Horkheimer criticized Adorno for assimilating music to society as identical spheres.

Evidence

Adorno’s text did in fact seem to focus all the important motifs of his thought together, but the plausibility of this was purchased at the price of an unmediated assimilation between musical and social processes. Admittedly, the treatment of the different spheres' (of base and superstructure) as identical does not always seem to me to be justified,’ Horkheimer noted in the critical part of his remarks on Adorno’s manuscript. `The danger of the philosophy of identity, and thus of idealism, which was of course as clear to you as you were writing it as it was to me reading it, does not yet seem to me to have been wholly overcome.’ — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1258

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains ‘philosophy of identity’ — treating base and superstructure spheres as identical — as an idealist danger in Adorno’s method.
• XREF: Connects to the Adorno-Horkheimer collaborative tension that shaped Dialectic of Enlightenment.