The Institute of Social Research 159Horkheimer remained unconvinced, and he also refused to launch a
debate about the sociology of knowledge in the journal which, as Adorno
crowed, would enable him to ‘slaughter Mannheim with complete equan-
imity’.^94 Nor did Adorno find the editorial board more sympathetic to
his argument that his critique of Mannheim would qualify him as an
expert on the whole field of sociology, and not just on the sociology of
music. He complained to Horkheimer that he felt like a ‘wounded deer’,
and that it was ‘vitally important for a writer to see his writings in print’,
for otherwise ‘even a truly enlightened and self-controlled man might
feel paralysed.’^95 There are no signs of the symptoms of paralysis in
Adorno. Instead, he acquiesced in the decision not to publish, albeit
with gritted teeth, as long as this refusal was justified in terms of insti-
tute policy.
For his own part, he continued to think highly of the article. This
emerges from the fact that he published it twice after an interval of
fifteen years, once in the journal Aufklärung in 1953 and then again in
Prisms, a collection of essays that appeared in 1955. This suggests that
he clung to the idea of two divergent sociological traditions. From the
point of view of his own sociology, we can see that the Mannheim
critique of 1937 initiated an attempt to clarify a problem of method.
How was it possible to establish a sociology that did not focus on the
sum of individuals and their actions, but was concerned to explain the
social nature of the contents of the social world, and to track down their
origins and validity? How can it be explained, and what does it mean,
that ‘a society’ should produce itself as ‘a strictly logical system...in
absolute unreason and unfreedom’?^96 This striking remark makes us
wonder whether Adorno could have written this sentence without his
experience of fascism. And of the victory of National Socialism, the
triumph of Hitler’s dictatorship and the enforced emigration of its
author from Germany, the country that had shown itself in practice to
be a system of absolute unreason and unfreedom.
The opera project: The Treasure of Indian JoeThe magical power to manipulate childhood is the strength of the weak.^97How long was Adorno’s normal working day? Hugely ambitious as he
was from early on in life, his immense productivity over a wide range of
intellectual activities shows him to have been a highly disciplined worker.
The fact is that throughout his life he concentrated all his efforts on the
things that he found vitally important, living on his nerves and working
to the point of exhaustion. Even while he was still very young, his
letters were full of complaints about the lack of time, and about physical
and mental strain. Even supposing that, in addition to his passionate
desire to write, he possessed exceptional powers of concentration and