tial for freedom calls for criticizing what an inevitable formalization has made
of the potential.” The tension that arises because of the concept’s unrealized
potentialityresults in a criticism of its actuality. For Adorno, “Dialectics is a
protest lodged by our thinking against the archaisms of its conceptuality”
(1995:152–154). It is the recognition of the mediated nature of all knowledge,
and of the contradictions contained within human thought and society.
This perspective forms the basis of Adorno’s concept of “social totality,”
which was discussed briefly above. Without a dialectical concept of society,
he argues, one cannot distinguish between a society’s actuality and its poten-
tiality. The status quowill be taken to be society’s only possible form. But in
the contemporary world’s current configuration, with ongoing disparities in
distribution of wealth, access to education and health care, Adorno argues
that one can only call modern society irrational:
[T]he irrationality of institutions, and the irrational moments in our society,
are to be understood only as functions of the continuing irrationality. While
the means used by society are rational, this rationality of the means is
really...only a means-ends rationality, that is, one which obtains between
the set ends and the means used to achieve them, without having any rela-
tion to the real end or purpose of society, which is the preservation of the
species as a whole in a way conferring fulfilment and happiness. That is
the reason not only why irrationalities survive, but why they reproduce
themselves further. (2000a:133)This is to say that, even if the methodology of Stark and Innaccone resulted
in some helpful initial empirical data (which Adorno’s perspective might well
challenge), without a broader concept of society – one more attentive to par-
ticularity and open to the critical sense of a different potentiality– their social
theory risks ignoring internal social contradictions, exceptions, and diversity,
while simply serving to support the established state of affairs:
The process which supports life, which sociology has as its essential sub-
ject matter, is indeed the economic process, but the economic laws already
stylize this process in accordance with a conceptual system of strictly ratio-
nal actions, which asserts itself all the more insistently as an explanatory
schema, the less it is actualized in the real world. Sociology is economics
only as political economy, and that requires a theory of society. (Horkheimer
and Adorno 1973:28)From A Beautiful Mindto the Beautiful Soul • 171