A Theory Devoured by Thought 425explain social reality.^63 The methods appropriate to grasping the differ-
ent dimensions of social reality formed the subject of a debate launchedin
1961 by Adorno and Karl Popper.^64 The background to this confronta-
tion was a set of disagreements that had emerged in 1959 during the
Fourteenth German Sociology Conference in Berlin. The West German
sociologists were celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Sociological
Society. The occasion had generated a quarrel about the National
Socialist past and also the future of the discipline.^65 One group, around
Helmut Schelsky, wished to establish a general situating of German
sociology, while others, such as René König and Ralf Dahrendorf, were
also concerned to draw a line under the past, separating modern socio-
logy from National Socialist transgressions in the years 1933–45, so as
to liberate the new discipline from the ballast of the past and enable it
to join forces with American sociology, which led the field internation-
ally. It was disputes of this kind about the best approach to take that led
to a workshop in Tübingen on ‘The Logic of Scientific Discovery’. This
was initiated by Ralf Dahrendorf, who was entrusted with the task of
choosing the speakers: Popper, and Adorno. He knew both of them
personally. Popper, who was teaching at the London School of Eco-
nomics, had made his name with the Logik der Forschung, which had
appeared in the early 1930s and which set out to develop a theory of
scientific knowledge arising from his disputes with the logical positivists.
For his part, Adorno had made his name as a social researcher not least
with The Authoritarian Personality, and in addition he had become known
for his theories about the relation between social theory and social
research through two articles that had become standard.
The starting-point for the discussions within the discipline was
Popper’s paper, which consisted of twenty-seven theses setting out his
programme for a critical rationalism. The question he was concerned to
ask was how to construct empirically sustainable theories and how to
distinguish them from theoretical speculations.^66
In his presentation, Adorno used Popper’s theses to show that critical
theory was an independent paradigm in its own right. He began by
defining the specific nature of the social sciences; he went on to explain
the concept of society as a totality and, finally, he discussed the meth-
odological status of criticism. In contrast to the scientific ideal of his
adversary, Adorno emphasized that sociology, unlike the naturalsciences,
did not deal in unqualified data, but only in data that have emerged
from the socio-cultural context and that bear its stamp. The available
facts are social in origin right down to their linguistic formulation.^67
Adorno began by clarifying the concept of the social because hisstarting-
point was ‘the priority of society as that of something all-encompassing
and consolidated above its individual manifestations’.^68 The totality of
the social manifests itself in every individual phenomenon, and yet is
more than the sum of individual phenomena. Society is not just omni-
present but also internally self-contradictory. The consequence of this