596 Notes to pp. 423– 425
Max Weber by bringing to the fore those aspects of his work.’ English
original of Adorno’s letter to the editor of the New York Times book
review of 26 March 1965. Herbert Marcuse Archive, Stadt- und Univer-
sitätsbibliothek, Frankfurt am Main.
55 König, Briefwechsel, vol. 1, p. 539. Demirovic comments: ‘Unlike König,
who continually proclaimed a unified sociological method by which
he wished to measure the progress of sociology as a science, Adorno
regarded the different sociologies as rational. He believed that, since
they were woven into the fabric of the various interest-groups of society,
they represented objective contradictions’ (Alex Demirovic, Der
nonkonformistische Intellektuelle, p. 832).
56 Frankfurter Adorno Blätter, IV, 1995, p. 7; cf. Udo Tietz, Ontologie und
Dialektik: Heidegger und Adorno über das Sein, das Nichtidentische, die
Synthesis und die Kopula, p. 90ff; cf. also Christoph Demmerling, Sprache
und Verdinglichung: Wittgenstein, Adorno und das Projekt einer kritischen
Theorie, p. 118ff.
57 Horkheimer and Adorno, Sociologica II, Reden und Vorträge, p. 2.
58 Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, GS, vol. 18, p. 521; cf. also Adorno’s draft
enclosed with his letter, Horkheimer–Pollock Archive, Stadt-und Univer-
sitätsbibliothek, Frankfurt am Main; cf. also Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt
School, p. 564ff. Wiggershaus remarks accurately enough that, in his
attempts to justify the absence of a developed theory of society, Adorno
‘arrived unexpectedly at an idealization of “marginalia” they were pre-
senting into the actual goal of their collaboration.’ Ibid., p. 565.
59 Adorno, ‘Empirische Sozialforschung’, GS, vol. 9.2, p. 359.
60 Alongside the investigation of such statistical data as income and educa-
tional qualifications, the methods of social research were confined to the
study of short-term social guides to action in order to throw light on the
subjective dimension of society. Here Adorno distinguished between
three categories: conscious opinions and their motivations, attitudes as
generalized ways of seeing, and actual patterns of behaviour.
61 Adorno, ‘Einleitung zu Émile Durkheim, Soziologie und Philosophie’,
GS, vol. 8, p. 264.
62 The concept of positivism goes back to Auguste Comte (1798–1857), a
French tutor in mathematics and physics at the École Polytechnique in
Paris. He introduced the concept of sociology for the positive philosophy
he had founded which was based on the exact methods of the natural
sciences. For the principles and different currents in positivism, see Georg
Hendrik von Wright, Explanation and Understanding. Wright explains
there that one of its basic assumptions is ‘methodological monism, i.e., the
idea of the unity of scientific method amidst the variety of the objects
of scientific investigation. A second basic assumption consists in the belief
that the exact sciences, especially mathematical physics, posit a methodo-
logical ideal... by which the state of development and perfection of all
other sciences... is to be measured.... Such explanations are “causal” in
a broad sense. They consist... in the subsumption of individual facts
under hypothetically assumed universal laws of nature.’ Ibid., p. 18.
63 Cf. Wolfgang Bonß, Die Einübung des Tatsachenblicks, p. 118ff. Bonß
distinguishes between two types of empirical knowledge: totalizing and
factual. While the emphasis on factual knowledge has triumphed in