Philosophical Elements of a Theory of Society

Theodor W. Adorno

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780745679488, 9780745679471
• eBook ISBN: 9780745694917
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

As an exile in America during the War, Theodor Adorno grew acquainted with the fundamentals of empirical social research, something which would shape the work he undertook in the early 1950s as co-director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. Yet he also became increasingly aware of the 'fetishism of method' in sociology, and saw the serious limitations of theoretical work based solely on empirical findings.

In this lecture course given in 1964, Adorno develops a critique of both sociology and philosophy, emphasizing that theoretical work requires a specific mediation between the two disciplines. Adorno advocates a philosophical approach to social theory that challenges the drive towards uniformity and a lack of ambiguity, highlighting instead the fruitfulness of experience, in all its messy complexity, for critical social analysis. At the same time, he shows how philosophy must also realise that it requires sociology if it is to avoid falling for the old idealistic illusion that the totality of real conditions can be grasped through thought alone.

Masterfully bringing together philosophical and empirical approaches to an understanding of society, these lectures from one of the most important social thinkers of the 20th century will be of great interest to students and scholars in philosophy, sociology and the social sciences generally.

LECTURE 1
12 May 1964

Ladies and gentlemen,

The title under which this course of lectures has been announced is somewhat amphibious: ‘Philosophical Elements of a Theory of Society’.¹ Some of you will have racked your brains and asked, ‘So is that philosophy or sociology?’ And only those who have been exposed to my corrupting influence for some time will have recalled that I do not make the distinction between these disciplines as separate trades so strictly, in keeping with what Mr Horkheimer said yesterday in his introductory seminar course: philosophy is anything but a trade.² What led me to this formulation is not the twofold title of my professorship, however,³ but something far more serious, namely the fact that I am asked time and again, and now especially by students of sociology: ‘So, you speak of a theory of society – what actually is that? Do you have such a theory? If you have it, why don’t you just come out with it, and if you don’t, why are you talking about it?’ So these constantly recurring questions led me to put it that way.

I hope I will be able to answer these questions at least to the extent that I can elaborate to you some of what I imagine I know about a theory of society, but, at the same time, I must explain to you the flaw of such a thoroughgoing theory of society; for it is always better to admit to, and hopefully explain well, an existing lack than to conceal it through some ideology. But it goes without saying that such a matter as the nature of a theory of society, in so far as it includes a reflection on theory itself, is at once something substantially philosophical; for while the standard practices of scholarship can be used to form theories, an examination of the possibility and nature of theory, and also a specific theory, is considered the domain of philosophy. In this context, let me remind all of you – but especially the sociology students among you – that the work of Max Weber, whose incredible wealth of material and empirical familiarity with the facts of society no one could deny, contains a special volume of so-called methodological writings;⁴ it is a matter of taste whether the reader wishes to call these texts philosophy or sociology.

The task I have set myself is twofold: on the one hand, I would like to give you a notion of what a theory of society actually is, what it can be and what it might look like. But, on the other hand – in keeping with both the brevity of such a lecture and my own way of approaching such things – I would also like to use a number of models to develop for you the elements, as announced, of such a theory of society itself. These two things, incidentally, are very difficult to keep apart; one of the dimensions of these lectures that will require a little relearning on your part is that I am not willing to make a rigid separation of method and contact – indeed, that I will even do all I can to unsettle the thinking habits that insist on such a separation. In other words, I will develop the methodological questions from the factual ones and, conversely, reflect on the factual questions themselves with methodological considerations, for example the structure of dialectical thought. That is also one reason why I will not begin by presenting a definition of a theory of society and its elements, as some of you might expect, because I believe that an understanding of such a theory can be attained only by addressing the philosophically epistemological questions on the one hand and the factual structural questions of society itself on the other.

To begin with, then, I am referring to the concept of a theory of society – and I am merely saying this so that you can get your bearings before being offered an elaborated concept of a theory of society – roughly as is familiar to you without having to engage in great philosophical deliberations, namely as an explanation or interpretation of phenomena, as opposed to their mere collection and subsequent more or less systematic presentation. So, if I say first of all that a theory is understood here as a body of more or less coherent contexts of ideas about society, that will be enough for now. I must add at once, however, that this deliberately very general definition of what such a theory is will form the framework for something that, at least epistemologically, is a central intention of what I have begun here: the distinction between a genuine theory of society and mere containers or collections of data. To the extent that we will deal with methodological considerations and questions about the concept of a theory of society, that will certainly be one of the most important tasks that is revealed to us by the current situation of scientific theory.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I had told you that some speak time and again, especially in the context of the shortcomings of positivism,⁵ of both the necessity and the deficiency of a theory of society, but without being truly able to offer such a theory with a clear conscience. And, indeed, no one does what people used to do in the days when the great so-called fathers of sociology – Saint-Simon, Comte, Spencer, Marx too, and finally perhaps even Durkheim, though one could question that – presented their conceptions of society. I would argue, however, that the reason for this can be found not only in the advance of a positivist scientific mindset (though this scientific mindset essentially views all theory with suspicion and considers it a necessary evil). The earlier positivists such as Comte and Saint-Simon, who can be considered positivists in a broader sense, referred to what we call theory in a substantive sense with other, somewhat derogatory, terms – ‘metaphysics’, for example, was a frequent choice. I think that the crisis of theoretical thought in sociology, and it is certainly no exaggeration to speak of such a crisis – those of you who were at the Heidelberg congress⁶ and heard the reactions of the panel members to the lecture by my friend Marcuse⁷ will have seen very clearly from the start how widespread the hatred towards emphatic theory is in academically established, official sociology, how widespread a genuine hatred of any theory that is more than the abbreviation of the facts it encompasses – this crisis depends not only on the scientific mindset but ultimately also on the matter itself. That is to say: the increasing difficulty of truly grasping contemporary society with theoretical concepts, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, certain changes in the consciousness of thinkers and researchers that make it increasingly difficult for them to adopt any theoretical stance at all. In relation to these changes in the object and in the subject’s level of awareness, however, the slogans of positivism very often strike me as mere rationalizations to conceal something that lies beneath and bears much greater weight. In the history of positivist thought in sociology and positivist research in sociology, moreover, almost every sociologist who does more than simply conduct some narrow investigations is immediately suspected by his successors of being a crazed theorist – or, to use the term from the Index Verborum Prohibitorum of the positivists,⁸ a metaphysician. If you read Durkheim’s Rules,⁹ for example, you will find that even Comte, who God knows offered no shortage of invective towards metaphysics and metaphysical thought, is denounced there as a metaphysician, for the telling reason that he worked with categories related to the totality of historical movement in society, such as progress or an internally cohesive humanity, both of which are unacceptable for a nominalism as extreme as Durkheim’s.¹⁰ Or, to give you a different example of the same general phenomenon, it is no exaggeration to count Max Weber among the positivists, at least in a substantial intention of his work – not only because he argued that a rational actor should heroically take the disenchantment of the world upon themselves, but also in the method of his work, which from the outset describes the concepts it uses as mere auxiliary tools that have no independence from whatever facts, but whose purpose is simply to measure the facts in order to structure them; and these can then, as he says quite openly, be discarded if necessary, as prefigured in Weber’s famous theory of ‘ideal types’.¹¹

As an aside, as this year happens to be the centenary of Max Weber’s birth, I would like to connect, as far as I can – without giving an outright lecture on Max Weber – these problems to Weber’s work and repeatedly open up perspectives on his œuvre, not only because of its wealth of material, but also because the problems we are dealing with are addressed in many of his texts at a very high level and with very great clarity and rigour. It is therefore not a coincidence that I keep returning to Weber, but a specific intention. Although I told you that, in certain basic tendencies, Weber can be considered an exponent of positivism, and thus of an actually anti-theoretical stance, and although I will add to this by noting that there is nothing by Weber that truly resembles a theory of society – that he did try out sociologies dealing with specific topics such as the great sociology of religion,¹² or finally individual sociologies such as the outline ‘On the Sociology of Music’,¹³ or that he examined certain interconnections between categories but never produced anything like a theory of society as a whole – it is still unmistakable that Weber’s output, going by the work that is generally viewed as sociology, as science today, by no means seems so atheoretical.

Let me say this at once: the reason I am placing such value on this problem that recurs insistently throughout the history of sociology, namely that one school of thought considers another too theoretical or metaphysical, is that this eternal recurrence seems to suggest that, in this science especially, which adopted the call to ‘focus on the facts’ as its mission statement with an almost hysterical fearfulness, that this science is constantly urged by its own object to go beyond mere facticity; and that this, in the eyes of every critic, is then easily attached like a stain to the sociologist thus criticized, which, if I am not mistaken, shows precisely that a science of society cannot actually be envisioned except through theoretical thought. Let me at least tell you how profound Max Weber’s relationship to theory is despite this, shall we say, anti-theoretical or anti-systematic mindset. Here I am not thinking of his methodology, which is a comparatively superficial aspect – for arch-positivists such as Lundberg¹⁴ or Stouffer¹⁵ have authored extensive methodological writings, or Lazarsfeld¹⁶ – but would rather say that the matter itself contains a theoretical aspect. I will remind you of just one of his central concepts, namely that of ‘understanding’,¹⁷ which is his attempt to understand social behaviour from within rather than applying concepts of identity to it from the outside, as it were, on the basis of particular similarities or consistencies, and through this ‘understanding from within’ to find a way of identifying something substantive about the interrelatedness of social actions among all individuals, instead of overlooking from the start the ways they come together and merely providing the data. It is precisely this concept of understanding, which he incidentally adopted from the southwest Ge...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Editors’ Foreword
• Lecture 1 Philosophy and sociology as scientific disciplines • Reflection and theory • Tasks of the lecture • Provisional conception of a theory of society • The crisis of theoretical thought; positivism • Weber’s relationship to theory • Weber’s concept of ‘understanding’ • Weber’s concept of ‘rationality’ • Bureaucracy and domination • Dialectics; theoretical aspects of atheoretical thinking
• Lecture 2 Facts and theory • Concretion and overcoming of the factual • Critique of the classificatory logic of positivism • The relationship between natural sciences and social sciences, nature and society • The anti-theoretical character of sociology • Hypothesis formulation and insight • The necessity of reflection; Darmstadt community studies • Theory formation presupposes a consideration of discontinuity; the status of facts within the complexion of society as a whole
• Lecture 3 Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler; Registering facts and productive imagination • The concept of tendency • Capitalist calculus • The exchange relationship • Tendency and prophecy; the new as the core of theory • The non-identical in theory • Theory and dynamics of society • Tendency and totality • Social reality and theory
• Lecture 4 Tendency and trend • Dependence of theory on its object; Distrust towards theory formation • Theory as a unified system of society; liberalism, Marxism, German Idealism • System as tendency • Modifications of ‘market society’ as results of class struggles • Monopolizing tendency of capital; state interventionism as a crisis outlet • Integration of the proletariat
• Lecture 5 Announcement of a lecture by Lucien Goldmann on ‘Marxism and contemporary society’ • Problems of theory formation; ‘Work Climate’ study • The system-immanence of the proletariat • Class consciousness and integration • Ideology and experience: the phenomenon of personalization • Insight into society in theoretical thought • System-immanent consciousness • Politics as an aspect of ideology • The meaning of changes in reality and consciousness; concretism
• Lecture 6 The difficulty of theory formation • Concretism as an expression of powerlessness; ‘levelled middle-class society’ • Exchange value as a source of pleasure • The meaning of concretism for labour organizations • The transformation of Marxian theory into state religion • Abstractism • Accusation of the bourgeoisification of the proletariat • Everyday class struggle
• Lecture 7 Everyday class struggle • The politics of small steps • The dual character of the workers’ realism; the consequences of mechanization • The dominance of conditions • Wage satisfaction • Subjectivism in sociological research • Communication research; the semblance of freedom in the exchange principle • Subjective experiences of the semblance of levelling • Supply and demand of labour
• Lecture 8 The thin crust of integrated society • Nuanced thinking • The shift of social pressure • Changes in nominalism and epistemology • Improvements within the work process • Loss of unambiguity; social theory between dogmatic ossification and naïve faith in facts • Semblance of integration and increasing socialization • Disintegration; rationalization and the reality principle • The function of the system; antagonism of power and powerlessness: disintegration through growing integration • Integration and powerlessness • False identity of the general and the particular
• Lecture 9 The relationship between economy and power • The negative unity of society in general unfreedom • The culture industry and analysis of ideologies • Positivism as a manifestation of ideology • The concept of the ‘human being’ and the ‘jargon of authenticity’; ideology critique and language critique • The mythologization of antagonisms in socialist countries • The dialectic and rupture of theory and experience • Loss of experience • Theory as system and non-system; the irrationality and rationality of society; Weber’s theory of science
• Lecture 10 Contradictory object and contradiction-free theory; rationality and irrationality • Changes in the concept of reason • The whole, in its rationality, is irrational • Dialectical theory • Critique of undialectical thought • Critique of unified sociology and the fetishization of science • The historical change in the function of science; openness as a key concept • Functional change in the concept of science: Leibniz, Fichte, Hegel, Kant • The equation of science with truth • The danger of intuitionism; the relationship between method and matter • Announcement of the next topic: critique of Parsons’s methodology
• Lecture 11 Critique of the ideal of the scientific method • Descartes; the postulation of method and the structure of the matter • Parsons’s unified conceptual system • The relationship between psychology and sociology: Karen Horney, Erich Fromm • Freud: sociology as applied psychology; the concept of role • Critique of the psychological reduction of social processes: Marx, Durkheim • Subject and socialization in Weber’s ‘understanding’ sociology • The antagonistic relationship between the individual and society • The necessity of a critical reflection on method
• Lecture 12 Fetishization of methodology instead of insight into the matter • Method I: spontaneity of thought • Formal and transcendental logic in Kant; the character of reason • Method II: dialectical philosophy and self-determination • Didactics; the complexity of capitalism and the Marxian method • Marx’s toying with dialectics • The disastrous consequence of the primacy of method • Two meanings of the concept of method
• Lecture 13 The dispute between positivist and critical thinking • Scientific fetishism and the acquisition of naïveté • Perfectionism of method and irrelevance of results • Weber: material and spirit collecting • Instrumentalization of reason • The defamation of spirit • Self-examination of thought in the material • Causes of scientific fetishism • Ego weakness as a subjective reason for scientific fetishism • On the ‘fear of freedom’; the employee mentality • Theory and system
• Lecture 14 The ideal of system in rationalism: reduction of the many to the one • Critique of systems that proceed from the subject: Hegel, Erdmann; Spinoza and Leibniz • The empiricist critique of rationalism • System frenzy and the disintegrated cosmos • The problem of the concept of system in Kant’s idealism • Nietzsche and Kierkegaard; rejection of system • On dogmatic attitudes • Systems regress to modes of representation • Systematic thinking and the administered world; equation of theory and system in Parsons • Focus on the essence
• Lecture 15 Inspiration and spontaneity • The reified consciousness • Kant: the worldly and scholastic concepts of philosophy; unregulated experience • Empiricism as a corrective • The relationship between knowledge and democracy; experimental situations • Realism and power relations; objectivity and subjectivity
• Lecture 16 Elements of a theory of society • ‘Transcendental reflection’ • The classes and the production process • The irrationality of the whole and particular rationality in the administered world • The armament apparatus • Class character and unfreedom • ‘Pluralism’ as a phenomenon of concealment • Changes in the sphere of competition and consumption • The intertwinement of rationality and irrationality in the processes of concentration and disintegration
• Lecture 17 Rationality and irrationality • Power relations and control over production; bureaucracy and domination; sociological concept formation • Personalized epiphenomena and fascism • The independence of bureaucracy in Russia • Armaments and overall social structure • The position of ideology today: de-ideologization; the consumer world • The ‘consciousness industry’: the change in ideology and its contemporary production • The technological veil • Language critique and reified consciousness • Critique
• Index
• End User License Agreement