422 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
in 1968, was concerned with the topical subject ‘Late Capitalism or
Industrial Society?’.^47
How are we to explain Adorno’s relatively powerful position in the
academic community of sociologists? The reasons are not to be sought
so much in the influence he wielded among the German Sociological
Society as director of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, or in
his prominence as a speaker at the sociology conferences from the very
outset, or even in the large number of significant publications and
research projects that he could claim to his credit. It was rather that,
following Horkheimer’s retirement in 1959 and consequent withdrawal
to Montagnola in the Ticino,^48 Adorno became the most prominent and
most important representative of critical theory.^49 He was well aware of
the responsibility implicit in the role of chairman of the German Socio-
logical Society, since it meant that he could rely not just on the support
of the members of the Institute of Social Research, but also on recogni-
tion by a small but weighty number of colleagues in the discipline,
despite self-evident differences of opinion.^50
Adorno was one of the major co-organizers of the Heidelberg Socio-
logy Conference in 1964. It attracted a large number of professional
participants. The tone of the conference was set by Herbert Marcuse,
who gave a paper on ‘Industrialization and Capitalism in the Work
of Max Weber’.^51 Adorno had written a detailed letter to Marcuse in
September 1963, making a number of concrete suggestions as to the
content. He advised him
to examine Weber’s concept of rationality... and to show that his
idea of ratio as a means–ends relation, as opposed to the full con-
cept of reason, in itself represented such a crippling of the concept
that not much could be gleaned from it. In this connection, I would
introduce a critique of his bureaucratization thesis which is what
his entire book [Economy and Society] amounts to if you set aside
all the waffle about value-freedom.. .As a person, I find Weber
just as disagreeable as you do, but compared to the Lazarsfelds,
he was still the very thing for which he is wrongly taken.^52The aim of this sociology conference was to commemorate the cen-
tenary of Weber’s birth. In addition to Marcuse, Adorno had invited
the leading American sociologist Talcott Parsons to give the otherplenary
session, and also Raymond Aron. Horkheimer chaired the plenary de-
bate on Parsons’s paper ‘Value Freedom and Objectivity’. Habermas
gave a presentation on the interpretations offered by Marcuse and
Parsons. Strikingly, the greatest applause was reserved for Marcuse,
with his thesis that Weber’s central category of formal rationality helps
to promote the authoritarian form of rule in capitalist economy and
the plebiscitary state. ‘In Max Weber’s sociology, formal rationality turns
into capitalist rationality. Thus it appears as the methodical taming of