Theodor W. Adorno: An Introduction

by Gerhard Schweppenhäuser; James Rolleston, trans.
Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2009
186 pp. Trade, $74.95; paper, $21.95
ISBN: 0-8223-4454-8; ISBN: 0-8223-4471-8.

Reviewed by Giuseppe Pennisi
Rome, Italy
Professor of Economics Università Europea di Roma

giuseppe.pennisi@gmail.com

This is an introductory book to Theodor W. Adorno's life and philosophy. It is not addressed to scholars specializing on Adorno's work but to a more general audience - viz. those in the past used to be called "cultivated men and women" who intend to approach the thinking of one of the most influential author of the 20 th Century. Thus, it is an important reading also for a person like me - a professor of economics deeply interested in information economics in theory and in practices (viz. to mould economic policies). As a matter of fact, a great deal of Adorno's work deals with information theory - e.g. his work on music not merely in aesthetic terms but as way to knowledge. As a coincidence the present Pope Benedetto XVI has made similar points many a times in several occasions in the last three years. Pope Benedetto XVI is a theologian, a philosopher and also a musician. He is a German too. Thus, he is no doubt familiar with Adorno's writing. Even though the Pope refers to a different knowledge than Adorno does, the paths are similar; for a Roman Catholic the ultimate knowledge is the Truth, for a relativist (like Adorno) the road to knowledge has as its aim and objective to reduced and eventually eliminate information asymmetries as a means to construct "the totally socialized society". However, for Adorno himself, such a "totally socialized society" is an unreachable goal, similar to the "powerless utopia of beauty" and to the "failure of culture" to drive mankind towards the "liberating praxis" essential to build the "socialized society".

Schweppenhäuser's introduction to the English edition and Rolleston's preface are meant to provide essential information on Adorno to Anglo-American readers more likely to be better familiar with the more over aspects of the Frankfurt School (of the 70s) than with Minima Moralia and the Dialectic of Enlightenment . The rightly stressed how the developments of Adorno's personal life (the study of music, the influence of Thomas Mann, the exile, the awareness of Auschwitz - and the related theorem of impossibility of poetry -, the disillusion with the Federal Republic emerging after World War II ) had a major influence on his thinking. However neither Schweppenhäuser nor Rolleston delve on the essential question: why Adorno never tried to construct a "system", like Habermas and Marcuse (to remain in the same circle) did. Did he consider also "philosophy" to be an utopian failure?

Schweppenhäuser, however, tackles the issue indirectly, by dealing with Adorno's "pessimism" on the future of the society. Minima Moralia , if properly read, has useful insights: the "liberating praxis" is "postponed but not forever". Education is the tool toward "the production of true consciousness". I doubt that Princeton economist, Avinash Dixit (a most likely candidate for a Nobel Prize for his theoretical contribution to the making of political economic), has read Minima Moralia . Dixit reaches conclusions similar to Adorno's when he builds a new development economics by marrying information economics and transaction economics with game theory and institutional economics.