280 Part III: Emigration Years
work process that they had in mind when in later years they said that
they were each responsible for every sentence, since they had dictated
their thoughts jointly. They described ‘the tension between the two
intellectual temperaments’ as ‘the vital principle’ informing their argu-
ments.^34 In reality, the typescripts (and subsequently the pages of the
book) do reveal stylistic differences. They show that each author was
responsible for specific sections. Thus Adorno later told Rolf Tiedemann
that the first chapter on the concept of enlightenment was written jointly,
while Adorno wrote the section on The Odyssey and Horkheimer that
on de Sade. For the chapter on ‘Enlightenment as Mass Deception’,
Adorno wrote drafts that were then revised in detail by Horkheimer.
They adopted the reverse procedure for the ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism’.
Horkheimer wrote the aphoristic texts at the end, to which Adorno
appended brief additions.^35
The book that gradually emerged from 1942 on as the result of the
collaboration of these two very distinct temperaments was somewhat
different from the book that Horkheimer kept alluding to as a ‘dialectical
logic’.^36 The reasons for the change were connected with the events
of the end of 1941 and early 1942. Horkheimer’s already deap-seated
pessimism about the course of world history was strengthened further
by a number of factors. Chief among these were the expansion of the
European crisis into a world war, the news of the massacres of the Jews
in the East, the deportations and concentration camps,^37 the appearance
of a latent anti-Semitism even in democratic countries, the trend towards
the ideological mobilization of the population in the United States, and
his sense of horror at the progressive Stalinization of the Soviet Union.
For this reason the idea of a negative totality moved to the centre of his
thinking about the course of history. It had formed the point of no
return of Adorno’s thought long before the Philosophy of Modern
Music and would be expounded more fully in the context of his critique
of enlightenment and rationality.
The intellectual harmony between Adorno and Horkheimer was
strengthened right from the start by an earlier collaborative effort to
prepare the text of The End of Reason for publication in the Studies
in Philosophy and Social Science.^38 This essay, which the two originally
intended as a joint venture,^39 already set out to show how the idea of
emancipatory reason was turning into a medium of domination. It was a
kind of preliminary study for the Philosophical Fragments.
The daily work on the comprehensive manuscript on reason and
enlightenment had to be interrupted frequently because of the press-
ure of other commitments. These included such tasks as the rapid
production of a report giving the institute’s view of method in the
social sciences, a programmatic memorandum for the State Depart-
ment,^40 and various memoranda for the American Jewish Committee,
with whom negotiations had been resumed about a number of pending
projects.