On Adorno

The Adorno Monument in Frankfurt am Main, Germany

When I was in Frankfurt in Germany, lately, I wanted to see also the Adorno monument on the grounds of the Goethe University there. For for a long time Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-1969) has been one of my philosophical and sociological heroes, and actually he still is a little bit. And wasn’t Adorno one of the founders of the famous “Frankfurt School”, once an important current in philosophy and sociology with Jürgen Habermas as its most important “product” (to use an anti-Adornian term)? And it were, among others, Adorno’s ideas that inspired in the 1960s the student movement and its leaders like Rudi Dutschke – the man who said that a real revolution is not a sudden change of society (often based on violence) but that it’s a “long march through the institutions of power”, so a slow internal change by taking nonviolently the seats of power. By the way, this idea that wasn’t unreal at all, as is exemplified by the political career of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, another leader of the 1968 student movement, who later became one of the leaders of the Green movement in Germany and France, deputy mayor of Frankfurt (indeed) and leader of the group of the Greens in the European Parliament. As such I see the green movement as the intellectual legacy of the student movement of the 1960s; and if so it has been inspired indirectly by Adorno’s ideas.

But back to Adorno himself. I must say that his ideas are often not easy to understand. I remember that his book Negative Dialectics stood for more than ten years on my special shelf with books “yet to read”. Then I decided to remove it from there, for if you haven’t read a book for ten years since you bought it, you’ll never read it. When leafing through the book and reading some fragments, I found it actually obscure. I understood hardly a word of it. Also his Dialects of Enlightenment, which he wrote together with Max Horkheimer – his co-founder of the Frankfurt School –, is not an easy book, but I read it with interest and pleasure. In this book – published for the first time in 1947 in Amsterdam, after a pre-publication in 1944 in New York – Adorno and Horkheimer defended the thesis that Nazism was a logical consequence of the Enlightenment. When they wrote it, the thesis didn’t sound implausible but now more than 70 years later it seems too simple. With the same persuasiveness that Adorno and Horkheimer defended their thesis one can object that the Enlightenment was flexible enough to overcome Nazism, or that it were just its ideas that overcame Nazism. Another thesis in the Dialectics of Enlightenment is that capitalist society represses expression of individuality and tries to make everybody the same and uniform and to bring everybody on the same line, for instance because this should be better for massa consumption (one of the pillars of capitalism in the 20th century). I think that this thesis has more substance and still applies to the society of the 21th century. Look how social media like Facebook try to manipulate us and try to make us like what they like! In view of this, Dialectics of Enlightenment is still a book worth to read but then one must try to translate what Adorno and Horkheimer wrote in the 1940s to society as it is in 2019. When you succeed to do so, the book is still modern.

Adorno didn’t write only obscure texts that are difficult to understand. Although also his Minima Moralia isn’t always easy, this book with 153 mini-essays about life and society gives you time to think and when you still don’t understand what you read, just try the next mini-essay.

Adorno’s most well-known contribution to sociology and social research is his The Authoritarian Personality, written together with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford. In this book the authors develop the famous F-Scale, a method to test whether a person is inclined to be authoritarian and to have fascist ideas. In the meantime this work is classic, and in view of the rise of right-wing populism it is still relevant. As the copywriter of Verso Books writes about it: “It ... marks a milestone in the development of Adorno’s thought, showing him grappling with the problem of fascism and the reasons for Europe’s turn to reaction.”

Adorno was a many-sided philosophical and social thinker and researcher, but not only that. He was also a composer, musicologist and literary critic, but to write about this is outside my competence.

On occasion of his 100th birthday the Goethe University in Frankfurt erected in July 2003 a monument for Adorno (see the photo above). The monument was created by the Russian artist Vadim Zakharov. “[He] described the desk and accompanying paraphernalia as ‘the true expression of Adorno’s personality’. ...  [Zakharov] chose to present the philosopher by documenting his ideas. Thus the functioning desk lamp symbolises his propensity for working at night and the ticking metronome his achievements as composer. Likewise, the edition of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1966) [indeed the book that I couldn’t read], placed on an otherwise remarkably tidy desk, represents his philosophical works; manuscripts and sheets of music indicate the main foci of his work. Quotations from Adorno’s Minima Moralia (1951) and Aesthetic Theory (1970) are engraved into the paving slabs surrounding the glass cube. They provide insights into Adorno’s thinking and inspire visitors to reflect on his philosophical ideas.” (quoted from https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/68260839/The_Adorno_Monument). The jury that chose the monument from six entries was enthusiastic about it. Nevertheless, it was marked by controversy, for– paraphrasing Adorno – who are you that you see yourself worth enough to value someone else? Do you think that you are better than that person? (same source). But who am I, then, that I have written this blog about Adorno?