Notes to pp. 421– 423 59544 Telegram from Adorno to Bloch, 8 July 1965, Theodor W. Adorno
Archive, Frankfurt am Main (Br 142/38).
45 Adorno and Bloch, ‘Etwas fehlt... Glück und Utopie’, p. 412; cf. Gunzelin
Schmid-Noerr, ‘Bloch und Adorno: Bildhafte und bilderlose Utopie’,
p. 25ff.
46 Adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, p. 35.
47 Theo Pirker, the Berlin sociologist, said of this second conference that it
was ‘an Adorno congress’; Adorno was actively involved in all the debates.
‘The future confrontation with the student movement was already fore-
shadowed here. At that time, Adorno did not seek to fight, but to con-
vince’ (Martin Jander, Theo Pirker über ‘Pirker’: Ein Gespräch, p. 59).
48 Between 1954 and 1959, Horkheimer spent some time as visiting pro-
fessor in Chicago. His premature retirement from Frankfurt was officially
explained on grounds of health. Even after his retirement he continued
to give regular courses in both sociology and philosophy. See Gunzelin
Schmid Noerr, ‘Eine Geschichte der “Frankfurter Schule” in Briefen’, in
Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, GS, vol. 18, p. 825f.
49 Taken as a whole, Adorno’s sociological texts may be regarded as the
core works of what was meant by the epithet of ‘Frankfurt School’ – along
with the reprint of Horkheimer’s older essays from the Zeitschrift für
Sozialforschung under the title of Kritische Theorie in 1968, and books
of Herbert Marcuse such as Kultur und Gesellschaft (1965) and, above
all, One-Dimensional Man (1964) [German edition 1967] and Eros and
Civilization (1955) [German edition 1965].
50 Ludwig von Friedeburg emphasized this point in a conversation with the
present author. See also von Friedeburg, ‘Anspruch und Schwierigkeiten
kritischer Forschung’, p. 73.
51 Herbert Marcuse, ‘Industrialization and Capitalism in the Work of Max
Weber’, in Negations, p. 201ff.
52 Adorno to Marcuse, 24 September 1963, Herbert Marcuse Archive, Stadt-
und Universitätsbibliothek, Frankfurt am Main.
53 Herbert Marcuse, Negations, p. 204f.
54 Adorno remained unimpressed by these critical objections when he
proposed a visiting professorship for Marcuse in the Philosophical Faculty
of Frankfurt University. Nelson took Marcuse’s lecture as the occasion for
a review of the Heidelberg conference in the form of a reader’s letter
to the New York Times (3 January 1965). Adorno replied to this attack
with a letter of his own to the same newspaper: ‘It would be impossible
to conceal basic antagonisms such as that between a critical theoretical
approach to society and a more positivistic one. Both positions, by the
way, have roots in the works of Max Weber himself. However, nobody
has, to the best of my knowledge, attempted a “scapegoating” of Max
Weber, or made him in any manner responsible for the Third Reich,
or charged his theory of scientific value neutrality with guilt for the con-
centration camps. The truth is that Professor Herbert Marcuse, against
whom obviously the letter of Mr Nelson is directed, has printed out in his
paper, which drew considerable attention from all sides, that the socio-
logical thought of Max Weber contains, among other and quite different
historical tendencies, certain elements of German thinking that proved
later disastrous. I do not think that one does injustice to the significance of