Chapter 1

Life and times

Three months before philosopher and social and cultural theorist T. W. Adorno’s death in August 1969, an interview with him in the German news magazine Der Spiegel opened with the following exchange:

Spiegel: ‘Herr Professor, two weeks ago everything seemed alright with the world … ’

Adorno: ‘Not to me it didn’t.’ (GS 20.1 p. 402)

Adorno’s laconic response chimes with his search for answers, in the wake of the Holocaust, to why the ever-increasing capacity for knowledge and technological control of nature has not led to a more humane world. Why, though, should a thinker notorious for the complexity of his thought, and sometimes unnecessary obscurity of his prose style, whose greatest interest was probably Western ‘classical’ music, now be generating widespread attention? The financial crisis that began in 2007, awareness of the climate emergency, and the revival of fascism in some countries have meant that, after a time in the 1980s and 1990s when he rather faded from view, Adorno’s insights into the ills of the contemporary world seem ever more prescient. The prevailing norms in much of economics, politics, and the social sciences in the Thatcher–Reagan era, for which ‘free-market’, ‘neoliberal’ capitalism is the only way to organize modern societies, have been increasingly discredited. Massive increases in wealth inequality, and the effects on the environment of underregulated markets and predatory transnational corporations have led to the point where the very survival of civilized human life on earth is in question. Given the failure of authoritarian communist regimes to offer a defensible alternative, Adorno’s attempts to understand why the goal of a just political, economic, and social order has proved to be so elusive seem more and more relevant.

In a lecture on ‘Aspects of the New Right-Wing Radicalism’ of 1967 Adorno talks of a ‘constellation of rational means and irrational purposes’ in right-wing radicalism’s often successful use of propaganda. He adds that this ‘in a certain respect corresponds to the overall civilisational trend, that, after all, culminates in such a perfection of techniques and means, while the purpose of this for society as a whole goes by the board’. The core of Adorno’s thinking is, then, in one sense quite simple: he asks why instead of everyone being fed, clothed, housed, and living a tolerable life, we are faced with mass poverty, enduring conflict, and the devastation of the natural world. So what does Adorno propose as a response to this situation?

Asked in the Spiegel interview about how his theoretical work can affect political practice, he insists: ‘I try to express what I recognize and what I think. But I can’t arrange this in terms of what one can do with it and what becomes of it’ (GS 20.1 p. 403). Accused of therefore living in an ivory tower, he counters: ‘I believe that a theory is more capable of being practically effective by dint of its own objectivity than if it subordinates itself to practice from the word go’ (GS 20.1 p. 403)—elsewhere he says ‘the demand for the unity of theory and praxis very easily leads to a kind of censorship of theory by praxis’ (GS 8 p. 579). One reason for his saying this is that he thought the Student Movement of the late 1960s in Germany was pursuing unrealistic goals, and acted in sometimes violent ways, which could be seen as echoing the Nazi past, and which hindered its emancipatory aims. His further reason is that the modern world renders decisions about what courses of action are justified ever more precarious. As he says in the collection of brief critical essays and aphorisms on modern culture, Minima Moralia (1951, but written during the war): ‘The signature of the age is that, without exception, no person can themself determine their life in a half-way transparent sense, of the kind that used to be given in the appraisal of the state of the market’ (GS 4 p. 41).

Although he rejects communism, Adorno still adheres in important respects to Marx’s ‘historical materialist’ idea that how things are produced and exchanged influences people’s thoughts and actions in ways which are not transparent to them. The search for objectivity is therefore conducted in circumstances where social and economic pressures make claims to objectivity inherently open to question: ‘The almost insoluble task consists in not letting oneself be made stupid either by the power of others or by one’s own powerlessness’ (GS 4 p. 63). He consequently talks in ‘Einleitung in die Philosophie’ of philosophy as ‘the comprehensive obligation not to be naïve’. The lesson of 20th-century history is that any modern society has the potential to fall into fascism and authoritarianism, because of its inherent economic instability and the conformist pressures it exerts on its members.

Adorno’s life spanned the major upheavals of the 20th century. He was born in Frankfurt am Main, in 1903, in a mixed Jewish and Catholic family, as Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno. He was a precocious musical talent, began lessons in composition at the age of 16, and by the age of 18 was studying philosophy, music, and psychology at university, and publishing music criticism. He completed a PhD on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl in 1924, and moved to Vienna in 1925 to study composition with Alban Berg. After returning to Frankfurt, while editing the musical journal Anbruch (‘Dawn’), Adorno read Hungarian Marxist philosopher and critic, Georg Lukács’s, History and Class-Consciousness. He also developed intensive contact with cultural critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, whom he had got to know in 1923. One of Benjamin’s key ideas is that the truth provided by the mathematically based natural sciences is not the truth which should concern philosophy, and this leads him, and Adorno, to an enduring concern with art’s relationship to philosophy. In 1931 Adorno finished his Habilitation (the German postdoctoral dissertation), Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (which was heavily influenced by Benjamin), an analysis of Kierkegaard’s concern with ‘inwardness’, in order to reveal the underlying repressive nature of bourgeois society. Adorno underestimated the dangers of the seizure of power by the Nazis, and continued to visit Germany until 1937, while an ‘advanced student’ at Merton College, Oxford. In 1938 he moved to the USA to work with Max Horkheimer, as a member of the Institute for Social Research, which had been exiled from Germany, living in New York, and then Los Angeles for the years 1941–9. During this period he wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment with Horkheimer, which consists of reflections on how modern rationality can turn into barbarism, Minima Moralia, Philosophy of New Music, which contrasts Schoenberg and Stravinsky as keys to the significance of modern music, and was a co-author of The Authoritarian Personality, which was part of the Berkeley ‘Project on the Nature and Extent of Antisemitism’. Adorno returned to Frankfurt in 1949, where he gained his first (and only) tenured professorship, at the re-established Institute for Social Research, in 1956. In the early 1960s he was involved in the ‘Positivism Dispute in German Sociology’, a debate about theory and evidence in the social sciences, in which his main opponents were philosophers Karl Popper and Hans Albert. Throughout the 1960s he worked on his major texts on philosophy and aesthetics, Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, and other projects, while being active in public life in relation to the protests of the Student Movement and other social, political, and cultural issues. He died of a heart attack while on holiday in Switzerland in 1969.

Adorno seems to have sometimes been quite a difficult character, but he also inspired great affection. The aim of the present introduction is to show the significance of his work for a contemporary audience, rather than using details about his life and character to interpret that work. His main works are written in a manner which deliberately resists summary, in order to avoid oversimplification of issues that need to be grasped in their complexity. Sometimes, though, this tips over into unnecessary opacity—his lectures, many of which have now been published, often deal with the same issues in a more lucid manner. Instead of summarizing Adorno’s main works, I want, then, to delineate his key concerns that recur in a wide variety of texts, and will try as much as possible to let Adorno speak in his own words, as paraphrasing him can obscure key nuances.

Adorno’s major concern can be seen in terms of understanding a world whose history often seemed to defy understanding. The history in question has been referred to by Eric Hobsbawm as the ‘short 20th century’, which begins with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, and ends with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. A key factor in what made the First World War possible, and had enduring negative consequences for the democratic Left, was the failure of the socialist parties of the Second International to put the interests of the European working class above national interests when war threatened. Among other things, this failure negatively influenced the course and effects of the Russian revolution. The War led to the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman, and Russian empires, and to ongoing political, social, and economic instability that eventually led to the Second World War and the unthinkable trauma of the Holocaust. International instability diminished somewhat with the conclusion of the Second World War in 1945, inaugurating a spell of growing economic prosperity in the West, despite the political tensions of the Cold War and the threat of atomic warfare. After Adorno’s death, the oil crisis of 1973 undermined the foundations of this prosperity and allowed the political right, led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, to begin to roll back some of the social and economic advances made in the preceding period. The collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, instead of leading to further stabilization, led to new instability, involving, in the wake of the 2007 economic crash, a revival of authoritarian right-wing politics in the USA and parts of Europe and elsewhere that is thoroughly in line with Adorno’s warnings after the war.

The political and economic upheavals of Adorno’s world were accompanied by rapid and often disorienting changes in the arts, philosophy, and the sciences, and exploration of the relationships between these changes is central to his work. Weimar Germany and post-imperial Austria saw some of the most innovative and influential cultural responses to the disintegration of many of the structures and expectations of Western society and culture. Sigmund Freud’s claims regarding the nature of the human mind, summarized in his dictum that the I is not ‘lord in its own house’, because its real motivations are often hidden in the unconscious, Max Weber’s analyses of rationalization and bureaucracy in modern societies, and Arnold Schoenberg’s abandonment of the musical organizing principle of tonality are paradigmatic for what concerns Adorno. The background to Adorno’s work is also formed by the reception of Marx and Nietzsche, whose influence in Europe grew in the wake of the First World War. In all these cases ideas from the past concerning society and politics, subjectivity, art, religion, morality, and the natural world are put in doubt, leaving the question of what should replace them. The devastation of the First World War gives this question a particular urgency, the war having shown what pent-up destructive forces could be unwittingly unleashed by modern forms of production, exchange, and technology.

Adorno’s importance does not depend on his immediate reactions to the political events of the Weimar Republic and beyond, but rather on his explorations of how these affect the arts, philosophy, and the social sciences. His earlier work consists mainly of his academic dissertations, other texts on phenomenology and existentialism which are increasingly influenced by the Marxist tradition, and writings on music and literature. It is the writings in American exile that appear in Europe after the war which begin to establish his reputation. His approach to the culture of his time is relentlessly critical, being famous for dicta like ‘the whole is the untrue’, ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’, ‘there is no right way of living in life that is wrong’, and for its stringency with respect to art which he thinks merely contributes to the status quo, rather than being aesthetically challenging. But what does he propose as an alternative to a world dominated by the destructive effects of modern capitalism? Any response to that question for Adorno depends on coming to terms with the Holocaust and the Nazi period, and the perversion of socialist ideas in communist countries. Without an understanding of what made such things possible, and the creation of a culture that would make a repetition impossible, hope for lasting human progress seems to him delusory.

In this context it should be remembered that in the years immediately following the war the Federal Republic of Germany did not engage in a thorough reckoning with the past. Many lawyers, doctors, scientists, and academics who had supported the Nazis remained in the same jobs, ex-Nazis played major political roles, and discussion of the Nazi period was often avoided in the name of rebuilding the devastated country as quickly as possible. Psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich talked of ‘the inability to mourn’ as being characteristic of Germany at the time. Instead of facing up to what happened, in order to understand it and make changes, people’s attention and energy were displaced into reconstruction of the country’s infrastructure. Adorno, in contrast, played an influential role in keeping the issue of the Nazi past alive, beginning, while still in the USA, with Dialectic of Enlightenment, and with his participation in the Berkeley Anti-Semitism project. In 1959 he gave a lecture on ‘What is coming to terms with the past?’ in which he maintains that ‘National Socialism lives on’ (GS 10.2 p. 556) in various forms in German society. The lecture is notable for its complete repudiation of the tendency in Germany to repress critical discussion of the Nazi period.

It is no coincidence, then, that the substantial public reception of Dialectic of Enlightenment does not begin until the 1960s, when it is read by many in the Student Movement, and, having first been published in Holland, is finally published in Germany in 1969. The Student Movement was the result of a conviction among young Germans that the Federal Republic was becoming more authoritarian and undemocratic. Anger at this was focused by the killing in Berlin by the police of a protester against a visit of the Shah of Iran in 1967, and the shooting of Rudi Dutschke, a student activist, by a far-right extremist in 1968. Adorno’s view of the way Nazism lived on, and his criticisms of the direction of modern societies resonated with the student protesters. The motivation of the protesters was fuelled by the failure of their parents’ generation to confront the injustices of the past and their consequences in the present. The complexity of responding to the Nazi past is demonstrated by the fact that, with the ebbing of the Movement, some participants became terrorists in the Red Army Faction, while others moved into mainstream politics (these divergent responses are insightfully dealt with in Margarethe von Trotta’s film, Die bleierne Zeit, released in English as The German Sisters). Although Adorno heavily criticized the more radical forms of action of the Movement, he encouraged the critical engagement with the status quo and entrenched conventions that was vital to the Movement (Figure 1). The hopes of a revolutionary change involving the working class on the part of the Movement were, as Adorno expected, soon dashed, but the lasting legacy of the period was that the Federal Republic, for all its faults, became a more open and democratic society.

1. Adorno with leaders of the Student Movement.

It is characteristic of Adorno that, during the last period of his life, when political unrest was widespread and he was involved in very difficult institutional encounters with protesting students, he was also trying to write his major theoretical works on philosophy and aesthetics. His work tries to steer a course between attention to institutional, historical, and political factors, and their wider theoretical implications. It can lack the mass of empirical detail of the kind which Hannah Arendt, for example, offers in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt herself does not, though, always convincingly explain the functioning of the relationships between the actions of individuals, and the varying social, cultural, and economic pressures that influence them, that are a major focus for Adorno. In an area as fraught as this no analysis is going to be definitive, and both Adorno’s and Arendt’s perspectives remain important as warnings against the recurrence of fascist politics.

Adorno’s acute sense of the historical situatedness of thought, his suspicion of positive metaphysical claims, and his insistence on the importance of art can, as we will see, be used to question many dominant approaches to philosophy, and to illuminate pressing social and political issues. In Aesthetic Theory Adorno asserts that ‘Already before Auschwitz it was an affirmative lie in the face of historical experiences to attribute any positive sense to existence. That has consequences right into the form of works of art’ (GS 7 p. 229). He always insists that the appalling brutality of history must be kept in mind; at the same time, though, he is sensitive to the need to give expression to what is repressed and neglected in history, that may be a source of hope. The growing contemporary importance of Adorno’s thought derives, then, from its attention to how to make sense in a world where so much militates against being able to do so.