Adorno's Uncompromising Quest for Democracy
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There is almost no review of Adorno’s work beginning in the late 1920s up to the present day that fails to comment on the difficulty of his thought: “terrifyingly dense,” the critics say, “polemical,” “paradoxical,” “myopic,” and “breathless”; “cumbrous,” “tedious,” “heady,” “idiosyncratic,” and even “dandified.” Yet in the last decades of his life, in the turbulent 1950s and 1960s, Adorno became almost a cult figure in the most public debates of West Germany. He did not become a public figure because his thought is difficult, yet he did become a public figure of uneasy thought. Epithets such as “uncompromising,” “concessionless,” and “unforgiving” suit his work better. He wrote for a public about a public to challenge the authority of public opinion. He wrote to reject the generation of a cult following.
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When Adorno returned to West Germany in 1949, he lectured in the public media, universities and research institutes on the difficulties of bringing democracy to a society that he worried was neither deserving of it nor mature enough to rid itself entirely of its all too recent comfortable order of terror. He asked what it meant to bring democracy to a country that had formerly been governed by dictatorship. He looked to the United States, where he had lived for ten years in exile, less for an answer than for a model, indeed a critical model, of the most advanced society. He was obliged by fast-changing world circumstances to think deeply about the end of one war—a total one—and the start of another—a cold one—and, therefore, about the change of alliances that moved at least one half of a divided Germany from deep political enmity to reserved friendship with the United States. He argued that bringing democracy to a country meant less the objective destruction of the remaining edifices of dictatorship—the monuments, buildings, and street-names—than the subjective education of its people. The culture, he remarked, will still be in ruins even after the rubble has been cleared. He asked for “a turn to the subject” through a confrontation with the past by subjects lost to the idola theatri of dictatorship.
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Adorno did not think that every turn toward democracy is necessarily, or could be immediately, an advance in the concept of democracy. Democracy can go wrong. He worried that too fast a democratizing process would more suppress than transform the kind of public opinion that had enabled the dictatorship in the first place (especially when that dictatorship had emerged, as it had in Germany, out of a mass or popular movement). He was surprised by how deeply antidemocratic sentiments remained ingrained in the social consciousness of the German people. He argued that intolerance, complicity, and relations of domination exist not in private opinions as such; they exist, rather, in the public structures and objective conditions that shape those private opinions. One cannot therefore just demand of a public that it change its mind. The public structures mediate what individuals take for granted.
