Adorno’s Path to Social Research 269statement that all clever people ridicule – such a statement contains the
truth that cleverness betrays.’^141
At the time, the attempt to arrive at an independent approach to a
philosophy of language misfired. Philosophical problems about the course
of world history and mankind’s role in it moved to centre stage. These
were the problems that many intellectuals felt the need to confront.
One specific trigger leading to such a focus was provided by the
rescue of a manuscript belonging to Walter Benjamin. This manuscript,
which had an electrifying effect at the time, was his set of ‘Theses on the
Philosophy of History’, his last completed work, and one which went
missing for some time, before being brought to Adorno in the institute
in June 1941. He knew of the existence of the manuscript, since Benjamin
had mentioned it in his letters of April and May 1940, and proposed
to make its eighteen theses accessible for a first reading and internal
discussion, even though ‘they open the door to enthusiastic misunder-
standing’.^142 Adorno thought of the document as Benjamin’s intellectual
testament. Nine months after Benjamin’s death, Adorno was given a
copy of his notes by Hannah Arendt, who had just arrived in New
York.^143 She and her husband, Heinrich Blücher, had succeeded where
Benjamin had failed and had escaped from Paris via Marseilles. While
they were still in Marseilles, Benjamin had entrusted the couple with
a collection of manuscripts, among them ‘Theses on the Philosophy of
History’. Adorno immediately wrote to Horkheimer telling him of the
find, which he said came closer to his own way of thinking than anything
else. This referred ‘above all to the idea of history as a permanent
catastrophe, the criticism of progress, the domination of nature and the
attitude to culture’.^144 For Adorno, who was contemplating a critique
of the entire tradition of Western civilization, Benjamin’s ideas about
the disruption of historical continuity were a far greater source of
inspiration than Horkheimer’s ideas about language. Adorno’s mind
was by no means closed to Horkheimer’s suggestions, but he had his
own ideas about the shape of the future book. In order to put them
forward he wished to go to California as soon as possible so as to
continue the discussions that had been broken off.
Nevertheless, it was Marcuse who was the first to follow Horkheimer
to the West Coast. Pollock followed soon afterwards. However, both
returned a few months later to attend to the increasingly urgent affairs
of the institute, and especially to take part in the lecture series at
Columbia University. Löwenthal, to his sorrow, was anyway condemned
to stick to his post in New York, although he later visited Horkheimer
and Adorno in California. Horkheimer’s hesitations in making decisions
about staffing were not primarily the effect of his own vacillations, but
were caused by the fact that since May 1940 the problems of the future
organization of the institute were becoming more acute. Among these
difficulties was the visit to the institute in the middle of the summer by
two detectives who wished to inform themselves in detail about the