It’s very hard not to read these novellas as romans à clef.

It’s hard, though, not to be sympathetic to their excoriated, Mammon-fixated fathers. All they wanted (conceived of in one way) was the best for their precocious, privileged, one might even say bratty sons.

he suggested that the Institute would be an alternative to a German university system that served as a training academy for ‘mandarins’ who who would go on to uphold the status quo

the Frankfurt School would change after 1928 when Pollock and later Horkheimer became directors of the Institute, unleashing an era of speculative neo-Marxist theorising inimical to Grünberg and older Marxists such as Grossman

from disenchantment to the ultimate reification: the making of thing into human and human into thing with the result that humanity, ultimately, is expendable

To account for the gap, Lukács developed the notion of reification, extending Marx’s analysis of the ‘fetishism of the commodity form’ in Capital.

At the level of culture, Fordism made the world modern. Those mass-produced goods included not just Model T Fords, but also Charlie Chaplin films

Through that gap came the corrupting flood of commodities. Here comes one now: it’s Apple launching a fatuous new iPhone minimally different from its predecessor.

Hypostatisation, a term that runs through Frankfurt School writing like a thread, refers to an effect of reification which results from the fallacy of supposing that whatever can be named, or conceived abstractly, must actually exist

much of Grossman’s work was directed against those who thought that the revolution could be successfully launched irrespective of the propitiousness of the circumstances