Adorno faulted Veblen for demanding culture’s emancipation from tradition too soon

Evidence

In Veblen, a technocratic Marxist' (as Dahrendorf called him), whose idea had been to contrast the engineer with the leisure class, Adorno attempted to protectfrom the pressures of dreamless adjustment and adaptation to reality’ those unarticulated elements of culture in which he saw the necessities of natural forces breaking through, an emancipation from the realm of ends and purposes. One example will suffice to show that Adorno’s objections to Veblen’s critique of culture involved nothing more than the fact that it demanded that the emancipation from tradition should be delayed. Veblen had `noticed the temporal disparity between the castle and the railway station but not the law behind this disparity. The railway station assumes the aspect of the castle but this aspect is its truth. Only when the technological world is a direct servant of domination is it capable of shedding the disguise. Only in fascism does it equal itself.’ — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1302

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Adorno’s broader dialectic of enlightenment (instrumental reason, domination) in Horkheimer’s Critical Theory more generally. — connects to: Adorno defended unarticulated cultural elements against pressure to adjust to reality. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 334