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That was one of the problems with the Germany to which he and Horkheimer returned: there were no Nazis any more. The returning exiles found their homeland in a state of mass denial. When Horkheimer visited Frankfurt in 1948 to discuss with the university authorities the possibility of re-establishi…

[...] ‘Once a formula was successful, the industry plugged the same thing over and over again. The result was to make music into a kind of social cement operating through distraction, displaced wish-fulfillment, and the intensification of passivity.’ In this, you might well think, Adorno was presci…

[...] Adorno fled first to Oxford where he would spend four years from 1934 to 1938 as an advanced student at Merton College – a demotion from his position as lecturer at Frankfurt. There were worse slights to his self-esteem: at Merton, he was obliged to dine communally. This was ‘like having to r…

For Marcuse fascism was not a break with the past, but a continuation of tendencies within liberalism that supported the capitalist economic system. This was the Frankfurt School orthodoxy – fascism wasn’t an abolition of capitalism, rather a means of ensuring its continued existence. Horkheimer on…