Change of Scene: Surveying the Ruins 327West coasts of America. His scholarly productivity during this time was
accompanied by a learning process that was of crucial importance for
his specific brand of sociology. His experience of Anglo-American cul-
ture led him not only to defend democratic forms of life, but also to
learn ‘no longer to regard as natural the conditions that had developed
historically, like those in Europe: “not to take things for granted”.... In
America I was liberated from a naive belief in culture, and acquired this
ability to see culture from the outside.’^7 This and other trends that
American scholarship made available to him provided the foundations
for his development in the course of the 1950s and 1960s into one of the
most important representatives of German sociology. Adorno was one
of the chief protagonists in the so-called positivist dispute in German
sociology early in the 1960s (alongside Karl Popper, Jürgen Habermas
and Hans Albert), and in the period 1963–8 he acted as the president of
the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie (German Sociology Society).
In this capacity, he was responsible for the congress devoted to the
topic ‘Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?’.
At the same time, Adorno made his mark in the musical life of West
Germany in the postwar years. His influence was partly as a theoretician
whose position had been made clear enough by his Introduction to the
Sociology of Music (1962) and his monograph of Mahler, Mahler: A
Musical Physiognomy (1960). But over and above that, he was also
influential as a teacher in the International Summer Courses for New
Music in Darmstadt.
As far as his position in the current philosophical debates was con-
cerned, his criticism of Martin Heidegger was decisive. His Jargon of
Authenticity (1964) served notice that he was to be taken seriously as
the antipode of the hitherto dominant fundamental ontological school.
Further contributions included not only Negative Dialectics (1966), the
authoritative statement of his own philosophy, but also the Aesthetic
Theory (1970), which did not appear until after his death.
The Explosive Power of Saying No 327