Adorno abandoned revolutionary grounding because the proletarian revolution never materialised

Evidence

Whereas Marx, ‘who thought his own era was ripe to redeem the theoretical promise of historical materialism’, could still anticipate the proletarian revolution which would cause philosophy to be superseded by a transformed practice and supposedly thereby liberate theory from a locked-up and base totality, it is no longer possible for Adorno to ground his theory in a practically effective non-identical. Following Lukács, Adorno envisioned as late as the 1930s a revolution on the part of the proletariat. However, this never materialised, and ‘the progressive implications of the contradiction’ between society and the working class ‘disappeared’, as Adorno and Horkheimer note several times in their discussions on whether and how to write a manifesto. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1199

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the book’s thesis of countering the ‘pessimistic cul-de-sac’ reading of Adorno — this passage grounds Adorno’s later position in a concrete historical failure rather than mere temperament. — connects to: Adorno retained class analysis while abandoning proletarian class-consciousness as impossible — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 679; Adorno rejected party-mediated revolutionary theory as doomed to capture or reformism — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1096; Adorno reframes philosophy as reflecting on missed revolutionary practice — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1210 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Adorno reframes philosophy as reflecting on missed revolutionary practice #expands (0.95) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1210
• Adorno kept class struggle but demoted it from analytical focus #corroborates (0.78) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 1743