172 Part III: Emigration Years
well aware of his privileged status as an émigré intellectual who was
able to leave first Germany in 1934, and then Europe in 1938, before
the outbreak of war. Moreover, these moves were made possible by
careful planning, the material assistance of his parents to begin with,
of the Academic Assistance Council somewhat later and, finally, of
Horkheimer’s Institute of Social Research. This good fortune also had
its price. ‘Even the man spared the ignominy of direct co-ordination
bears, as his special mark, this very exemption, an illusory, unreal
existence in the life-process of society.’^15 Suspended as he was between
security and foreignness, there was another reason why the situation in
which Adorno found himself as a 35-year-old in America marked a
caesura in his life. His identity as an intellectual was subjected to a stern
test. From this time on, he would have to earn his own living if he was
to support his wife and himself.^16 Moreover, and this is decisive, he
could no longer earn his living either as a music critic or as aphilosopher
protected by the privileged position of the academic freedom to teach.
He now had to survive as a salaried scholar in an environment with
specific performance criteria as well as values and forms of cooperation
to which he had to adapt. He did so in a professional manner, though
in his own way, and without making concessions. He remained the
man he was. At the same time, his talent for empathy enabled him to
turn to productive use the varied and intensive impressions he received
in exile. During his exile years his literary style acquired the contours
that turned him into one of the century’s most individual writers.
During his time in emigration his philosophy acquired the intellectual
force and theoretical density that later became manifest in the writings
of these fifteen years of exile, writings such as The Philosophy of Modern
Music (1940–1) and Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944–7). During this
period in the United States, in which Adorno worked principally in
the realm of social research, he laid the foundations for his unique
concept of sociology as a science of reflection.^17 While in Britain and the
United States he was able to free himself from Kracauer’s sociological
phenomenology, and also from the utopianism of Bloch’s ontological
anticipation, as well as Benjamin’s re-emphasis on revelation as an
integral part of his philosophy of history. Only then did his antithetical
way of thinking acquire the weight of an individual dialectical criticism
of society. And, finally, his territorial ‘non-identity’ was also an experi-
ence that was channelled into his philosophical chef d’oeuvre, Negative
Dialectics (1966). Adorno was to insert the concept of the non-identical
into the very heart of his principal work of philosophy.