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.

[...] Brecht hoped that there would be an abrasion between the grandeur of the opera house and the harsh message. Instead, it became another culinary treat in the operatic repertory, aberrantly decoded by its audiences and then happily consumed like whiskey. [...]

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

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

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

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

the positivists – at least those whom Horkheimer characterised thus – suspended facts in aspic and falsely eternalised the status quo

[...] In two papers on the criminal justice system, he argued that the state presented itself subconsciously as a father and therefore ruled through the fear of paternal punishment; he also contended that it had a class bias and that, by focusing on crime and punishment rather than tackling the oppressive social conditions that led some to commit crime, criminals became the scapegoats for society’s unfairness and economic inequality. The image of the punishing father was now projected into the authority of the state. Fromm even contended that the criminal justice system did not reduce the crime rate; rather, its function was to intensify oppression and crush opposition. These thoughts are echoed in our time by the American activist and professor Angela Davis, a one-time student of Marcuse. [...]

This leitmotif – sadness in intoxication, catastrophe foreshadowed in the very moment of exultation, death figured in birth pangs – is, for Adorno, utterly German

[...] daddy would not bankroll his son to follow a profession that was premised on not making a living. As his biographers put it: ‘His parents pushed for a career with some earning potential and steadfastly refused the kind of support that would enable Benjamin to live independently while continuing to live and write as he wished.’ Their son was temperamentally incapable of pursuing a career with earning potential: he was too astute a reader of Kafka for that. Kafka had bent the knee to his father’s desires and taken a job in an insurance office. The novelist described what that work meant: ‘You have to earn your grave.’ Benjamin was not temperamentally capable of following Kafka’s abasement.

[...] If the Frankfurt School was the last hurrah of German romanticism, then Benjamin was its emblem, revealing the group in all its contradictions – Marxists without party, socialists dependent on capitalist money, beneficiaries of a society they sniffily disdained and without which they would have had nothing to write about.

Benjamin’s writings in the last eight years of his life were examples of Joseph Schumpeter’s notion of creative destruction, reducing history to rubble the better to find a path through its ruins

to name something as a crime is not just to announce its prohibition, but to confer on that act a libidinal cathexis: transgression is sexy

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 once wrote ‘he who does not wish to speak of capitalism, should also be silent about fascism’. [...]

What has long shocked some readers of the Frankfurt School is the apparent blitheness with which they elided Hitlerian fascism, Stalinist communism and Roosevelt’s America

[...] 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 return to school’, he wrote, adding, with pardonable exaggeration, ‘in short, an extension of the Third Reich’. [...]

Deracinated, lonely, struggling to make his philosophy understood in a language that he was just mastering, Adorno took succour

Deracinated, lonely, struggling to make his philosophy understood in a language that he was just mastering, Adorno took succour

[...] ‘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 prescient: he recognised early the developments that would dominate television, film, commercial theatre, book publishing and the internet in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, how the endless repetition of successful formulas, such as in sequels or online retailer recommendations based on past consumption patterns, keeps us in a kind of Sisyphean hell, buying and consuming minimally different cultural products.