‘You can measure the honesty of a contemporary philosopher’, the sociologist Max Weber once told a group of students, ‘by his attitude toward Nietzsche and Marx’. Marx revealed the subordination of the individual to a dynamic system of impersonal domination that incubates its own destructive elements; Nietzsche disclosed the weak psychological constitution of the ‘last men’ who emerge from the womb of this historical process along with the contingency of their millenarian dogma. These two contrasting insights have shaped our intellectual universe, Weber insisted, and honest thinkers must take both sides of the equation seriously.
By this metric, Theodor W. Adorno was an honest philosopher. His original application of Marxist concepts to the study of culture has earned him his place in the pantheon of Western Marxists, and yet he conceded that it was Nietzsche, among all the great thinkers, to whom he owed his greatest debt. These heterogeneous sources of Adorno’s thinking are seldom acknowledged in one breath. Marx and Nietzsche are consumed by different readers, their ideas are discussed in different venues, their teachings are extended in different traditions. Adorno must be a descendant of one or the other. Otherwise, he is confusing and problematic.
Mikko Immanen’s Adorno’s Gamble challenges any one-sided appropriation of Adorno’s work by showing how his Marxism was invigorated by his reception of Nietzsche’s rotten children: Oswald Spengler and Ludwig Klages. This is surprising. Spengler was a dilettante historian whose bestselling magnum opus, Decline of the West, heralded an impending dystopia of skyscrapers, declining birthrates, propaganda, kitsch, deracinated urban mobs and visionary dictators. Klages was an antisemitic psychologist whose name calls to mind a mythical pagan dreamworld of primeval forests, Pelasgians, blood sacrifice, swastikas and cosmic rhythms. Spengler criticized the emasculation of the German mind by Anglo-American liberal values. Klages struck at the Judaeo-Christian foundations of the soul-crushing rational mind as such. Both writers fanned the flames of Nazi ideology. And Immanen argues that Adorno, the leading representative of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, read these men with interest, not in order to know his adversary, but rather to enrich his own emancipatory philosophy with fresh insights.
Although it remains shocking, Adorno’s interest in the interwar reactionary right is not news. His proximity to Klagesian psychology in particular, as Immanen details, was the subject of heated discussion among members of the second generation of the Frankfurt School in the early 1980s, when emissaries of Adorno’s teaching like Axel Honneth and Albrecht Wellmer disapprovingly noted the pessimistic scaffolding common to both Dialectic of Enlightenment and Klages’s magnum opus, The Mind as Adversary of the Soul. Years later, the director of the Adorno Archive, Rolf Tiedemann, rejected these ‘bizarre’ comparisons of Adorno and Klages, stressing Adorno’s contempt for the esoteric antisemite (13-15).
Immanen settles the score with the first monograph-length examination of this topic. His investigation opens with an epigraph from Adorno’s Minima Moralia that recurs as a leitmotif throughout: ‘Not least among the tasks now confronting thought is that of placing all the reactionary arguments against Western culture in the service of progressive enlightenment’ (1). In two additional essays excavated by Immanen and examined in detail – the first draft of Adorno’s ‘Odysseus Excursus’ from Dialectic of Enlightenment and the 1941 version of what later became Adorno’s Spengler essay in Prisms – Spengler and Klages are singled out as exemplary reactionary writers whose criticisms of the enlightenment tradition were ‘superior in many respects’ to those stemming from the Marxist camp (15). But what does it mean to enlist bad arguments in the service of a good cause? Adorno’s Gamble tarries with this question over the course of three brisk chapters in order to demonstrate that Spengler and Klages allowed Adorno to ‘sharpen his critical virtues’ (27). He was not ‘influenced’ by these men and did not ‘adopt’ their ideas per se, but rather ‘harnessed’ their vital powers in an act of ‘critical appropriation’ and ‘active repurposing’. They ‘made him think’ (19, 24).
Immanen shows how, in the years after Adorno’s 1931 inaugural lecture, which cites Klages in passing, Adorno became increasingly captivated by Mind as Adversary. He had hoped to review it in Max Horkheimer’s Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, partly as a way of addressing criticisms of the concept of ‘myth’ in his own recently published study of Kierkegaard (41-47). Adorno abandoned this review in 1933 before offloading it first to Alfred Sohn-Rethel and then to Walter Benjamin. Sohn-Rethel’s idiosyncratic derivation of Kant’s categories of the understanding back to the emergence of coined money in seventh century Greece would have historicized, radicalized and redeemed the Klagesian metanarrative of corrosive intellectuality by translating Klages’s anthropological concept of Geist into the Marxist concept of ‘labor’ (63-66). Benjamin, for his part, had been fascinated by Klages since meeting him in 1913; he wrote letters to Klages in the 1920s, studied Mind as Adversary in 1930 and wanted to summon Klages for the methodological bedrock of his study of nineteenth century Paris (39-41, 53-4). But Horkheimer doubted the philosophical merit of Sohn-Rethel’s project and was not interested in a comparative essay on dialectical and archaic images from Benjamin.
In some of the more challenging, conjectural sub-sections of Adorno’s Gamble, Immanen suggests that Adorno ‘came to trust his own mental impulses’ while studying Klages during his stint at Oxford in the mid-1930s (32). Adorno’s unfinished Oxford dissertation (published two decades later as Metacritique of Epistemology) is marked by a ‘Hegelianism pressed through the specifically Klagesian mantle’, and Adorno’s critique of constitutive subjectivity and defense of ‘mimetic reason’, fleshed out in Negative Dialectics, is colored by Klages’s biocentric worldview (48, 58). Adorno’s confrontation with Klages culminates in Dialectic of Enlightenment, where he reads Klages’s critique of proto-rational elements in indigenous Aegean culture and his recognition of the sacrificial logic of rationality as confirmation of the book’s core theses: ‘myth is already enlightenment’ and ‘enlightenment reverts to myth’ (142-143).
Adorno’s reception of Spengler is less ambiguous; he published three essays on the provocateur, including the awesome defense of Spengler against his mandarin naysayers in Prisms. But these essays are rarely discussed in secondary literature. Immanen argues that Adorno read Spengler’s historical exposition of the psychological mutilation of urban populations into atomized, spiritually emaciated masses, as ‘a masterclass in democracy’s self-destruction’ and a striking anticipation of the Third Reich (78). Just as Adorno hoped to refashion Klages as a Marxist critic of labor via Sohn-Rethel, so in the 1940s Adorno aimed to assimilate Spengler’s metaphysical theories of civilizational hardness and the erosion of historicity to the theory of ‘state capitalism’ that had recently been developed by Adorno’s colleague, Friedrich Pollock (91-94). As Immanen shows, Horkheimer described Adorno’s 1941 essay on Spengler as a ‘masterpiece’; in response, Adorno expressed his hope that it would serve as a ‘preparatory work’ for further collaboration in California, namely on Dialectic of Enlightenment (113, 115). This leads Immanen to argue, in the most speculative sub-sections of the book, that Spengler’s writings ‘nurtured’ Adorno’s analysis of conformism and fascist psychology in both his famous study of the ‘culture industry’ and his contribution to The Authoritarian Personality (102-112)
The title of Immanen’s book implies that Adorno ‘risked’ something by recuperating Klages and Spengler. This seems exaggerated in the interest of drama. Immanen ‘surmises’ that Horkheimer had wanted Adorno to write a critical review of Klages; he affirms Richard Wolin’s suggestion that Horkheimer rejected Benjamin’s proposed review of Klages because of his antisemitism; he avers that Adorno somewhere ‘explicitly’ dismissed Klages before his students as a ‘neo-romantic charlatan’ (42, 66, 100). In the case of his reception of Spengler, Adorno is depicted as a manic reader, perversely fascinated by a text that he also found disgusting. Adorno deemed Spengler’s cultural morphology ‘utter nonsense’, a ‘disgrace’ and a ‘neo-romantic hoax’ (75, 85, 149). He had ‘nothing but contempt’ for Spengler’s conservatism and was ‘allergic’ to his theory of democracy (77, 89). Yet, Adorno ‘praises’ Spengler’s perspicacity, is ‘impressed’ by his ideas and has ‘restrained admiration’ for his discernment (88, 100, 102). In short, Adorno is tortured by this material. But the evidence cited throughout his book is actually interesting insofar as it presents Adorno as an open-minded scholar who did not find unusual research topics taboo and who was supported by his colleagues in his philosophical pursuits. The book is really Immanen’s gamble: are readers ready for this reconsideration of Adorno’s intellectual profile?
Adorno’s Gamble concludes by alluding to the obvious contemporary relevance of Adorno’s recuperative mission. For example, Immanen notes how recent critiques of the reactionary right by disciples of Critical Theory, such as Peter Gordon’s analysis of the ‘narcissistic affirmation’ provided by the contemporary social media landscape, or Max Pensky’s critique of ‘impersonal technocracy and atomistic consumerism’ in liberal society, were first addressed in Spengler’s Decline of the West (167-168). To the extent that this is true, it is an ironic genealogical curiosity: that a reactionary writer influenced critiques of the reactionary right. But it is just one side of the story, and it would be wrong to assume that the teachings of Spengler and Klages are sustained primarily by readers of Adorno. Immanen might have mentioned that discussion of Spengler and Klages flourishes on alt-right podcasts and YouTube channels, or that neo-Nazi publishing houses have been commissioning original English editions of the untranslated works of both of these writers over the past ten years. They have returned to the forefront of the far-right imaginary and have influenced a new generation of critics of liberalism and modernity. If Adorno mined Spengler and Klages for fresh insights, this begs the question: should today’s Marxists consult Curtis Yarvin and Bronze Age Pervert for intellectual stimulation?
Or would the radical right find an answer to their frustrations somewhere in the Marxist tradition? That was the implication of Weber’s statement about honest philosophers, which was uttered just moments after he and his students had spent several hours listening to Spengler rant about Marx as the antagonist of the German spirit. Weber felt that Spengler should have studied Marx more carefully; he was not an honest scholar, and he was inadequate as a leader of the German youth. A true leader would be able to harness the seductive energy of Nietzschean critique into a sophisticated economic illumination of the modern world. Just like Adorno.
Reviewed by Kyle Baasch