The history of the Frankfurt School in America is usually told as a story of one-way traffic. The question being: What did America get from the Frankfurt School? The answer usually offered: a lot! We got Marcuse, Neumann, Lowenthal, Fromm, and, for a time, Horkheimer and Adorno (who ultimately went back to Germany after the war)—the whole array of émigré culture that helped transform the United States from a provincial outpost of arts and letters into a polyglot Parnassus of the world. The wonderfully counter-intuitive and heterodox question that animates Eric Oberle’s Theodor Adorno and the Century of Negative Identity is: what did the Frankfurt School get from America? To the extent that question has been asked, it has traditionally provoked […]

“A November 1944 letter to Horkheimer, for example, finds Adorno recalling that he ‘had a lot of fun’ meeting with the Berkeley Public Opinion group to develop preliminary questions on the ‘F-Scale.’” —Eric Oberle, Theodor Adorno and the Culture of Negative Identity, p. 152 I highly recommend Oberle’s book. It’s a little outside my usual reading these days, but it has some really fascinating readings of old and familiar texts and terrific biographical nuggets like this. I’ll be blogging about it more once I get rid of this cursed flu.