sologdin’s Reviews > The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance > Status Update

This may be seen as an indication of the extent to which both Horkheimer and Adorno had assimilated the theological basis for the critique of progress and of conservative positions which lay behind the categories of release, uselessness and self-abandonment.

Adorno was thus exposing himself to Lazarsfeld’s criticism that, by treating the explication of all the logical possibilities of a problem as superfluous, he was allowing himself to maintain his own prejudices. The fact that many people whistle distorted forms of tunes they are familiar with was, for Adorno, equivalent to children mistreating their pet dogs.

What Horkheimer stated here was said on the basis of his knowledge of the ‘dark’ writers of the bourgeois period, whom he thought so much of, and it was more or less independent of any particular scientific research.

Adorno approached Kierkegaard’s work in his Habilitation thesis in the same way that Benjamin had approached Goethe’s Elective Affinities'. with a destructive critical attitude which attempted to preserve what could be saved.