Horkheimer and Adorno rejected history as autonomous substance and grounded theory in social material

Evidence

Horkheimer writes that history in itself ‘has no reason, nor is itan“essence”intheusualsense;itisneither“Spirit”beforewhichwemustgenuflect nor “power”, but rather a comprehensible collection of events resulting from the social life processes of human beings. … The pantheistic promotion of history to the status of an autonomous, unitary, substantial being is nothing other than dogmatic metaphysics’. Adorno adopts the epistemological assumption that one cannot grasp reality by identifying it with spirit or with the subject, but rather only by means of the material of society. The task of theory is to configure this material so that objectivity itself can speak. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 186

Categorization

• XREF: Grounds Adorno’s materialist epistemology in Horkheimer’s Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History, tying the critique of political economy directly to early Frankfurt School programmatics. — connects to: Horkheimer rejected vulgar Marxists’ passive materialism by reviving Marx’s active, dialectical epistemology — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 219; Horkheimer rejected introspective understanding of history because past was made unconsciously — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 209; Adorno demanded theoretical mediation between superstructure and substructure in historical materialism. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 280 (+4 more)