I don't know then what you call bureaucratic. Isn't it the mind of a bureaucrat that censors Wlater Benjamin's work to take all references to Marx and Marxists concepts out of it?
>The Frankfurters were regarded with deep suspicion and
>hostility by the Adenauer elites.
But the quotation about the support of the Adenauer regime is from Aesthetics and POlitics, isn't it?
> The fact that the CIA was clueless
>enough to think that Adorno was just another bourgeois academician
On the contrary, they knew full well that Adorno and the F School were a safe alternative to revolutionary Marxism. They were happy to countenance Adorno's morbid and pessimistic denunciations of modern culture, as preferable to the programme of revolutionising modern society.
No progressive politics follows from Adorno's work. It is a romantic and
backward-looking refusal of industrial society, of the kind that
Conservatives have always indulged in. That's not to say he wasn't an
excellent writer. The Jargon of Authenticity is the best critique of
Heidegger published. But revolutionary - far from it.
>
>
>> 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.
I think Meszaros point is that the underlying component of the FS was in keeping with the Cold War Liberalism and its 'End of Ideology' thesis. Meszaros point is one of irony: that the greatest critics of Americanisation in culture, were in fact the greatest proponents of an American ideological hegemony in Europe. I think it stands.
But I'll certainly take your suggestion and look at Minima Moralia. -- Jim heartfield