386 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
to confess their inability to override the limits imposed on their actions
by rigid social structures.
Adorno’s starting-point in public speeches, in his many radio talks,
but also in his seminars and lectures, was the contradiction he dia-
gnosed between a social structure that had frozen into objectivity, on
the one hand, and a democracy that was based on self-determination,
on the other. It was social circumstances that were the real reason
why individual human subjects felt themselves to be dependent and
determined by others. A further negative burden was the fact that ‘the
oft invoked working through of the past... was unsuccessful and has
degenerated into its own caricature, an empty and cold forgetting.’^81
This explained why democracy in Germany was built upon sand.^82
Burdened by a history they have repressed and by a growing compul-
sion to adapt, people are forced to ‘negate precisely that autonomous
subjectivity to which the idea of democracy appeals; they can preserve
themselves only if they renounce their self.... The necessity of such an
adaptation with the given, the status quo, with power as such, creates
the potential for totalitarianism.’^83
This social diagnosis of the lethal interaction between historical blind-
ness, the compulsion to adapt to existing social conditions and the
heteronomy of the subject was a theme on which Adorno played many
variations. At the same time, he was well aware that his interpretation
consciously overemphasized the sombre side. Thus in the first half of
the 1960s, at a time when in Germany the whole process of working
through the past slowly and hesitantly began to gather momentum with
the Eichmann trial in Israel and the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt, he
practised sociology as a mode of enlightenment directed at individuals
and groups. ‘A working through of the past understood as enlighten-
ment is essentially... a turn towards the subject, the reinforcement of
a person’s self-consciousness and hence also of his self.’^84 This ‘turn
towards the subject’ was the practical goal for Adorno’s conception of
a critical sociology. But he stressed that this subjective enlightenment
had its limits since the politically dangerous potential of fascism had its
roots in social conditions, social pressure and its ‘objective force’. It is
certain, Adorno concluded, that the real consequences of the catastrophic
policies of fascism were still present. ‘Despite all the psychological
repression, Stalingrad and the night bombings are not so forgotten that
everyone cannot be made to understand the connection between the
revival of a politics that led to them and the prospect of a third Punic
war. Even if this succeeds, the danger will still exist. The past will have
been worked through only when the causes of what happened then
have been eliminated.’^85
By attempting to keep alive an awareness of ‘the causes of past events’,
both in the university and as a public intellectual, Adorno made a sig-
nificant contribution to raising consciousness about the function of a
democracy. His efforts prepared the way for the idea that a democratic