The Nation Magazine, DECEMBER 15, 2020
The Scars of Democracy
Theodor Adorno and the crises of liberalism.
By Peter E. Gordon
On April 6, 1967, Theodor W. Adorno accepted an invitation from the
Association of Socialist Students at the University of Vienna to deliver
a lecture on “aspects of the new right-wing extremism.” The topic held a
special urgency: The National Democratic Party, a recently founded
neofascist group in West Germany, was surging in popularity and would
soon surpass the official 5 percent threshold needed to secure
representation in seven of Germany’s 11 regional parliaments. In Europe
after World War II, Adorno was highly esteemed not only for his
philosophical and cultural writings but also for his analysis of the
fascist tendencies that still survived in the so-called liberal
democratic orders of the capitalist West, and the students and socialist
activists gathered in Vienna were eager to hear his thoughts.
BOOKS IN REVIEW
ASPECTS OF THE NEW RIGHT-WING EXTREMISM
By Theodor W. Adorno; Wieland Hoban, trans.
The lecture, though brief, addressed the specific instances of a
neofascist resurgence in postwar West Germany. And it spoke to the
general question of what fascism is and how we should think about
challenges to liberal democracy that come from the extreme right.
Liberal democracies, Adorno argued, are by their nature fragile; they
are riven with contradictions and vulnerable to systemic abuse, and
their stated ideals are so frequently violated in practice that they
awaken resentment, opposition, and a yearning for extrasystemic
solutions. Those who defend democracy must confront the persistent
inequalities that breed this resentment and that prevent democracy from
becoming what it claims to be.
Newly transcribed from a tape recording and now published in an English
translation under the title Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism, the
lecture reminds us of Adorno’s political engagement into the late 1960s.
It should also serve as a corrective to the popular misconception of
Adorno as a philosopher of unrelieved darkness and negativity who took
refuge in what Georg Lukács scornfully described as the “Grand Hotel
Abyss.” After his years of exile in the United States and his return to
Frankfurt, Adorno dedicated himself not just to philosophy but to the
rebuilding of the Federal Republic of Germany as well, and he spoke
frequently, in person and on the radio, exhorting his audiences to
embrace the democratic ideals of self-criticism, education, and
enlightenment.
For those not blind to the resurgence of authoritarian movements across
the globe, the earlier spasm of neofascist enthusiasm in mid-’60s West
Germany may serve as a sobering confirmation of Adorno’s claim that
fascist movements are not exceptional to liberal democracy but rather
are internal and structural signs of its failure. This insight—we might
even call it the essential theme in the Frankfurt School’s dialectical
assessment of fascism—is easily misunderstood, and not just by
conservative apologists who enable the forces now threatening democracy.
Some critics on the left are unwilling to see fascism as an enduring
threat but confine it to an irrelevant past, dismissing fears of its
resurgence as a symptom of liberal hysteria. Anyone who has read Adorno
will know that this misses the mark. Reading his lecture during the
current era of neofascist revival can help us appreciate the enduring
power of his claims.
Of the many misrepresentations about Adorno that circulate among critics
on the left and cranks on the right, perhaps the most persistent is the
notion that he was a man of great wealth who preferred to luxuriate in
the esoteric artifacts of high modernism and had little patience or
aptitude for practical politics. The actual story is more complicated.
Born in 1903 in Frankfurt, Adorno grew up in a middle-class household.
His father, a wine merchant of Jewish descent, was well-off but hardly
rich, and young Teddie received a serious education in music from his
mother and his aunt, both accomplished musicians. But he was also drawn
to modern philosophy and social thought—the classics (Kant and Hegel)
and the works of rebels (Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud)—which
he read in what became his characteristic style, playing them off one
another and exposing their contradictions, until what was once settled
doctrine became an endless dialectic.
After gymnasium, Adorno attended the University of Frankfurt, where he
plunged into philosophy and wrote on Husserlian phenomenology and
psychoanalysis. It was there that he met Max Horkheimer, who would soon
assume the directorship of the Institute for Social Research (the
so-called Frankfurt School), and fell in with a circle of left-wing
intellectuals and social critics that included Walter Benjamin, who
inspired Adorno to sharpen the blade of his criticism, applying it
ruthlessly to the details of capitalism and modern life. Adorno’s first
book, a study of Kierkegaard, bore such a close resemblance in style and
method to Benjamin’s notoriously difficult study of German Baroque drama
that the historian Gershom Scholem, a mutual acquaintance, called it a
kind of plagiarism.
Adorno was hardly a political activist, but he was instinctively
critical of the interwar years’ liberal politics, and he and his
like-minded colleagues found a congenial home in the Institute for
Social Research, which was playfully known among the students in
Frankfurt as Café Marx. There they framed even their most abstractly
philosophical insights in the context of concrete problems in history
and society, and no matter how far they strayed from the Marxist or
neo-Marxist agenda of the institute’s founders, a dialectical
understanding of the relation between philosophy and lived experience
remained a constant theme in their work.
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Forced into exile in 1933, Adorno and many of his Frankfurt School
colleagues became preoccupied with fascism as an object of cultural and
sociological inquiry. Critical theory, in fact, emerged from this
crucible. Adorno and other members of the institute struggled to explain
how fascism took hold, how it appealed to diverse constituencies in
democratic elections, and how, once in power, it transformed the state.
Though Adorno seldom descended from philosophical to institutional
analysis, he shared with his colleagues a conviction that fascism was
not just a German problem but a human one, a pathology that threatened
all modern societies and could be explained only with multidisciplinary
tools that combined political science, sociology, and even psychology.
These efforts carried the risk that in their use of such a method,
fascism would lose its specificity, becoming inflated into a universal
affliction with few distinguishing marks of time or place. In their best
work, however, Adorno and his colleagues kept their focus on what he
called “micrological” criticism, sustaining a dialectic between the
general and the particular.
This emphasis on the particular is immediately evident once we shift our
attention from soaring, speculative classics like Dialectic of
Enlightenment, written by Adorno and Horkheimer, to more empirical work
such as the studies of Nazism by Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer,
members of the Frankfurt School whose names too often pass without
mention today but whose works were once central to the institute’s
anti-fascist program. Nor should we neglect exercises in social
psychology like The Authoritarian Personality and Group Experiment, in
which Adorno and his fellow researchers marshaled quantitative and
qualitative data to develop a comprehensive understanding of the
potential for fascism in a democratic citizenry, delving deep into the
psyche but never failing to note that authoritarianism is not reducible
to individual psychology but ultimately reflects the objective
conditions of modern society. The famous F-scale, introduced in 1950,
was designed as a measure for broad trends—such as conventionalism,
rigidity, and hostility to imagination—that promised to explain why
modern subjects might feel drawn to fascism or possess few of the
critical resources necessary to resist it.
Reading The Authoritarian Personality and Group Experiment today, one is
struck by the wealth of empirical detail, the readiness to discern
authoritarian tendencies not only in specific political institutions but
also in the most commonplace features of everyday life. Fascism, the
studies argued, is not a sublime evil or a pathology for which there is
a simple remedy. It is something far more unsettling: a latent but
pervasive feature of bourgeois modernity. With this broadened
definition, one could hardly take comfort in the defeat of fascism at
the war’s end. In that 1959 lecture, Adorno made this point explicit:
“The past that one would like to evade is still very much alive.”
For Adorno, fascism’s deeper persistence was undeniable. Hundreds and
even thousands of former Nazi Party officials had succeeded in avoiding
scrutiny for their wartime conduct and continued their careers in the
Federal Republic of Germany without interruption. But fascism was also,
in his words, born from “the general situation of society.” Liberal
democracy contained in itself a drive toward standardization, powered by
the commodity form, that reduced objects as well as human subjects to
items for exchange. Stripped of their differences, individuals dwindled
into an unreflective mass that loathed the very thought of resistance
and was primed for submission. Fascism could never be addressed or
defeated if it was seen merely as liberalism’s other, an exotic pathogen
that had come from the outside. It was composed not of rare elements but
of the base metals that are the building materials of our common world.
In a 1959 lecture, Adorno declared, “I consider the survival of National
Socialism within democracy to be potentially more menacing than the
survival of fascist tendencies against democracy.”
This understanding of fascism as something internal, not alien, to
liberal democracy may also reflect Adorno’s history. Even before the
rise of Hitler and the Nazis, he was conscious of the latent violence
that courses through the veins of bourgeois society, and in later years
he was not embarrassed to invoke even the most casual memories as
evidence. In his postwar collection of aphorisms, Minima Moralia, he
recalled the schoolyard bullies of his childhood, writing, “The five
patriots who set upon a single schoolfellow, thrashed him and, when he
complained to the teacher, defamed him as a traitor to the class—are
they not the same as those who tortured prisoners to refute claims by
foreigners that prisoners were tortured?” The suggestion may sound
forced, but only if one clings to the illusion that Nazism was all high
politics without roots in everyday conduct. Having witnessed the Nazis’
rise, Adorno harbored no such illusions; well before the Nazi seizure of
power, he was in the grips of an “unconscious fear” that the future
would bring catastrophe.
And catastrophe did come. With the Nazis in power, the new laws of the
Third Reich forced Adorno into exile. First he attempted to restart his
career at Oxford, then he abandoned this effort and joined Horkheimer
and other colleagues from the institute in the United States. His
parents managed to survive only by slender odds. Remaining in Germany
after their son had taken up residence in New York, they were arrested
during the wave of persecution that followed Kristallnacht, the
state-sponsored pogrom against Jewish businesses and homes. His father
was beaten and sustained a serious injury to his eye, and the offices of
the family firm were ransacked and confiscated; Jewish property could
simply be claimed by the state. Eventually his parents were released,
though the experience left them shaken. They escaped via Cuba to the
United States, but the specter of fascism continued to haunt the entire
family.
Such experiences impressed Adorno with a visceral sense that fascism is
not simply a political form but also a species of regression, a violent
descent into archaic modes of collective behavior that could be
understood only by appealing to the categories of anthropology and
psychoanalysis. Prompted by Freud’s essay “Group Psychology and the
Analysis of the Ego,” he came to believe that human groups display an
instinctive resistance to change and a longing for authority. The group,
Freud wrote, “wants to be ruled and oppressed,” and it looks to its
heroes not for enlightenment but for “strength, or even violence.” From
psychoanalysis, Adorno also took the crucial lesson that the cathexis
between a group and its leader is primarily libidinal, not rational, and
any attempt to explain mass politics purely in institutional terms or as
an expression of rational self-interest will miss the underlying factors
that make authoritarianism an enduring temptation.
The analysis of fascism as a persistent threat within liberal democracy
is a recurrent theme in Adorno’s work. This is true of The Authoritarian
Personality and Group Experiment and in the public lectures he delivered
after his return to Germany. He was deeply troubled by the emergence of
neofascist organizations like the National Democratic Party, as it was,
in his view, a sign that the spirit of the old fascism had never been
truly vanquished. He was equally troubled by the fact that the public
did not show much interest in committing itself to the difficult process
of “working through the past.” In his speeches, if not in his published
philosophy, he addressed such concerns with clarity and moral urgency.
The 1967 lecture on the new right-wing extremism is only one modest and
rather brief specimen of this work, but it deftly encapsulates his
general view that fascism was never really defeated but resides in the
everyday facets of both social structure and personal conduct and must
always be combated anew.
In that lecture, Adorno warned against taking a merely “contemplative”
view of the recent events, as if politics were a series of natural
phenomena, “like whirlwinds or meteorological disasters.” Adopting such
a stance, he said, was already a sign of resignation, as if one could do
away with oneself as a political subject. “How these things will
continue, and the responsibility for how they will continue,” he
declared, “that ultimately lies in our hands.”
In the spring of 1967, few on the left could feel optimistic about the
prospects for real democracy in West Germany. Since its founding in
1949, it had remained in the grips of the Christian Democratic Union and
Konrad Adenauer, a staunch conservative who was 73 years old when he
became the nation’s chancellor. He was succeeded by another CDU
politician, Ludwig Erhard, who was replaced in 1966 by his colleague
Kurt Georg Kiesinger, who formed a coalition government with the
recently reorganized Social Democratic Party.
The SPD’s resurgence might have seemed like a glimpse of light. But in
1966 and ‘67, West Germany suffered its first major setback when a
recession punctured its famous “economic miracle.” Unemployment climbed
to at least half a million people by early 1967, and the once marginal
National Democratic Party began to grow, its membership surging by 1968.
The NPD was by no means the first far-right party to appear in West
Germany. The Socialist Reich Party, a group of avowed neo-Nazis, was
founded after the war but banned in 1952; the German Reich Party and
related groups appeared in its wake, but by the mid-’60s the Reich Party
had dissolved. The NPD, however, drew many of its leaders and members
from the older groups and posed a far greater threat. Adolf von Thadden,
a prominent nobleman who was an active Nazi during the war, held the
party’s reins of power, even if he was not at first its titular head;
after internal struggles, he gained control in 1967. In local meetings
and when assured that the national media would not take notice, the NPD
railed against “international Judaism and the Jewish press,” insisting
that the Third Reich had committed no crimes against humanity. They
claimed that Nazism had been supported by “the best German elements” and
that it was now the NPD’s mission to redeem the people from their
national humiliation and make Germany great again. In 1966 the party
gained entry into the Landtags, or regional parliaments, in Hessen and
Bavaria, and it appeared poised to win inclusion in many others across
West Germany.
For Adorno, the NPD manifested some of the tendencies he examined in his
earlier work on fascism and authoritarianism, and he took note of its
appearance in a global context, where the distinctions of national
identity were losing their political relevance. Animated by a “pathic”
nationalism in an age of great-power blocs, parties like the NPD would
“take on their demonic, their genuinely destructive character precisely
when the objective situation has deprived them of substance.”
Paradoxically, this element of unreality may be the most distinctive
feature of fascism: It evacuates politics of its content and reduces it
to the mere circulation of propaganda. The old fascism and the new are
alike in their ingenious use of propaganda without a higher purpose, as
if the only aim were the perfection of mass psychology for its own sake.
“There was never a truly, fully developed theory in fascism,” Adorno
said; instead, it stripped politics of any higher sense, reducing it to
sheer power and “unconditional domination.”
Such considerations helped explain why fascist movements exhibit such
flexibility in ideology, or what Adorno called “conceptless praxis.”
Emerging from a conformist society that had enfeebled the capacity for
resistance, fascism was less a distinctive political form than a
radicalization of what modern society was already becoming: cold,
repressive, thoughtless. Fascism, for Adorno, was therefore not an
excrescence that could be simply removed from an otherwise healthy organism.
Adorno was not indifferent, of course, to the fact that some individuals
may be drawn to right-wing extremism for psychological reasons. Every
society, he admitted, has its residue of “incorrigibles.” But a mass
movement is not made of them alone: It consists of ordinary men and
women who are no more irrational than the world they inhabit. If their
politics are irrational, this is only because they make explicit the
systemic irrationality of the social whole.
The proponents of centrist liberalism will insist that fascism be
expunged so that democracy can carry on just as before. But for Adorno,
democracy is not a full-fledged reality that fascism has damaged; it is
an ideal that is yet to be realized and that, as long as it betrays its
promise, will continue to spawn movements of resentment and paranoid
rebellion. Some of Adorno’s critics—and even some of his
admirers—persisted in thinking of him as a radical pessimist who
disparaged the ideals of the Enlightenment and felt that progress itself
was a myth. But he was far more dialectical in his thinking: He wanted
to overcome the false ideology of progress so that its truth could come
to light. No matter how far he may have traveled from the explanatory
orthodoxies of neo-Marxism, he recognized that democracy remained merely
formal in its modern expression and not concrete. The systems that now
boast of themselves as democratic will never be adequate to their stated
ideal, he insisted, as long as they are premised on irrationality and
exclusion. Few lines by Adorno serve as a better summation of his
concept of fascist movements than his 1967 claim that they are “the
wounds, the scars of a democracy that, to this day, has not yet lived up
to its own concept.”
Readers of Adorno’s lecture today cannot help but recognize in his
warnings a reflection of the current global situation. In Germany a
neofascist resurgence has once again taken root with Alternative für
Deutschland, a far-right and anti-immigrant movement that in 2017
secured 94 seats in the Bundestag to become the body’s third-largest
party. Across Europe and around the rest of the world, this trend in
neofascist or authoritarian politics is now ascendant (in Turkey,
Israel, India, Brazil, Russia, Hungary, Poland, and the United States).
The extravagant notion that the past is utterly past—that its alterity
inhibits us from drawing any analogies across differences of time and
space—will hold us in its grip only if we see history as broken into
islands, each one obeying laws entirely its own.
Although Adorno warned against “schematic analogies,” he also knew that
the image of the past as a foreign country is in error. As historians of
American racism have long shown, there are more continuities between the
past and the present than apologists would care to admit. (Nor should we
forget that the Nazis drew instruction from racist policies in the
United States.) Fascism, too, casts a long shadow and cannot be
consigned to the past, especially when it rears its head once again.
Well after Adorno’s death in 1969, conservative historians in Germany
voiced the complaint that the left would not cease reminding
contemporaries of the nation’s crimes. In the words of the historian
Ernst Nolte, Nazism was “the past that will not pass away.” The
philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who had been Adorno’s student, intervened
in this historians’ controversy, insisting that continuity and
comparison must serve as instruments of criticism, not apologetics.
To be sure, nothing ever occurs precisely as it did before; resemblance
does not preclude difference. But any similarities should alert us to
the fact that beneath the superficial markers of historical
transformation, things have not changed as much as they should. The
shadows of the past stretch into the present, and much like statues in
public parks, they loom darkly over public consciousness. Citizens in
Germany (or most of them, anyway) eventually learned that memorials to
fascism could serve critical rather than apologetic ends, as reminders
that it must never be permitted to return. As Alternative für
Deutschland claws its way to the center of parliamentary politics, this
lesson has once again assumed a new urgency. It is no different in the
United States, where too many statues to the past seem to confirm rather
than criticize the racism of our own time. The past, indeed, does not
pass away.
Peter E. Gordonteaches philosophy and social theory at Harvard. His
newest book is Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question
of Secularization.
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