424 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
become obsolete. In contrast, Adorno emphasized in the draft sketch
of the introduction that the authors were conscious of the claim they
had made to a coherent theory of society ever since the Dialectic of
Enlightenment. However, in the light of the systematic state of total
societalization, it would be wrong to entertain a theory that merely
duplicated this coherence. Furthermore, even though society appeared
to be so unified and so utterly organized, it was really riddled with
contradictions. This irrationality of the whole could not be grasped in a
rational theory, but only in fragmentary form.^58
Even if Adorno passionately advocated the use of the methods of
social research, he made no attempt to conceal their merely auxiliary
function in sociology, which as the science of society could not confine
itself to ‘mere findings’, but which had to advance further to the forma-
tion of theory. If there were any danger that sociology would come to
be dominated by techniques derived from the natural sciences such as
the statistical quantification of social phenomena, then this would tell us
something about the standardization of human beings in contemporary
mass society. Thus he believed that social research that was adapted
to commercial and administrative purposes would be appropriate to a
society in which human beings have become primarily the objects of
administrative acts. This critical approach is not directed at defects within
science itself, but at a society in which the principle that ‘science is
measurement’ could prevail. Thus Adorno defended research methods
based on the model of formulating hypotheses from which deductions
could be made, while at the same time criticizing their predominance in
sociology. This was an approach he retained in his later writings as well.
He insisted on the methods adopted by empirical social researchers
as the tool of an incorruptible process of sociological enlightenment
because it contributed to ‘the demystification of sociological constructs
that have lost all contact with the reality that supported them’.^59 At the
same time, however, he insisted that the limited value of these methods
was to be clarified.^60 ‘Legitimate though method is as an antidote to
uncritical intuition, it becomes perverted as soon as it abandons the
process of interacting with its object and insists inflexibly on its own
criteria instead of reflecting on what it is being applied to.’^61
At the beginning of the 1960s, Adorno broadened his critique of
methodology by engaging in a comprehensive debate with positivism.^62
His aim was to make use of the critical scrutiny of the positivist model
of science in order to elucidate the validity criteria governing the critical
theory of society. The combination of reflection on method, criticism of
positivism, and epistemological self-clarification created the impression
that Adorno – somewhat in contradiction to his own practice as a social
scientist – was setting up an opposition in principle between two types
of sociology, one empirical and based on experience, the other specul-
ative and theoretical. In fact, he wanted to define the scope and limits
of the divergent approaches, both of which aimed to understand and