From Idealistic to Materialistic Dialectic
Already in 1942, Horkheimer had stated in American exile, that if one thought
through precisely Hegel’s teaching, that the originally theological notion was
the interior of the thing itself, then its execution, the idealistic dialectic, became
materialistic all by itself (Horkheimer 1985a). The critical theorists were
engaged in such inverse theology no less than Hegel or Marx before. It is in
its materialistic form that the religious text is inverted and negated, but also
preserved, elevated and fulfilled. As late as May 2, 1968, a year before his
death, Adorno taught in his 4th Lecture on the Introduction to Sociology at the
University of Frankfurt, that the decisive difference between a dialectical and
a positivistic teaching about society was, that the former, the critical theory,
referred to the objectivity of the notion, which lay in the thing itself, while
the latter, the positivistic sociology, denied the process or removed it at least
into the background and posited the formation of the concept exclusively
into the looking, watching, considering, contemplating, meditating, examin-
ing, observing, ordering and concluding subject (Adorno 1970, 1993; Popper
1961, 1967; Zerin 1998).
Dialectical Sociology
Adorno stated in his 5th Lecture of his Introduction to Sociology, that the notion
of society could not be reduced either to the sum of individuals or to a social
reality in and for itself, e.g., according to the image of an organism (Adorno
1993). For Adorno, the notion of society was a kind of interaction between
the individuals and a social objectivity, which made itself independent in
opposition to them. It was a dialectical interaction between individual and
collective. In Adorno’s view that precisely was the macrocosmic, or better
still, macro-sociological model for the critical theorists’ dialectical conception
of society: their dialectical sociology. To be sure, sociology had to be thought
of dialectically, because here the notion of mediation of the two opposite cat-
egories – the individual on one hand and the society on the other – was intrin-
sic in both of them. That, precisely, constituted for Adorno the pressing and
urging reason for the development of a dialectical consideration of society:
a dialectical sociology.
82 • Rudolf J. Siebert