between the chthonic force of Beethoven and the fissured landscapes of Schubert

history is not the simple unfolding of some preordained noumenal realm and that existence is therefore ‘ontologically incomplete’

this doesn’t sound like a communist society premised on solidarity and shared activities, but a prelapsarian paradise wherein material needs are satisfied

what Brecht and Weill dramatised on stage was not the traditional Marxist hell of exploitative production relations, but one of unfettered consumerism

Monopoly capitalism and the fascist state could not tolerate this autonomous sphere of life that represented a potential threat to the existing order, so they did to rarefied bourgeois culture what they did to the family

Brecht’s libretto, too, sought to make it clear that the bourgeois world was absurd and anarchic.

But the philosopher never shared the dramatist’s agitprop hopes.

the Institute for Social Research as it evolved in the 1930s. It was Brechtian in its inverse relationship between scabrous critique and changing that which it critiqued

Adorno and Horkheimer returned the abuse: they regarded Brecht as a petit-bourgeois poseur and apologist for Stalinism

Horkheimer’s vision in his inaugural lecture was that philosophy should open up a synoptic, critical view of human life that empirical research and interdisciplinary work might fill in