Lectures 1949-1968, Volume 2: Social Theory and Politics

When Theodor W. Adorno returned to Germany from his exile in the United States, he was appointed as a lecturer and researcher at the University of Frankfurt and he immediately made a name for himself as a leading public intellectual. Adorno’s widespread influence on the postwar debates was due in part to the public lectures he gave outside of the university in which he analysed and commented on social, cultural and political developments of the time.

This second volume brings together Adorno’s lectures given between 1949 and 1968 on social and political themes. With an engaging and improvisational style, Adorno spoke with infectious vigour about architecture and city planning, the relationship between the individual and society, the authoritarian personality and far-right extremism, political education and the current state of sociology, among other subjects. After Auschwitz, it was incumbent on Germany to undertake intensive memory work and to confront the reality of its own moral destruction, while rebuilding its political and economic systems. To rebuild was taken to mean rediscovery and looking outward, but Adorno also nurtured a vision of tradition which - far from being unthinkingly conservative - would attest to society’s honestly-appraised relationship to the past while it underwent the process of modernization. The volume illustrates Adorno’s deep commitment to holding society to standards commensurate with the aspirations of a modern world emerging from the horrors of war.

This volume of his lectures is a unique document of Adorno’s startling ability to bring critical theory into dialogue with the times in which he lived. It will be of great value to anyone interested in the work of Adorno and critical theory, in German intellectual and cultural history and in sociology and politics.

Theodor W. Adorno was one of the leading philosophers and critical theorists of the twentieth century. A brilliant philosopher and social thinker, Adorno was a founding member of the Frankfurt School and he played a crucial role in reformulating Marxism, moving it away from what he and his colleague Max Horkheimer saw as sterile economic determinism in order to stress the cultural and ethical factors that shape history and social life. Their co-authored book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, is a classic of modern social thought and a foundational text in critical theory. Adorno’s writings on the Culture Industry transformed our understanding of the ideological underpinnings of modernity and remain deeply influential in media and cultural studies. Having fled Nazism, he developed his thought in exile in the USA before returning to Frankfurt in 1949, where he remained until his death in 1969. He maintained an astonishingly varied set of intellectual interests throughout his life, ranging from philosophy to music, film, art and literature. Polity has published over a dozen books by Adorno, including much of his correspondence and the many volumes of his lectures which are being published posthumously in Germany.