Adorno's critique of progress

Michael Löwy and Eleni Varikas

The ideology of progress, born (in its modern guise) during the Enlightenment, finds its culminating philosophical expression in Hegel's conception of history. Here, everything that happens marks a further step in mankind's march towards freedom: watching Napoleon ride into his home town, Hegel is convinced that he has witnessed `the world spirit [Weltgeist] mounted on horseback'.

The thought of Theodor Adorno is at the furthest possible remove from such optimism and progressivism. For Adorno, there was no possibility of identifying with the all-conquering advance of Reason. Writing during the Second World War, he parodied Hegel's metaphor in a bitterly ironic passage of Minima Moralia: he too had seen a `world spirit', he said, but it was mounted not on horseback but `on the fins of a rocket'. The history of the twentieth century was a sufficiently striking refutation of Hegel's philosophy.

Apart from a lecture given in 1962, Adorno never offered a `systematic' or detailed account of his views on progress. Nonetheless, the critique of `progressivist' illusion runs right through his work. It is central to his historical vision and decisively important in the development of his ideas on art, literature and culture.

The critique of progress was, of course, already a familiar theme in Central European culture and philosophy. Adorno's reflections on the topic draw on a large stock of (often bitter) polemic against bourgeois modernity. They form part of the broad Romantic current which has flowed through German, and European, cultural history from the late eighteenth century right up to the present. Romanticism is to be understood here not simply as a literary movement, but as a world-view whose basis is a critique of modern capitalist/industrial society founded on pre-capitalist social and cultural values. The two high points of his critique are the moment of `classic' Romanticism in the early nineteenth century, and the so-called `neo-Romantic' phase of the late nineteenth century, which was especially influential in academic circles. These two moments are of fundamental significance to Adorno's view of progress, though he evidently reinterprets and reworks them in the terms of a philosophy which remains in the last analysis wedded to the tradition of the Enlightenment.

Thus Adorno acknowledges the (admittedly partial and limited) legitimacy of the Romantic critique of modernity and of the Enlightenment: insofar as it is pure instrumentality, `a mere construction of means, the Enlightenment is as destructive as its romantic enemies accuse it of being'. Even in its most reactionary guise, as for instance in Catholic reaction, Romanticism justly criticizes Enlightenment liberalism insofar as the latter is shown to transmute freedom into its opposite through the operations of the market economy. In some respects, Adorno came close to sharing the cultural elitism of the mandarins of the late-nineteenth-century German academy, with its hostility to the positivistic and utilitarian values of a modern mass society dominated by the market and by technology. This is the case even though he took radically different positions in his Marxist social views, his allegiance to aesthetic modernism, and his rejection of any restoration of the aristocratic privileges of the past.

Such a position may seem to be in contradiction to Marxism's faith in progress. But this depends how we read Marx: and the texts are susceptible of very divergent interpretations ... For Adorno, the Marx of the Critique of the Gotha Programme is to be understood as rejecting the view that the doctrine of labour as the sole source of social wealth necessarily led to an endless growth of well being: Marx also admitted `the possibility of relapse into barbarism'. Such a reading - which is selective, but not necessarily mistaken - allows Adorno to mitigate the tensions between his deep and sincere commitment to the Marxist project of social emancipation, and his sympathy for the cultural critique of progress. His friend Walter Benjamin had already interpreted Marx along these lines, and Benjamin's writings were undoubtedly the most important and immediate source of Adorno's ideas in this domain.

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