Adorno demands intellectuals resist both external power and their own powerlessness

Evidence

Adorno’s famous description of the almost insoluble task of letting oneself become stupefied neither by the power of others nor by one’s own powerlessness articulates the responsibility of the intellectual who desires something more than to simply produce scholarship, which in the meantime has truly become its own industry. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 2286

Categorization

• DEFINE: States and glosses Adorno’s criterion for intellectual responsibility against the power of others and of one’s own powerlessness.
• XREF: connects to: Adorno’s aphorisms were a form of intellectual collaboration under forced separation