Identity and difference in the ethical positions of Adorno and Habermas

Abstract

One can explore the overlaps and tensions between Adorno and Habermas on diverse and related themes concerning instrumental reason, the potential for crises in contemporary capitalist democracies, the prospects for historical transformation, the relationships between critical theory, social science and analytic philosophy, the normative positions of critical theory, and so on. Depending upon one's thematic focus, assessments of proximities, distances, advantages, and disadvantages will vary markedly. In this essay my analysis of the relationship between Adorno and Habermas is limited to questions concerning the normative character of critical theory. On my reading Adorno provides a more interesting and promising position than Habermas recognizes, and both illuminates and gestures beyond some of the most important weaknesses of Habermas's communicative ethics. Habermas once noted with a certain melancholy that his writing had not succeeded as much as he would have liked in “awaken[ing] the hermeneutic willingness requisite for its reception” Ironically, given Habermas’s often harsh and repeated criticisms of Adorno, there is a sense in which Habermas may indirectly contribute to just such an awakening for the reception of Adorno's work. For the former's emphasis on communicative ethics has contributed to an interrogative framework - a set of compelling questions concerning ethics and dialogue - which illuminates and brings into sharper focus themes that are often missed because of their oblique, sometimes illusive (though persistent and promising) treatment in Adorno’s work. Thus illuminated, Adorno appears to raise the question of whether Habermas’s self-proclaimed movement beyond him is not more adequately to be characterized as “one step forward, two steps back.”