Adorno’s Gamble: Harnessing German Ideology

Adorno’s Gamble offers a startling reinterpretation of the evolution of Theodor W. Adorno’s thought, usually seen as a mix of critical Marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis, aesthetic modernism, and Jewish tradition. Mikko Immanen argues for another, previously unacknowledged source of Adorno’s thinking on instrumental reason, dialectic of enlightenment, and frailty of democracy: the intellectual underpinnings of Germany’s ＂conservative revolutionary＂ movement of the 1920s.

In a dramatic reappraisal of the leading light of the Frankfurt School, Immanen follows Adorno’s path of philosophical development from the late Weimar era through years in exile to the postwar period, establishing his debt to thinkers of radical conservative bent. In particular, he focuses on Adorno’s enduring, and daring, effort to harness two of the most infamous works from this tradition--Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West and Ludwig Klages’s TheSpirit as Adversary of the Soul--and to repurpose their reactionary teachings for emancipatory ends.

Mikko Immanen is scholar of modern German thought. He has been Fulbright fellow at CUNY Graduate Center and an Academy of Finland postdoctoral researcher at the University of Jyväskylä. He is the author of Toward a Concrete Philosophy.