Adorno’s postwar Marx turn began with a 1957-8 teaching seminar on economy and society

Evidence

Starting with the winter semester of 1957–8, Adorno held a two-semester seminar titled ‘Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft’ (‘Economy and Society’), which Horkheimer also co-taught on occasion. This seminar marked the first time in his teaching that he ‘explicitly and exhaustively covered Marxian theory’. Adorno identified the ‘primary task’ of the seminar as the attempt to ‘assemble the building blocks of a politico-economic theory beyond the division of economy and sociology, and in doing so, to prevent the de-economisation of sociology from rendering it a psychology in disguise’, such as Freud envisioned it. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1110

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Adorno’s late work generally and to the ‘de-economisation of sociology’ critique now debated in critical theory.
• SEED: Angle: Adorno’s pedagogy as the incubator of his late critique of political economy — the seminar as laboratory for Negative Dialectics.