Abstract

Intellectual Bad Conscience and Solidarity with the Underdogs

Highlights

  • There are few aphorisms in Minima Moralia that display a less sympathetic attitude towards their subject than “They, the people” (§ 7)

  • Adorno denounces the “amor intellectualis for [the] kitchen personnel” in the subsequent aphorism, but “They, the people” already seems to con rm all suspicions about the alleged elitism of critical theory.The idea that intellectuals mostly encounter those less educated when “illiterates come to intellectuals wanting letters written for them” is laughable, even for the 1950s, and the claim that, among the “underdogs”,“envy and spite surpass anything seen among literati or musical directors” oozes with contempt, no matter how much Adorno insists that these alleged character de cits result from the social structures in which uneducated, working class people nd themselves

  • He wishes to criticize those intellectuals who promote such theories because of the “justi ed guilt-feelings of those exempt from physical work”.While Horkheimer had already criticized those who were “satis ed to proclaim with reverent admiration [...] the creative strength of the proletariat” as evading intellectual e ort in “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1975, 124), Adorno o ers a social-psychological explanation of persistence of this form of deferential standpoint theory: It is a species of bad conscience arising from the fact “that intellectuals are [...] bene ciaries of a bad society” as he puts it later in Minima Moralia (§ 86)

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Summary

Introduction

There are few aphorisms in Minima Moralia that display a less sympathetic attitude towards their subject than “They, the people” (§ 7). He wishes to criticize those intellectuals who promote such theories because of the “justi ed guilt-feelings of those exempt from physical work”.While Horkheimer had already criticized those who were “satis ed to proclaim with reverent admiration [...] the creative strength of the proletariat” as evading intellectual e ort in “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1975, 124), Adorno o ers a social-psychological explanation of persistence of this form of deferential standpoint theory: It is a species of bad conscience arising from the fact “that intellectuals are [...] bene ciaries of a bad society” as he puts it later in Minima Moralia (§ 86).

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