Marianne Tettlebaum
In the mid-1960s, Adorno delivered a series of lectures on history and freedom. In a lecture on the concept of progress, he urges his students not to capitulate to sceptics who argue that concepts that are not easily defined are meaningless. Adorno counters that no matter how difficult or vague concepts such as progress or freedom might be, one must attempt to understand rather than dismiss them. To this end, he offers his own “remedy” for combating sceptics: “when someone asks what freedom is . .. tell him that he needs only to think of any flagrant attack on freedom” – which he illustrates with the following example, based on his own experience: “I am content to be able to say of freedom – by this I mean political freedom, not the free will – that being free means that, if someone rings the bell at 6.30 a.m., I have no reason to think that the Gestapo . .. or the agents of comparable institutions are at the door and can take me off with them without my being able to invoke the right of habeas corpus” (HF: 140).
A house search by the Gestapo could be a matter of life and death. Adorno emerged from his own search, which occurred during the early years of fascism, physically unscathed, but the consequences could easily have been dire. The incident serves, therefore, not only as an example of what freedom is not – the possibility of being carried off from one’s own home by the Gestapo – but also an intimation of what it might be – the possibility of living without fear. As distant as we may believe ourselves to be today from the first possibility involving the Gestapo, Adorno would argue that we are equally distant from the second: a life without fear.
Adorno’s focus on the difficulty, rather than on the likelihood, of achieving true freedom – on what freedom is not, rather than what it is – has led to the charge that his philosophy is apolitical. Politics is, admittedly, not a concept that explicitly guides his thought. Moreover, because he offers neither a circumscribed field of study that could be called politics nor a definition of the political, locating the political dimension of his work is no straightforward endeavour. That dimension, however, as the above example demonstrates, is crucial to his theoretical project.
At the moment of “that ominous knock at the door” before the house search (HF: 20), the occupant faces, at one extreme, the possibility of losing her life, and, at the other, the possibility that she has nothing to fear. The political dimension of Adorno’s work, I suggest, lies in the spaces between these possibilities, the spaces, that is, between what was, what is and what ought to be. His political thought aims at analysing and understanding the “societal play of forces”, to use his term, that comprise this space, determining both the occupant’s expectations and the actual outcome (CM: 203). This “play of forces” involves everything from a society’s history and economic structure to the concrete experiences of the individuals who comprise it. Only a thorough understanding and critique of all these aspects, rather than some kind of immediate action, can achieve anything resembling the second possibility of freedom while excluding anything resembling the first.
The lingering possibility of “that ominous knock”, even in so-called free societies, pervades Adorno’s writings. The powerlessness of intellectuals in the face of fascism’s rise in the 1930s, and the general lack of resistance to it in the German population, left a profound impression on him. He was horrified, above all, by the atrocities of the concentration camps and the fact that such atrocities could occur in a civilization that called itself advanced. He argues, therefore, in “Education after Auschwitz”, that the central idea of political instruction ought to be “that Auschwitz should never happen again” (CM: 203).
In the history and freedom lectures, Adorno contends that “if Auschwitz could happen in the first place, this was probably because no real freedom existed . .. [T]he misdeeds of Auschwitz were only possible . .. in a political system in which freedom was completely suppressed” (HF: 202). We must prevent another Auschwitz, not only because of the terror and injustice associated with the concentration camps, but also because the very existence of such camps testifies to the oppression and domination – the “unfreedom” – inherent in the societies in which they exist. To say that Auschwitz should never happen again is to say that the oppressive political and social conditions that permitted Auschwitz should never be allowed to proliferate. As long as the possibility of another Auschwitz exists, we remain fundamentally unfree.
Adorno believed that in order to ensure that Auschwitz does not happen again, we must understand the circumstances that led to it. He came to realize that no single factor could account for Hitler’s rise to power, the horrors inflicted by the Nazis and, most puzzling of all, fascism’s seemingly spellbinding effect on the German population. More problematic still, from a philosophical perspective, fascism arose despite the strong German enlightenment tradition of rational and independent thought as well as of moral and cultural education or Bildung. The tradition that ought to have been a source of powerful resistance to a development such as fascism was all too easily co-opted in favour of an uncritical German nationalism. Adorno argued that if that intellectual tradition was to continue to have the validity necessary for the success of political instruction, if not of education in general, then it had to be completely rethought. Even its most vaunted concepts, such as reason, had to be subjected to “critical treatment” (CM: 203).
Adorno’s commitment to education rather than direct political action as a means of combating the legacy of fascism and other social ills in postwar Germany made him a controversial figure during the student uprisings of the late 1960s. In principle, students shared many of his concerns: they were disillusioned by what they perceived as the failure of their parents’ generation to come to terms with its Nazi past; by the dulling effects of capitalism on society; and by a conservatism latent in public institutions, especially the university. But Adorno was sceptical of the students’ leap into direct political action. The rise of the oppressive Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union made him, and other members of the Frankfurt School, wary of revolutionary Marxism. For Adorno, the potential for any kind of socialist revolution, even in postwar Germany, was long past, if, indeed, it had ever really existed. He believed, moreover, that political action that is not grounded in extensive thought and self-reflection risks, by its refusal of critical distance, perpetuating the very repressive conditions it seeks to change. Thinking, therefore, is ultimately a more effective means of resistance than action.
The students, however, saw Adorno’s focus on thinking rather than action as a form of resignation and as an inadequate if not unjust response to their concerns. Their perception of his stance was only confirmed by his decision to call the police when they occupied the Institute of Social Research. In August 1969 Adorno was publicly humiliated by students who interrupted him during a lecture at the university and called on him to renounce his decision to call the police during the occupation of the Institute. Adorno refused and left the lecture hall. The incident left an indelible blemish on the perception of his political thought. From the students’ perspective, Adorno was unable to actualize the potential for resistance that is inherent in his thought. The conservatism of his old age, they claimed, was inconsistent with the spirit of his earlier philosophy.
But the incident admits of another reading. Adorno’s refusal to acquiesce in the face of the students’ demands was itself a form of political resistance, an individual denial of the logic of force, and an invocation of precisely that right of habeas corpus he had been unable to invoke in the face of the Gestapo. Indeed, given the current political climate in the West, where the use of force has become synonymous with realizing freedom, Adorno’s example is especially relevant. The continued prevalence of violence on a global scale has rendered action more suspect than ever before, for action serves largely to perpetuate the very fear it is meant to eradicate, fear that has, in turn, become an instrument of unfreedom, grounds for revoking the right of habeas corpus even in a democratic society. Now more than ever, thought is needed to unmask the repression and oppression at the root of violence. The use of freedom as a battle cry can only be the harbinger of unfreedom. Thinking, in fact, may be the only way to avoid total destruction.
In our current political climate, the student of politics who turns to Adorno will find his writings remarkably prescient. The most accessible and potentially relevant of these, from a political standpoint, are found in the collection Critical Models. For those who want to understand the development of Adorno’s political thought in the context of the German philosophical tradition, the lectures on History and Freedom are an ideal place to start. The ideas Adorno introduces in these lectures receive their final formulation in the sections on Kant and Hegel in Negative Dialectics. In what follows, I draw on these and other writings1 to elaborate the concepts I deem most salient, not only to Adorno’s political thought, but also to its continued relevance.
Adorno considers the relationship between individual and state to be one of the fundamental concerns of political philosophy since Plato. Crucial to his understanding of this relationship is the notion that both individual and state are historical categories: they arose and developed in response to particular historical circumstances. As the categories of individual and state evolve, so does the relationship between them.
In Adorno’s view, that relationship has become largely antagonistic. In “Individual and State”, written shortly after his return to Germany, but unpublished during his lifetime, he examines the historical and theoretical roots of the increasing alienation that modern individuals experience with respect to the state. The state, he suggests, may have begun as an “organized society” to enable the survival of the human race in the face of “the forces of nature”.2 Eventually, however, with the advent of market economies that pitted the very individuals the state was supposed to protect against each other in competition, the state became an entity in its own right, seemingly independent of the individuals who constitute it.
As Adorno explains, however, the organization of society into states that came to have an existence larger than their individual members is only partially to blame for the alienation of individuals. Ever since the Greeks made the individual central and “determined its happiness to be the highest good”, the individual, in its efforts to secure its own happiness, lost sight of its relationship to the state and society as a whole: “through its unrestrained liberation, the individual simultaneously prepared the ground for its oppression”.3 The very category of the individual, in other words, as it arose during the phase of the Greek city-states, contained the seeds of its own oppression. The more the individual made its own interests a priority, the less it seemed to need the state, the purpose of which was initially to protect those interests. Just as the state came to seem larger than and separate from the individuals it was supposed to serve, so the individual and its own interests came to seem larger than and separate from the state it was supposed to support.
In modernity, where all the functions of the state are more tightly incorporated and where, therefore, state power seems overwhelming and all-encompassing, the individual comes to feel not only that its interests are contrary to those of the state but also, more critically, that it is powerless in the face of the state. From this feeling of powerlessness, Adorno argues, arises a feeling of apathy toward the state and, hence, the alienation of the individual from the state – the sense that nothing one does would make a difference anyway. For this very reason, “the call for participation in things related to the state is, in truth, not so empty as it sounds to people. Their own fate, in fact, will depend, ultimately, on the consciousness of the necessity to form their state themselves.”4 The key to fostering such a consciousness, at least in the social sciences, is to bring to light the ways in which the problematic relationship between state and individual has its roots in the life of society.
According to Adorno, an individual’s relationship to the state is always mediated by the role of class in society. His acknowledgement of the centrality of class is evidence of his indebtedness to Marx. Yet, as he argues in “Reflections on Class Theory” (1942), in a society dominated by advanced or monopoly capitalism, class no longer functions as Marx argued it did. Although class still exists, it has become an instrument of conformity rather than a source of resistance. Class has become largely synonymous with the supposedly egalitarian bourgeoisie, which has become so prominent that the notion of it as a “class” no longer seems to apply. Purged of its critical potential by its association with what seems to be the norm – the bourgeoisie – class comes to seem useless and outdated.
By becoming less visible, class differences have become less potent: “The distinction between exploiters and exploited is not so visible as to make it obvious to the exploited that solidarity should be their ultima ratio; conformity appears more rational to them. Membership in the same class by no means translates into equality of interests and action” (CLA: 97). The working class loses sight of its own oppression and thus of the desire for a change in the system. In fact, changing the system seems as though it would threaten rather than increase freedom. But the bourgeoisie, too, suffers: its less prosperous members are “denied individuality” by their lack of wealth (ibid.: 108). The general elevation of the standard of living in Western society serves only to propagate the false impression that society has progressed.
In “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?”, Adorno reformulates the problem of the apparent disappearance of class in terms of the relationship between the forces and the relations of production. He argues that while the forces of production – the raw materials and labour required to produce goods – have been modernized with the most advanced technology, the relations of production – the system of the ownership and administration of capital – have remained stagnant. As he explains, “The forces of production are mediated more than ever by the relations of production . .. They are responsible for the fact that, in crazy contradiction to what is possible, human beings in large parts of the planet live in penury” (CLA: 121). Adorno’s logic is hard to deny; the technological level of advancement reached by modern forces of production ought to allow for the worldwide elimination of poverty. Instead, wealth, influence and power remain concentrated in the hands of the few. If society were as advanced and civilized as it claims to be, then relations of production would facilitate rather than hinder a more equitable distribution of capital.
Under monopoly capitalism, Adorno argues, not only the state and the economy, but also the forces and relations of production, appear to be one. This appearance or “illusion” of unity is “socially necessary” (CLA: 124): it ensures the stability of society by making it seem as if the interests of the relations of production really do coincide with those of the forces of production, as if what is best for the upper levels of the bourgeoisie is also what is best for the working class. The result, ultimately, is that the system itself takes on a life of its own; it becomes a self-perpetuating machine indifferent to the lives of the individuals, indeed even to the societies, supporting it.
Capitalism thus ends up suppressing the very individualism and difference it claims to be promoting. As Adorno and Horkheimer argue in Dialectic of Enlightenment, based largely on their experiences in the United States during their exile from Germany, the seemingly endless variety of goods offered the consumer is really an endless version of the ever-same. What has become true of things, moreover, has also become true of society as a whole, including its political institutions. The Fordist assembly-line model, in which goods are produced with standardized parts, has become the model of a supposedly well-functioning society in which individual labour and thus individuals themselves must conform to the same standards. Those who do not conform are ostracized because they threaten the total control of the self-perpetuating system.5 Capitalism, like fascism in Germany, seems to have cast a potentially dangerous spell over the American population, making it indifferent to any real possibility for change.
Breaking this spell of indifference is, for Adorno, especially crucial to the functioning of democracy. Although he believed in the potential of a democratic form of government, he also held that democracies, like any other form of state organization, are easily co-opted, leading to the unfreedom rather than the freedom of individuals. As he and Horkheimer write in “Democratic Leadership and Mass Manipulation”: “To apply the idea of democracy in a merely formalistic way, to accept the will of the majority per se, without consideration for the content of democratic decisions, may lead to complete perversion of democracy itself and, ultimately, to its abolition” (DLM: 268). Democracy is more than a mere form of social organization in which the majority rules. Adorno and Horkheimer recognize, however, that encouraging individuals to think critically about, and take a stake in, the “content” of the democratic political process is a difficult task. The biggest obstacle, perhaps, is the indifference, if not hostility, that derives from the suspicion that politics is solely “the realm of initiated politicians, if not of grafters and machine bosses. The less the people believe in political integrity, the more easily can they be taken in by politicians who rant against politics” (ibid.: 271).
Such indifference is compounded by the “antidemocratic stimuli to which the modern masses are exposed” (ibid.: 272). Adorno and Horkheimer’s experience with the rise of fascism in Germany taught them that democracy is not immune from authoritarian political attitudes. In the United States, they worked with the Berkeley Public Opinion Study Group on an empirical and theoretical study of “the problem of subjective susceptibility for antidemocratism and anti-Semitism” (ibid.: 274) – or an account of the relationship between individual psychology and social and political attitudes towards repression.6 Adorno and Horkheimer believed that an analysis of the authoritarian traits that hinder democracy and foster movements such as fascism might, if widely available to the general public, “induce people to reflect on their own attitudes and opinions, which they usually take for granted, without falling into a moralizing or sermonizing attitude” (ibid.: 278). Self-reflection, they suggest, could weaken the violence that is inherent in prejudice.
For its part, democratic leadership must work towards “the emancipation of consciousness rather than its further enslavement”:
Today perhaps more than ever, it is the function of democratic leadership to make the subjects of democracy, the people, conscious of their own wants and needs as against the ideologies which are hammered into their heads by the innumerable communications of vested interests.
(DLM: 268, emphasis in original)
Democratic leaders must treat people as subjects, capable of rational self-reflection, rather than as objects to be manipulated; they must abandon propaganda in favour of truth. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, those who “prate about the immaturity of the masses” overlook the “mass potential of autonomy and spontaneity which is very much alive” (ibid.: 272). Democratic leaders must recognize and foster this potential for self-reflection in the masses, for heightened political introspection goes hand in hand with the awareness of the prejudices that limit such introspection.
This insistence on the individual’s political awareness and responsibility reflects the importance Adorno attributes to critique in the functioning of democracy. In “Critique” (1969), he argues that “[c]ritique and the prerequisite of democracy, political maturity, belong together”. Echoing Kant’s famous essay, “What is Enlightenment?”, Adorno suggests that the person who is “politically mature” speaks “for himself, because he has thought for himself and is not merely repeating someone else; he stands free of any guardian” (CM: 281). Political maturity is a prerequisite for the critic, who must refuse to temper her criticism in the face of calls for something “constructive” or “positive”. She adheres, as Adorno argues, to the idea that “the false, once determinately known and precisely expressed, is already an index of what is right and better” (ibid.: 288). In a democratic society, the critic is, ultimately, the individual who guarantees the survival of individualism and, thus, the survival of democracy itself.
The high value Adorno places on the role of the critic reflects his view that theory – the critical examination of a given circumstance – is a more responsible and effective means of bringing about political change than praxis – the active intervention in that circumstance. Adorno’s ideas about theory and praxis – outlined most extensively in “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis” (unpublished during his lifetime) – stem, on the one hand, from his disagreement with the goals of pragmatist philosophy, and, on the other, from his suspicion, rooted largely in his experience of fascism, that violence inheres in most collective movements. For Adorno, a philosophy directed towards practical application is automatically constrained by the very limitations of the situation it seeks to address. To get results, in other words, such a philosophy must start with what is possible within the framework of the system it wants to change, rather than with what ought to be. It must address itself to precisely those “constructive” and “positive” concerns that dilute the rigour of true critique.
Owing to the limitations inherent in a praxis-oriented philosophy, collective movements that seek to put that philosophy’s ideas into practice or to change existing conditions based on that philosophy risk becoming dogmatic. In the process of actively seeking change, moreover, the means often overshadow the ends, with the result that the relation of praxis to its object is “a priori undermined” (CM: 259). As Adorno explains,
the error of the primacy of praxis as it is exercised today appears clearly in the privilege accorded to tactics over everything else. The means have become autonomous to the extreme. Serving the ends without reflection, they have alienated themselves from them.
(CM: 268)
Praxis becomes an end in itself, rather than a means towards achieving an end; overwhelmingly concerned with action, it abandons reflection. An unreflective practice, is, for Adorno, inevitably unfree, and risks turning to rage or violence. With its emphasis on the collective, praxis also too easily absolves the individual of any responsibility. Adorno thus rejects any notion of “collective reason” as purely irrational.
Although theory is not immune to the conditions of unfreedom that plague praxis, it is nevertheless capable of maintaining a greater degree of freedom. This is due, on the one hand, to theory’s freedom from achieving explicitly practical aims and, on the other, to the roots of both theory and praxis in the division of physical from intellectual labour. “Praxis”, according to Adorno, “arose from labor, from the need to work in order to survive.” From the moment, however, that the working class wanted to determine the conditions of its life, rather than passively reproduce, through its labour, the conditions that enabled other classes to live, the concept of praxis became divided: praxis, as labour, was necessary for survival, but praxis was also the reaction against that necessity, the desire to be free from it. As Adorno explains, “Praxis was the reaction to deprivation; this still disfigures praxis even when it wants to do away with deprivation” (CM: 262). Even in its current form praxis cannot escape its ties to self-preservation, cannot do away with the moment of unfreedom that is a fundamental part of its concept. Contemporary political movements have forgotten the roots of praxis in labour and thus its contradictory double character, as both a means of survival and a deterrent to freedom.
The price that theory paid for the division of individual from physical labour was its alienation from practice. This alienation is especially problematic because theory is, in fact, itself a form of praxis; it is “an inalienably real mode of behavior in the midst of reality” (CM: 261). Those who denigrate theory as ineffective disregard the transformative potential of thought, which lies in its resistance to a given situation, in its refusal to accept that what is must be: “Whoever thinks, offers resistance” (ibid.: 263). Whoever thinks, moreover, and through such thinking refuses to accept “the already given”, initiates a “practical impulse”: “There is no thought, insofar as it is more than the organization of facts and a bit of technique, that does not have its practical telos” (ibid.: 265).
Truly transformative praxis, however, is not determined and planned out in advance by theory; rather, it must emerge of itself, spontaneously, from the very attempt to think something other than what is. The importance of spontaneity cannot be overemphasized, for, in a society dominated by monopoly capitalism, in which the total rationalization and monopolization of the means and ends of production – the “rationality of the eternally same” (CM: 260) – have blocked genuine experience, the ability to act spontaneously is one of the few measures of freedom.
The totalizing effect of monopoly capitalism on society pertains even at the level of individual experience; distinguishing one’s own desires from those prescribed by the system becomes almost impossible. In the face of such an all-pervasive system of control, spontaneous action, action that has not been determined in advance by the very system it seeks to disrupt, becomes rare. Praxis, therefore, “is a source of power for theory but cannot be prescribed by it. It appears in theory merely, and indeed necessarily, as a blind spot, as an obsession with what is being criticized” (CM: 278). Praxis emerges from theory only at the moment when theory, completely enmeshed in its analysis of a given situation, is most oblivious (or “blind”) to praxis: praxis emerges from theory when it is least expected.
Ultimately, the relationship between theory and practice is one of “qualitative reversal”; they “stand in a polar relationship. The theory that is not conceived as an instruction for its realization should have the most hope for realization” (CM: 277). Theory is realized only via the negation or refusal of every practical impulse. In Adornian terms, we might say that theory offers the negative image of a possible practice. As the potential for realizing what is not or not yet, theory is the most effective way of conceiving freedom. For freedom “can be defined in negation only, corresponding to the concrete form of a specific unfreedom” (ND: 231). Theory that enables us to think this negative image of freedom might one day be the means of its realization.
For Adorno, no modern attempt to conceive of freedom can ignore the rise of fascism and the tragedy of the concentration camps. As discussed above, freedom is possible only if and when the reoccurrence of such a tragedy has become impossible. Even individual freedom remains “imperfect and incomplete . .. as long as and to the extent that it presupposes the unfreedom of other human beings” (HF: 178). Freedom, therefore, can be conceived only negatively, as freedom from rather than freedom to: only under utopian conditions could a positive freedom be said to exist. And yet we cannot give up on the concept of freedom, even if “this very freedom is something that cannot be found in the realm of factual reality” (ibid.: 177).
According to Adorno, “If we are to update the concept [of freedom], the biggest mistake we could possibly make would be to issue appeals to freedom, to popularize the idea of freedom as a slogan or to appeal to people’s autonomy.” General appeals to do something in the name of freedom, or unreflective celebrations of freedom, denigrate the very freedom they wish to extol by reducing it “to the level of a cliché”. The better approach to understanding freedom “would be to take the question of what has become of freedom and what threatens to become of it in the future and to treat such questions as the precondition of any serious reflection on freedom” (HF: 201). The concept of freedom is, like those of theory and practice, a historical concept whose meaning is inseparable from a given context. Understanding this concept, therefore, requires a critique of the shifting and often contradictory moments or aspects that comprise it.
Adorno’s own critique of this concept, both in his lectures on history and freedom and in Negative Dialectics, begins with Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. In Kant, Adorno sees the origins of our modern philosophical idea of freedom and the moments of unfreedom inherent in it. In determining a universal norm or categorical imperative to which all human actions must be held accountable, rather than holding them accountable to a particular set of empirical values, Kant lays the foundation for an “egalitarian idea” of ethics and freedom (ND: 236). But Kant’s conception of the will, the human capacity to act freely according to laws, ultimately leads, Adorno argues, to a concept of freedom in which true freedom is repressed.
For Adorno, the problems with the Kantian notion of the will arise largely from the rift between his analysis of the transcendental subject and the empirical examples he uses to illustrate it. Kant assumes that the subject’s decisions “roll off in a causal chain”, whereas, for Adorno, “what occurs is a jolt” (ND: 226–7). Kant attempts to ground human decisions and action in laws of causality. In so doing, however, he leaves out the very aspect of those decisions that is most indicative of freedom, their “spontaneity” (ibid.: 229). His account of the will suppresses those spontaneous impulses that are not identical with the laws of causality by which it supposedly operates, impulses of which the subject itself might not be conscious. Thus, voluntary actions become equivalent to human consciousness of those actions. As Adorno explains, “the subject knows itself to be free only insofar as its action strikes it as identical with it, and that is the case in conscious actions only” (ibid.: 227). A subject that acts only according to laws of which it is aware, laws that accord with its consciousness of itself, may in Kantian terms be exercising its freedom in accordance with the moral law. In Adornian terms, however, it is acting under coercion. Grounding the will in causality corrupts freedom into obedience (ibid.: 232).
Adorno’s aim in critiquing Kant is, ultimately, to bring to light the way that freedom, by being conceived of as obedience, has come to be equated with the acceptance of the world as it is. His aim, in other words, is to expose the structures of thought that led us to value a concept of freedom not worthy of the name. He argues that the limits Kant places on freedom reflect the ambivalent attitude to freedom of the general bourgeois consciousness. On the one hand, that consciousness “fears the limiting of freedom and the constraints placed upon it”; on the other hand, it “takes fright at its own courage and fears that a freedom made real might lead to chaos” (HF: 196). Bourgeois enlightenment thinkers such as Kant opted for a restricted concept of freedom as much out of fear as out of theoretical necessity.
In Adorno’s view, we are still largely beholden to this Kantian idea of freedom, which leads us to accept less than we otherwise might: “Where it is maintained that the substance of freedom is that you are free when you freely accept what you have to accept anyway, you can be certain that the concept of freedom is being abused and is being twisted into its opposite” (HF: 197). Passive acceptance, even of the law of the land, without consideration for the content of such law, does not, for Adorno, constitute freedom. Moreover, if all behaviour were constituted by passive reactions, “there could be no thinking” (ND: 217). If the individual is only autonomous to the extent required of her by the current economic system in order to function, then she is not really autonomous at all.
At stake in this social illusion of freedom is nothing less than the concept of life itself. Adorno argues that life ought to presuppose “the possibility of things not yet included, of things yet to be experienced”, but this possibility has “been so far reduced that the word ‘life’ sounds by now like an empty consolation” (ND: 262). Freedom that consists in nothing but obedience to the laws that govern the world as it is forecloses the possibility of anything different or unexpected – the possibility, in other words, of a truly full concept of life. In other words, “[w]ithin a reality modeled after the principle of identity there exists no positive freedom” (ibid.: 241). A concept of life that is identical with existence reduces life to mere self-preservation. An individual who cannot conceive of herself as other than she is will never “truly be a subject” (ibid.: 277). Adorno’s term for this otherness, this moment of difference inherent in concepts and subjects, is “non-identity”. Non-identity, like spontaneity, is ultimately the guarantor of freedom in a society dominated by unfreedom. It is the basis for resistance to the current situation, the promise of the possibility that what is might be otherwise.
For Adorno, education is the most effective means of fostering the thought, critique and resistance necessary for freedom. As he explains in “Philosophy and Teachers” (1962), one of his duties as a member of the Philosophy Department at the University of Frankfurt was to hold examinations for future high-school teachers who were required to pass a general philosophy exam. These future teachers, he writes, are “burdened with a heavy responsibility for the spiritual and material development of Germany” (CM: 21). In order adequately to fulfil this responsibility, teachers must demonstrate in their exams that they can think for themselves. Rather than merely summarizing a predefined area of philosophic study, the teachers ought to be able to “experience and to engage with a topic in a free and autonomous manner” (ibid.: 25).
At stake in the ability to think for oneself is nothing less than the future of society. For the inability to think for oneself is a precursor of totalitarian attitudes such as fascism: “National Socialism lives on today less in the doctrines that are still given credence . .. than in certain features of thought.” These features, which include submission to the values of the moment, lack of spontaneous relations to “people, things, ideas” and “compulsive conventionalism”, have grave political implications (CM: 27). Teachers who cannot transcend the narrow limitations of established thought do an injustice to their future pupils: they prepare them for obedience rather than freedom.
In “Taboos on the Teaching Vocation” (1965), Adorno contends that in preparing students to think for themselves, education prepares the way for the “debarbarization of humanity”, the elimination of “delusional prejudice, oppression, genocide, and torture”. The “key to radical change”, therefore, “lies in society and in its relationship to the school”. For this reason, “it is so eminently important for society that the school fulfills its task and helps society to become conscious of the fateful ideological heritage weighing heavily upon it” (CM: 190).
If freedom, as Adorno suggests, “means to criticize and change situations, not to confirm them by deciding within their coercive structure” (ND: 226n), then an education that prepares its students to critique rather than confirm prepares them for the possibility of freedom. Conceived in its relation to society, therefore, education is the realm in which change becomes a possibility. As such, although Adorno himself never explicitly frames it this way, education serves as the truest form of praxis available to society. Education prepares us to recognize and understand the threat of “that ominous knock”, so that we ourselves neither perpetuate nor experience it.
1. My account of Adorno’s political thought is indebted to the more thorough accounts of Russell Berman, “Adorno’s Politics”, Adorno: A Critical Reader (2002), especially 126–31; Espen Hammer, Adorno and the Political (2006), especially 18–25; and Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (1995). For an extensive account of, and documentation related to, the Frankfurt School and the student movements, see Wolfgang Kraushaar (ed.), Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung. Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotowcocktail 1964–95, 3 vols. (1998).
2. Adorno, “Individuum und Staat”, Gesammelte Schriften 20.1 (1986), 287. All translations are my own.
3. Ibid., 288.
4. Ibid., 292.
5. See especially, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”, DE, C: 120–67; J: 94–136.
6. That study, written with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levison & R. Nevitt Sanford, was published as The Authoritarian Personality (1950).