A Theory Devoured by Thought 423the irrational “acquisitive drive”, the taming that finds its typical ex-
pression in “innerworldly asceticism”.’^53 Marcuse’s success among the
German sociologists was partly blighted in the following discussion thanks
to the mauling he received at the hands of such experts on Weber as
Reinhard Bendix and Benjamin Nelson.^54
The conflicting interpretations of Max Weber undoubtedly contrib-
uted to the polarization of schools and intellectual trends in sociology.
Adorno remained unperturbed by this. Following the Heidelberg con-
ference, he wrote to René König, saying that ‘the divergent tendencies
in German sociology ... cannot be eliminated by administrative fiat,
and no rational person would have an interest in doing so.’^55 Adorno’s
self-confident assertion that his own sociological publications as well
those of the institute amounted to a paradigm was based on the reputa-
tion he had built up from the early 1960s of taking a prominent role in
the slowly emerging dispute on the logic of the social sciences and the
relations between social research and social theory. Unlike the Amer-
ican sociologist Talcott Parsons, he never claimed to have developed
a systematic sociological theory. But he did try to explain his own spe-
cific approach to sociology in epistemological terms and to ground it
methodologically. He has given a number of accounts of the principal
obstacles standing in the way of a systematic theory of society. As early
as summer 1939, he recorded in one of his notebooks that ‘there were
prohibitive difficulties for such a theory’ and they showed themselves in
the nature of language. ‘Language no longer permits us to say things as
they have been experienced.. ..Language denies itself to the object; it
has succumbed to a dreadful disease. ..The fact that the power of facts
has become so horrifying, that all theory, even true theory, reads like
a mockery of this, – this has been burned into language, the organ of
theory, like a stigma.’^56
A further explanation for the problems of a critical theory of society
can be found in a longer text that Adorno had written for a collection of
fourteen philosophical and sociological essays that appeared in 1962.
This volume, Sociologica II, contains eight essays by Horkheimer and
six by Adorno. It is claimed in the introduction that, taken together,
these essays should not be thought to aspire to the status of a ‘theory’.^57
None of the essays provides any explanation for this defensive stance,
though the original introduction itself goes some way towards this. It
had been preceded by an (unpublished) correspondence between Adorno
and Horkheimer on the status of their own theory of society. The theme
of these letters had been the question of what obstacles might present
themselves to a comprehensive theory of society. Adorno rejected
Horkheimer’s argument that a unanimous theory was ruled out by the
divergence of interests as to how a future social order might be consti-
tuted. Horkheimer had long since jettisoned the hope that society might
of itself generate a social movement that would represent the universal
interest and with it the abolition of systems of domination that had