Adorno-Horkheimer’s instinct-based utopian critique rested on unproven biological assumptions

Evidence

But Adorno and Horkheimer’s position was no less open to attack than Fromm’s. To the extent that, in the 1940s, they considered biological materialism' to be the theoretical core of psychoanalysis which was to be maintained against the revisionists, they were adopting a biological and anthropological basis for the criticism of societyan assumption that there was utopian potential in instinctual structurewhich was no less problematic than Fromm's belief in spontaneity. Although Adorno and Horkheimer's position was less conventional than Fromm's, it was at the same time less exposed, in that it said nothing about the way in which this utopian potential might be expressed. Their weakness in positive formulations’ made Horkheimer, but not Adorno, uneasy in this respect. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1121

Categorization

• XREF: Wiggershaus’s even-handed critique of the Frankfurt core mirrors the known tension: the School’s biological-materialist gamble was as speculative as the revisionism it attacked. — connects to: Horkheimer and Adorno posited a hidden utopia within reason to explain resistance to demythologization. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1389; Horkheimer grounded ethics in desire as a fact needing no justification — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1464; Skinner’s utopia rested on treating humans as engineered organisms — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1185
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what concrete ‘utopian potential in instinctual structure’ did Adorno-Horkheimer ever name, and does their silence on it make the theory hollow?