Introduction

The failure of socialist revolution in Western Europe is often viewed as the key to understanding Adorno's diagnosis of modern society. The very first sentence in his main work, Negative Dialectics, reads: “Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed” (ND: 3). Socialist revolution, which might have overcome the irrationality of the existing bourgeois order and established a rational world, failed to materialize. This is why philosophy remains necessary as a vehicle of radical critique.

Horkheimer and Adorno witnessed the complete victory of fascism in Europe. The Institute for Social Reasearch's empirical studies under Erich Fromm in the 1930s had already discovered the pervasive influence of the authoritarian personality among the German working class. This problem was compounded by the apparently successful reorganization and stabilization of monopoly capitalism under the New Deal in the United States. Its success ensured that a burgeoning consumerist culture was never problematized as a way of life but hailed as a truly democratic expression of the popular will. The multiple crises of the interwar period in Europe and the worldwide Depression appeared to have been overcome, but only at the cost of increased state intervention into the economy and the adoption of a greater planning and regulative role. The Bolshevik revolution in Russia had stagnated into a totalitarian form of state oppression. Rosa Luxemburg's fears about the bureaucratization of the Communist Party seemed to be realized.