Adorno

380 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional

were somehow combined with Sigmund Freud’s theories about human
drives and the nature of the human subject, Émile Durkheim’s theory
of the coercive character of social conditions which was synthesized
with Max Weber’s theory of progressive rationalization and bureaucrat-
ization, and the categories of Kant’s epistemology which were amalgam-
ated with Hegel’s dialectical philosophy of history. From this time on
(together with Horkheimer at first, then, later, with Herbert Marcuse
and Jürgen Habermas), Adorno came to be regarded as the outstanding
speculative mind of critical theory, known for his ability to track down
the symptoms of reification in an increasingly integrated society.
As director of the institute, he initiated important projects in social
research and social theory; as a cultural critic, he intervened in the
current public debates on music and literature. And, finally, he was
known as the representative of an independent philosophy, a philo-
sophy of negativity which attempted ‘to bear up under the suffering of
alienation by exceeding it on the horizon of undiminished and thus no
longer violent rationality.’^59

Speaking of the rope while in the country of the hangman

What the Nazis did to the Jews was unspeakable. The language had no

words for it.... Despite everything, an expression had to be found if the

victims, who were anyway too numerous for them all to be remembered

by name, were to be spared the obloquy of being consigned to oblivion.^60

Adorno’s plea for a critical sociology that must be conscious of its own
scope and limitations was no mere abstract programmatic desideratum.
On the contrary, what he had said on the subject in his Weinheim
lecture, ‘On the Contemporary Situation of Empirical Social Research
in Germany’, was closely linked to the concrete research the institute
had carried out since early 1951 with the title of ‘Group Experiment’.
Initially, the directors and their colleagues were still housed in the ruins
of the original building, and this lasted until they could move into the
new buildings in October 1951. The new project was concerned with
uncovering both the manifest opinions and latent attitudes of the mem-
bers of individual social strata towards ideological and political issues.
The research team employed what was at the time a novel technique of
data gathering in their efforts to understand the dynamics of the pro-
cesses involved in opinion-formation in small-group discussions. It was
the use of this technique that led them to give the study its title, ‘Group
Experiment’. In this case, the method was to be used in order to as-
certain what were assumed to be the characteristic strategies employed
by Germans to deny their own past – doubtless a challenging task. To
research this 121 group discussions were conducted, involving over 1800
people of different social backgrounds. These groups were relatively