The Displaced Intellectual? Adorno's American Years Revisited

Abstract

America which for him meant the U.S.A. as a happy or successful relationship. In fact, most commentators have rightly stressed the highly problematic nature of this meeting, either by pointing out how unable and unwilling Adorno was to adjust to the American way of life or by emphasizing how the United States failed to receive and integrate the persona and work of the German-Jewish philosopher. Charges of cultural elitism and arrogance were common among American as well as foreign contemporary observers, charges that were later reiterated by critics of Adorno or intellectual historians dealing with the generation of German intellectuals exiled from Germany after 1933.' Defenders of Adorno, on the other hand, tend to foreground the incongruity between Adorno's European outlook and the intellectual atmosphere in the United States during the 1940s and early 1950s. By and large, foes and friends seem to agree that Adorno's complex and ambiguous attitude to America was rooted in his European and German Wleltanschauung, his critical humanism that motivated him to reject modern America its political order, its economic system, and particularly its culture. Because of his education and his commitment to an (elitist) humanist tradition (steeped in classical literature), so the argument goes, Adorno ended up giving a largely negative account of