Adorno’s Tübingen remark on resignatory sociology could equally indict Critical Theory itself

Evidence

What was surprising about the draft was the fact that Horkheimer was discussing the possibility or impossibility not of a dialectical theory of society but of a consistent, discrete one. Adorno’s version of the preface was equally surprising. A few months before, he had remarked during the positivist dispute' at the German Sociological Society's Tübingen meeting: Sociology’s abandonment of a critical theory of society is resignatory: one no longer dares to conceive of the whole since one must despair of changing it.’ This was an ambiguous statement, though: since it was spoken by a representative of the Critical Theory, one was forced to interpret it as referring to the defenders of a sociology that was content to be positivist. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 592

Categorization

• DEFINE: Locates Adorno’s famous formulation of resignation — despair of changing the whole precludes conceiving it — at the 1959 Tübingen positivist dispute.
• QUESTION: Does Adorno’s own late work then perform the resignation he diagnosed in positivist sociology? Worth chasing through the ‘no longer possible’ discussions.
• XREF: connects to: Adorno coined the message-in-the-bottle image for Critical Theory’s lack of an addressee — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1153
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Adorno coined the message-in-the-bottle image for Critical Theory’s lack of an addressee — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1153