Society as real abstraction: Adorno’s critique of economic nature
In a time punctuated by crisis, the alternatives to capitalism appear as remote as ever. Why does the movement of speculative financial flows, of money, and of market prices appear to govern us like laws of nature? Although Theodor W. Adorno did not live to see the neoliberal revolution of the 1970s–1980s, his critical theory can provide a framework for theorizing the naturalization of the contemporary neoliberal turn of capitalist society.1 This chapter develops Adorno’s concepts of exchange and real abstraction to criticize economic concepts and categories, focusing on Marx’s dialectical approach to ‘natural history’ as the key to an immanent critique of economic theory. Adorno’s revitalization of Marx’s concepts of natural history, as well as the related concepts of commodity fetishism and real abstraction, can be developed to demystify the ideological function of the epistemological turn in neoliberal economic theory. The liberal concept of a free market society that arises through the spontaneous, competitive actions of individuals has returned in neoliberal theory, particularly in the work of Friedrich von Hayek, whose theory holds that the free market is a ‘superior information processor’, and the absolute horizon of all rational economic action.2 This chapter returns to Adorno to critique neoliberal society in its ideological appearance as a self-regulating, evolving order that asserts itself as an independent economic logic. I argue that Adorno’s dialectics reveals how the abstract and impersonal relations of capitalism are generative of reified forms of thought in social science, and how these forms of thought become ideological moments in the social world they reinforce. By conceptualizing society as a process of ‘subject-object’ mediation, Adorno’s dialectics can recover the genesis of economic concepts in their constitution by the practice of commodity exchange. Through a reconsideration of Adorno’s critique of positivism, social science, and subjective economics, I argue that the neoliberal free market can be grasped as an ideological form of thought that belongs to the structuring relations of capitalist society. In what follows I delineate Adorno’s critical theory of society by focusing on the related concepts of exchange, society as second nature, and real abstraction as the key to grounding the ideological function of economic thought in the neoliberal present.
Real abstraction and identity thinking
Adorno’s critical theory argues that value in capitalism is a socially constituted abstraction. Social reality is abstract because individuals relate to each other through commodity exchange. This understanding of society is grounded in Marx’s critique of the ‘fetish-character of the commodity’, a theory which suggests that capitalism is organized by isolated producers who only realize the social character of their labour through exchange.3 Adorno similarly maintains that the fundamental principle of capitalist society is the exchange abstraction, the principle of mediation that unconsciously synthesizes society as an objective whole. ‘What really makes society a social entity, what constitutes it both conceptually and in reality, is the relationship of exchange, which binds together virtually all the people participating in this kind of society.’ 4 Exchange is the ‘all-around mediator’ that connects individuals through abstract commodity relations.5 The exchange abstraction is thus an ‘objective abstraction’ that is prior to the individual’s cognitive abstractions: ‘The first objective abstraction takes place, not so much in scientific thought, as in the universal development of the exchange system itself; which happens independently of the qualitative attitudes of producer and consumer, of the mode of production, even of need, which the social mechanism tends to satisfy as a kind of secondary by-product. Profit comes first.’ 6
What does it mean to say that society is really abstract? According to Adorno, abstraction is present in every act of commodity exchange, because in the exchange commodities are reduced to a principle of unity: socially necessary labor.7 Through the exchange of commodities we ‘abstract’ from concrete reality through an unwitting reduction to unity. Adorno remarks: ‘In this exchange in terms of average social labour time the specific forms of the objects to be exchanged are necessarily disregarded; instead, they are reduced to a universal unit.’ 8 In commodity exchange we equate qualitatively different, heterogeneous things to each other by reducing them to quantities of money. This practice not only relates non-identical things to an abstract form of equivalence in money, it also isolates value from its genesis in society’s relations of production.
This practice of exchange-based abstraction is connected to Adorno’s concept of ‘natural history’, because exchange systematically generalizes throughout society, transforming relations between individuals into a universal context of abstract determinacy. As the exchange abstraction extends through every sphere of life, society petrifies into an object that appears to reproduce – and posit – itself independently of the individuals who constitute it. The capitalist relations of society thus appear automatic and immutable, a congealed whole that Adorno calls ‘second nature’. By second nature, Adorno means that social practice presents itself in a manner that appears to be ‘first nature’ – that is, as an external and alien objectivity that seems to govern individuals independently of their own action.9 This production of society as a second nature lends capitalist relations the quality of fated necessity. That society appears as a second nature is attributable to the fetishized law of exchange-value: ‘The law is nature-like due to the character of its inescapability under the dominating relationships of production.’ 10 The exchange abstraction seems to be a law-like – or fated – principle of socialization that binds all individuals to the necessity of capital accumulation: ‘The law which determines how the fatality of mankind unfolds is the law of exchange.’ 11 This naturalization of exchange is a function of the commodity abstraction, or, the condition that social relations appear indirectly in the form of value, of abstract quantities between commodities: ‘The concept of commodity fetishism is nothing but this necessary process of abstraction. By performing the operation of abstraction, the commodity no longer appears as a social relation but seems as if value were a thing-in-itself.’ 12 The fetish-character of exchange, according to Adorno, is not a subjective illusion, but belongs to the objective relations of capitalist society: ‘the fetish-character of commodities is not chalked up to subjective-mistaken consciousness, but objectively deduced from the social a priori, the process of exchange’.13 The relations of capitalist society reproduce themselves through an objective illusion, namely, that economic laws govern society as if they were natural laws. And yet the objective illusion of value is also a reality; individuals in capitalism really do act and relate to each other through the medium of exchange. Exchange value ‘dominates human needs and replaces them; illusion dominates reality. To this extent, society is myth and its elucidation is still as necessary as ever. At the same time, however, this illusion is the most real thing of all, it is the formula used to bewitch the world’.14 The fetish character of exchange arises from the peculiar character of the mediated relations of capitalist society, a system of production organized by isolated producers who do not relate to each other directly, but only realize the value of their social labour indirectly through exchange. Value is realized in an unconscious, unwitting manner in capitalist society. Through the objective and mediated relations of society, exchange imposes a static claim on individuals and things: by reducing non-identical things to a principle of unity – value – these things are assumed to remain identical during their comparison in markets.
An economic thing, such as money or a price signal, is the manifestation of a social relation, a fetishized form that exerts power over individuals. The movement of money is, as Adorno puts it, the power by which ‘the life of all men hangs by’.15 This blind and automatic movement of exchange reproduces society in a quasi-mythological manner, because individuals experience the movement of society in the form of an abstract, independent movement of value. Adorno calls this abstract context of exchange a ‘secular logic of things’, an autonomously self-moving whole that attributes social power to commodities and objectifies individuals as bearers of exchange-value.16 The interdependence of the whole that synthesizes individuals through exchange is predetermined by the end of capital as the automatic subject. This externalization of social relations and practices in things is a part of natural-history, of the passage of historically produced forms into the appearance of nature. The socially constituted ‘second nature’ of capitalism asserts itself through the exchange abstraction: ‘What is self-made becomes the In-itself.’ 17 This process of exchange-based socialization inverts means and ends, reducing individuals to functions of capital accumulation in the form of a ‘fatal mischief (Unwesen) of a world arranged so as to degrade men to means of their sese conservare[.]’18 Rather than acting as the subject of its own social world, the individual in capitalism is ruled by the autonomous movement of abstractions, by the law of value which they create behind their backs as if by force of nature.
One area that differentiates his critical theory from Marx’s critique of political economy is the key role Adorno attributes to subjectivity in the reproduction of society. Although he grounds the dialectical accounts of exchange, abstraction and natural history in Marx’s critique of value, Adorno also suggests that Marx ‘went rampaging through the epistemological categories like the proverbial bull in the china shop.’ 19 Focusing on the inner-connection between the exchange abstraction, naturalization and subjectivity, Adorno’s approach conceptualizes the constitution of epistemological categories by the objective relations of society. The cognizing subject, according to Adorno, is not merely a passive object of exchange, but is equally a necessary moment in the reproduction of society. The real abstracting practices of commodity exchange are not only constitutive of economic forms, but also forms of thought that condition the naturalization of value. Adorno names the prevailing mode of thinking in capitalist society ‘identity thinking’. Identity thinking is any mode of cognition that represents reality through conceptual predication; identification is classificatory and subsumptive. According to Adorno, identity thinking is instrumentalizing and dominating because it reduces particulars to functions of universals. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno is at pains to point out the inadequacies of identity, revealing the non-identical moment that is cut out of subjectivity: ‘the name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder’.20 Identity thinking, according to Adorno, is pervasive in logic, formal reasoning, science and positivism. It is the mode of cognition that is as dominating as the social world it reflects. His materialist claim suggests that there is a concealed link between identity thinking and the exchange abstraction:
The exchange-principle, the reduction of human labor to an abstract general concept of average labor-time, is Ur-related to the identification-principle. It has its social model in exchange, and would not be without the latter, through which non-identical particular essences and achievements become commensurable, identical. The spread of the principle constrains the entire world to the identical, to totality.21
Here Adorno points to an affinity between identity and exchange as principles of synthesis; the resemblance between identity and exchange lies in the act of abstraction. If the exchange abstraction is the principle of socialization that equalizes and reduces different use-values to labour-value, then the cognitive act of abstraction similarly reduces different, particular objects to universal concepts through identification. Adorno thus frequently refers to an ‘exchange principle’, and an ‘identity principle’, to illuminate their inner-connection. This convergence of thought and practice belongs to the mediations of capitalist society in general, as each principle reinforces the other, compelling subjects to adopt identity as the paradigmatic form of cognition and validity. Thinking therefore, in capitalist society, is necessarily mediated by the form of the commodity and the real abstraction of exchange, and exchange is mediated by the form of thinking.
In articulating an inner-connection between thought and practice that converges in the exchange abstraction, Adorno’s critical theory can grasp the constitution of forms of thought by the objective relations of society in a manner that is both self-reflexive and immanent to its context. Its critical intent is to reveal the non-conceptual in the concept, the relations of sensuous practice that appear as an abstract relation between values. Adorno’s epistemological critique of identity thinking reveals the implicit non-identity in every identification. This critique of identity belongs to his critique of liberal society and its ideal notions, of the concept of a social whole that arises through the free and spontaneous actions of individuals.22 Insofar as the compulsory drive to master reality through identity always falls short, the social totality is similarly disunited in its unity, it is a ‘negative totality’ that reproduces itself through the class antagonism between capitalist and wage-labourer.23 Concealed within the appearance of society as an abstract movement of values lies the antagonistic relation between the class of capitalists and the class of wage-labourers who must sell their labour power as means of subsistence. ‘The class relationship makes up the objective motor of the production process which the life of all men hangs by, and the primacy of which has its vanishing point in the death of all.’24 This antagonistic relation between capital and labour disappears in the appearance of the exchange abstraction, individuals exist as ‘personifications’ of economic categories, bearers of particular class interests, ‘character masks’ who act as functions of the objective relations of production.25
To further delineate the connection between exchange and identity, Adorno conceptualizes society as a dialectical process of ‘subject-object’ mediation, a double-sided totality that reproduces itself through practice. Individuals within the class-relation unconsciously reproduce society though the exchange abstraction, a process of objectification that constitutes society as a ‘mediating conceptuality’, compelling subjects to reproduce society in a manner that conceals domination.26 ‘Society as subject and society as object are the same and not the same.’27 Society is subjective because it depends on subjects, on human practice. ‘Society is subjective because it refers back to the human beings who create it’.28 Society does not reproduce itself independently of practice; society can only maintain itself and reproduce itself through subjects. The social totality ‘does not lead a life of its own over and above that which it unites’.29 Society, however, is also objective, because, ‘on account of its underlying structure, it cannot perceive its own subjectivity’.30 The concept of society as the simultaneous subject–object is connected to Adorno’s claim that exchange naturalizes capitalist relations, because in exchange individuals externalize their practice in abstract relations between things, in commodity values, in prices that seem to lead a life of their own. Adorno’s claim that society is systematically ‘false’ can be understood in terms of this inversion of subject and object: the social world of capital that appears to be governed by economic laws is the world that subjects make. Society is simultaneously ‘blind nature and yet mediated by consciousness’.31 Unlocking the constitution of the invisible principles that govern society in the form of abstract value is the pivot of Adorno’s critique of domination, as well as the reified forms of thought that systematically fail to grasp the ideological character of society’s autonomization from those who make it.
Positivism and the science of economic nature
What are the implications of this inversion of society as subject and object for the social scientist who studies it? Many of Adorno’s post-war reflections on social science, instrumental reason and positivism are an attempt to answer this question. One consequence of the inversion of subject and object is that the subject appears in this inverted reality as the agent of her own sociability. Positivist social science, according to Adorno, fails to recognize the inverted reality of the subject’s social world. As Adorno puts it:
The notions of subjective and objective have been completely reversed. Objective means the non-controversial aspect of things, their unquestioned impression, the façade made up of classified data, that is, the subjective; and they call subjective anything which breaches that façade, engages the specific experience of a matter, casts off ready-made judgments and substitutes relatedness to the object for the majority consensus of those who do not even look at it, let alone think about it – that is, the objective.32
By placing the dialectic of society as subject–object at the centre of his critical theory, Adorno recovers the genesis of the disciplines of sociology and economics in the relations of society. Positivism represents a particularly insidious case of identity thinking; in social science, positivist methods grant priority to ‘what is at hand, what is given as fact’, without conceptualizing the mediation of facts by the totality.33 Positivist approaches to social science apply a reified method to their object, reducing society to empirical data without recognizing the reified character of the social object.
In addition to the undialectical methods Adorno attributes to empiricist social science (e.g., classification, statistical analysis, opinion polls), his main objection to the positivist tradition lies in its ‘primacy of method’, that is, its refusal to recognize the objectivity of mediation, of a social essence that appears in inverted form.34 This critique can be seen in his debate with Karl Popper in the Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (1962), where Adorno synthesizes his claims about the question of method, as well as the fragmentation of social science into isolated disciplines. Insofar as positivism refuses to conceptualize society as an internally contradictory object that is not immediate, but mediated, it can only register the surface appearances of social phenomena. Observing this one-sided primacy of method in the abstractly isolated disciplines of sociology and economics, Adorno names positivism ‘reified thinking’, and locates its genesis in the real movement of the social object: ‘Scientific mirroring indeed remains a mere duplication, the reified apperception of the hypostatized, thereby distorting the object through duplication itself. It enchants that which is mediated into something immediate.’ 35 By collapsing the social essence with its forms of appearance, positivism cannot grasp the objectivity of reification – it merely reflects it through a primacy of method that treats society as ‘nothing but the average value of individual modes of reaction’.36 Cut off from the economic categories of exchange, value, and labour, sociology tends to study subjective attitudes and opinions without theorizing their objective mediation.37 By the same token, the discipline of liberal, ‘subjective’ economics reduces the totality to the law-like movement of putatively objective, or natural economic laws, while failing to grasp the genesis of these laws in society’s relations. Both sociology and economics, according to Adorno, are positivist methods that fetishize the identifiable facts and figures of reality, and ignore the socially constituted character of their form of appearance. ‘Positivism is so blinded by society that it regards second nature as first nature and identifies the data of society with the data of natural science.’38 The absence of any determinate concept of society in positivism means that sociology and economics are ill-equipped to grasp non-empirical relations and tendencies, such as the reality of class antagonism, or the persistence of general crises of capital accumulation.39 All empirical research devoid of theory, according to Adorno, is blind to the fundamental ‘conceptuality which holds sway in reality (Sache) itself’, and is doomed to function as a moment in the reproduction of the totality.40
If positivist sociology fails to grasp the economic form of society’s relations, economic theory is similarly one-sided in its reduction of society to economic laws. Adorno invariably names the tradition of liberal bourgeois economics, ‘subjective economics’, and criticizes its failure to recognize the ‘congealed human relationships’ that manifest in economic things.41 To review the background briefly, subjective economics began in the context of the ‘Marginalist Revolution’ – a body of research that developed a scientific model for formalizing economic laws. Similarly originating within the wider context of the ‘Methodenstreit’ in social science, Marginalist economics resembled the positivist methodologism of sociology in its prioritization of scientific validity.42 Rejecting the classical liberal tradition and its objective labour theory of value, Marginalists like William Stanley Jevons, Leon Walras and Carl Menger introduced a subjective theory of value that focused on the individual’s ‘utility’ as the foundation of market equilibrium.43 This neoclassical approach turned away from the classical considerations of production in political economy, focusing on consumption and rational economic behaviour. The subjective turn in neoclassical economics holds that the individual’s evaluations of commodity prices are the true cause of market equilibrium. The master concept of ‘utility’ refers to the degree of satisfaction derived by individuals in consumption, a principle of subjective rationality that finds its ideal representation in the figure, ‘homo economicus’.44 Despite the neoclassical departure from Smith and Ricardo’s labour theory of value, the neoclassical school can rightly be interpreted as a political revival of the liberal ideal of individual freedom. To neoclassicals, supply and demand find equilibrium through the evaluations of individuals in free markets, and laissez-faire returns as the ideal form of political organization.45
Adorno’s critique of subjective economics suggests that its scientific validity is merely a description of marketized relations: ‘Subjective economics is essentially an analysis of market processes in which established market relations are already presupposed.’ 46 The formal models of neoclassical theory describe the movement of quantitative economic things without comprehending the social constitution of value relations. To neoclassicals, prices represent nothing but the abstract movement of an independent economic rationality that individuals possess in relations of competition. In its one-sided fixation on prices and market equilibria, neoclassicism attributes subjective power to a sui generis economic nature. By relinquishing Marx’s distinction between value and price, subjective economics ‘fails to translate the economic laws back into congealed human relationships’.47 The theory’s blindness to the question of social constitution is most acute in its naturalization of need, a category which, in the hands of neoclassicals, is reduced to the static principle of ‘utility’. This naturalized vision of a market society is a part of the inverted world of capital. The exchange abstraction, as Adorno claims, is not simply an immediate transaction between atomized individuals that express value preferences – exchange is the universal principal of mediation that envelopes the movement of social reproduction in an abstract totality. Exchange cannot be detached from value as the social form of wealth that valorizes value through abstract labor.48 Subjective theory is blind to the manner in which the exchange-principle prevails in things, shaping the whole sphere of social need according to the compulsory ends of capital accumulation. By reifying need as a static principle of optimization, neoclassical theory idealizes market relations according to a mythically formal, homogeneous and static conception of market self-regulation.
Against this universal, quasi-scientific concept of value as utility, Adorno reminds us of the historically specific relations of production in capitalist society, and suggests that the regulation of consumption is itself something mediated by the antagonistic class relation between capital and labour.49 Subjective economics, he claims, is essentially the ‘apology’ of liberal bourgeois society.50 Economics is akin to the positivist methods of sociology insofar as it reifies the putatively objective facts of society (in the form of prices), without recognizing the ‘problem of constitution’, that is, the historical process that generated all mediation as value-relations.51 This scientific turn in economics isolates the movement of quantitative things in a manner that mirrors the sociological reduction of inter-personal relations to empirical facts. ‘As for economics itself, however, it will have no truck with anything – whether it be history, sociology or even philosophy – which does not take place within the context of the developed market economy and which cannot be calculated, mathematized, according to the schemata of current market relationships[.]’52 Positivist sociology and subjective economics are opposite sides of the same false coin. Both disciplines fail to grasp the contradictory movement of society in its unity as subject–object. The isolation of both disciplines, Adorno suggests, ‘sets aside the really central interest of both disciplines’.53 Neither grasps the fundamental inversion of capitalist society: the movement of a world where the material relations between people manifest as an abstract movement of economic things amongst themselves. Instead, sociology objectifies interpersonal relations, and economics subjectifies things. By fixating on the appearance of society in statistical facts or prices, positivist social science fails to grasp the manner in which society’s essence disappears in its form of appearance. Society is a process of mediation, subject and object are dialectically caught up in an ongoing inversion of ‘subjectivity into objectivity’, and vice versa.54 Misrecognizing second nature for first nature, the traditional theories of sociology and economics conceptualize the movement of markets in their appearance as natural laws. Such an approach describes marketized phenomena without comprehending the historical production of society’s relations. This scientific model of society loses the perspective that could grasp the processes of domination that are immanent to liberal society, affirming what has been constituted as mythically prearranged.
Neoliberal theory: Markets think too
The ascent of neoliberalism in the 1970s revived the dream of a free market society. Breaking from the neoclassical framework of market equilibrium, neoliberals transformed subjective economics by conceptualizing markets as ‘superior information processors’, instruments of an economic rationality that knows more than individuals.55 The origins of neoliberal economics are multiple: Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises of the ‘Austrian School’ are key players, but the most decisive thinker of this tradition was Mises’s student, Friedrich Hayek, who would play a major role in building the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, a closed society of economists, philosophers and business elites committed to forming a ‘new liberalism’.56 With training in biology, brain science and psychology, Hayek transformed economics by shifting its conceptual framework to epistemology. This epistemic grounding of markets was first formulated during the ‘Socialist Calculation Debate’, where Hayek departed from the neoclassical emphasis on resource allocation, and reconceptualized markets as instruments of communication. This shift can be seen in his influential essay, ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’ (1945): ‘The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources [. . .] it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality.’57 Hayek’s argument is that free markets are necessary because the data individuals need to evaluate goods is ‘dispersed’, ‘subjective’, and therefore fallible.58 This concept of dispersed information decentres the rational economic agent, homo economicus, and turns away from the concept of utility to a vision of markets as aggregators and conveyers of incomplete fragments of information. According to Hayek, the free movement of prices both reflect and shape the beliefs and plans of individuals. As he insists, ‘It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunication.’59 Against the neoclassical ideal, which grounds the invisible movement of markets in the economic rationality of individuals, Hayek insists upon the fragmentary, partial and misleading status of the individual’s knowledge, while affirming the superior rationality of markets.
In something of an ironic twist, Hayek’s theory is forced to decentre the standpoint of the economist who purports to understand economic data, because his theory holds that no economist can rival the superior information of the free market itself.60 After a brief period of hostility to the use of scientific methods and categories in economics, Hayek later turned to the sciences of cybernetics and systems theory to elaborate the distributed character of information in market self-regulation. (This return to scientific method for economic theory was crucially influenced by Mont Pelerin society member and interlocutor, Karl Popper).61 Hayek’s efforts to translate cognitive processes into market principles led to another wave of naturalized concepts and categories in neoliberal theory.62 This shift from the traditional theory of marginal utility brought a corresponding transformation to foundational liberal concepts: knowledge became ‘information’, competition became ‘discovery’, and freedom became ‘order’.63 In addition to cybernetics, Hayek also turned to biology and systems theory, developing a cultural evolutionary framework that would ground his concept of the free market. In his mature work, Hayek frequently names the free market a ‘spontaneous order’, an emergent whole that has evolved through the competitive rules human beings have acquired over the course of civilization’s development. As he remarks in his final text, The Fatal Conceit (1988): ‘the extended order is perfectly natural: in the sense that it has itself, like similar biological phenomena, evolved naturally in the course of natural selection’.64 The spontaneous order emerges through the unconscious behaviours of individuals, and through the selection of competitive ‘rules’ that facilitate market activity.65
Hayek’s theory is not merely the apologia of a capitalist class perspective; it has its truth-content. Capitalist society reproduces itself through exchange; the relations between individuals appear in abstract form as a quantitative movement of things. The exchange process is not only the objective principle of socialization, it has also played a key role in the historical production of the individual, understood as spontaneous, autonomous and free. Hayek’s epistemology of the free market approaches the border of the dialectic of subject and object, and it recognizes the secret identity of exchange and thought. However, it does not ask the question: why does society appear in the form of an autonomous movement of abstractions? Society forms itself as system of communication in exchange, but this system is not a function of the immediate decisions of individuals, rather, it is a function of the fundamental inversion of a social world where human relations vanish in their commodified appearance. Hayek’s theory attributes the determination of the free market’s information to the value preferences of individuals without recognizing the objective social form of value. His theory remains caught in the subjective moment of the social totality. This neoliberal concept of the free market affirms the incomprehensibility of economic quantities as if the abstract movement of society was the movement of an independent economic nature. But this autonomization of society belongs to the law of exchange that socializes individuals within an immanent context of value that is valorized through labour. The reproduction of the social totality is the fated movement of a real abstraction. Individuals experience this alien world of finance capital through the convergence of chance and necessity. As Adorno remarks: ‘What chance and necessity have, lethally in common, is what metaphysics refers to as fate.’66 In capitalism, chance is ‘the form taken by freedom under a spell’, by the expulsion of all moments of reality by the identity principle, by the rule of abstractions over life. That society can only take the form of this identity is illusion, socially necessary illusion. This mythological appearance of society as fate is a moment of the naturalization of exchange, of the independence of exchange-value that circulates and returns in abstract isolation from productive relations.67 This real metaphysics of capital is the neoliberal ‘secular logic of things’, the blind movement of prices which individuals confront as economic predetermination. The mythological appearance of fate belongs to the real abstracting practices of individuals who are not the subject of their social world. The individual in neoliberalism lives in relation to the immediacy of market prices, of apparently self-determining fluctuations that conceal the mediated opacity of value. Hidden within the appearance of society as a free and equal exchange of spontaneous individuals is the silent compulsion of capital, the automatic subject that must accumulate more capital. The appearance of society as a free and spontaneous movement is a reality and illusion. As Adorno points out, the ‘illusion signifies that within this society laws can only be implemented as natural processes over people’s heads, while their validity arises from the form of the relations of production within which production takes place’.68 Neoliberal theory is so blinded by the abstract identity of the exchange principle that it cannot grasp the socially constituted nature of the fated economic nature it affirms.
This concept of a free market society fails to extricate itself from its positivist legacy – it cannot comprehend the antagonistic unity of society’s appearance and essence, of subject and object. Hayek’s concept of information is a type of identity thinking, it sees only equivalence between things amongst themselves, but it does not enquire into the social basis of this identity. Considered as a part of natural history, the neoliberal dream of returning the world to an invisible law of economic nature betrays the need of a society to actualize a directly social world that was never realized. The free market fundamentalism of neoliberal thought asserts the primacy of economic nature as if it were first nature, ontologizing the sphere of the market as the only possible site of freedom. In a brief moment of speculation in Negative Dialectics, Adorno questions the natural basis of society’s origins, the famed ‘principle of homo homini lupus’, of liberal contract theory. Perhaps for a time in prehistory – he suggests – humanity was compelled by scarcity to live through violent acts of ‘power-seizure’.69 (He doubts that such prehistory is knowable). That the whole of human history appears as natural history, as the prolongation of domination, is a piece of ideology that belongs to capitalist modernity. The standpoint of domination in the present conditions the appearance of history as mere natural history: ‘Human history, progressive domination, continues the unconscious one of nature, of devouring and being devoured.’70 To the extent that liberal theory derives the origins of bourgeois social institutions from the putatively natural unity of progress and domination, theory naturalizes the antagonism of the capitalist totality. Adorno’s point regarding natural history is that the unity of progress and domination is semblance, socially necessary illusion. In the final analysis, he suggests, ‘Marx was ironically a social Darwinist.’71 What the social Darwinists praised – natural conflict – is in truth the social negativity of a false world that reduces individuals to means, to a form of wealth that exploits labour for the valorization of value. The social subject in capitalism exists through objectification, through an immanent compulsion that prolongs history as mere preservation. This form of compulsion, Adorno suggests, is not a necessary fact of nature: ‘The inescapable spell of the animal world is reproduced in the brutal domination of a society, still caught up in natural history. But one should not apologetically conclude from this that compulsion is immutable.’72
The neoliberal idea of a market society eternalizes what has been historically produced: the inverted world of capital that attributes social power to things. In the present conditions of financial and political crisis, the independent movement of abstract value now threatens to capture the whole of planetary nature in the exchange-principle. As the automatic subject, capital ‘ruthlessly compels humanity towards production for production’s sake’.73 That social reproduction still occurs through compulsion is betrayed by the neoliberal push to marketize ecological crises, swallowing nature in carbon markets and speculative commodity futures.74 Ruled by the abstract movement of flows of speculative finance capital, the contemporary neoliberal order confronts us as if it were an independent economic logic of nature, rather than the result of human practice. For Adorno, the key to critical theory that could demythologize society as a second nature does not reside in an alternative science of economics, but in recovering the historical process underlying the universal extension of the exchange principle. The disappearance of history from society is the basis of society’s reproduction as second nature: ‘The more relentlessly the process of societalization spins its web around every aspect of immediate human and interpersonal relations, the more impossible it becomes to recollect the historical origins of that process and the more irresistible the external semblance of something natural.’75 Unlocking the riddle of society as second nature requires deciphering the human relations and practices that appear in abstract things. Understanding the present’s relations as socially constituted is the key to breaking the appearance of capital as the automatic fetish of capitalist wealth, of money that appears to generate more money through its own movement.
Conclusions
Adorno’s contribution to critical theory can continue to illuminate forms of social domination in today’s neoliberal order. The potentials of his theory for resistance to neoliberal capitalism do not consist in an alternative science of economics, but turns on a ‘conceptualized praxis’ that reveals the nature of economy as a socially produced nature.76 Such a praxis moves through the concepts and categories of a society ruled by value, revealing the relations of human practice that appear in reified form. Faced with the ongoing realities of rising inequality, austerity and the concentration of private wealth, contemporary criticism of neoliberalism often demands a more just and equal distribution of the social product. The absence of any clear capacity by capital to resolve its crises of accumulation has led to the recent wave of right-wing, populist and racist movements, each demanding a return to a mythological past. This fascist critique of neoliberalism is a personalized critique of individuals, of tangible and concrete representatives of capital. The critique of politicians, financiers and immigrants is the reaction formation of a disempowered resistance to abstract domination. Such a fetishized critique of capitalism only identifies the capitalist as a force of corruption and manipulation without recognizing the capitalist as the personified function of capital.
Adorno’s critical theory is a useful alternative to such a fetishized perspective. His critical theory targets the dependence of all individuals on the social world that they make. Rather than demanding more of the social product for the worker in a world that remains hostile to the subject, Adorno criticizes the capitalistically arranged relations that reduce practice to the ends of profit. His critical theory suggests that freedom from need and domination requires the abolition of the class relation and the exploitation of labour: ‘the absolutization of labor is that of the class relationship: a humankind free of labor would be free of domination’.77 Rather than affirming an alternative economics that would expose the inequality of financialized wealth, critical theory would do well to refuse all sciences of economic nature. All theory that is critical, Adorno suggests, illuminates the law of value as socially necessary illusion. The critique of society’s appearance as second nature points to the abolition of the law as the horizon of freedom: ‘That the assumption of natural laws is not to be taken à la lettre, least of all ontologized in the sense of a however stylized draft of so-called humanity, is confirmed by the strongest motive of Marxist theory of all, that of the potential abolition of those laws. Where the realm of freedom had begun, they would no longer apply.’78 The critique of neoliberalism does not find its resolution in the return to a more equally distributed, comfortable liberal society, but in the abolition of the class-divided form of society that valorizes value through labour, of the antagonistic social object that ‘only needs all’.79
Notes
1 For an account that explores the transition from state managed capitalism to neoliberalism, see Charles Andrew Prusik, Adorno and Neoliberalism: The Critique of Exchange Society (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).
2 There are of course differences amongst neoliberals regarding the meaning of free markets, market societies and self-regulation. While the ‘Chicago School’ still remains methodologically committed to fundamental neoclassical principles, Hayek’s framework represents a major break from this tradition. For a detailed overview of the myriad strands of neoliberal theory, see The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, edited by, Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). For an analysis of the ordoliberal tradition that focuses on Hayek’s role in the development of an anti-democratic, free market society, see Werner Bonefeld, The Strong State and the Free Economy (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).
3 For accounts of Adorno’s development of Marx’s theory of fetishism, see Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (London: Verso, 2014), and Riccardo Bellofiore and Tommaso Redolfi Riva’s ‘The Neue Marx-Lektüre: Putting the Critique of Political Economy Back into the Critique of Society’, in Radical Philosophy 189 (January/February 2015), 24–36.
4 Theodor Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 31.
5 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, translated by Dennis Redmond. Retrieved 20 December 2018, from http://members.efn.org/~dredmond/ND2Trans.txt, 328. Note that the Redmond translation is not paginated, all paginations refer to the German original.
6 Adorno, ‘Society’, translated by Frederic Jameson Salmagundi 3, no. 10–11 (1969–1970): 148.
7 Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, 31–2. Note that the notion of real abstraction was introduced to Marxian theory by economist Alfred Sohn-Rethel. Adorno praised Sohn-Rethel’s theory of real abstraction and applied it to his own critique of epistemology. As Adorno writes, ‘Sohn-Rethel was the first to point out that in the latter, in the general and necessary activity of the Spirit, inalienably social labor lies hidden’, Negative Dialectics, 178. For an account of the differences between Adorno and Sohn-Rethel’s approach to real abstraction, see Frank Engster, ‘Subjectivity and Its Crisis: Commodity Mediation and the Economic Constitution of Objectivity and Subjectivity’, History of the Human Sciences 29 (2016): 1–19.
8 Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, 32.
9 For an account of the use of the concepts first and second nature in Adorno’s work, see Stefan Breuer’s, ‘Adorno’s Anthropology’, translated by John Blazek, Telos 64 (1985): 15–31.
10 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 347.
11 Adorno, ‘Sociology and Empirical Research’, in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, translated by Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1977), 80.
12 Adorno, ‘Marx and the Basic Concepts of Sociological Theory: From A Seminar Transcript of the Summer Semester 1962’, translated by Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson and Chris O’Kane, Historical Materialism 26, no. 1 (2018), 6.
13 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 190.
14 Adorno, ‘Sociology and Empirical Research’, 80.
15 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 314.
16 Ibid., 313.
17 Ibid., 339.
18 Ibid., 164.
19 Ibid., 206.
20 Ibid., 17.
21 Ibid., 149.
22 For an account that analyses Adorno’s critique of liberalism in the context of his theory of integration, see Jakob Norberg’s, ‘Adorno’s Advice: Minima Moralia and the Critique of Liberalism’, PLMA 126 (2011): 398–411.
23 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 21.
24 Ibid., 314.
25 Adorno, ‘Society’, 148.
26 Adorno, ‘Sociology and Empirical Research’, 80.
27 Adorno, ‘Introduction’, in The Positivist Dispute, 34.
28 Ibid., 33.
29 Adorno, ‘On the Logic of Social Sciences’, in the Positivist Dispute, 107.
30 Adorno, ‘Introduction’, 33.
31 Adorno, ‘On the Logic’, 107.
32 Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, translated by E.F.N. Jecphcott (London: Verso, 2005), 69–70.
33 Adorno, ‘Einleitung zu Emile Durkheim’, Soziologische Schriften I, Band 8 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2018), 246–7.
34 For an analysis of Adorno’s critique of methodologism, as well as the details regarding its neo-Kantian context, see Rose’s Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Verso, 2009), 2–38, and Matthias Benzer, Adorno’s Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
35 Adorno, ‘Sociology and Empirical Research’, 75–6.
36 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 197. Note that Adorno is referring to the neoclassicism of Vilfredo Pareto. See also his critique in Introduction to Sociology, 11.
37 ‘In other words, sociology [. . .] disregards the social production and reproduction of the life of society as a whole. And if anything is a social relationship it is precisely that totality’. Introduction to Sociology, 141.
38 Adorno, ‘Marx and the Basic Concepts’, 3.
39 See Adorno, ‘Introduction’, 37.
40 Adorno, ‘Sociology and Empirical Research’, 80.
41 Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, 143.
42 For background and discussion regarding the origins of neoclassical economics that analyses its relation with sociology, see Simon Clarke’s, Marx, Marginalism, & Modern Sociology (London: Macmillan, 1991), and Janek Wasserman, The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).
43 The individual’s utility preferences render goods commensurable and valuable in markets rather than labour. See Clarke, Marx, Marginalism, 182–206.
44 For an historical analysis of the neoclassical revolution that focuses on the utility concept as being analogous with proto-energetics physics, see Mirowski’s, More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics: Physics as Nature’s Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For a critique of this scientism of economics in neoclassicism which mobilizes Adorno’s subject–object dialectic, see Hans-Georg Backhaus, ‘Between Science and Philosophy: Marxian Social Economy as Critical Theory’, in Open Marxism, vol. 1, edited by Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn and Kosmas Psychopedis (London: Pluto Press, 1992), 54–92.
45 See ibid., 193–241.
46 Adorno, ‘Marx and the Basic Concepts’, 10.
47 Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, 143
48 See Clarke, Marx, Marginalism, 219.
49 Adorno, ‘Marx and the Basic Concepts’, 9.
50 Ibid., 10.
51 Ibid. Adorno also cites Marx’s concept of ‘primitive accumulation’ as the historical process in which exchange relations dissolved traditional social ties. See Negative Dialectics, 328.
52 Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, 142.
53 Ibid., 144.
54 Backhaus, ‘Between Science and Philosophy’, 60.
55 For an historical analysis of the multiple concepts of information in neoliberal theory, see Mirowski and Edward Nik-Khah, The Knowledge We Have Lost in Information: The History of Information in Modern Economics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
56 See Plewhe, ‘Introduction’, Road from Mont Pelerin, 1–39.
57 Friedrich Von Hayek, ‘The Use of Information in Society’, American Economic Review XXXV, no. 4 (1945), 519.
58 For an extensive analysis of Hayek’s subjectivism, see Bruce Caldwell, Hayek’s Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F.A. Hayek (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 205–31.
59 Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: Gateway, 1972), 87.
60 For a time, Hayek’s opposition to rational economic planning and expertise brought about an ‘anti-scientism’ phase in his work, particularly in his ‘Abuse of Reason’ project, a text devoted to criticizing socialist planning and the ‘slavish imitation of the method and language of Science’. His target was primarily Keynesian regulation, but his critique of scientism and positivism also took aim at the failure by social scientists to conceptualize the subjective, or ‘dispersed’, information possessed by individuals. For details on this change in Hayek’s work, see Mirowski, ‘On the Origins (at Chicago) of Some Species of Neoliberal Evolutionary Economics’, in Building Chicago Economics: New Perspectives on the History of America’s Most Powerful Economics Program, edited by Robert Van Horn, Philip Mirowski and Thomas A. Stapleford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 260–6.
61 For details regarding Karl Popper’s influence on Hayek, see Malachi Haim Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902–1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 449–95.
62 In addition to developments in information theory, Hayek plundered the science of cybernetics to further elaborate the priority of information in economic activity. Cybernetics, which enjoyed numerous waves of development since its origins in the famed ‘Macy Conferences’ of 1941, is a trans-disciplinary theory that analyses the properties of living and non-living systems. Hayek praised a number of elements of cybernetic theory and systems theory, particularly its reduction of cognition to mechanism. For details see Mirowski’s, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018); Stephen Beckett, ‘Knowledge Conditioned by the Void: On Complexity and the Design Problem’, Design Issues 36, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 6–17.
63 See Slobodian, Globalists, 224–40.
64 Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, edited by W.W. Bartley III (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 19.
65 Ibid., 11–47.
66 Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–1965, edited by Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 97.
67 Adorno, ‘Marx and the Basic Concepts’, 8.
68 Adorno, History and Freedom, 118.
69 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 315.
70 Ibid., 349
71 Ibid.
72 Adorno, ‘Introduction’, 64. Translation modified.
73 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 301.
74 For an account that uses Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of reification to theorize the domination of nature in the context of ecological crisis, see Harriet Johnson, ‘The Reification of Nature: Reading Adorno in a Warming World’, Constellations 26 (2019): 318–29.
75 Adorno, History and Freedom, 121.
76 For an analysis that draws from Alfred Schmidt’s notion of Adorno’s conceptual praxis, see Bonefeld, ‘Negative Dialectics and the Critique of Economic Objectivity’, History of the Human Sciences 29, no. 2 (2016): 60–76.
77 Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999), 26.
78 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 347.
79 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, translated by Edmund Jecphcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 42.