Adorno defended authority as indispensable for communist avant-garde politics.

Evidence

In Fromm’s essay on The Social Determination of Psychoanalytic Theory', Adorno saw a genuine threat to the journal’s line’, due to the essay’s one-sided condemnation of authority (without which neither Lenin's avant-garde nor dictatorship can be conceived') and its bourgeois-individualist’ demand for more goodness. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 648

Categorization

• QUESTION: Adorno defending authority — this reverses the common caricature of him as pure anti-authoritarian; worth tracing how this squares with later Frankfurt School positions.