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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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.
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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
Notes
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
Notes
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
Notes
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
Notes
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
Notes
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
Notes
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
Notes
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
Notes
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
Notes
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
Notes
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
Notes
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
Notes
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
Notes
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
Notes
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
Notes
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
Notes
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
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Lecture 1
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PHILOSOPHICAL ELEMENTS OF A THEORY OF SOCIETY
1964
Theodor W. Adorno
Edited by Tobias ten Brink and Marc Phillip Nogueira
Translated by Wieland Hoban
polity
Copyright page
First published in German as Philosophische Elemente einer Theorie der Gesellschaft © Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2008
This English edition © Polity Press, 2019
Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7947-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7948-8 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Adorno, Theodor W., 1903-1969, author.
Title: Philosophical elements of a theory of society, 1964 / Theodor W. Adorno.
Other titles: Philosophische Elemente einer Theorie der Gesellschaft, 1964. English
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, [2019] | First published in German as Philosophische Elemente einer Theorie Der Gesellschaft, 1964. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018029142 (print) | LCCN 2018031559 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745694917 (Epub) | ISBN 9780745679471 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745679488 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Sociology--Philosophy.
Classification: LCC HM590 (ebook) | LCC HM590 .A3713 2019 (print) | DDC 301.01--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029142
Typeset in 10.5/12 Sabon by Fakenham Prepress Solutions
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon
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EDITORS’ FOREWORD
The lecture course Philosophical Elements of a Theory of Society is the eighth of fifteen transcribed courses by Adorno. Here, in the context of an introductory discussion of the philosophical traditions on which sociological theory formation rests, he develops a critique of both sociology and philosophy. Adorno emphasizes that theoretical work requires a specific mediation between philosophy and sociology. As well as criticizing the ‘fetishism of method’ in sociology, which seeks to impose rules on thought, and insisting that theoretical thought about society cannot be formulated simply through empirical findings, he also questions a characteristic of philosophy since the Enlightenment: the urge to create uniform systems that reflect bourgeois rule. Sociology and philosophy must face their own immanent critique – thus Adorno’s postulation. Following on from Marx, he develops philosophical elements of a social theory that break through the compulsion to achieve identity and lack of ambiguity in sociological theory formation in order to make ideas fruitful for critical sociological analysis and theory through an emphatic consideration of unregulated experience. Nonetheless, philosophical reflection always needs sociology too, so that it does not fall for the old idealistic illusion that the totality of real conditions could be grasped through thought alone. The dialectical method of philosophical interpretation must prove itself in relation to the ‘material’, the results of sociological research that are placed in different experimental situations and unfamiliar ‘constellations’.
The theory of society originated in philosophy whilst, at the same time, it attempts to reformulate the questions posed by the latter by defining society as the substratum which traditional philosophy called eternal essences or spirit. Just as philosophy mistrusted the deceit of appearances and sought after interpretation, so the more smoothly the façade of society presents itself, the more profoundly does theory mistrust it. Theory seeks to give a name to what secretly holds the machinery together. (Adorno, ‘Sociology and Empirical Research’, in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby [London: Heinemann], 1976, p. 68)
In working with the transcripts from the tapes of Adorno’s unscripted lectures, we preserved their oral character. We corrected the transcripts – the tape recordings have not survived, sadly – only when clarity of content and syntactical structure required it in order for the text to be readable. Accordingly, punctuation marks such as colons and dashes are used more often than would be the case in a fully composed text. Obvious typographical errors that altered the grammar or meaning, as well as incomplete or interrupted sentences, were corrected or augmented without comment whenever there was no doubt as to the intended result. In a small number of cases, and only when they lacked any rhetorical significance, repetitions or uses of such particles as ‘so’, ‘well’ or ‘and’ were removed. Extensive portions of missing text are marked with […].
On the whole, the quality of the surviving transcripts varied considerably. In Lecture 13 especially, we felt obliged to cut small text fragments because, owing to technical problems with the tape, they were missing a sufficient amount of content to be incomprehensible. In four cases, missing transcripts had to be replaced with notes taken by Hilmar Tillack, which are more summary in nature. As the reader can see from the gaps between the lecture dates – which always took place on Tuesdays and Thursdays – there are four lectures missing between the second (15 May) and third (2 June) lectures. Two were cancelled because of public holidays, on 19 May (Whitsun) and 28 May (Corpus Christi). It was impossible to establish whether the other two lectures were also cancelled or have simply not survived. Two others are missing between the fourth (4 June) and fifth (16 June) lectures. As Adorno remarks in the text, these were cancelled; the content of Lecture 5 also follows on directly from Lecture 4. Lectures 14 (16 July) and 15 (21 July), which were documented as notes, were swapped in the surviving manuscripts, as Adorno states at the end of Lecture 13 (14 July) that he will expand on the question of ‘system’ in the ‘next session’, which takes place in the notes only in Lecture 15. The notes were therefore integrated into the full text in the correct order.
The explanations in the notes, the index and the overview are intended to serve the reader’s understanding. The related passages and explanations from Adorno’s writings clarify some of the oral elaborations, as well as showing the many connections between his lectures and his written work. We have also included explanations of certain theoretical and methodological concepts of authors who are now little known, perhaps even unknown. In order to clarify elements of argumentation that are important for the larger context of the lectures, especially when more expansive questions are only touched on here, these have been quoted at greater length. The overview offers the reader some assistance in finding passages on certain topics.
LECTURE 112 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 German school, especially from Heinrich Rickert’s18 concept of the idiographic,19 namely the method in the humanities that focuses on the description and understanding of the individual – this concept of understanding as an attempt to grasp from within is actually profoundly opposed to the positivist impulse. And it is no coincidence that a passage by Kant that can be considered one of the foundational texts of the positivist scientific mindset, namely the ‘amphiboly chapter’ from the Critique of Pure Reason,20 includes a fierce invective against a theory of his immediate predecessor Leibniz that criticizes understanding the matter itself from within, as is inherent in the concept of rationalism, in the harshest terms.
As an aside, to draw your attention directly to what makes this structure special in Weber’s work, what we find is that – in agreement with Durkheim – he now does not want to view this ‘understanding’ as a psychological understanding of separate individuals but, rather, sets himself the task of understanding social behaviour from within as social behaviour, not in terms of the subjective motivations of the individuals. He does this for a very profound and legitimate reason: he knows that, in so far as we act socially, in so far as we move within the context of society, we generally act not as psychological beings but actually as functionaries – to use a term that is fashionable today, one might say as ‘role-bearers’ within the social context – and the key role carried by the concept of the rational, of ‘rationality’ in Weber’s sociology, can be understood precisely from this perspective. Rationality plays such a decisive part in Weber’s work because rationality, as the organ of adjustment to reality – or, as contemporary psychoanalysis calls it, testing reality – is removed from psychology, from the unconscious of the respective individuals, but can simultaneously be understood on the basis of its objective mechanism, namely the mechanism of calculation. That means one can grasp from within, if you will, what makes a person act socially. To accept or turn down a position, for example, to make some decisions as a businessman or a politician – this can essentially be understood using the same rationale that also governs the respective person’s own behaviour. And this fact, which is initially indisputable, was what led Weber to make rationality the key category of sociology – not that he thought everything happens rationally in society; on the contrary, completely irrational categories such as that of social prestige, to name only one example, play an extremely important part in Weber’s sociology – but one can say that he saw this as the point of access where social behaviour can be understood from within, where something like a coincidence, if you will, can be brought about between the observing scientific subject and the object, namely the socially acting person or persons.
If one wanted to develop a little further this thought, and which is naturally not formulated explicitly by Max Weber, one could say that the incredible emphasis he places on the concept of rationality suggests something almost like the concept of ‘objective spirit’, which, of the many things that positivist science finds offensive about Hegel’s philosophy, is probably one of the most offensive. Because Weber makes this concept of rationality so central, however, he arrives at something that stands in extreme contrast precisely to the notion of a non-theoretical sociology which assesses individual phenomena only by their ideal type. And I can only repeat here, in the context of the problems we are seeking to investigate, what I once had occasion to say in Heidelberg, namely that, with Weber, as with most theorists of any significance, those parts which do not appear in Baedeker,21 by which I mean the things that they did not say programmatically about their own intentions, are more important than what they did say. And if I can give you some reading advice in this context, because I do think that many or some of you will read texts such as Economy and Society or the Sociology of Religion in connection with these lectures, it is to concentrate far more on what Weber does, on the investigations he carries out and their own structures, than on what he says about it in methodological reflections. He is a thinker – and I would call this a strong argument in his favour – whose analyses possess far greater theoretical force than his purported epistemology. So if you look at Weber, this atheoretical and neutral thinker who was sworn to presenting what is the case, who wanted to deal only with what is the case and not let in any thoughts about what should be the case, you will find that a major tendency running through society throughout history is constructed in his work, namely the one he posits with his own central category of rationality. Because he retains rationality as the ultimate authority for the sake of the objective validity of mathematics, because of its irresistibility – it is strange how mathematics creeps into the unmathematical Weber’s thinking at every turn, something that would merit examination – he views the overall tendency of society as a tendency of progressive rationalization, an ever-advancing development in the calculation of all socially relevant actions in the sense of a probability calculation – not only as a heightening of rational and mathematical procedures that are available to society. For Weber, this point, namely the development of the procedures in themselves, was only of secondary interest; what was most important was that, in his view, according to his theory, which he supports with extremely historical material, calculation according to the model of such a probability affects more and more sectors of society, that society itself is increasingly becoming rationally controllable and controlled. The famous thesis of the ‘disenchantment of the world’ from the lecture ‘Science as a Profession and a Vocation’22 is quite simply an expression of this tendency, a tendency that, according to Weber, is inherent, is immanent, in the principle of rationality itself; this rationality must spread to ever greater sectors of life. This, he argues, goes hand in hand with a change in the mechanisms of power, without which he cannot imagine society, to rational mechanisms of power – that is, mechanisms of power that are dealt with by a social group which, as he envisages it, is ultimately no more than an executive body of this rationality itself, namely bureaucracy. And the thesis of the inexorable bureaucratisation du monde, which really constitutes the true historico-philosophical aspect of Weber’s sociology, and in which it sometimes almost approaches certain Spenglerian perspectives of becoming frozen in late Caesarist periods,23 is derived from this equation of bureaucracy and rationality.
So you see how Weber’s sociology, simply because of certain observations it makes on the basis of the weight that certain categories bear in it, without any deliberate allocation of systematic precedence by the author, is ultimately forced into a theoretical construction of society. And I think that, if there is an argument for the science of society actually to view theory not as a deficiency but as something that lies in its own nature, this can perhaps be shown most convincingly e contrario, namely in the fact that a way of thinking such as Weber’s – which viewed itself very much as a specialized science, and thus stood in the starkest contrast to the notion of a comprehensive, overarching historico-philosophical construction – became a form of theory in spite of itself, both out of its own momentum and because of the oppositions affected by it. But this goes further. It goes without saying that a way of thinking like Weber’s was highly ill-disposed towards a concept such as dialectic, something that is deeply rooted in philosophical speculation and cannot be separated from philosophical, specifically critical-philosophical, reflection. And this hostility was expressed in Weber’s scientific mindset, after all, in his polemical stance towards materialist dialectic, a position that, as most of you probably know, is the real motive for Weber spending such a massive amount of time and work on his sociology of religion, and why he plunged even into the most obscure exotic materials: in order to attack one of the centrepieces of Marxist dialectic, namely the principle that the so-called spiritual superstructure is dependent on the economic substructure. Now, it is a most notable fact that, although one does not encounter a positive use of the word ‘dialectic’ anywhere in Weber’s œuvre, its own dialectical elements are extremely evident. Various things were said about this at the Heidelberg sociology congress, for example in Ms Jaerisch’s presentation.24 I will name only two such dialectical elements: firstly, the tendency of ‘charismatic authority’25 – that is, forms of rule that rest on the genuinely or supposedly supernatural, exceptional vocation of a leader, such as the political rule of Muhammad in Arabia – to change over time into traditional rule, to be inherited and thus also to produce firm, fixed, objectified, concrete forms of rule, and ultimately even a bureaucracy. To understand this properly, you must know that Weber’s method consists in setting such ideal types – charismatic authority, traditional authority and rational authority, for example – apart from one another through very exact, somewhat legalistic definitions, and then his plan is simply to observe whether some social phenomena he is investigating correspond to the one or the other type – how near or how far from it, how much they deviate from it – without assigning these types any meaning, let alone movement of their own. But, by examining not only such phenomena as the charismatic type of authority I just used to illustrate this but also their development, he is ultimately forced not only to see them to a certain extent as something autonomous that exhibits tendencies of movement in itself – insight into such immanent tendencies of movement in a phenomenon, even such an insight is already an element of theory, for such a tendency of movement is not a fact one can objectively determine – but, in addition, he is even forced to concede that such phenomena change substantially and in a very particular way, and with them their ideal type. So one could say that a historical structure is produced between the type of charismatic authority and the type of traditional authority, and thus that he teaches something like an overarching structure of social movement, and beyond this such a structure in the form of a movement in oppositions; thus he concedes, working from within the material itself, something like a recognition of dialectical necessities or tendencies that is actually irreconcilable with Weber’s sociological approach. Or a similar dialectical phenomenon in his work is that rational bureaucracy, which is meant to be part of the rational, transparent and fundamentally democratic form of rule, which I already touched on earlier as Weber’s central thesis, becomes firmly established and inevitably turns into anti-democratic and irrational rule. As an aside, this is a theoretical insight with which the supposedly so atheoretical Weber very accurately predicted developments in large sectors of society directly after his time. One of the strangest things today is that, if one reads something like Weber’s invectives against Leninist Bolshevism from the last years of his life,26 one sees that he prophesied with incredible precision, based purely on the concept of rationally bureaucratic rule, that hardening of democracy towards the people on whose behalf it claims to act which came to terrible fruition in the later history of Bolshevik Russia, as we all know today. Here we find something like Weber’s final legacy, an unconscious legacy of old cyclical theories of society, something of this bourgeois conviction that, where democracy fulfils its own concept most perfectly, it will inevitably regress, with a sort of demonic necessity, to rule – blind rule. Now, ladies and gentlemen, let us end with this as a first anticipatory illustration of how theoretical elements compulsively assert themselves within an anti-theoretical way of thinking. I will speak to you about the next conclusions to be drawn from this in the lecture on Thursday.
Notes
1
The lecture schedule at the University of Frankfurt for the 1964 summer semester listed this course under the title ‘Elements of a Philosophical Theory of Society’.
2
Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) gave an introductory seminar course in the 1964 summer semester entitled ‘Introductory Seminar Course in Philosophy’.
3
The title was ‘Professor of Philosophy and Sociology’.
4
See Max Weber,
Collected Methodological Writings
, ed. Hans Henrik Bruun and Sam Whimster, trans. Hans Henrik Bruun (London: Routledge, 2012).
5
Adorno is referring to the so-called positivism dispute [
Positivismusstreit
], one of the unresolved fundamental discussions in sociology. Prominent opponents in the dispute during the 1960s were Adorno and Popper. See
The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology
, ed. Theodor W. Adorno, Hans Albert, Ralf Dahrendorf, Jürgen Habermas, Harald Pilot and Karl R. Popper (London: Heinemann, 1976).
6
The 15th German Sociology Congress took place in Heidelberg from 28 to 30 April 1964, directly before lectures began, under the title ‘Max Weber and Sociology’.
7
Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), who was teaching at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, at the time, gave a presentation on the topic of ‘Industrialism and Capitalism’ at the 15th German Sociology Congress; it was sharply criticized by some panel members. See Marcuse’s presentation and concluding remarks as well as the contributions to the discussion by Georg Weippert, Reinhard Bendix, Benjamin Nelson, Georges Friedman, Richard F. Behrendt and Wolfgang J. Mommsen, in
Verhandlungen des 15. Deutschen Soziologentages: Max Weber und die Soziologie heute
, ed. Otto Stammer (Tübingen: Mohr, 1965), pp. 161–218.
8
The phrase
Index Verborum Prohibitorum
[Index of Forbidden Words] refers to the
Index Librorum Prohibitorum
[Index of Forbidden Books] used by the Catholic Church until 1966.
9
The Rules of Sociological Method
(1895) is one of the central works by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858–1917). See Emile Durkheim,
The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method
, ed. Steven Lukes, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).
10
Durkheim summarizes his critique as follows:
Briefly, in his consideration of historical development, Comte has taken his own notion of it, which is one that does not differ greatly from that commonly held. It is true that, viewed from a distance, history does take on somewhat neatly this simple aspect of a series. One perceives only a succession of individuals all moving in the same direction, because they have the same human nature. Moreover, since it is inconceivable that social evolution can be anything other than the development of some human idea, it appears entirely natural to define it by the conception that men have of it. But if one proceeds down this path one not only remains in the realm of ideology, but assigns to sociology as its object a concept which has nothing peculiarly sociological about it. (Ibid., p. 119)
11
Regarding the concept of ideal type in Weber, see Max Weber,
Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology
, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 6–22. He writes:
For the purposes of a typological scientific analysis it is convenient to treat all irrational, affectually determined elements of behavior as factors of deviation from a conceptually pure type of rational action. […] Only in this way is it possible to assess the causal significance of irrational factors as accounting for the deviations from this type. The construction of a purely rational course of action in such cases serves the sociologist as a type (ideal type) which has the merit of clear understandability and lack of ambiguity. By comparison with this it is possible to understand the ways in which actual action is influenced by irrational factors of all sorts, such as affects and errors, in that they account for the deviation from the line of conduct which would be expected on the hypothesis that the action were purely rational. (Ibid., p. 6)
12
See Max Weber,
The Sociology of Religion
, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).
13
See Max Weber,
The Rational and Social Foundations of Music
, ed. and trans. D. Martindale, J. Riedel and G. Neuwirth (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1958).
14
The sociologist George Andrew Lundberg (1895–1966) was one of the leading exponents of neopositivism and an advocate of mathematical-statistical approaches in sociology. He espoused the principle of avoiding value judgements and operationalism. In 1943 he became the thirty-third president of the American Sociological Association. See George A. Lundberg,
Foundations of Sociology
(New York: Macmillan, 1939) and
Social Research: A Study in Methods of Gathering Data
(New York: Longmans, Green, 1942).
15
Samuel Andrew Stouffer (1900–60), a statistician and pollster, was the forty-second president of the American Sociological Association. See Samuel A. Stouffer,
Social Research to Test Ideas: Selected Writings
(New York: Free Press, 1962) and
Measurement and Prediction
, ed. Samuel A. Stouffer, Louis Guttman, Edward A. Suchman, Paul F. Lazarsfeld et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950).
16
One of the studies by Paul Lazarsfeld (1901–79),
Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 2002), which he carried out together with Marie Jahoda and Hans Zeisel and published in 1933, is today considered a classic of empirical-sociological research. In 1933 Lazarsfeld went to the USA, where from 1935 to 1937 he headed the Office of Radio Research, which was initially located in Princeton and moved to Columbia University (New York) in 1939. In 1938 Adorno joined Lazarsfeld’s Princeton Radio Research Project.
17
Weber begins the explanation of his ‘basic sociological terms’ with the words: ‘Sociology (in the sense in which this highly ambiguous word is used here) is a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences’ (Weber,
Economy and Society
, p. 4). Regarding the concept of ‘interpretive understanding’ in Weber’s sociology, see Max Weber, ‘On Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology’, in
Collected Methodological Writings
, pp. 273–301.
18
The Baden School was a philosophical movement within neo-Kantianism that existed between 1890 and 1930, primarily at the universities of Heidelberg, Freiburg and Strasbourg. Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915), one of its most prominent members, distinguished between nomothetic and idiographic sciences. This distinction corresponds to Heinrich Rickert’s (1863–1936) differentiation between natural science, which seeks generalized laws, and cultural science, which emphasizes the meaning of the particular. See Wilhelm Windelband, ‘History and Natural Science’ (1894), trans. Guy Oakes, in
History and Theory
19 (1980), pp. 223–35.
19
The philosopher Heinrich Rickert completed his Habilitation thesis ‘The Object of Knowledge’ in 1891. In 1915 Rickert was appointed at the University of Heidelberg.
20
In the chapter on amphiboly from the
Critique of Pure Reason
, Kant questions Leibniz’s claim that the interior of things can only be recognized through the intellect. See Immanuel Kant,
Critique of Pure Reason
, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 368ff.
21
