the Frankfurt scholars ought to have checked out of the Grand Hotel Abyss and joined the students at the barricades. Adorno, with typical waspishness, poured scorn on that suggestion, writing in his essay ‘Marginalia to Theory and Practice’ that ‘the barricades are a game, and the lords of the manor let the gamesters go on playing for the time being’.43
And yet, in the early days of the protests, Adorno had expressed solidarity with the student protesters. In one of his sociology seminars in 1967, he went so far as to say that ‘the students have taken on something of the role of the Jews’. He had also prefaced a lecture in June that year by inviting his students to stand in memory ‘of our dead colleague Benno Ohnesorg’. Ohnesorg had been shot in the back by a police officer during a student-led demonstration in Berlin against the security measures put in place for the state visit to West Germany by the Shah of Iran, the dictator who tortured opponents and crushed freedom of expression.44
Nor was Adorno unsympathetic to the students’ demand for an overhaul of obsolete authoritarian university structures. Certainly, students were exasperated at the undemocratic power wielded over them by their professors. In one protest, for example, a ceremony honouring a rector at the University of Hamburg was interrupted by two students carrying a banner bearing the slogan: ‘Beneath their robes: two thousand years of mustiness.’ Adorno was less sympathetic to disruptions of lectures and the forcing of university staff to undergo self-criticism. He told students in an aesthetics lecture that there had to be some rules and that formalised statutes could not be viewed entirely negatively by anyone who knows ‘what it means when the doorbell rings at 6am and you do not know whether it is the Gestapo or the baker’. For all that critical theory had long suggested that there were parallels between fascism and the totally administered advanced industrial society, Adorno chose this moment to stand up for the Federal Republic against those who called it a fascist state. He warned his students not to make the mistake of ‘attacking what was a democracy, however much in need of improvement, rather than tackling its enemy’.45
But protesting students weren’t the only ones to invoke the spectre of fascism. Habermas, whom Adorno had lured back to Frankfurt in 1964, to take over the retired Max Horkheimer’s job as professor of philosophy and sociology, did just that in June 1967 when he shared a platform in Hanover with the student leaders Rudi Dutschke and Hans-Jürgen Krahl to discuss the topic ‘University and Democracy: Conditions and Organisation of Resistance’. Habermas spoke in support of the student radicals’ programme, but not their means. He rounded on Dutschke for pursuing revolution by ‘any means necessary’, arguing: ‘In my opinion, he has presented a voluntarist ideology which was called utopian socialism in 1848, but which in today’s context … has to be called left fascism.’46
Adorno didn’t dissociate himself from Habermas’s words and, partly as a result – for all his meetings with students to discuss educational reform and the sympathetic noises he made in interviews – he became one of the leading targets of the Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund (SDS). When he gave a talk at the Free University of Berlin on Goethe’s Iphigenie in Tauris later that year, two students unfurled a banner: ‘Berlin’s left-wing fascists greet Teddie the Classicist.’ They urged him to speak out in support of student and self-styled spaßguerrilla (fun guerrilla) Fritz Teufel, who had been on hunger strike in jail facing a charge of treason over his role in the demonstration that had led to the death of Benno Ohnesorg.47 Teufel had become a celebrity in Germany for his involvement in the so-called ‘pudding assassination’ of US vice-president Hubert Humphrey in which he and other protestors had planned to throw bags of pudding and yogurt during a state visit. But Adorno refused and carried on with his lecture, at the end of which a woman tried to present him with a red teddy bear. Adorno claimed to be unshaken by what he called this ‘abusive behaviour’. He was nevertheless becoming exasperated by the students, writing to Marcuse that many of them tried ‘to synthesise their practice with a non-existent theory, and thus expressed a decisionism that evokes horrific memories’.48 Not for the first time, he was seeing fascism behind the flower power student movement.
The following year, 1968, the student rebellion escalated across the west, with the May revolt in Paris. In Frankfurt, strikes were organised by students in the hope that they would inspire workers to do the same. It was in this context that at the Frankfurt Book Fair in September that year, Adorno, along with Habermas and the future Nobel Laureate Günter Grass, shared a platform with one of his student protégés, Hans-Jürgen Krahl, to discuss the topic ‘Authority and Revolution’. The discussion went Oedipal as Krahl turned on his mentor. ‘Six months ago, when we were besieging the council of Frankfurt University, the only professor who came to the students’ sit-in was Professor Adorno’, recalled Krahl. ‘He made straight for the microphone, and just as he reached it, he ducked past and shot into the philosophy seminar. In short, once again, on the threshold of practice, he retreated into theory.’ Adorno replied: ‘I do not know if elderly gentlemen with a paunch are the right people to take part in a demonstration.’49 He later wrote to Günter Grass, noting that ‘I have nothing in common with the students’ narrow-minded direct action strategies which are already degenerating into abominable irrationalism. In truth, it is they who have changed their position rather than I mine.’50
Greater humiliation was to come. His sociology seminar was taken over by striking students calling for the reform of their course. ‘Critical theory has been organised in such an authoritarian manner that its approach to sociology allows no space for the students to organise their own studies’, said a leaflet distributed by the occupying students. ‘We are fed up with letting ourselves be trained in Frankfurt to become dubious members of the political left who, once their studies are finished, can serve as the integrated allies of the authoritarian state.’51 This was a shattering rebuke for a critical theorist like Adorno. After all, before the First World War, as a student leader Walter Benjamin had rebelled against a university education that churned out obliging state functionaries. ‘We have to wake up from the existence of our parents’, Benjamin wrote later in The Arcades Project. This, in a sense was what Krahl and his fellow SDS protesters were doing, awakening from the parental authority of Adorno and asserting that education had to be more than the Institute for Social Research was offering. In these charged circumstances, Adorno wrote to Marcuse inviting him to Frankfurt in the hope that the presence of the darling of the student movement, the Father of the New Left, might have a mollifying effect on the putative children of the revolution.
But Marcuse started to get compunctions about helping Adorno after he heard about what happened at the Institute in January 1969. It was then that a group of SDS students led by Krahl occupied a room and refused requests from Adorno and Habermas to leave. ‘We had to call the police, who then arrested all those who they found in the room’, Adorno wrote to Marcuse. The students were outraged at his betrayal. ‘Adorno as institution is dead’, declared a flyer distributed by a radical group of sociology students in April of that year. And Marcuse, too, thought his friend had made a mistake. He wrote to Adorno: ‘Occupation of rooms (apart from my own apartment) without such a threat of violence would not be a reason for me to call the police. I would have left them sitting there and left it to somebody else to call the police.’ More profoundly, Marcuse disagreed with his former Frankfurt School colleagues on their analysis of the students’ tactics, and with Adorno on the relationship between theory and practice. He wrote:
You know me well enough to know that I reject the unmediated translation of theory into praxis just as emphatically as you do. But I do believe that there are situations, moments, in which theory is pushed on further by praxis – situations and moments in which theory that is kept separate from praxis becomes untrue to itself … But this same situation is so terrible, so suffocating and demeaning, that rebellion against it forces a biological, physiological reaction: one can bear it no longer, one is suffocating and one has to let some air in … And I would despair about myself (us) if I (we) would appear to be on the side of a world that supports mass murder in Vietnam, or says nothing about it, and which makes a hell of any realms that are outside the reach of its own repressive power.52
In such circumstances, Marcuse decided not to go to Frankfurt to help Adorno out of a fix and ease the conflict between him and his students.
Adorno replied angrily, saying that he had no regrets about calling the police. He accused the SDS of both Stalinism (for interrupting his lectures to demand that he engage in self-criticism) and fascism (because of their violence and silencing tactics). Adorno rounded on Marcuse for siding with the students, given their outrageous tactics and their jejune politics that his old, misguided friend seemed to share. He wrote: ‘We withstood in our time, you no less than me, a much more dreadful situation – that of the murder of the Jews, without proceeding to praxis; simply because it was blocked for us. I think that clarity about the streak of coldness in one’s self is a matter for self-contemplation.’ Marcuse had complained about Habermas’s use of the term ‘left fascism’ to describe the students. ‘But you are a dialectician, aren’t you?’ Adorno snarled back in his reply. ‘As if such contradictions did not exist – might not a movement, by the force of its immanent antinomies, transform itself into its opposite? I do not doubt for a moment that the student movement in its current form is heading towards that technocratization of the university that it claims it wants to prevent, indeed quite directly.’
But if Adorno thought himself a better dialectician than Marcuse, able to see how spaßguerrilla tactics, flower power and erotic liberation could mutate into their own kind of oppression, then he wasn’t to enjoy being proved right. On April 22, he endured his bitterest humiliation. He started his lecture series ‘An Introduction to Dialectical Thinking’ by inviting students to ask him questions at any point. Two students demanded he perform an act of self-criticism for having called the police to clear the Institute and for starting legal proceedings against Krahl. It was then that a student wrote on the blackboard: ‘If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease.’ Others shouted: ‘Down with the informer!’ Adorno said he would give everyone five minutes to decide if they wanted him to carry on with the lecture. Then three women protesters surrounded him on the platform, bared their breasts and scattered rose and tulip petals over him. He grabbed his hat and coat, ran off from the hall and later cancelled the lecture series.53 Dialectics had been brought to a standstill, though not in quite the edifying way Benjamin had hoped for in The Arcades Project.
A report in the Frankfurter Rundschau, under the heading ‘Adorno as an Institution is Dead: How the Consciousness Changer was Driven out of the Lecture Hall’, compared what became known as the ‘Busenaktion’ (breast action) to fascism: ‘The rowdy treatment of Adorno, far from signalling the emergence of a new post-bourgeois style … points to a pre-bourgeois, indeed pre-civilised, relapse into barbarism.’ Adorno, for his part, couldn’t quite believe he had been targeted: ‘To have picked on me of all people. I who have spoken out against every kind of erotic repression and sexual taboo … The laughter that was aimed at me was basically the reaction of the philistine who giggles when he seeks girls with naked breasts.’54 The incident drove Adorno into ‘extreme depression’ as he put it to Marcuse, who had travelled across the Atlantic for a lecture tour and was hoping to meet up with Adorno and Habermas during the summer.
While Adorno was humiliated, Marcuse, on his return to Europe was feted. The magazine Konkret described him as ‘the only representative of the “Frankfurt School” who supports those who wish to realise the claims of Critical Theory: the students, young workers, persecuted minorities in the metropolises, and the oppressed in the Third World’. But a couple of weeks later the Marcusean love-in was rudely interrupted by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the May ’68 Paris student uprisings. ‘Marcuse, why have you come to the theatre of the bourgeoisie?’ yelled Cohn-Bendit as Marcuse tried to give a lecture at the Teatro Eliseo in Rome. ‘Herbert, tell us why the CIA pays you?’55 Danny the Red was reacting to reports in a left-wing Berlin newspaper claiming that Marcuse had worked for the CIA long after he had ostensibly quit working for the US Secret Service in 1951. Could it really be that the radically chic excoriator of American imperialism was really its lackey? Was the man who theorised the one-dimensional society in fact one of those responsible for keeping it in place? That seems unlikely. Marcuse, though, clearly found the Roman experience uncomfortable, if not as humiliating as the ‘Busenaktion’ against Adorno: according to newspaper reports he walked out of the lecture, though in correspondence with Adorno he was keen to deny that it had been ended by student protest.
Marcuse, though upset by Adorno’s rough treatment in Frankfurt and chastened by Danny-le-Rouge’s ribbing in Rome, didn’t revise his opinion of the student protestors. They were, if not the revolutionary subject he had been seeking to replace the disappointing working classes, then at least capable of ‘a protest against capitalism’. He wrote to Adorno from the Provençal town of Cabris in late July:
Of course, I never voiced the nonsensical opinion that the student movement is itself revolutionary. But it is the strongest, perhaps the only, catalyst for the internal collapse of the system of domination today. The student movement in the United States has indeed intervened effectively as just such a catalyst: in the development of political consciousness, in the agitation in the ghettos, in the radical alienation from the system of layers who were formerly integrated, and, most importantly, in the mobilisation of further circles of the populace against American imperialism.56
Marcuse thought that the Frankfurt School should be helping the students, rather than demanding their arrest. ‘I have fought publicly enough against the slogan “destroy the university”, which I regard as a suicidal act. I believe that it is precisely in a situation such as this that it is our task to help the movement, theoretically, as well as in defending it against repression and denunciation.’57
If the Institute opposed the student movement, it would betray its radical heritage, argued Marcuse. He was worried already that its radical credentials had been tarnished by its apparent support for US foreign policy. Marcuse was furious, in particular, about the defence of America’s role in Vietnam made by Horkheimer, who had retired as the Institute’s director in 1964. According to Friedrich Pollock, Horkheimer regarded the Vietnam war as a ‘justified attempt to halt the Chinese in Asia’ and thought that US withdrawal would lead to a blood bath that ‘would also expedite China’s passage to the Rhine’.58 For Marcuse, the student movement was fighting US imperialism and deserved the Frankfurt School’s support. He wrote to Adorno:
According to its own dynamic, the great, indeed historic, work of the Institute demands the adoption of a clear position against American imperialism and for the liberation struggle in Vietnam, and it is simply not on to speak of the ‘Chinese on the Rhine’, as long as capitalism is the dominant exploiter. As early as 1965, I heard of the identification of the Institute with American policy in Germany.59
Adorno replied to this in a hand-written letter that reached Marcuse on August 6, the day of Adorno’s death. He and his wife Gretel had gone on holiday to the Swiss Alps, hoping that ‘badly battered Teddie’, as he described himself to Marcuse, could recover from his ordeals in Frankfurt with some extended Alpine walks. At a recent exam, he related, he ‘got another dose of tear gas; that is most burdensome, given my severe conjunctivitis’. He wanted, in his final letter to Marcuse, to clear up a misunderstanding: he wasn’t unsympathetic to the student movement, for all that it had made the past few years a merry hell for him. He had, though, an important caveat: ‘But it is mixed with a dram of madness, in which the totalitarian resides teleologically, and not at all simply as a repercussion (though it is this too).’
Despite warnings from his doctor to avoid strenuous activity, Adorno travelled by cable car up a 3,000-metre Swiss mountain. At the summit he started to suffer pains and so later that day went to hospital in Visp, Switzerland, where the following morning he suffered a heart attack and died. He would have turned sixty-six the following month. The year before his death, Adorno had written to his friend Peter Szondi that he was becoming sick of student affairs and feared that they were manipulating him and his colleagues. ‘It’s a case of patricide deferred’, he wrote.60 It would be glib, though, to argue that the deferral was only brief and that Adorno was killed by his students.
In any case, not only would Adorno’s and his colleagues’ writings survive their authors’ deaths, but, thanks to his former assistant, the Frankfurt School was about to take a new turn.