Adorno co-authored key Horkheimer essays on state capitalism

Evidence

As with ‘The Jews and Europe’, Adorno evidently also contributed to ‘The Authoritarian State’: in a letter to his parents from early 1940, he describes the text as a ‘critique of contemporary Marxism’ he needs to ‘sort out’ with Horkheimer and Gretel Adorno; writing to Horkheimer around the same time, he refers to it as the essay ‘we wrote’. During this period, which would continue through Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer’s collaboration was so intense that the latter even considered publishing his 1942 essay ‘The End of Reason’ ‘under both of our names’, although he ultimately did not do so. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 563

Categorization

• XREF: This textual-archival evidence directly feeds the revisionist claim that Adorno was central to the political-economy critique, countering the ‘pessimistic cul-de-sac’ reading. — connects to: Internal power politics shaped Adorno’s early relations with the Institute — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 639; Horkheimer’s postwar academic output largely consisted of Adorno-drafted occasional pieces. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1910