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The Sociology of Theodor Adorno
Abstract
Theodor Adorno is a widely-studied figure, but most often with regard to his work on cultural theory, philosophy and aesthetics. The Sociology of Theodor Adorno provides the first thorough English-language account of Adorno's sociological thinking. Matthias Benzer reads Adorno's sociology through six major themes: the problem of conceptualising capitalist society; empirical research; theoretical analysis; social critique; the sociological text; and the question of the non-social. Benzer explains the methodological and theoretical ideas informing Adorno's reflections on sociology and illustrates Adorno's approach to examining social life, including astrology, sexual taboos and racial prejudice. Benzer clarifies Adorno's sociology in relation to his work in other disciplines and the inspiration his sociology took from social thinkers such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Kracauer and Benjamin. The book raises critical questions about the viability of Adorno's sociological mode of procedure and its potential contributions and challenges to current debates in social science.
... The 'first generation' of Frankfurt School, mainly authors such as T.W. Adorno, M. Horkheimer, H. Marcuse and W. Benjamin, have a bad reputation concerning empirical research, in the sense that their critique of social injustices, and modernity more in general, was accused of having paralysing effects on the impulse of researching the circumstances of specific social conditions and social actors. However, recent scholarly studies on Adorno's Critical Theory (Benzer, 2011;Holloway, Matamoros & Tischler, 2009;Holloway, 2010) and the influence of broader critical approaches (Bonefeld, 2014;Best, Bonefeld & O'Kane, 2018) are making the overall critical enterprise of the early Frankfurt School appealing to several fronts. Not least to those who are not satisfied with the mainstream methods of social sciences, still influenced by positivism (and indeed this term will be used to refer to mainstream social science). ...
... The last example helps us to introduce the difference between method-led and content-led research (Benzer, 2011). That example tells us that the approach to methodology must be critical and not dogmatic: Critical Theory favours research driven by the content rather by the method and it would reject the identity of empirical research with method-led research. ...
... Thus, Critical Theory invites to content-led research, rather to method-led research (Benzer, 2011). ...
Based on critical theory, this chapter focuses on the first generation of Frankfurt School (mainly to authors such as T.W. Adorno, M. Horkheimer, and W. Benjamin). For discussing methodology in research, these authors are considered more representative than the younger generation (e.g., Habermas and Honneth) mainly because of the renewed interest in the direct critique of society and because of the failure of the younger generation to produce empirical research. The proponents of critical theory establish connections between theory and practice, in the sense that the social content of research must have human dignity at its centre. The difference between method-led and content-led research is discussed and considered central for this kind of approach to empirical research. Feminist research methodologies and critical race methodology are considered as closely associated with critical theory. These different approaches have developed autonomously from critical theory and are not directly related to it. However, feminist research methodologies and critical race methodology are expounded here because of their similarities to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School aimed at providing an emancipatory approach to empirical research.
... The 'first generation' of Frankfurt School, mainly authors such as T.W. Adorno, M. Horkheimer, H. Marcuse and W. Benjamin, have a bad reputation concerning empirical research, in the sense that their critique of social injustices, and modernity more in general, was accused of having paralysing effects on the impulse of researching the circumstances of specific social conditions and social actors. However, recent scholarly studies on Adorno's Critical Theory (Benzer, 2011;Holloway, Matamoros & Tischler, 2009;Holloway, 2010) and the influence of broader critical approaches (Bonefeld, 2014;Best, Bonefeld & O'Kane, 2018) are making the overall critical enterprise of the early Frankfurt School appealing to several fronts. Not least to those who are not satisfied with the mainstream methods of social sciences, still influenced by positivism (and indeed this term will be used to refer to mainstream social science). ...
... The last example helps us to introduce the difference between method-led and content-led research (Benzer, 2011). That example tells us that the approach to methodology must be critical and not dogmatic: Critical Theory favours research driven by the content rather by the method and it would reject the identity of empirical research with method-led research. ...
... Thus, Critical Theory invites to content-led research, rather to method-led research (Benzer, 2011). ...
Based on critical theory, this chapter focuses on the first generation of Frankfurt School (mainly to authors such as T.W. Adorno, M. Horkheimer, and W. Benjamin). For discussing methodology in research, these authors are considered more representative than the younger generation (e.g., Habermas and Honneth) mainly because of the renewed interest in the direct critique of society and because of the failure of the younger generation to produce empirical research. The proponents of critical theory establish connections between theory and practice, in the sense that the social content of research must have human dignity at its centre. The difference between method-led and content-led research is discussed and considered central for this kind of approach to empirical research. Feminist research methodologies and critical race methodology are considered as closely associated with critical theory. These different approaches have developed autonomously from critical theory and are not directly related to it. However, feminist research methodologies and critical race methodology are expounded here because of their similarities to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School aimed at providing an emancipatory approach to empirical research.
... Desta perspectiva se desenvolveram os sucessivos escritos com os quais Adorno, após ter se iniciado nos métodos da pesquisa social empírica e introduzido sua prática na Alemanha do pós-guerra, viria a defender metodologicamente o que, mais precisamente, chegou a chamar de sociologia crítica (Benzer, 2011), em vez de teoria da sociedade -mas não a obra tardia de Marcuse (1965Marcuse ( , 1969. Ambos concordavam com Horkheimer (1937Horkheimer ( /1990) que, perante o avanço do estado totalitário e da sociedade administrada, a teoria crítica da sociedade, se não perdeu "relação com o presente", passou a exigir de si mesma "uma reflexão muito mais criteriosa". ...
A pesquisa crítica em comunicação de massa progrediu teórica e praticamente em várias áreas do conhecimento: economia política, estudos culturais, psicologia social analítica, história social, análise do discurso etc., a reboque do que se apresentou como uma nova forma de ciência social, a crítica, sob a influência da devida teorização e, assim, do marxismo cultural. O artigo reconstrói racionalmente aspectos centrais do desenvolvimento desta problemática, visando mostrar os impasses constitutivos que resultam da interferência de um tipo de teorização muito rígido e dogmático, de resto bem degradado atualmente, em programa de pesquisa científica que, acredita-se, ainda não teria esgotado seu potencial epistêmico e reflexivo.
... Since we are mainly treating Adorno's debate with Popper here, we will focus more on the concept of the negative social totality, but the writings on education and subjective formation briefly mentioned at the end of this paper would necessarily play an important role in a more comprehensive study. For an excellent introduction to Adorno's complex sociological project, see Benzer (2011). 4. ...
This article examines the differences and affinities between Karl Popper's critical rationalism and Theodor Adorno's critical theory through renewed attention to the original documents of their 1961 debate. While commentaries often describe the Popper–Adorno encounter as a theoretical disappointment, I reveal a confrontation between conceptually opposed programs of social research. Though both theorists are committed to critique as a political and epistemological struggle for human freedom, their conceptions of this struggle are starkly different. In the original seminar papers, we find a conflict between critique as a practice of social rationality (Popper) and a critique of social rationality itself (Adorno). The versions of critical rationalism and critical theory meeting in this debate thus emphasize opposite dimensions of a reflexive practice of immanent critique. In closing, I suggest dissolving this conceptual tension by recovering the educational orientation of critique.
... For social, political and economic structures to remain in place, individuals are situated in the larger context of social systems in ways that ensure that they are "functionaries of society," as Durkheim ([1893] 2007, p. 162) put it. At the same time, this dimension does not apply universally and in clear-cut fashion, and its importance for modern social life is difficult to assess, partly as a consequence of its transactional or "exchange character" (see Benzer, 2011) and the prevalence of the principle of competition, even though it frequently is being alluded to or thematized in culture, especially art and entertainment. ...
The burden social theorists must be willing to accept, respond to and act upon pertains to the difficulties that predictably accompany all efforts to convey to non-theorists the unwelcome fact of heteronomy-that as actors, we are not as autonomous as we were told and prefer to assume-and to spell out what heteronomy in the form in which it has been shaping the developmental trajectory of modern societies means for professional theorists. I introduce the concept of "vitacide," designed to capture that termination of life is a potential vanishing point of the heteronomous processes that have been shaping modern societies continuing to accelerate and intensify in ways that prefigure our future, but not on our human or social terms. Heteronomy pointing toward vitacide should compel us as social theorists to consider critically both the constructive and destructive trajectory that social change appears to have been following for more than two centuries, irrespective of whether the resulting prospect is to our liking or not. In this context, the classical critical theorists of the early Frankfurt School, especially Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, pursued what turned out to be an evolving interest in rackets, the authoritarian personality, and the administered world--concepts that served as a foil for delineating the kind the theoretical stance that is becoming more and more important, as we are moving into an increasingly uncertain future.
... To understand Adorno's critique of phenomenology it is necessary to grasp his theory of society as both an external, reified entity and a humanly-produced artifact (Adorno, 2000;Benzer, 2011, Ch. 1). The methodological and epistemological difficulty for Adorno is how to examine an elusive social totality, which is, on the one hand, an "unintelligible opacity" yet, on the other, "intelligible" and "human" (Adorno, 2000, p. 82). ...
Why have societies failed to effectively respond to climate change? We address the question of climate change inaction by (1) examining how an unambiguously ominous report about climate change (IPCC 2018) was made palatable by news media and (2) explaining why climate change is typically unthematized in everyday life. Drawing on Adorno and Schutz, we develop a political-economic theory of relevance. The imperative to accumulate capital is not only a social-structural reality but also shapes why particular facts are regarded as relevant in experience (topical relevance) as well as how relevant material is interpreted (interpretative relevance) and acted toward (motivational relevance). Applying this framework, we (1) argue that media popularizations of the IPCC’s dire Global Warming of 1.5ºC (2018) are constituted by relevance systems conditioned by a capitalist social context and (2) strengthen Ollinaho’s (2016) Schutzian explanation for climate change inaction by examining how productive relations and the culture industry perpetuate climate change irrelevance in everyday life. Schutz’s framework helps conceptualize the intricacies of ideology and, when revised with Adorno’s sociology, shines new light on an old question: the relations between social conditions and knowledge.
... It is well known that Adorno did not relish working on the empirical studies of the project. Lazarsfeld's program of applied Badministrative research( which, to a substantial extent, was conducted as survey research) was, in Adorno's mind, pedestrian at best, if not pernicious in its potential collusion with a Bfalse^societal reality (Benzer 2011;Jenemann 2007). 11 Instead, Adorno's and his fellow critical theorists' core business was fundamental critique; it went beyond criticizing capitalism and amounted to a denunciation of modernity as such. ...
This article examines the relationship between sociology and modern society by exploring the methodological implications of a modern ontology of society. Focusing on one of the signature methods of sociological research, the survey, we discuss how modern society has given rise to the survey subject who is able to participate in survey research. We finally consider recent developments that foreshadow the fall of the survey subject. © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.
... Our starting point and central argument can thus be described as a hermeneutic educational perspective (Fairfield 2010;Gustavsson 2009;Schuback Sá Cavalcante and Ruin 2006) in that we look at how students' perceptions about musical practices are formed in a culturally specific context – as a dialogue between the individual and the collective and between text and context. This in contrast to approaches which either asserts the text (Adorno 2003;Benzer 2011) or the context (DeNora 2000;Finnegan 1998). Within music research, there are re-occurring questions about the relationship between text and context. ...
... Yhteydet itseen, muihin ihmisiin, yhteiskuntaan, luontoon ja menneisyyteen välineellistyvät. Samalla merkityksettömyyden, tarkoituksettomuuden ja arvottomuuden kokemukset yleistyvät (Benzer 2011;Taylor 1995, 86–87). Ekonomisoitunut käsitys ihmisestä ja maa-ilmasta saattaa ohjata ajattelemaan, että yhteiskunnan uhkan muodostavat tyytyväiset kansalaiset, jotka eivät halua jatkuvasti lisätä kulutustaan, vaan tunnistavat, minkä verran materiaalista hyvää heille riittää. ...
Kaikki inhimillisen elämän osa-alueet ovat pohjimmiltaan yhteydessä toisiin ihmisiin ja luontoon.
Tämän vuoksi ihmiskunnalla ei ole täyttyvällä maapallolla muuta selviytymisen mahdollisuutta kuin omaksua sellainen sivistyskäsitys, jossa hyvää elämää tavoitellaan yhden maapallon rajoissa. Ekososiaalinen sivistyskäsitys haastaa vallalla olevan vaurauden maksimointiin tähtäävän olemassaolemisen ihanteen. Ekososiaalisesti sivistynyt ihminen tunnistaa ekologisen, sosiaalisen ja taloudellisen todellisuuden välisiä keskinäisriippuvuuksia. Hän myös ymmärtää, että ekologisten, sosiaalisten ja taloudellisten intressien välillä on tärkeysjärjestys, joka turvaa tulevien sukupolvien elämän edellytykset ja toimintamahdollisuudet. Hänen käyttäytymistään ohjaa tietoisuus siitä, että sosiaaliset, kulttuuriset ja henkiset asiat voivat kasvaa rajattomasti, mutta materiaaliselle kulutukselle maapallo asettaa rajat. Kestävään ja elinvoimaiseen yhteiskuntaan siirtymistä tukevat arkiset valinnat eivät välttämättä edellytä uhrautumista, sillä ne voivat avata uusia merkitysnäköaloja omaan elämään toisin kuin ongelmien vahvistajaksi jääminen. Vastuullisuuden, kohtuullisuuden ja ihmistenvälisyyden toteutuminen elämässä voi koitua omaksi ja muiden eduksi jo lyhyellä, mutta etenkin pitkällä aikavälillä. Ekososiaalinen sivistys on vapauden ja vastuun tasapainoa ihmisen ajattelussa ja toiminnassa rajallisella maapallolla.
In this article, we will delve into Theodor W. Adorno’s sociology. The general aim is to study Adorno’s theory of society and its relation to sociological interpretation. What primarily distinguishes Adorno from other sociologists (of his time and today) is that he considers society to be the fundamental concept of the discipline. Theorising on the post-liberal capitalism of his time, Adorno proposes the concept of the exchange society, which is understood as an antagonistic totality that reproduces itself through the suffering it inflicts on socialised individuals. Within texts dating back to the 1960s, such as ‘Society’, Adorno engages in an exploration of comprehensive sociology and the sociology of social facts, reciprocally examining them. He confronts one with the other in a proposal of an interpretative model of the comprehensibility or incomprehensibility of society. This intellectual confrontation, while avoiding synthesis, leads Adorno to two main outcomes. First, it yields a diagnostic perspective on social theory, portraying capitalist society as simultaneously rational and irrational, comprehensible and incomprehensible. Second, it hints at a sociological interpretation of specific phenomena. In addition to exploring this central theme in Adorno’s sociology, we will also shed light on his distinctive approach to classic texts and concepts. Specifically, Adorno links to the received terminologies but incorporates them into constellations that imbue them with eloquence by revealing the underlying objective moments they encapsulate. The theoretical significance of this article lies in the aim to demonstrate that Adorno’s contributions to sociology are not merely borrowed from philosophical contemplations. Instead, they arise from an immanent critique of the sociological tradition.
Este artículo realiza un trabajo exploratorio sobre algunos aspectos filosóficos presentes en la obra Minima Moralia de Th. W. Adorno. Se pretende rescatar los principales elementos relacionados a su crítica del valor como realidad totalizadora, dando cuenta de las consecuencias concretas manifestadas en la vida social y de las posibilidades asequibles para superar tal estado. Se parte de la hipótesis de que Minima Moralia constituye un elemento central de la crítica del valor en la versión de Adorno. En primer lugar, se presenta el contexto de publicación del escrito adorniano. A continuación, se investiga el papel de la experiencia en el pensamiento crítico del pensador. Después se precisa la importancia de la teoría de la apariencia e inversión real en la comprensión de este universo social, para cerrar el escrito con un análisis de las posibilidades objetivas de trascender lo dado y el papel de la felicidad en la Teoría crítica.
Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) was a German Jewish philosopher, sociologist, and cultural critic who played a key role in the development of the Frankfurt School. His work includes a critique of capitalist society as well as numerous sociological studies regarding the formation of authoritarian attitudes, and the ideological function of mass culture. His critical theory conceives of society in terms of the fundamental relations between individuals that are conditioned by commodity exchange. Drawing from elements of Marx, this framework understands society as a process of mediation, characterized by the domination of individuals by estranged forms and institutions. While contributing to numerous empirical studies (of authoritarianism and musical reception), Adorno's sociology criticized positivist methodologies in debates with Karl Popper. His writings on philosophy, sociology, psychoanalysis, and art continue to interest critical theorists of society.
This article offers a comparative exploration of the practices of resistance Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault champion against the structures of modern power their enquiries have the merit to illuminate and contest. After a preliminary examination of their views about the relationship between theory and praxis, I shall pursue two goals: first, I shall illustrate the limitations of Adorno’s negativist portrait of an ethics of resistance and contrast it with Foucault’s more promising notion of resistance as strategic counter-conduct, which in his late ethico-political writings becomes the heart of a distinctive politics of the governed. Second, despite their dissimilarities, I shall argue that their ideas can be brought together to elaborate a ‘compounded’ account of resistance, where Adorno’s politics of suffering figures as the necessary pre-condition for the creative practices of freedom Foucault seeks to encourage.
I conduct a critical evaluation of Amy Allen’s book, The End of Progress: Decolonising the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (2016), and I use this as a starting point for a series of reflections concerning Frankfurt School critical theory’s links to Eurocentric and colonial attitudes. I argue that Allen’s response to Frankfurt School critical theory's silence on colonialism is insufficient, and in doing so, I foreground issues and problems that Adorno, Allen, and indeed many other writers simply pass over.
This paper studies the conflict between critical rationalism and critical theory in Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno’s 1961 debate by analyzing their shared rejection of Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge. Despite the divergences in their respective projects of critical social research, Popper and Adorno agree that Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge is uncritical. By investigating their respective assessments of this research programme I reveal a deeper similarity between critical rationalism and critical theory. Though both agree on the importance of critique, they are less concerned with the development of critical consciousness as a focus of this project. In this way, Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, particularly in its formative stages, revolves around a set of problems relatively inaccessible to critical rationalism and critical theory, since it is centrally concerned with identifying and cultivating the possibility of critique in society. In closing, I gesture to the importance of political education in Mannheim’s early work, suggesting that a return to these experimental texts will yield resources for political thought today.
Este trabajo afronta dos de las objeciones que cabe aducir contra la presencia de un proyecto de filosofía social en Dialéctica negativa. En primer lugar, se matiza la continuidad del diagnóstico social de Adorno con la teoría lukacsiana de la cosificación, interpretando el núcleo de su teoría social como un análisis del proceso de subsunción que se produce con la autonomización de la objetividad social. En segundo lugar, se presenta la noción de constelación como núcleo del razonamiento epistemológico de Adorno en Dialéctica negativa y se cuestiona el argumento acerca de su incompatibilidad con el trabajo de las ciencias sociales, analizando su relación con respecto al método de los tipos ideales de Max Weber y su afinidad con los modelos teóricos de Edward P. Thompson y David Harvey.
Qualitative methodological development has produced canonical tendencies that over-complexify and fix a fluid and lived social world. Meanwhile, critical theory has produced critiques on methodology but without enough attention to the qualitative tradition. I bridge these gaps by using an Adornoian position to interrogate the concepts of systematicity, rigidification, complexification, and their problems in ethnographic research and qualitative methodology. I conduct an urban ethnography and autoethnography of the metropolitan blasé as a public attitude of indifference to articulate an alternative, quotidian approach to ethnography that better captures social embeddedness, meaning-creation, and how contexts should drive data collection, analysis, and method-selection.
Major sociological work related to the culture industry thesis was undertaken by Adorno during his period as a ‘refugee scholar’ in the USA. It has been charged with a ‘sociological deficit’ by leading figures within critical theory, typically without reference to that US context. A dialogue with Márkus’s work on Adorno and the Marxian production paradigm can redress failings in those critiques. However, such a task is complicated by the limitations of Márkus’s own major essay on this topic. This paper thus conducts an immanent critique of Márkus: ‘Márkus against Márkus’. Márkus’s proposals for the application of the Marxian production paradigm to aesthetic culture and his prospective vision for critical theory are so found to be very compatible with Adorno’s related work.
To make Adorno’s difficult notion of “identity thinking” more amendable to sociological research, this project brings his Negative Dialectics into conversation with Schutz’s theory of typification. When revised with Adorno’s attention to political economy and the pathologies of reification, Schutz’s framework allows for an analysis of identity thinking in everyday life. Both theorists argue that categories of thought: (1) automatically subsume objects for pragmatic yet socially conditioned reasons, (2) are socially formed, transferred, and selected, and (3) suppress particularizing characteristics of objects. Their overlapping arguments are cross-fertilized to propose a critical approach to cognitive sociology that can engage in a form of ideology critique that illuminates forms of thinking that conceal social contradictions. This approach is useful for explaining the “mundane dialectic of enlightenment”: the daily reproduction of unreflective rationalization that breeds irrationality in the form of social domination and environmental harm, a contradiction which finds its ultimate expression in climate change inaction.
After 1945, both the Western Allies in Germany and some German social scientists embraced empirical public opinion research. This article examines the rhetoric, practices, and collaborative professional efforts of two of the most significant institutions conducting opinion research in West Germany in the 1950s: the Allensbach Institute and the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Although the political stances of these institutions differed, they were motivated to apply empirical research methods associated with Anglo‐American social research to the West German population by shared concerns about the fragility of democracy, faith in the empirical sciences as an antidote to Nazi‐era thought patterns, and the need to form a united front against doubters within West Germany. Even while declaring their desire to incorporate the latest empirical advances from the United States, however, they sought to articulate the meaning of their methods and findings in terms of the specific challenges faced by West Germany.
The dual trajectories of Japanese sociology and Japan itself are poised at a watershed moment in their shared history. In recent years, Japanese sociology has enlarged its international presence in unprecedented fashion and the Tokyo Olympics have positioned the global spotlight on the entire nation of Japan, making it an opportune moment to reflect on the future of Japanese sociology in connection to Japanese society by way of internationalization. This article draws on the author's reflections on the latest 92nd Japan Sociological Society Annual Conference in the context of recent socio‐structural and intellectual transformations in counterpart sociological cultures in Anglo‐America. Drawing on three theorizations of disciplinary development by Abbott, Connell, and Burawoy, this article articulates two dimensions (socio‐structural and intellectual) with which to examine (i) what Japanese sociology can contribute to improve the internationalization, decolonization, and pluralization of global sociology; and (ii) what global sociology can do to advance Japanese sociology's public contribution to improving and preserving LGBTQ minorities' societal well‐being.
As digitalization binds society to an apparently perpetual acceleration, questions about the nature of time and speed have gained new urgency in the social sciences. Yet, theorizations of these issues have neglected their implications for social life and generations. Linking these lacunae, this article articulates how digital media and social networking sites (SNS) shape social life through cultural transformations in the generation. This article rationalizes predominant patterns of SNS user behaviors in the context of social theoretical and philosophical frameworks informed by Mannheim, Simmel, Adorno, Benjamin, Arendt, social presence, action, and acceleration theories to offer a relational reconceptualization of the generation as a set of social relations and processes for visualizing changing conceptions of time and speed in a digital (izing) modernity. This article introduces the concept of general and local generationing processes to articulate the processual nature of the generation and to assert that trends in SNS use and content production are underwritten by grammatical logics that collectively “flatten” separate traditional generations to form a cross‐demographic and cross‐temporal digital generation.
This project clarifies the notoriously ambiguous concept of reification through analytical descriptions of reificatory modes of experience in social context. The experience of social constructions as fixed and unchangeable (“subjective reification”) is manifest in four interrelated experiential modes: (1) doxa, taking the social world for granted; (2) identification, experiencing abstractions as realer than particular objects; (3) enframing, the experience of means (technology and economic production) as ends and ends (humanity and life) as means; and (4) detachment, experience after suspending genuine emotional engagement. Each experiential mode is rooted in historically contingent yet objective social conditions (“objective reification”) and, thus, has a degree of validity – hence the power of reification, in comparison to legitimation, in social reproduction. Methodologically, the difficult path remains theorizing society as a totality without losing sight of its human formation with due attention to the everyday actors who reproduce and, every so often, challenge this totality.
The legitimacy of feminist ways of knowing and the well-being of marginalized identities they attend to are endangered by a “post-truth,” North American political climate. There thus arises an urgent need to examine and vindicate the significance of feminist methods (FM) for women and people of color (WPC). This article contributes to this goal by critically examining the themes that have hitherto organized FM as a category of efforts to reverse WPC’s historical dispossession in the academy. This article identifies three thematic objectives of FM (symbolic, social, and economic empowerment of WPC to reverse their historical dispossession), three thematic strategies of FM to accomplish these objectives in research design (centering WPC in the research agenda, designing more inclusive methods, innovating new theoretical concepts to analyze findings), and two thematic debates that continue to divide FM (styles of intersectionality and identity in the feminist movement as an analytical approach and political effort at large). This article concludes by situating these thematic distinctions in Lamont and Swidler’s broader articulation of methodological tribalism, opening dialogue on the political and analytical advantages of and need for superior methodological pluralism in FM.
Focusing on his essays “New value‐free sociology” and “Remarks on social conflict today,” this chapter discusses Adorno's assessments of how Karl Mannheim, Georg Simmel, Lewis Coser, and Ralf Dahrendorf have addressed the tensions and conflicts that beset contemporary society. The chapter draws on these sociologists' works and on Adorno's reading of them to elucidate core arguments in his critique of both their conceptions of the social world and their sociological modes of procedure. Particular emphasis is placed on Adorno's notion of the potential of a sociological approach that is more suitable for gaining insight into the antagonistic capitalist condition. The key components of such an approach, notably experience, its interplay with theory, and sociology's response to appearance, are further illuminated with reference to passages that illustrate their operations in sociological research.
From his return to Europe in 1949 to his death in 1969, Adorno was one of the most prominent public voices in West Germany. As a professor and institute director, a frequently heard expert on radio, a prolific cultural critic, and even a sort of public counselor, he helped shape the self‐image of German postwar society. The very term “postwar society” is partly an achievement: Adorno approached Germany sociologically, as a configuration of organizations and groups, as opposed to a community of blood, race, and fate, and he sought to encourage an earnest postwar and post‐genocide reckoning with the crimes committed under National Socialism, against widespread tendencies of evasiveness and disavowal. More insistently and effectively than most, Adorno reminded Germans that they lived “after Auschwitz.”
Adorno was deeply influenced by ideas about the rationalization of mass society and effects of commodification on consciousness. The work of Max Weber and Georg Lukács were dual influences that shaped much of Adorno's own work. He develops his critique of the “totally administered society” as a confluence of Weber's rationalization thesis as well as Lukács' theory of reification of consciousness due to the penetration of the commodity form into everyday life. But Adorno moves beyond these ideas by arguing that the spread of exchange‐value and quantification, carried forth via the commodity form, collapses the modern individual and its consciousness into the prevailing forms of dominant rationality. I then show how his later projects of Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory seek to protect the subject from these trends and then reflect on how Adorno's ideas can be brought together with Lukács' later ideas about social ontology in order to glimpse a broader concept of Critical Theory.
The article explores Adorno's theoretical efforts to think through the relationship of art and society, treating it as a significant part of his aesthetic theory. The emphasis of the article is placed on those writings that explicitly theorize the link between art and society. The essay therefore traces Adorno's theoretical statements and arguments from his 1932 essay on the situation of modern music to his late Aesthetic Theory, focusing on his methodological and aesthetic concerns: methodologically his persistent critique of empiricism and quantitative research, aesthetically his preoccupation with the concept of aesthetic autonomy as the precondition of modern art. As it turns out, with in terms of its basic concepts such as commodity and reification, even his late work (Aesthetic Theory) remains committed to the Marxist tradition that defined his early writings.
Scholars have charged Adorno of hypocritically abandoning efforts to articulate possibilities of social transformation, a propensity he emphasizes is central to social critique and sociocritical sociology. Keeping consistent with his fundamentally negative position, this essay reexamines democracy by scoping his work and reorganizing its philosophical and sociological contexts to open dialogue on the characteristics of democracy that Adorno would not reject. Throughout, I negatively reflect upon the nature of this democracy and criticize it towards the goal of fleshing out the paths of social transformation possible and available for its realization-through the things it could not be. Adopting this coupling as a point of departure, I analyze the regression of consciousness in Adorno's thought, as the root of ego-weakness-the destroyer of maturity and that which underpins every shackle he sees as subjugating the masses-and bring this into dialogue with the insights informed by Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and action theory. To examine the practical implications of social transformation, this essay will also demonstrate how they play out in contemporary contexts, drawing parallels with evidence from contemporary social movements, on account of their conception as a means of social transformation and of Adorno's own engagement with this conception.
This study is an examination of the role of alcohol and its central place in university sport hazing rituals, whereby veteran team members require new team members to participate in a rite of passage to gain full access to team membership. Academic research studies as well as media reports on sport hazing reveal the significant extent to which alcohol is closely tied to dangerous behaviors in team initiation rituals. Data was collected using in-depth interviews with varsity athletes, coaches and athletic directors at Canadian universities. The participants discussed their experiences with hazing and provided their perspective on the role of alcohol in university team hazing activities. In our analysis, we applied a sociological lens informed by the work of Theodor Adorno, using a negative dialectic approach to highlight the gap between the actual undesirable impact of team hazing and alcohol in collegiate sport and the potential of collegiate sport to provide a positive contribution to the lives of student-athletes; this negative dialectic approach reveals the social and institutional structures in place which promote the harmful incorporation of alcohol (abuse) in sport, while revealing how change within those very structures can lead to positive change. These data can thus be used to inform programs and policies aimed at improving the transitional experiences of varsity student-athletes, subsequently enhancing the overall culture of university sport.
Tulisan ini menunjukkan proses renegosiasi identitas lokal dalam praktik komersialisasi dan konsumerisme di Aceh. Dua praktik sosial ini muncul di Aceh sebagai akibat dari proses ekspansi pasar yang meluas pasca tsunami. Di mana faktanya telah didukung oleh egen-egen globalisasi yang merepresentasi pemikiran-pemikiran dan etos kapitalisme. Tidak saja itu, bahkan praktiknya berlangsung sebagai ideologi gerakan, bukan sekadar sebagai bentuk-bentuk praktik ekonomi politik yang berlangsung secara normal dan seimbang. Di sinilah bentuk dominasi pasar faktanya telah terlalu kuat mendominasi masyarakat terutama bagi yang tidak memiliki kekuatan modal ekonomi, politik, dan akses distribusi yang cukup, negara telah begitu saja perannya dapat dibeli dengan kekuatan-kekuatan kapital yang berkuasa. Bahkan dampaknya sampai melahirkan pergeseran pada identitas Keacehan, seperti bagaimana masyarakat Aceh yang sebelumnya memegangi prinsip-prinsip kekeluargaan, kebersamaan, kesetiakawanan, kepedulian, dan bahkan egaliter, kemudian dipaksa dan dibenturkan pada tradisi baru yang meletakkan etos transaksional dengan mengedepankan prinsip-prinsip individual, serta bergantung pada sistem ekonomi kapitalistis.
In the 2016 American presidential election, 81% of White evangelicals voted for Donald Trump despite the obvious fact that he had little knowledge or interest in Christianity. This has continued to puzzle many commentators, as well as conservative Christian leaders. This paper argues that Theodor W. Adorno’s 1943 analysis of the radio broadcasts of Martin Luther Thomas provides insight into Trump’s popularity among evangelicals. Adorno compares the fascist-style broadcasts of Thomas to a pagan religious sect. He describes this practice as “racketeering in religion,” which effectively results in the “liquidation of religion.” The article demonstrates ways in which this analysis is relevant for understanding the relationship between Trump and American Evangelicals.
Traces the influences of Max Weber and Georg Lukács on the thought of T.W. Adorno.
This paper is concerned with how a particular logic informed the articulation of ‘Liberia’ from its conception as an idea of liberty at the beginning of the nineteenth century to its consolidation as a nation-state in the twentieth. The paper begins with an examination of the logic itself, through a reading of John Austin’s lecture on ‘things’. This reveals a logic operating through a legal framework that can render an object entirely fungible. The logic, I argue, is the logic of capital. The paper then turns to the making of Liberia to show how this logic was super-imposed over lands and peoples in west Africa through a process of colonisation, which, since the Roman colōnia, has involved both the introduction of civilisation and the cultivation of new land. The argument running through this history is that, at each point, the legal-representational framework that was supposed to liberate its object—human and land—was informed by the logic of capital. On this logic, liberation would come with the super-imposition of a general value: rendering humans productive citizens, and rendering land productive territory, through the investment of rights. However, the result was that, what began at the start of the nineteenth century as an idea of liberty that was supposed to make free all of Africa, culminated at the end of the twentieth century in a state of civil death, and eventually revolution and war.
We are living in an era characterised by the repercussions of recession and austerity, and the fields of work and family are directly affected by historical changes, making the need for reformulating concepts used in the sociology of work and family quite apparent. In order to do so, this article proposes an approach inspired by Open Marxism and critical theory that will assess the contribution of specialised literature in the work–family articulation to advance original analyses and investigate relevant issues around social reproduction under capitalism. The tension between capitalism and contemporary forms of family will be framed through the concept of the dual nature of labour and family life, insofar as they entail both sensuous and abstract forms of human involvement – most notably abstract labour. Issues around the emotional patterns of family life and the mediation that families operate between ‘home’ and ‘work’ spheres will take centre stage. One of the main points is that the development of labour as abstract labour under capitalism marginalises family forms in terms of the mediation between the private and the public spheres, because it relies on a more direct social integration (or ‘synthesis’) of its subjects. However, members of families, as active subjects, create social forms and resist disruptions caused by socio-economic changes. In that sense, ‘subjectivity’ is thought to be a key concept to avoid thinking work and family as reified structures.
Diversos intérpretes da obra de Theodor W. Adorno sugerem que a crítica da racionalidade instrumental substituiu a crítica do capitalismo no desenvolvimento de sua obra, principalmente por causa da adoção do diagnóstico acerca do surgimento do capitalismo de Estado proposto por Friedrich Pollock. Neste artigo questiono a aceitação por parte de Adorno, ao menos em sua obra tardia, de tal diagnóstico e mostro que a crítica do capitalismo não foi substituída pela crítica da razão, e sim complementada.
Fragility is a condition that inhabits the foundations of social life. It remains mostly unnoticed until something breaks and dislocates the sense of completion. In such moments of rupture, the social world reveals the stuff of which it is made and how it actually works; it opens itself to question.
Based on this claim, this book reconsiders the place of the notions of crisis and critique as fundamental means to grasp the fragile condition of the social and challenges the normalization and dissolution of these ‘concepts’ in contemporary social theory. It draws on fundamental insights from Hegel, Marx, and Adorno as to recover the importance of the critique of concepts for the critique of society, and engages in a series of studies on the work of Habermas, Koselleck, Arendt, and Foucault as to consider anew the relationship of crisis and critique as immanent to the political and economic forms of modernity.
Moving from crisis to critique and from critique to crisis, the book shows that fragility is a price to be paid for accepting the relational constitution of the social world as a human domain without secure foundations, but also for wishing to break free from all attempts at giving closure to social life as an identity without question. This book will engage students of sociology, political theory and social philosophy alike.
This article examines a fundamental theoretical aspect of the discourse on ‘intersectionality’ in feminist and anti-racist social theory, namely, the question whether intersecting social divisions including those of sex, gender, race, class and sexuality are interacting but independent entities with autonomous ontological bases or whether they are different dimensions of the same social system that lack separate social ontologies and constitute each other. Based on a historical reconstruction of its genesis, the article frames this as a dispute between system-theoretical and dialectical, ‘Critical Theory’-related approaches and argues that the latter better capture the dynamics of contemporary society, including the perspective of its transcendence.
Georg Simmel's “The intersection of social circles,” a chapter in his 1908 Sociology, contains discussions of class, religion, ethnic, and gender relations that are highly relevant to contemporary sociological concerns. Simmel's argument is based on a notion of historical dynamic that interprets increasingly complex intersectionality as a sign of progressing civilization. The article establishes how Simmel describes “the intersection of social circles” and then looks at Simmel's account through the concept of “intersectionality” as developed in contemporary feminist theory. The article suggests that although some aspects of Simmel's account of women in modernity are incompatible with contemporary feminism, the shared use of the same image, “intersection,” in Simmel and in contemporary feminist theory is the symptom of a shared concern with a particular aspect of the complexity of modern society. In Simmel, the increasing density of the intersections of social circles points to the increasingly complex individuality of modern subjects, whereas the use of the same image in contemporary feminist theory is part of a critique of inequality and oppression in the same modern society whose advent Simmel celebrated. Intersectionality is a characteristic of modern society that first became visible more than a century ago and has meanwhile become ever the more a signature of modernity.
In the context of recent attempts to more adequately engage with Adorno’s approach to sociology and social theory, this article argues that such a project requires a more complete understanding of the philosophical basis of Adorno’s critical material perspective on knowledge and language. In particular, the interpretation of Adorno within sociology has been hampered by a fundamental misunderstanding regarding his methodology of critique and composition, which prioritizes the content of Adorno’s claims regarding sociology and social theory, over their rhetorical and performative character. This character is identifiable in Adorno’s prose, and grasped through a close attention to his account of the negative dialectic. Using Bernstein’s articulation of the ‘complex concept’ as an analytical framework, and Adorno’s introduction to Durkheim as its material, the article argues that the inability to grasp the rhetorical character of Adorno’s critical interpretive approach prevents an understanding of his potential relevance for sociology and social theory.
Three ways of thinking about the history of ideas“the revolutionary, the reactionary and the revivalist”are useful when examining connections and relationships between architecture and mathematics from the sixteenth century to the present, and projecting them into the future. Here the authors provide an overview of historical developments in the profession of architecture and the discipline of mathematics from 1500 to today, and introduce the 45 chapters that comprise the second volume of this present work.
Axel Honneth has had considerable success in grounding his normative social philosophy on recognitive structures, and the capacity of experiences of disrespect to stimulate "struggles for recognition." These struggles for recognition are held to yield advances in social structure, and to expand the individual's capacity for self-realization. In this paper, I show that this account relies on a supressed dichotomy (inherited from Mead) between the immediate prerecognitive self, and the mediated self produced intersubjectively. I argue that this dichotomy persists beyond Honneth's explicit use of Meadian terminology, and that Honneth relies on an unsophisticated account of mediation which, once critiqued, undermines his attempt to derive norms from recognition simpliciter. A promising alternative is found in Adorno's analysis of humanism and the category of the individual, which shows that true fidelity to the aims of humanism entails a rejection of humanism itself, as the individual is a proleptic category.
Purpose
– This paper aims to, drawing from Adorno et al.’s (1950) The Authoritarian Personality, explain why some workers reject participation in decision-making on principle, preferring instead to defer to managerial authority and remain silent.
Design/methodology/approach
– The paper reviews the literatures on employee voice and silence and then builds a conceptual framework that can be used to explain employee silence in relation to personality structures.
Findings
– It is argued that some employees have personality structures that make them more susceptible to anti-democratic thoughts. Potentially fascistic personalities, as measured by the F-scale, are expected to derive pleasure in submission to the will of management.
Research limitations/implications
– The paper has implications for political and social psychologists, especially those seeking to understand how best to promote employee voice in the workplace.
Originality/value
– This study makes an original contribution to the employee voice and silence literatures by being among the first of its kind to examine the political psychology of fascism in the micro-context of the workplace.
This article suggests reading Theodor Adorno not as a notoriously pessimistic sociologist but as a committed public educator. Partly drawing on still unpublished transcripts of lectures, public talks and radio broadcasts from the 1950s and '60s, the article offers an account of Adorno's concept and practice of a 'democratic pedagogy'. The key question is how we should understand the difference between Adorno the social philosopher, on the one hand, and Adorno the educator, on the other. It is argued that Adorno's pedagogical interventions are not a footnote to his social theory, but a key to understanding his entire oeuvre.
This paper offers a method for examining elite schools in a global setting by appropriating Theodor Adorno's constellational approach. I contend that arranging ideas and themes in a non-deterministic fashion can illuminate the social reality of elite schools. Drawing on my own fieldwork at an elite school in Argentina, I suggest that local and global determinants in the school's past contribute to its current, and relatively recent, elite status. Moreover, all of these factors can be arranged to elucidate the school in a history of global capitalism that coincides with Argentine nationalism, British ‘informal’ imperialism and Presbyterian educationalism.
Ziege’s book focuses primarily on the two main empirical studies carried out by Max Horkheimer’s Institute of Social Research during its exile in the United States in the 1940s: a relatively unknown and never-published study of anti-Semitism among American workers and the much better known, five-volume Studies in Prejudice. Ziege poses and successfully answers the question of why the Institute began to focus more on empirical studies and anti-Semitism in the 1940s. Her thorough archival research illuminates as never before the Institute’s relations to the main organizations that funded its ambitious empirical projects during this time: the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Labor Committee. She also provides the richest existing account of how the experience of American exile affected the Institute’s theoretical premises and empirical work. By distinguishing between the Institute’s ‘esoteric’ theoretical assumptions, which maintained a large degree of continuity with its earlier work, and a willingness to work at the ‘exoteric’ level with many scholars who didn’t share these assumptions, Ziege explains how the Institute made certain concessions to mainstream American academic culture without ever abandoning the radical intentions of Critical Theory.
The article examines Adorno’s conviction that a critique of concepts inevitably entails a critique of society. Some commentators, notably Cook, read Adorno’s idea of the seamless transition from conceptual to social critique as dependent on the use of normative concepts. According to this ‘Marxist’ reading, a critique of unfaithful concepts provokes a persuasive and constructive critique of society for failing to fulfil concepts. This line of argument creates problems. Adorno’s inquiries into society’s resistance to decipherment imply that the progression from conceptual to social critique via normative concepts leads to advocating misguided, potentially dangerous social standards. In response to this dilemma, the article proposes an alternative interpretation of the transition from conceptual to social critique. The focus shifts from normative concepts to Adorno’s examinations of society as a condition of false consciousness and suffering. From this perspective, conceptual critique entails a convincing — albeit no longer constructive — critique of society.
Book reviews: Adorno, Theodor W., Metaphysik. Begriff und Probleme (reviewed by Ståle R.S. Finke)
When Durkheim’s Sociologie et philosophie was first translated into German in 1967, Adorno wrote a critical introduction to the book. This article first presents the main thoughts in Durkheim’s sociology of morals - that is, his concept of societally instituted morality as a reality sui generis that must be obeyed because the state of society constitutes a ‘reason’ beyond that of the individual. The article then presents Adorno’s critique of Durkheim. Departing from a general critique of Durkheim’s disregard for individuality in establishing obligatory social morality, Adorno utilizes the Marxian concepts of ‘second nature’, ‘continued natural history’ and true and false consciousness to show how Durkheim’s concept of conscience collective is merely expressive of what society ‘believes itself to be’. In conclusion, the article demonstrates how the respective positions of Durkheim and Adorno may serve as each other’s correctives.
Analysis is provided of the roots of sociology and its links with historical optimism. Particular focus is placed by such a sociology upon the origins of modernity and problems of urban disorder. Sociology's golden age was in the immediate postwar period. But since the 1960s, ‘globalization’, the sciences of complexity and cultural studies have transformed the context for sociology (especially transforming the so-called ‘two cultures’). The article concludes with some wide-ranging recommendations as to how sociology should be developed into a re-unified, historical social science on a truly global scale.
Quantitative analysis has many limitations. In this paper, Siegfried Kracauer proposes that qualitative analysis may be a more fruitful procedure in some stages of international communications research.
Siegfried Kracauer, formerly a prominent journal editor in Germany, has published widely in the field of communications research. He is presently completing a book on the aesthetics of the film.