266 Part III: Emigration Yearsform of capitalism the sphere of circulation, which had been the tradi-
tional source of Jewish commercial activity and also the foundation of
bourgeois democracy, ceased to have any meaning. Horkheimer inter-
preted fascism and anti-Semitism as having arisen from the internal
dynamics of liberal capitalism. ‘He who does not wish to speak of cap-
italism, should also remain silent about fascism.’^127 It follows that, strictly
speaking, any critique of the fate of the Jews should contain a critique
of liberalism and capitalism. Horkheimer sought to deliver some initial
arguments for this. His essay of 1940 on ‘The Authoritarian State’ pointed
in the same direction. Here too, Horkheimer proceeded on the assump-
tion that the economy was characterized by a growing tendency towards
monopoly and hence by a general dependence on the large trusts.
Competition was being eliminated by the internal logic of capitalism
itself. He perceived the danger that authoritarian states on the model of
the terrorist National Socialist state might be formed elsewhere than in
Germany and the Soviet Union as a complement to the monopolist
tendencies of industry. This meant that a new technocratic power was
on the point of emerging that would lead to an ‘integral statism’, a state
‘that had freed itself of all dependence upon private capital’.^128 Marx’s
hope that society could be utterly transformed was not merely an illu-
sion, but utopian in the bad sense. For since reason had placed itself
entirely in the service of domination, the revolutionary will to make
a better humanity can no longer appeal to the forces of production as
the power bases of historical progress. Horkheimer gave added depth
to these ideas in his essay ‘Reason and Self-Preservation’. As reason
allows itself to be forced into the service of self-preservation, it is trans-
formed into instrumental rationality. ‘The new, fascist order is reason
in which reason is unmasked as unreason.’^129
Adorno too wished to play his part in ensuring that he and Horkheimer
could finally make a start on their much talked-about book on dialectical
logic. He did not confine himself to verbal and epistolary exchanges
with Horkheimer, but took the trouble to work out his own view of the
debate on totalitarianism. Although he had a number of objections to
Pollock’s essays on state capitalism, he nevertheless adopted Pollock’s
theory in his own ‘Reflections on Class Theory’, which he wrote in 1942
in the form of a working paper. However, he did broaden Pollock’s
theory, turning it into a general diagnosis of the age: ‘The most recent
phase of class society is dominated by monopolies; it is pressing forward
towards fascism, the form of political organization worthy of it.... The
total organization of society by big business and its omnipresent tech-
nology has taken possession of the world and our minds to the point
where the idea that things could ever be different has become a forlorn
endeavour.’^130 The paper contained a number of judgements on structural
changes in late industrial society that Adorno subsequently probed more
deeply in his sociological analyses of the present. Thus, for example, he
noted that one feature of society was that the proletariat now appeared