The philosophers who are categorized under the heading of the Frankfurt School were deeply influenced by Hegel, such that even when they criticize him, they operate in a conceptual space that he opened up. Some elements of Hegel's influence on them can be summarized as follows: (1) the attention to the holism of society, namely, to how the various social and political institutions hang together in order to secure the reproduction of society at large, and relatedly (2) the integration of the discipline of social philosophy into the body of political philosophy; namely the view that political issues cannot be discussed in abstraction from their sociological and ultimately economic underpinnings. (3) The critique of merely ideal social and political theories, and the attempt to understand and to explain the real mechanisms operating in society, but in such a way as to allow the diagnosis of the progressive or emancipatory potentials hidden in the fabric of social life.
This volume brings together ten new articles (as well as a foreword by Gordon Finlayson, a preface by Eduardo Mendieta, and an introduction by Paul Giladi) about the relation of the Frankfurt School to Hegel. The range of issues discussed is broad and includes, among others, the importance of Hegel's logic and dialectics for social theory, the methodology of the Philosophy of Right and its significance, the nature of social antagonisms, the concept of second nature, and the critique of standard political philosophy. Attention is given to the first, the second, and the third generation of the school, especially to Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, and Axel Honneth. The book also contains an interesting chapter on Friedrich Pollock's neglected Hegelian political economy. Since it is impossible to give a summary of all of the chapters, I feel justified to adopt a tendentious strategy in this review: namely to discuss those chapters that primarily deal with Adorno. In my opinion, Adorno is both the most important philosopher in this school of thought, and simultaneously, despite the wealth of materials published on him, still the least understood.
In the first section of the Introduction, Giladi takes record of Adorno's vexed—love/hate—relationship towards Hegel. On the one hand, Adorno reads Hegel as an arch-idealist, who attempts to ‘devour’ reality into his conceptual machinery. According to Adorno, the rampant idealism of Hegel must be politically translated into some version of authoritarianism or even totalitarianism that does not tolerate any otherness in society. On the other hand, Adorno regards dialectical thought as being characteristically critical, thus avowing himself to be a Hegelian. As Giladi notes, in Adorno's eyes, the true and the false of Hegel can hardly be disentangled; rather, in order to rescue Hegel, a transformation of Hegel's philosophy is needed, a transformation which would supposedly bring about Adorno's own philosophy.
In his chapter on the philosophical foundations of Adorno's mature thought, Espen Hammer argues that there are two incompatible tendencies in Adorno's Negative Dialectics. On the one hand, there is a strong commitment to the values of self-reflection and autonomy, as is characteristic of Kant and Hegel. According to this ‘modernist’ tendency of Adorno, our knowledge is completely conceptually articulated, and is thus amenable to the practice of asking for and giving of reasons. On the other hand, there is a demand for radical transcendence, as is characteristic of Schelling or Heidegger, which posits that epistemic and moral authority does not solely reside in reason. This is the ‘anti-modernist’ tendency of Adorno, according to which ‘true reality is at least in part ineffable and recalcitrant to any standard mode of experiential intake’ (41–42). According to Hammer, Adorno's simultaneous commitment to reason and transcendence makes his thought contradictory or antinomial. The philosophical antinomy thus expressed, Hammer suggests, displays the antinomial structure of modern society (45). The repetitive, reified experience of modern individuals, couched in conceptual terms, cannot, in and of itself, grasp the truth. There is additionally a demand for utopian impulses, which transgress the quotidian rhythm of bourgeois life, but which cannot be conceptually grasped. According to Hammer, Adorno is usually read either as a progressive socialist engaged with criticizing capitalism, or as a Romantic critic of modernity who indulges in despair, while gesturing towards a Messianic horizon. In contrast to both camps, Hammer suggests that Adorno's true position lies in his attempt to hold fast to both horns of the contradiction or the antinomy. This may seem not to be a coherent philosophical position, but Hammer insists that, despite its obscurity, Adorno's programme in the Negative Dialectics must be understood in this contradictory or antinomial way, although he concedes that Adorno's view needs further philosophical clarification.
In their excellent chapter on Hegel's and Adorno's social theory, Borhane Blili-Hamelin and Arvi Särkelä ask a question with which they take Adorno to be primarily concerned: ‘Why do individuals systematically act in ways that reinforce conditions that are obviously incompatible with their happiness and freedom?’ (53). Adorno invents the concept of Bannkreis—a spellbound vicious circle of social reproduction—to name and then answer this question. According to Blili-Hamelin and Särkelä, Bannkreis has essentially a subjective, even psychological component. The circle of social reproduction transforms the subjectivity and the psychology of individuals so as to force them to adapt themselves to the requirements of the social totality; this being the case although the social totality is at odds with their happiness. Adorno specifically puts his finger on two psychological mechanisms: the first he calls ‘concretism’. Concretism is a socially induced psychic pathology, which renders individuals stuck to the immediately given requirements of life, thereby robbing them of their capacity to critically reflect on themselves, on society, and on the future (71–74). The second is the ‘identification with the aggressor’, a concept that Adorno borrows from Anna Freud. For Adorno, the aggressor here need not be a single individual, but may designate impersonal forces of society that dominate individuals. In response to their feeling of powerlessness against the norms and regularities of social life, the affected individuals over-identify with their social roles, an over-identification which renders them the agents of their own repression (74–76).
Interestingly, according to Blili-Hamelin and Särkelä, the origins of the concept of Bannkreis can be traced back to Hegel's notion of Bildung (79–81). In the Philosophy of Right, Bildung does not designate the formal education one receives in schools or in universities. Rather, Bildung is primarily a practical comportment that one gains through actively participating in the affairs of society. Through Bildung, one learns to overcome one's idiosyncratic individuality, thereby becoming habituated to the requirements of social life. Adorno gives Hegel's positive conception of Bildung a negative twist, and asserts that the process of integration in society to a large extent robs individuals of their capacity to distance themselves from social pressures. Thus, the so-called Bildung effectively renders individuals amenable to the phenomenon of ‘concretism’ and makes them uncritically accept the status quo. In short, Hegelian Bildung for Adorno functions as ideology.
In the chapter ‘The passionate nature of freedom’, Federica Gregoratto emphasizes that freedom is not only about agency and action. Indeed, ‘bodily emotional expressions and manifestations as well as the elaboration and articulation of emotions do directly concern freedom’ (249). In Adorno's view, Kantian autonomy requires agents to be totally sovereign over their desires and bodily affects. This kind of autonomy, in Adorno's view, ends up with a sort of interior iron-cage, where the agent is not open to experiencing desires and inclinations that are ‘non-identical’, i.e. cannot be rationally controlled. Against Kant, Adorno holds that genuine freedom requires one to be receptive towards passions and bodily feelings that may eventually carry one away. The occasional, transgressive, somatic impulse—which Adorno calls the ‘addendum’ (das Hinzutretende)—discloses to the agent that natural inclinations cannot be wholly repressed. As the addendum cannot simply be integrated in the normal psychic life, and has essentially a disruptive character on our typically repetitive life, yielding to it may potentially be emancipatory.
Being an Aristotelian, Hegel is more congenial to emotions and bodily desires than Kant is. The question is how Adorno's conception of bodily affections fares with regard to Hegel. In order to elucidate this, Gregoratto compares Hegel's conception of love in the Philosophy of Right with an Adornian conception. According to Hegel, emotions and bodily affections have their rightful place in one's experience of freedom, but these emotions should be tamed within an institutional setting that gives rational form to them. In contrast, in the Adornian conception, passionate love has a radically disruptive character. One should not want the disruptive nature of passionate love to fade away, such that it can be eventually integrated in more rationally ordered psychic life. One should rather be open to potentially transformative effects that passionate love may bring about. In this context, Gregoratto appropriately discusses James Baldwin's novel Another Country, where the passionate encounter of the protagonist has a transformative effect on his life, radically changing the way he understands himself and relates to others.
Much of Adorno's criticism of Hegel, I believe, is based on Adorno's rather careless conflation of Hegel's conception of the ‘understanding’ (Verstand) with ‘reason’ (Vernunft); namely, when Adorno criticizes the domination and the totalization of rationality in Hegel's philosophy, he is in fact criticizing the ‘understanding’, but believes that he is criticizing rationality as such. Now that Hegel's philosophy—thanks to decades of intense scholarship—has become more comprehensible, it is high time to re-evaluate Adorno's relation to Hegel in order to see how Adorno's thought differs from Hegel correctly understood. And this volume is indeed a most welcome contribution in this direction.
