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whose development they also took an active interest in) and in academic administration and intellectual interventions everywhere (it seems) they got the chance?
These are not the actions of hermetically self-exiled and defeated men.
Demirovic s study is the first full-scale project dedicated to challenging the
message-in-a-bottle interpretation of the postwar careers of Horkheimer and
Adorno with the weight of the evidence. At 983 densely printed pages, the
evidence is awfully weighty, and not just metaphorically. Demirovic , a long-time
colleague at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, evidently made very
full use of his access to the Horkheimer and Adorno archives. There is a sharp
irony in this as well, which Demirovic himself seems either unaware of or, more
likely, disinclined to mention: the volume of documentation necessary to refute
the standard view of Horkheimer and Adornos intellectual life in postwar
Germany places such extraordinary demands on the reader that it is difficult to
imagine that the book taken itself as an intellectual-political intervention into
the public sphere will have the reception and effect that it deserves and that
Demirovic surely intends. (All the more so if we imagine the author and
Suhrkamp attempting to convince a British or American publisher to bring out the
book in an English translation for students of Critical Theory who depend on
translations, it hardly seems likely that Demirovic s untranslated work will mount
a significant challenge to Wiggershaus.)
Demirovic begins his book with a brief (by his standards) theoretical introduction that develops a working model for interpreting the functions and definitions of the modern intellectual (about which more later), and closes with a
modest conclusion that argues for his alternative to the message-in-a-bottle model
for First Generation Critical Theory. The rest of the book is devoted to an extraordinarily detailed reconstruction of the various aspects of Horkheimer and
Adornos work as public intellectuals in the Federal Republic of the 1950s and
1960s. Chapters on Horkheimer and Adornos return from American exile and
into positions of prominence in Frankfurt document the overall position of the
German university system in the years immediately following the war, and
connect this up with the competing conceptions of pedagogy afoot in the early
FRG. In fact, a range of contributions to the philosophy of education, and specifically the various debates on the relation between pedagogy and democracy, is a
highly significant and usually overlooked achievement of the supposed intellectual sterility of the Adenauer years.2 Adorno and Horkheimer stood at the very
center of this debate, and what we in the United States know of it is usually
concentrated around Adornos essays on the working-through of the collective
past and Education after Auschwitz. But these are only the most striking and, if
I can put it this way, the most easily decontextualizable contributions, and the tip
of the iceberg. It took a tremendous amount of less spectacular work in what
Demirovic accurately identifies as the quasi-public sphere of public administration curricular proposals, correspondence and negotiations with educators
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and politicians, budget drafts, and what we would now call mission statements
for Horkheimer and Adorno to succeed in bringing off an achievement whose
significance only became apparent years or even decades later. They used their
positions of influence (Horkheimer as Rektor of the Johann Wolfgang GoetheUniversitt) to shift the terms of the debate about curricular reform and pedagogy
in the Federal Republics systems of higher education; they succeeded in connecting up the notion of curriculum and pedagogy directly with the normative and
political tasks of the institutional anchoring of a democratic politics. No less
significantly, in their own way they challenged the hidebound inherited view of
the German university professor as a conservative knight-errant of deutsche
Geist, and succeeded (though only in part) in modernizing the professional expectations and to an extent even the self-understanding of the German professorate.
Perhaps most influentially of all, Horkheimer and Adornos quite explicit challenge to preconceived notions of the role of the academic in German political life
effectively undermined the traditional understanding of the antinomy between the
(politically committed) intellectual and the (politically aloof) academic mandarin.
For Demirovic , this successful pedagogical politics shows how inadequate the
message-in-a-bottle view has been, and how strongly it has hidden the concrete
political achievements of First Generation Critical Theory from retrospective
view. Rather than hermetically protecting an emphatic conception of truth from a
society that is untrue as a whole, Horkheimer and Adorno were in fact conducting what Foucault referred to as a politics of truth: operating in, below, and
between public spheres, they effectively challenged the terms and procedures
through which socially valid truths were constructed, where the rules of truthproduction were legitimated, where rhetorics or vocabularies were approved and
subjects authorized. And insofar as they did successfully prosecute a politics of
truth, Demirovic argues, Horkheimer and Adorno also succeeded in finding more
than a hermetic theoretical home for a substantial version of enlightenment
reason. The nonconformist intellectual embodied a form of theory-as-praxis:
the politics of truth is a response to the diagnosis of the crisis of reason which
proposes to re-install reason into the social structure via reasons institutionalization in quasi-public spheres, rather than to shield it hermetically from society.
Such a politics of truth surely did not regard the political public sphere of postwar Germany as especially open, or democratic, or free from overwhelming structural pressures toward instrumental closure or even delusion. But and this is
the pinion-point that separates Demirovic s reconstruction from the message-ina-bottle view neither do their practices and their achievements support the
notion that for them there was no political public sphere at all.
As intellectual-academics, however, it was the project of the construction of
the new discipline of German academic sociology that turns out to be Horkheimer
and Adornos most lasting influence, and appropriately the longest and most
exhaustively documented dimension of Demirovic s study. My sense is that we
tend to decontextualize the Positivismusstreit of the 1950s as a theoretical
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Moralia the book that established his reputation as a great postwar German
Schriftsteller that [f]or the intellectual, inviolable isolation is now the only way
of showing some measure of solidarity. All collaboration, all the human worth of
social mixing, and participation, merely masks a tacit acceptance of inhumanity.6 All methodological exaggerations notwithstanding, views like this imply
strongly that the old message-in-a-bottle interpretation, while certainly one-sided,
is very far from refuted. That interpretation connected the aporetic outcome of
critical social theory with the quietist outcome of political and institutional
engagement in the moment of totalizing critique of a totally irrational social order.
Demirovic will argue that (apparently) aporetic theory can be understood properly only in its context with ongoing institutional engagement, and for this reason
that in the case of Adorno and Horkheimer one must always speak instead of
theory-as-praxis. No doubt. All the same, it is also just possible that the First
Generation of critical theorists did not coherently resolve the relation between
their theoretical works and their roles as academic politicians, sociological
reformers, and cultural mavens because to do so would have obliged them to
recast convictions concerning the viability of progressive democratic reform,
hence of the general characteristics of the postwar social order, to which they
were so committed that alternative conceptions simply were not realistically
available to them.
However we interpret this problem, Demirovic s book (or more likely,
condensed versions of the interpretive claims that the book makes) will change
the debate over the legacy of Critical Theory for the better. And this is all the more
welcome as we take stock of the fact that this debate is also one over the present
and future character and self-understanding of German political culture. Even if
reports of the death of the message-in-a-bottle view are premature, Demirovic has
made sure that we can no longer take such a view for granted.
NOTES
1. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, tr. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 27.
2. One of the few English language studies of the contours of the postwar Institutes contributions to democratic pedagogy is found in Peter Hohendahl, Education after the Holocaust, in Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).
3. Jrgen Habermas, Theodor W. Adorno. Ein philosophierender Intellektueller, in
Philosophisch-politische Profile, 3e (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), 16066.
4. Ibid., 161.
5. Clemens Albrecht, Gnter C. Behrmann, Michael Bock, Harald Homann, and Friedrich H.
Tenbruck, eds., Die intellektuelle Grndung der Bundesrepublik. Eine Wirkungsgeschichte der
Frankfurter Schule (Frankfurt & New York: Campus, 1999); Wolfgang Kraushaar, ed., Frankfurter
Schule und Studentenbewegung, 3 vols. (Hamburg: Rogner & Bernhard, 1998).
6. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 26.