Ladies and gentlemen,
Regarding what I said to you about the concept of tendency, I should perhaps add that it would be highly worthwhile, and a very promising piece of methodological work, to compare the concept of trend, which is common in empirical sociology, with that of tendency as I attempted to elucidate to you in the last session. There are two reasons for this: on the one hand, it will show you something that I already wish to emphasize now and which we will discuss at length in the future, namely that there is no absolute rupture, no absolute chorismos, between a theory of society (whatever that might be) and the empirical investigation of society. And I think it is important for you to be aware of this from the start, so that you avoid reifying and hardening the concept of social theory in the same way that is disastrously evident with empirical insight into society. Let me say in advance, in this context, that a number of findings developed in theory also belong to empirical research and that, if this were not the case, there would have to be well-grounded objections, well-grounded suspicions about theory; the relationship is therefore an extremely difficult one and should, for heaven’s sake, not be understood as a simple dichotomy. So, if you were to go home after this lecture and say to yourselves, ‘Alright, so on the one hand there’s empirical research in sociology, whereas Adorno advocates a theory of society’, that would be entirely wrong, for the theory I am advocating, as you will see when we go into detail, is precisely a theory that does not stand in abstract opposition to the facts with which it is concerned. On the other hand, the concept of trend differs in one decisive point from what I have explained to you as tendency. Perhaps you recall that, in those explanations, I placed the greatest emphasis on the fact that recognizing a tendency means recognizing, within the theoretical analysis of a given state, that element which qualitatively differs from this state itself, from the direction of its development, which means that it is not simply an extension of how the current state presents itself. This is precisely what is absent from the concept of trend. A trend is identified according to the schema I tried to explain to you via the silly caricature of the rabid dog; that is, it will state that something which is already becoming apparent in subjective reactions – with reference to the attitudes of voters towards those whom they are to vote for, for example – without any numerical dominance on one side that would be considered statistically significant, as they say, nonetheless has sufficient weight that, if things continue as they are now, this can be expected to increase to such an extent that it will in fact become statistically significant. This is more or less the exact empirical definition of what is meant by a trend. Naturally, this is extremely remote from the concept of tendency as I tried to intimate to you. This is just an aside to show you that empirical observation does actually involve, in a certain sense, the same types of subjective phenomena and behaviour that theory examines, but with a different emphasis; and we will consider the nature of this different emphasis in our further deliberations.
But the most important, the essential thing we encountered in the last session was not actually this, but something entirely different, namely that the question of the possibility of theory itself is not simply a matter of intellectually organizing the material, or simply a matter of the so-called productive imagination of those who investigate society – recall Ejlert Lövborg – but, and this was where we ended, is itself to a considerable and, I would say, a decisive extent dependent on the object itself in a historico-philosophical sense, namely that theories of society are not equally possible at all times. I already pointed this out last time, when I developed such concepts as totality and tendency – which are closely connected, for one could almost define tendency as the dynamic laws of a totality – as central aspects of a theory of society, and when I told you that something like the question of a theory is by no means an urgent one for a primitive horde society, or even for feudalism. It is no coincidence, in other words, that a theory of society in an emphatic sense came about only with the Industrial Revolution and emergent economic liberalism, which was already anticipated in extremely radical fashion by the classical national-economic model in liberal theory, namely that of Adam Smith,1 before being developed in its full ramifications. If, on the other hand, one no longer encounters theoretical conceptions in this emphatic sense, if Max Weber, for example, who God knows did not lack intellectual power or theoretical imagination – if anyone recognized a trend in modern society, it was truly Max Weber – if this Max Weber nonetheless refrained from formulating a real theory of society, this is due not merely to a subjective inability or the so-called decline of bourgeois thought, as theorists such as Lukács2 claim with the usual glib slogans; it is due to the matter itself, namely the fact that the current society is so complex and so difficult in its construction that it resists theory, at least in the initially naïve sense of an unambiguous, unqualified, direct explanation based on a few concepts. And if you can observe such a widespread distrust towards the formation of any theories today, then this distrust towards theory formation is not only what I would call a harmful and pathetic symptom of the employee mentality, which it certainly is, but it also has its basis in the matter itself – and especially in the entirely legitimate disappointment that countless so-called theoretical conceptions have failed. After all, even the race theory of the National Socialists was something like an attempt at a theory of society, but one that had completely degenerated into a delusional system and thus no longer had any basis in reason. If the disappointment over this failure of theory in the face of social reality leads to such a scepticism towards theory itself, there is historical validity in this; and this aspect must itself be taken up into a theory – which has, incidentally, always been the case in the great manifestations of sociological theory, and has been conceptually neglected only in more or less superficial and apologetic harmonizing descriptions of society.
So I am telling you that theory is generally imagined first of all as a unity, as a system of society, and this concept came about at the time when society, without offering any great resistance, seemed to apply such a concept, such a construction from its pure, realized concept, to itself; and that happened to be liberalism, in the sense of a purely implemented exchange society in which all socially relevant acts are essentially determined by a calculable unit, namely the society’s average working time used to produce commodities. Theory has really always been something like that. One can say that the objective character of the social theories of Smith, of Ricardo3 and, as a counterpoint, of their student and deadly critic Marx, but also the social theory of Auguste Comte, was uniform in that they started from systematic umbrella terms which they could use to explain the whole. Yet as soon as the formation of theories, for example the analysis of market society, no longer had the objectivity of the concept of value, specifically the concept of labour value, but, rather, based the explanation of society on the subjective reactions of individuals, on the needs of people in their manifold psychological impairments, it could no longer achieve such a unanimity of theory, which was expressed in the complexities and constant self-corrections of subjectively oriented social theories. I would say that, in this sense, the positive liberal theories and the negative ones such as those of Marx and Engels, the critical theories, were in agreement; that is, Marx’s theory is entirely traditional in viewing society as a system, a self-enclosed deductive system, only – and this ‘only’ is meant with great irony – with the twist that it asks, ‘Now look at this system, what happens to it because of its absolute consistency?’ But the notion of the objectivity of an internally congruent context is shared by the classical economists – and the classical economists were always additionally theorists of society as a whole – and their great critics. It is fair to say that all these theorems are attempts, in a sense, to capture terminologically the rupturing dynamic of society as formulated especially in the purely sociological and not properly economic theories of the time, namely those of Saint-Simon and Comte, namely that element which resists being tied to particular invariants. They are dynamic systems in a very similar way to the systems of so-called classical German Idealism, especially those of Fichte and Hegel – that is, systems which believed they could reconcile the concept of dynamics, which comes from society itself, after all, with the invariance of the concepts of its self-identical nature by claiming, especially in Hegel’s case, that the essence of social dynamics is itself its invariant element, its ontology. That is, if you like, the point – or, put less respectfully, the trick – of Hegel’s entire construction. With Marx, the situation is that he – how shall I put it? – demands identification papers from this attempt to deduce society objectively from its constitutive concepts, he questions the basis of its validity, and naturally this is already an admission that he has difficulties with that pure, seamless deduction of the system from its concept. For if the system could truly be deduced purely from its concept, this would essentially mean that, in the final reckoning, despite all contradictions in the details, there was something like unity. Now Marx discovered – as was already implicit in the classical economic texts, especially Ricardo’s – that this unity was not quite so convincing, and the challenge ‘Take a look at how your society really functions as a system, take a look at what results if one imagines the liberal principle of free and fair exchange unfolding on all sides’, simultaneously means that this system, in realizing itself, becomes its own negative, that it is not the internally harmonious, congruent and thus life-guaranteeing being for society as a whole that the theory of liberalism presents.
One might now say – here it is the same as with all cases of dialectic – that essentially the systematic model was already askew back then. I told you last time that the concept of tendency is constitutive of this systematic model – that is, that one can only ever speak of a system of society as a tendency, and not as something fully realized, and this, strictly speaking, already means that society tel quel, society as it is, is not the system that, according to its own concept, it should be. But this difference exposes itself, in keeping with a theory of tendency, not as a mere epistemological deviation of the accidental from its law but as a law of its own. I told you that, the way things are, one can say that the deviations and contradictions which seemed only particular and quite deep in the past have, on the one hand, developed so far that they can no longer be deduced in the same form from the uniform concept of society, as is attempted in Marx’s theory, but that, on the other hand, they have expanded to such a degree in empirical terms that the very idea of a theory of society, in the sense of a systematic unity, has become extremely problematic. And I think that, if I am to introduce you here to the elements of a philosophical theory of society, I should at least give you a cursory description of some of those aspects that no longer define this theoretical unity of society and follow this with the question of whether this rules out the possibility of formulating a theory at all, as well as the question – which is admittedly a philosophical question and can only be answered philosophically – of what a theory of society should then look like, or to ask about the nature of a non-systematic theory, which we will consider later.
So I will begin, and truly keep it suitably short, with the first point: that something like the unity implicit in an unconsidered concept of a theory cannot simply be stipulated for our current society. Consider that one usually speaks of our society as a market society, which means, and sanctions the fact, that the classical exchange principle of liberalism continues to apply. For the market is the literal and metaphorical place of all exchange relationships between people and initially, in its appearance, embodies this purely implemented liberal principle. Because market society has been modified so greatly, however, one must ask – and this is a very serious question that I wish by no means to anticipate dogmatically – whether, after this modification, one can really still speak of an exchange society. My own position, to make this absolutely clear, is that it still is one; but I think that the objections to this are so numerous and so serious that it takes a certain theoretical pig-headedness to hold on to this idea. So I will name several of these modifications, and, so that you do not take the matter too lightly and think that these are only apparent phenomena – some restrictions of the pure market laws, for example due to mere quantitative expansion – let me say in advance that the modifications of exchange society to which I shall draw your attention stem from a very serious cause, namely that, because of the class system, the class tensions and the class struggles that have taken place, as well as the class consciousness that is at least potentially evident at times, society in its existing forms, namely with private ownership of the means of production and with the universal exchange principle, could probably not have survived if these modifications had not been made. That does not mean there was a conscious reflection on this – Hegel’s statement that, subjectively speaking, humanity has never learned from its mistakes is probably as valid now as it was in Hegel’s day. But it does mean that the necessity of dealing with a number of phenomena, especially those of crisis and unemployment, which took on a scale roughly thirty-five years ago that brought bourgeois society to the threshold of collapse,4 simply forced these modifications step by step, without there being any great theoretical reflections on the decisive causes. So, in other words, the tendency – if I may return to this concept – the tendency of exchange society itself, in order for it to survive, led to those changes where one must ask whether they constitute something qualitatively different or not.
So let me name a few of the most important such modifications. I will leave aside the entire phenomenon of concentration and centralization and standardization, even though it is the true reason for these modifications. I will pass over it because this phenomenon – to which I already drew your attention in the last session as a decisive one – is itself very much in keeping with the strictly maintained liberal model. And today’s conflict is such that the so-called economic royalists, namely the truly orthodox liberals, are precisely the advocates of monopolism, in a sense, because the classical Smithian laissez faire laissez aller principle leads simply to the creation of monopoly, and because measures against corporate consolidation, as found in the American trust law as well as our anti-trust legislation, are not meant to be reconcilable with this principle; thus anyone who is still a strict and whole-hearted liberal today by definition sanctions the most unchecked formation of monopolies. Perhaps I might add that the intra-social and intra-economic power of this movement towards monopolies is evidently so overwhelmingly strong that, despite this law, nothing can seriously be done about this tendency either in America or here, despite this legislation, in the context of overall technical and economic development. I think one could show this very clearly and drastically by looking at the development of certain branches of industry both here in Germany and in America, where there are oligopolies – a few extremely powerful giant companies that have sucked up everything in sight; this is so evident that there is really something rather innocent about the idea of such anti-monopoly or anti-trust legislation. So, having noted this, I will name a number of modifications that can mostly be understood as unconscious reactions to the distinction between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, which is heightened to a fantastic degree by the tendency towards monopolization. The first are state interventionism, unemployment benefits and public employment programmes, whose absence would be inconceivable in any developed nation today, although they no longer have the character simply of unemployment benefit, which has a very problematic and explosive aspect; rather their character is that of public work or similar measures to create outlets, from the start, in case of a crisis and mass unemployment. All these institutions – and that is the entire sphere to which a term such as ‘social market economy’ refers in this country – are naturally breaches of the pure competition principle inherent in the liberal model and no longer permit any explanation of the totality of social life, and the reproduction of the life of society, with the traditional terms of a liberal exchange society. This means that, if society did not convey to its members, openly or covertly, an awareness that, should they no longer be able to support themselves with their own means, they will be supported with public means – without this awareness, which defines the entire climate of the major capitalist countries like an ether, the continuation of society in its existing forms would probably become inconceivable. And the interventionist economy first conceived by Keynes,5 which has meanwhile become highly developed, is the theoretical expression of this and, simultaneously, an expression of the renunciation of a contradiction-free, rigorously implemented liberal model.
A second aspect, to which I would like to devote a special lecture if at all possible – that is, if our time allows it – concerns the position of the proletariat, in a sense that no longer corresponds either to the classical liberal model or, on the other hand, to the Marxian model. And this is the question of the organization, and concomitantly the integration, of the proletariat. Because the workers have joined to form gigantic professional organizations – just think of the huge organizations of the complete workforce that have existed in America since the merger of the AFL and the CIO6 – which have their own bargaining power [Eng.], as one calls it in America, the power to negotiate the most favourable possible terms with the great economic monopolies, the share of the national product received by each worker can no longer simply be expressed according to the law of supply and demand, or in the categories of the ‘iron wage laws’ of Lassalle,7 or classical Marxian theory, or indeed classical liberal theory, which simply assumes – in Robinsonian fashion – that every worker goes to the market all alone and sells their labour power, then receives whatever can be paid according to demand. But today, with these gigantic organizations in the background, the worker is no longer in this position of relative powerlessness in relation to the employer but rather, to an extent, in a situation that has been termed the monopoly of work – certainly a caricature, but not without an element of truth. I told you that this development – whose significance cannot yet be assessed, and which has been described in its perspectives for the whole complex of the social sciences, but by no means fully developed – is also irreconcilable with Marx’s theory. But this is not only because it modifies the pure theory of labour value in a certain way, one might say, but also for a much deeper reason that is decisive for a theory of society: Marx’s theory rests essentially on the assumption of, shall we say, the social extraterritoriality of the proletariat; that is, the fact that, on the one hand, the proletariat not only reproduces the life of society as a whole through the sale of the commodity of labour power but also gains a share in this society by receiving a minimum. At the same time, it is defined as something essentially located outside of society, as its more or less defenceless object or victim. This should certainly be understood in terms of the specific historical situation during the fifty years of the first Industrial Revolution, when groups that had not previously belonged to the industrial proletariat – the craftsmen who were made obsolete by machines, as well as large numbers of expropriated small farmers – were forced to sell their labour power under the most miserable terms; and, perhaps precisely because they did not have a share in all manner of things, they were within society, to the extent that they helped it to live, but outside it in a similar way to slaves in ancient society, who were subject to an extraterritoriality that prevented them from sharing in the concept of the human being,8 as you know, or permitted it only with severe restrictions. The phenomenon we observe today is first and foremost simply that the proletariat is integrated, which means that the proletariat reproduces its life beyond the minimum level within the framework of bourgeois society, that what used to be the most visible and drastic differences between a proletarian and a bourgeois – a so-called white-collar proletarian, meaning a clerk – are become ever smaller, and that the proletariat has above all lost its role as an explosive power unreconciled with society, which it still had as long as it was being dragged into the force field of capitalist development as something pre-capitalist, and is now experiencing first-hand what it meant to be socially uprooted and, in this sense, affected by society; and it therefore acquired the very revolutionary – or rather rebellious – impulses which both the early socialists and the classical theories of socialism and anarchism believed they were taking up. So, in a certain sense, to connect this to our larger theme, you could say that society thus became more similar to a system than it had been at the time of the classical socialist conception, because this obvious contradiction no longer exists; but you can already see here that this move towards the systematic, this stricter adherence to its own concept, does have a somewhat uneasy character – if one can speak of such a thing – that this construction of an integrated and independent proletariat is no longer strictly compatible either with the model of free wage labour or with the Marxian model of increasing immiseration, and thus the necessary movement of society towards a disaster that has been delayed far too long for us simply to ignore it, unless one actually wants to turn socialism into pure apocalypticism. So this integration of the proletariat, the fact that, in a sense which is very difficult to pin down, the workers have themselves become bourgeois, is irreconcilable with the model of a purely bourgeois society, because one could say that the difference between bourgeois society and the proletariat, the underclass, is immanent in the very concept of a purely bourgeois society. I will explain the resulting changes in the consciousness also of proletarians, with all the implications of this phenomenon as one of the most important for a theory of society, in a special session; but first I will speak to you a little more next Tuesday about the modifying aspects that make something like the traditional concept of a unified theory so extraordinarily problematic.