The first excerpt explores the sickness of the kind of solidarity demanded by Parties, though one wonders whether Adorno is not writing a critique of any large scale, organised attempt at political change.
The second excerpt seems to suggest that savages, a term used without any caution as it seems to be applied to anyone who hails from outside Central Europe, are not noble because they are the leading candidates to give positivism and modernisation a second life. There is no recognition of the role positivism may play and has played in combatting religious reaction or obscurantism; one should also be forgiven for not being easily won over to Adorno's own critique of positivism. Or am I just so in awe of The Tradition that I refuse to understand his profundity? Moreover, isn't it strange for someone so inspired by Benjamin to read history against the grain and to find insight in the fragments cast off by the Dialectics of History and Progress seems to find nothing of value in those "petty bourgeois" studies of non capitalist or primitive or non-white music or art?
yours, rakesh
ps max, thanks for the reply; I'll be off email for the next day or so, but I'll think about your important objections.