Adorno’s Path to Social Research 265link up with Horkheimer’s arguments in ‘The Jews and Europe’, an
essay that had appeared in 1939 in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung,
which was renamed the Studies in Philosophy and Social Science in that
year. Together with Horkheimer’s contributions, ‘The Authoritarian
State’ and ‘The End of Reason’, both written in 1940–1, these texts
had emerged from the intensive discussions with Adorno and now
constituted a material foundation for the projected book on dialectics.
All three essays were underpinned by the same question: what were
the causes of the self-destruction of reason as we find it in the dif-
ferent versions of totalitarianism and in anti-Semitism? Horkheimer
also thought of his essays as building blocks for a theory of fascism,
something which had also been included in the institute’s programme
since 1940.
The attempts by members of the institute to formulate a theory of
fascism or National Socialism led to vigorous in-house controversies.
On the one side, there were Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer and
A. R. L. Gurland, on the other, Fritz Pollock, Max Horkheimer and
Theodor Adorno. The first group defended the somewhat simplistic
continuity thesis. According to this, the fascist system sprang from a
capitalist system that began by being liberal and then became mono-
polistic. Thus National Socialism was essentially a form of capitalism,
and recurrent economic crises would therefore eventually cause it to
founder on its own contradictions. The second group maintained in
contrast that fascism was a fundamentally new form of rule. What
defined this totalitarian ‘state capitalism’ was the fact that the economic
system was directed by politics, and that the free market operating in
liberal epochs was now replaced by a comprehensive planning system.
Monopolies, acting as agencies of government, would now replace
the market.^125 The controlling apparatus would consist of a cartel of the
leading cliques belonging to the party and the state, together with some
top managers from major industrial companies. What the two theories
had in common was the assumption that National Socialism contained
monopolistic elements and command mechanisms alongside one another.
But whereas Pollock thought that the market was being replaced by
command mechanisms and that state functions disabled the key market
functions, Neumann insisted on the crucial importance of crises in the
workings of capitalism and on the tensions between the forces and
relations of production.^126
Horkheimer was concerned to bring the two sides together, but he
also defended Pollock’s ‘state-capitalist theory’ against Neumann’s
‘theory of monopoly capitalism’. What was of central importance in his
eyes was how to explain the irrationality of racism and of the expulsion
and persecution of the European Jews. In his essay of 1939, the most
pessimistic he ever wrote, he ascribed the rise of anti-Semitism to the
historical end of the liberal phase of capitalism and the simultaneous
emergence of the totalitarian form of organized capitalism. In this new