Gaining Recognition for Critical Theory 375of labour... makes himself vulnerable by its standards in ways insepar-
able from elements of his superiority.’^34
Adorno may well have thought of his wide-ranging discussions of a
variety of current topics as a practical contribution to political educa-
tion. This was a field with which he was preoccupied throughout the
1950s. He believed that there was a great need for reform both there
and also in the methods of teacher training.^35 The German Sociology
Society had formed a sub-committee in 1958 to address the question of
the sociology of education and culture, and he had been involved in this
from its inception. The conference in the Akademie für Unterricht und
Erziehung in Calw in 1954 focused on the problems of the sociology of
education. Adorno had received an invitation to the conference at the
suggestion of Hellmut Becker. Alongside such topics as the structure
of authority in German schools or education and social stratification,
he was particularly interested in the deterioration and even crisis in
education, a subject he also discussed in his ‘Theory of Pseudo-Culture’
at the Fourteenth Conference of German Sociologists in Berlin in 1959.^36
He had previously tackled the question of university education, some
time before his interlude with the Hacker Foundation, when he had
written drafts that Horkheimer used as the basis for addresses that he
gave at the matriculation ceremonies as rector of the university in both
the summer semester 1952 and the winter semester 1952–3. On the one
hand, Adorno criticized the predominant demand for experts and the
resulting growth of specialization and purely specialist education. He
put in a plea for students to seize the opportunity offered by university
education to cultivate their capacity for unregimented thinking. On the
other hand, he questioned the idealist conception of education that
contributed, so he maintained, to the barbarizing of mankind. In the
theses he wrote on ‘The Democratization of the German Universities’
he welcomed the dismantling of authoritarian structures and hierarchies
because this was a precondition for the emergence in the university realm
of ‘the type of the free human being’ who would be capable of free self-
determination. At the same time, he called for academics to tackle tasks
in the public arena and not ‘to privatize’, i.e., not to devote their ener-
gies to the accumulation of expert, professional knowledge and the pro-
motion of their own careers. For ‘the retreat from politics negates the
democratic principle even allowing for its validity as contemplation. It is
the Achilles heel of the democratization of the German universities.’^37
Adorno’s various ideas and initiatives in the sociology of education
were closely related to the research work being done at the time in the
institute.^38 One project was concerned with ‘The Political Consciousness
of Students’ (Ludwig von Friedeburg, Jürgen Habermas, Christoph
Oehler and Friedrich Welz), another with ‘The Effectiveness of Political
Education’ (Egon Becker, Joachim Bergmann, Sebastian Herkommer,
Michael Schumann and Manfred Teschner). Both were commissioned
projects that Adorno followed throughout their development. The survey