Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism

Theodor W. Adorno, Wieland Hoban

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781509541454, 9781509541447
• eBook ISBN: 9781509541461
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

On 6 April 1967, at the invitation of the Socialist Students of Austria at the University of Vienna, Theodor W. Adorno gave a lecture which is not merely of historical interest. Against the background of the rise of the National Democratic Party of Germany, which had enjoyed remarkable electoral success in the first two years after its formation in November 1964, Adorno analysed the goals, resources and tactics of the new right-wing nationalism of this time. Contrasting it with the 'old' fascism of the Nazis, Adorno gave particular attention to the ways in which far-right movements elicited enthusiastic support in sections of the West German population, 20 years after the war had ended. Much has changed since then, but some elements have remained the same or resurfaced in new forms, 50 years later. Adorno's penetrating analysis of the sources of right-wing radicalism is as relevant today as it was five decades ago. It is a prescient message to future generations who find themselves embroiled once again in a struggle against a resurgent nationalism and right-wing extremism.

Afterword by Volker Weiss

Theodor W. Adorno’s deliberations on ‘Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism’ from 1967 constitute one of the philosopher’s public interventions. As a purely spoken lecture at the University of Vienna, previously existing only as a tape recording, it has remained virtually unknown. More than half a century later, however, one is struck by the continued validity of his analysis, which reads in parts like a commentary on current developments.

Adorno was ambivalent towards recordings and transcriptions, as is known from the editorial history of other lectures he gave. To him, the reproduction of the freely spoken word blurred its fundamental difference from writing. He considered such reproductions part of ‘the behaviours of the administered world, which even pins down the ephemeral word, whose truth lies in its own transience, to place the speaker under oath.’¹ In contrast to the ephemeral form of oral presentation, however, the content of this lecture is anything but fleeting in nature and justifies the publication of what was spoken back then.

The Vienna speech can be read as a continuation of the 1959 lecture ‘The Meaning of Working through the Past’.² For all its current relevance, then, it has a solid place in Adorno’s output. His deliberately loose reflections served to explain to an Austrian audience the rise of the German NPD, founded in 1964, which was gaining significant popularity as a collective movement on the right. By 1968 it would gain seats in the regional parliaments of seven German states. The narrow defeat of the NPD in the 1969 general election was not yet foreseeable at the time of the lecture. Because of the concrete topic, Adorno made his more fundamental reflections on the historical and social conditions of this development rather cursory. He gave more attention to the socio-psychological dispositions of the Germans and the ways in which fascist agitation functions.

Speaking in 1967, it was obvious that Adorno would invoke the historical experience of National Socialism as a reference point. The publication of the spoken text now augments the two stages of his reflections with a third. In addition to his historical vanishing point, National Socialism, and the immediate context of the speech, namely the 1960s, there is now a present in which an extreme right is once again emerging as an influential political force. This lends Adorno’s words their relevance; yet one should avoid any simplistic equivalence. In his lecture, Adorno himself emphasizes the differences between his time and the Weimar period. Likewise, analogies to National Socialism were tenable only to an extent. The same applies to comparing the present day in 2019 to the time fifty years ago. Reading the speech thus requires that we distinguish between context-dependent and fundamental aspects. Its far-sighted relevance must be seen in relation to its temporal, historical core.

At times these two levels merge, for Adorno was speaking in Vienna not only as a critical analyst of the situation, but also as a witness of the time. He had experienced how willingly the bourgeois elites had supported National Socialism – directly on 3 April 1933, when the University of Frankfurt ended its association with the Institute of Social Research (ISR). Max Horkheimer was dismissed immediately, along with other staff considered undesirable either ‘racially’ or in their worldview. No one, in Rolf Wiggershaus’s description of the events, intervened to defend ‘their ostracized and persecuted colleagues’.³ With the return of the ISR to the old world after the war, circumstances in Germany approached the situation discussed in the lecture.

This decision to move the institute back to Frankfurt was by no means an automatic one. Europe, as the outcome of the war had shown, was the past. The staff at the ISR knew that the future of Western society, and thus their object of analysis, would henceforth be decided in the USA. The American model based on capitalism and democracy expedited the development of serial production, mass consumption and the culture industry – those fields that were central to their theory of society. Tendencies that would shape Europe were anticipated there. Adorno saw this as the manifestation of a historical tendency.⁴ This interpretation discerned a historical development without equating the two models. The difference lay especially, though not exclusively, in the Holocaust, which was more a product of National Socialism than of Fordism.

But the ISR had never lost sight of Germany or National Socialism. A lecture series at Columbia University in the spring of 1945, entitled ‘The Repercussions of National Socialism’, testified to the contradictory situation. On the one hand, the lectures proved how intensively the institute was continuing its analysis of Germany and Europe. On the other hand, it ‘clearly suggested that the crucial problems of Germany and Europe were best studied from the USA.’⁵ Consistently with this, the institute had based its large-scale project Studies in Prejudice on data from the USA. Nonetheless, in 1949, the inner circle of the institute – Horkheimer, Adorno and Friedrich Pollock – made the decision to return. The step was also motivated by a paradoxical hope that, in Germany’s less developed society, rudiments of a time before total socialization, residues of educational ideals and bourgeois subjectivity – in short, European culture – would have stayed alive, having vanished in the fast-moving USA.

Finding the framework for a new beginning in Frankfurt was no easy matter. Horkheimer described in 1948 how, at exploratory talks, the university officials greeted him in a ‘sweet, slick and insincerely honourable’ way: ‘They don’t know yet whether to see me as a relatively influential traveller of America or as the brother of their victims, whose intention is remembrance. They have to decide on the latter.’⁶ But soon after the war, as in the USA, the political direction of the occupying authorities in West Germany had also shifted from anti-fascism to anti-communism. The new line was oriented towards ensuring German loyalty in the incipient East–West conflict. This increased the resonance echo of National Socialism in society, and the institute’s work focused on this.

A group experiment was initiated in 1950, on the model of the Studies, to assess the attitudes of young Germans to the Nazi dictatorship and the occupation, to guilt and democracy, using new empirical methods developed in the USA. The result described a demoscopic phenomenon that is known to this day: a ‘non-public opinion … whose content can deviate very considerably from the content of the public opinion, but whose formulations circulate alongside those of the public opinion like monetary units of a second currency.’⁷ This showed that the convention of civilizatory-democratic chastening was scarcely capable of keeping the latency of fascist elements under control. Any weakness in the higher authority and the appropriate stimuli were enough to let it come rapidly to the surface again, a pattern reminiscent of processes familiar from psychoanalysis. The findings showed early on that fascism does not require any party to survive, and that a party can quickly be formed by falling back on such ‘non-public’ resentments.

This was not welcome news. In the light of the findings of the group experiment, opponents of the institute resorted to a ‘tried and tested procedure which is popular to this day: playing down the dangers from the right, presenting the “exposers” of such dangers as totalitarian moralists and idealists’.⁸ Today, by contrast, the pioneering work of the ISR is as undisputed as its significance for current studies: ‘The significant discussions about right-wing populism are based on questions that could only be asked using the conceptual apparatus derived from the institute’s studies on prejudice’, namely what ‘psychological advantage’ was gained through denigrations, why ‘one’s own (genuine or pretextual) fear’ acted as a justification for resentments, and how ‘racism, anti-Semitism and sexism’, as well as ‘the nation-state, capitalism and racism, are connected.’⁹ The ISR and Adorno himself had spent decades working on such complexes. In the light of this, his declaration in Vienna that he simply wanted to add to a few thoughts was a remarkable understatement.

At the moment of his lecture, then, Ado...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism
• Publisher’s Note
• Afterword by Volker Weiss
• About the Authors