220 Part III: Emigration Years
form’. The commodity form arose, he maintained, as a generalization
from the exchange of equivalents as mediated by money. He then tried
to demonstrate that the commodity form was associated with a twofold
process of abstraction. On the one hand, there was an abstraction from
the concrete use of the commodity which was now separated in time
and space from the act of exchange. On the other, there was an abstrac-
tion from the concrete labour that supplied the foundation of the use
value of the commodity.^38
Adorno and Sohn-Rethel had known one another since 1925, when
towards the end of the summer they had engaged in philosophical dis-
cussions with Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer in Naples. There
were meetings later on from time to time in Frankfurt and Berlin. In
October 1936, a few weeks before Adorno had read the exposés, they
had met briefly in Paris, where, together with Benjamin, they had hotly
debated Sohn-Rethel’s ideas in conversations lasting seven hours at
a time.^39 Adorno was not surprised, therefore, to receive a typescript
of some 130 pages entitled ‘Sociological Theory of Knowledge’ that
Sohn-Rethel had sent to him from Paris in the autumn of the same year.
Sohn-Rethel hoped that this contribution to the origins of abstract think-
ing would result in a closer collaboration with the Institute of Social
Research, or that at the very least they might commission a research
project. Then something unusual happened – Adorno capitulated when
confronted with the complexity and abstract nature of Sohn-Rethel’s
argumentation. Nevertheless, he declared his willingness to provide
Horkheimer with an expert opinion on Sohn-Rethel’s work. For this
purpose, he asked Sohn-Rethel to let him have a shorter version of his
project,^40 while emphasizing that there was a whole series of similarities
between his own epistemological study of Husserl and Sohn-Rethel’s
attempt to elaborate Marx’s analysis of the commodity. What Adorno
expected of Sohn-Rethel was nothing less than ‘the overcoming of the
antinomy of genesis and validity’, and he suggested a link-up with ‘the
dialectical logic planned by Horkheimer and myself’. At the same time,
his critical sense warned him of the danger of ‘turning a materialist
dialectic into a prima philosophia (not to say: an ontology)’.^41
Sohn-Rethel’s response was not long in coming. A few days later
he summarized his ideas in a lengthy letter to Adorno. It began with
endless explanations of Marxism’s true objective. His key concepts were
those of ‘commodity form’ and ‘functional socialization’ that he had
taken from the basic fact of exploitation. The genesis of ‘essential forms’,
and in particular the idea of subjectivity, was mediated by ‘the historical
dialectic of functional socialization’. It followed that subjectivity must
be conceived ‘as the inseparable correlative of the development of money
as a form of value’.^42
Having studied the bulky ‘Nottingham letter’, Adorno wrote to its
author enthusiastically, praising Sohn-Rethel’s work, ‘which had triggered
the greatest mental upheaval that I have experienced in philosophy