> I couldn't find chapter and verse, but Istvan Meszaros comes colse
> enough, comparing Adorno's sitution to Lukacs (at a time when Adorno was
> crticisisng him for being supplicant to the Stalinist regime in
> Hungary):
>
> 'Thus he [Adorno] could feel free to indulge constantly in the most
> scathing and generic denunciation of "institutions" and "bureaucracy" as
> such while assuming paradigm bureaucratic and institutional functions -
> like doctoring Walter Benjamin's heritage ... - firt as deputy Director
> and then as Director of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research,
> recreated in West Germany ater his return from the US "with the
> benevolent approval of the Adenauer Regime" [fn cites Adorno et al
> Aethetics and Politics p 142]' Meszaros, p 119
>
> '.. Adorno's utterly self-debasing attack on Lukacs - who was under
> house arrest at the time in Hungary - was published in the CIA journal
> of West Germany (Der Monat) and soon afterwards in the other CIA funded
> journals (like Encounter) all over the world' p 118
This is hilarious. Adorno was the furthest thing from a bureaucrat you could imagine. The Frankfurters were regarded with deep suspicion and hostility by the Adenauer elites. The fact that the CIA was clueless enough to think that Adorno was just another bourgeois academician only confirms what we already knew -- that bureaucrats of both McCarthyite and Zhdanovite extraction are a dim lot indeed (not that Adorno could've known that these publications were funded by the CIA anyway).
Also, you left out the latter-day confessions of a Frankfurt School typist -- you know, the stuff about the wild cocaine parties with Allen Dulles, Adorno's controlling share in IG Farben, and how all his texts were just ripoffs from his graduate assistants.
> Meszaros judges the Frankfurters:
> 'the repatriated Institute, first under Horkheimer's and later under
> Adorno's direction, played a dubious - not radically democratizing but
> actively Americanizing - role in the cultural developements of postwar
> Germany.'
Jim, I know you're too busy revolutionizing the British proletariat to bother with these things, but have you ever actually *read* Minima Moralia? You know, the pages where he denounces America and Americanization? It's hard to miss, given that it makes up, well, 95% of the text or so.
-- Dennis