10

The guilt of reification: Adorno’s

critique of sociological categories
louis hartnoll

Though a minor episode in the history of the Institute for Social

Research, Max Horkheimer’s extended letter to Henryk Gross-
man of 20 January 1943, discussing and criticizing the latter’s
manuscript ‘The Evolutionist Revolt against Classical Econom-
ics’, contains some paradigmatic statements regarding a reading
of the work of Karl Marx. Taking to task what he believed to
be an ‘intellectual-historical approach’, Horkheimer charged
Grossman with rendering Marx indistinguishable from a run-
of-the-mill ‘progressive positivist’ or ‘narrow-minded empiricist’
and for reducing him to merely ‘another link in the long chain
of ever more astute political economists’.1 Whether or not this
is a fair characterization of Grossman’s position, Horkheimer
would propose the counterinterpretation that Marx’s primary
achievement was better understood as being ‘as universally
anti-sociological as it could possibly be’.2 Articulated at a point
in which Dialectic of Enlightenment was already well in train – at
that moment, that is, when Horkheimer and Theodor W.

1. Max Horkheimer, letter to Henryk Grossman, 20 January 1943, in Max Horkheimer,

Gesammelte Schriften, Band 17: Briefwechsel 1941–1948, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr,
Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1996, pp. 398–415, here p. 401. Unless otherwise
stated, all translations from German are my own.
2. Ibid.
194 futurethoughts

Adorno’s close intellectual collaboration marked their supposed

turn away from classical Marxian concerns – this image of Marx
as a critical, non-positivist and anti-empiricist thinker further
underscores a certain Marxian approach to sociology.3 This
approach, I will here argue with respect to Adorno’s oeuvre, in-
volves a twentieth-century retranslation of the subtitle of Capital
as a philosophical ‘critique of sociological categories’.4 From this
standpoint, in revisiting Adorno’s interventions into sociology
from the 1930s through to the 1960s, whether as an awkward
and semi-reluctant researcher or in his facilitating role as direc-
tor of the Institute, we cannot view him as straightforwardly
offering a competing sociological counter-model, as if he were
but another link in the chain of ever more astute sociologists.
Whilst this latter interpretative possibility may be open to us,
it is rendered inherently problematic by the fact that Adorno’s
unorthodox commitment to sociology was simultaneously a
dialectical commitment to the critical value of its fundamental
untenability – at least, in its dominant bourgeois variant. Or, as
Werner Bonefeld succinctly puts it, there is no ‘sociologist by the
name of Adorno’.5

3. Following Helmut Dubiel, the Institute’s development is often framed in terms of

a sequence of programmes that drew it away from its original political and theoretical
commitments until, in the 1940s, it sought ‘the conscious abandonment of the Marxist
theoretical tradition’. Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development
of Critical Theory, trans. Benjamin Gregg, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2016, p. 93. For a
refutation of Dubiel’s claim that ‘[t]he programmatic concept of critique and dialectic
is, after 1937, no longer conceived in terms of Critique of Political Economy’ (ibid.,
pp. 92–3), see Nico Bobka and Dirk Braunstein, ‘Adorno and the Critique of Political
Economy’, trans. Lars Fischer, in Werner Bonefeld and Chris O’Kane, eds, Adorno and
Marx: Negative Dialectics and the Critique of Political Economy, Bloomsbury, London,
2022, pp. 35–54. For a reading of Adorno’s relation to Marx and Marxism in the context
of the philosophical interpretation of sociology, see Peter Osborne, ‘Adorno and Marx’,
in Peter E. Gordon, Espen Hammer and Max Pensky, eds, A Companion to Adorno, Wiley
Blackwell, Hoboken NJ, 2020, pp. 303–19.
4. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On the Logic of the Social Science’, in Theodor W. Adorno
et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby,
Heinemann Educational Books, London, 1976, pp. 105–22, here p. 114. See also Hans-
Georg Backhaus, Dialektik der Wertform. Untersuchungen zur marxschen Ökonomiekritik,
ça ira Verlag, Freiburg, 2018, p. 75.
5. Werner Bonefeld, ‘Economic Objectivity and Negative Dialectics: On Class and
Struggle’, in Bonefeld and O’Kane, Adorno and Marx, pp. 99–120, here p. 102.
 out takes 195

Commenting on this project, Helmut Reichelt indicates that

Adorno’s critique of sociological categories draws from a dual
inheritance of Marx and G.W.F. Hegel, thereby positing a notion
of critique understood in a twofold sense. The first extends
Marx’s mature critique of political economy, taking it to be the
dialectical dispelling of a discipline’s central concepts as bound
up in a politically complicit scientific representation of the social
relations of production. In this regard, Reichelt writes:

Like Horkheimer, Adorno saw very precisely that what Marx

meant with the concept of critique was not only a critique of
science, but he also grasped critique as a principle of presentation
[Darstellungsprinzip], as a critique of categories and their dialectical
development. This dialectic – in which, as Adorno himself suggests,
the critique of categories has to unfold the ‘incomprehensible’
(that is, the objective abstraction) in its immanent dynamic – is
simultaneously the methodologically sophisticated demonstration of
the unity of this actual, real system.6

The second notion of critique turns instead on a critique

of what ‘would have to be thematized under the heading of
‘phenomenal knowledge [erscheinendes Wissen]’. This, Reichelt
continues, is to examine ‘how social objectivity is experienced by
humans themselves’, how a subject is confronted by an abstrac-
tion that they encounter ‘as an object (in money and all the other
categories connected to it)’. Though the money-form was more
properly a concern of Alfred Sohn-Rethel than it was Adorno,
this second notion is useful here for stressing an element of the
critique of sociological categories that must critique sociology
‘as a form of knowledge’, a form that constructs and presents
a notion of social objectivity itself.7 To this dual critique, we
might add the following claim taken from Adorno’s ‘Reflections

6. Helmut Reichelt, Neue Marx-Lektüre. Zur Kritik sozialwissenschaftlicher Logik, ça ira

Verlag, Freiburg, 2020, p. 34. Though Reichelt does not note this, often when Adorno
speaks of ‘comprehending the incomprehensible’ or some variation thereon he is
commenting on the work of Émile Durkheim.
7. Ibid.
196 futurethoughts

on Class Theory’, drafted just a year earlier than Horkhemer’s

aforementioned letter, as a compressed methodological maxim:
‘Nothing helps’, Adorno writes, ‘but to turn the truth of the
sociological concepts against the untruth that produced them.’8
This essay is an attempt to examine one instance of this cri-
tique, centred on the category of reification and one of its closest
sociological cognates, Émile Durkheim’s concept of the social
fact. Whilst Adorno’s reception of Durkheim is multifaceted and
for the most part misunderstood, there is one line of argument I
want to draw out and expand upon for the purposes of sharpen-
ing his account of and confrontation with post-war sociology and
sociological positivism: the critique of Durkheim’s treatment of
social process as if it were a reified thing. Although the criticism
might be assumed in advance to be relatively straightforward,
a mere ‘tick-box exercise’ in the mechanical and uncharitable
Marxian dismissal of Durkheim,9 Adorno’s account rather turns
on several theoretical and political ambiguities, ambiguities
that ensure that Durkheim is conversely figured as an enduring
theoretical resource for social analysis and critique.
I begin with a reconstruction of Adorno’s concept of reifica-
tion as outlined in Negative Dialectics and elsewhere. With
recourse to Marx’s extended mature project, and pace the
interpretation offered by Gillian Rose, I argue that reification in
Adorno underscores not the discrepancy between use-value and
exchange-value, as well as the exchange of equivalents, but the
social and relational forms of value that objectively arise from
the exchange process. This concept of reification is supplemented
by a second philosophical source, the work of Hegel. Arguing
that this element in Adorno’s thought should not be minimized,
8. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Reflections on Class Theory’, trans. Rodney Livingstone, in
Rolf Tiedemann, ed., Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, Stanford
University Press, Stanford CA, 2003 (1942), pp. 93–110, here p. 102.
9. Hans-Peter Müller, ‘Interview by Gregor Fitzi and Nicola Marcucci with Hans-Peter
Müller on the reception of Émile Durkheim in Germany’, Journal of Classical Sociology, vol.
17, no. 4, 2017, pp. 399–422, here p. 402.
 out takes 197

I attempt to demonstrate the pertinence of The Phenomenology of

Spirit for combating reified thought in the positive sciences.
I then recount Durkheim’s concept and theory of the social
fact as advanced in his early plea for the sociological discipline,
The Rules of Sociological Method. Here I delineate both the
fundamental coordinates of this base sociological object and his
account for their evidence through social constraint. Drawing
on Adorno’s essays, interventions, lectures and, albeit cautiously,
seminar protocols, I then take the concept of reification as a
leitmotif to reconstruct his mature encounter with Durkheim.
Doing so, I suggest, demonstrates that Adorno finds in the
concept of the social fact a correct but deficient notion of reifica-
tion, a recognition, to paraphrase Marx, that social relations
between individuals assume the phantasmagoric form of
relations between things, though with the intonation inverted.
Finally, I go on to show how this framework is redeployed as
part of Adorno’s confrontation with Karl Popper and others as
part of the now-infamous ‘positivism dispute’. At the level of self-
conception, the question of reification was one of the principal
dividing lines that separated the disputants, or, as Adorno writes,
the ‘dialectical critique of positivism finds its most important
point of attack in reification’.10 Viewed from the perspective of
his critique of sociological categories, the positivism dispute
appears less concerned with narrow epistemological issues, less
concerned with arbitrating among competing sociologies, as it
were, than with spelling out how post-war sociology is bound
up in a political problematic. From this I argue that some of the
stakes involved in this dispute might be better understood if
Adorno’s criticisms are viewed as offering a particular reading
of internal developments within sociological positivism itself.
For whilst Adorno characterizes both Durkheim and Popper as

10. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Introduction’, in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, pp.
1–67, here p. 63.
198 futurethoughts

positivists, much to the chagrin of their defenders, the charges

levelled against them are not equivalent. Comparing the two
critiques brings to the forefront how, over the course of the
twentieth century, sociological positivism was to undergo a
theoretical impoverishment. Durkheim is mobilized because his
sociological theory sketched a ‘more serious’ alternative approach
to those sociologists who lacked even the faintest hint of, to use
Adorno’s phraseology, the ‘guilt of reification’.11

Adorno and the reified social

Though it was, as Rose summarizes in her study of the subject,

‘the centrifuge of all his major works and of his many shorter
articles’ from 1932 onwards,12 Adorno’s concept of reification
is most cogently and forcefully articulated in a few passages
of Negative Dialectics. There, its backdrop is ‘the ideological
accompaniment of the emancipation of the bourgeois I’, the
philosophical subjectivism that protests the ‘priority of the
object’.13 According to his historico-philosophical sketch, such
protestation is driven by the reactionary theoretical suspicion
that the subject may not be as powerful as assumed, a suspicion
that emerges from ‘a misdirected opposition to the status quo,
from opposition to its thingness’.14 Adorno rereads Marx’s theory
of reification as a commentary on the history of bourgeois phil-
osophy, a reading in which the chapter on the fetish character
of the commodity is not only an exposition of part of the basic
logic of capital, but simultaneously inherits and formulates
a critique of ‘classic German philosophy’.15 Given the replete

11. Adorno, ‘Introduction’, p. 12.

12. Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W.
Adorno, Verso, London, 2014, p. 55.
13. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton, Continuum, New York,
2007, p. 189.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., p. 190.
 out takes 199

philosophical coordinates of Marx’s mature project, Adorno

unfortunately remains characteristically vague in specifying just
which of Marx’s statements he is referring to, leaving open to
interpretation which elements are constitutive of his concept. As
such, whilst an indicative reference is made to the chapter on the
fetishism of the commodity, the passages in Negative Dialectics
contain no direct quotation from or coded reference to the
locus classicus of the theory of reification in Marx, which in the
original reads:

the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour

within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the
physical nature of the commodity and the material [dinglich] relations
arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation
between men themselves which assumes [annimmt] here, for them,
the phantasmagoric form of a relation between things [Dingen].16

This widely cited remark from Capital compresses at least two

lines of argument. The first, textually restricted argument pre-
sents a moment in the opening analysis of the commodity, now
subject to extensive Marxological reconstruction. The second,
which I want to concentrate on, rearticulates an idea that Marx
had variously tested and reformulated in his extended mature
project. Turning to the first notebook of the Grundrisse, ‘The
Chapter on Money’, Marx describes the mutual co-dependence
of all individuals as ‘their social connection’.17 In the capitalist
mode of production, an individual’s activity is rendered ‘social’ in
so far as it is expressed as exchange-value or, at this point in his
analysis, as money. An individual’s capacity to define and shape
the activity of others is thereby determined by their possession of

16. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes,
Penguin, London, 1976, translation amended. For a brief commentary on Fowkes’s
translation of phantasmagorische Form as ‘fantastic form’ rather than ‘phantasmagoric
form’, the latter of which I have opted for here, see Rose, The Melancholy Science, pp.
40ff.
17. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Raw Draft),
trans. Martin Nicolaus, Penguin, London, 1993, p. 156.
200 futurethoughts

exchange-value or money. Evocatively formulated, ‘The indi-

vidual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society,
in his pocket.’18 Here Marx articulates what Rose characterizes
as ‘the germ of commodity fetishism’19 – though it must be noted
and in distinction from her reconstruction, Marx’s stress is not
on the discrepancy between use-value and exchange-value but on
the conditions of exchange as presented and confronted in the
value form. Marx writes:

The social character of activity, as well as the social form of the

product, and the share of individuals in production here appear as
something alien and objective, confronting the individuals, not as
their relation to one another, but as their subordination to relations
which subsist independently of them and which arise out of collisions
between mutually indifferent individuals. The general exchange
of activities and products, which has become a vital condition for
each individual – their mutual interconnection – here appears as
something alien to them, autonomous, as a thing. In exchange-value,
the social connection between persons is transformed into a social
relation between things; personal capacity into objective wealth.20

Shortly thereafter, in the chapter on the commodity in A

Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, this line returns
as part of the burgeoning discussion of the double character of
labour. In these passages, Marx is specifically concerned with
establishing the relation of labour time to exchange-value and,
further, how an individual’s labour becomes specifically social
labour. In the course of the exposition, Marx contends that

it is a characteristic feature of labour which posits exchange-value

that it causes the social relations of individuals to represent
themselves, as it were, in the perverted [verkehrt] form of a social
relation between things. The labour of different persons is equated
and treated as universal labour only by bringing one use value into
relation with another one in the guise of exchange-value. Although

18. Ibid., p. 157.

19. Rose, The Melancholy Science, p. 40.
20. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 157, translation amended.
 out takes 201

it is thus correct to say that exchange-value is a relation between

persons, it is however necessary to add that it is a relation hidden
beneath a material veil [dinglicher Hülle].21

Then, strikingly extending this through his analysis of money

in the same chapter,

A social relation of production appears as something existing apart

from individual human beings, and the distinctive relations into
which they enter in the course of production in society appear as the
specific properties of a thing – it is this perverted appearance, this
prosaically real, and by no means imaginary, mystification that is
characteristic of all social forms of labour positing exchange value.
This perverted appearance manifests itself merely in a more striking
manner in money than it does in commodities.22

Whilst it is not my concern here to draw out the strict conse-

quences of this unfolding line of argument for the development
of Marx’s thought, I want to argue that it is not, as Rose inter-
prets it, the transformation of a use-value as a product of labour
into a commodity, but the social and relational characteristics and
appearance that exchange-value adopts, its form-determinant
aspects, that are consequential, not only for Marx’s claim in
Capital, but also for Adorno’s mature concept of reification.23
As Adorno unfolds his reading of Marx, he proposes to read
exchange and the exchange process speculatively, suggesting that
21. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Victor
Schnittke, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works [hereafter MECW], Volume
29: Marx: 1857–1861, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1987, pp. 257–417, here pp. 275–6,
translation amended.
22. Ibid., p. 289. Marx later goes on to comment on these passages in Karl Marx,
Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63, trans. Emile Burns, Renate Simpson and Jack Cohen,
MECW, Volume 32: Marx: 1861–1863, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1989, pp. 317ff. My
thanks to Morteza Samanpour for impressing upon me the importance of the 1861–63
Manuscripts for Marx’s Capital project.
23. Rose’s interpretation imports aspects that are neither textually nor conceptually
justified. Whilst it leads to a theoretically richer account of Adorno’s notions of identity
and exchange – enabling us, as part of a growing chorus, to recognize the buried
importance of Marx to Adorno’s mature philosophical project – by recasting Adorno’s
concept of reification as the philosophical extrapolation of Marx’s theory of value and
exchange (rather than the narrower presentation of exchange-value, the commodity
form and the form of social relations), it too hastily conflates reification with the more
important and original notions of identity and exchange, and downplays its formal and
phenomenological aspects.
202 futurethoughts

they possess a ‘real objectivity’ as a structuring and systematic

social force and yet are simultaneously ‘objectively untrue’
because they betray the principle of equality upon which they are
based.24 Importantly, however, the contradiction between these
two poles results in the ‘distortion in the commodity form’,25 a
contradiction mirrored in the commodity’s appearance as an ‘ex-
tremely obvious, trivial thing’ and which Marx’s analysis reveals
as a complex and secretive ‘sensuous suprasensory thing’.26 That
exchange is ‘a law of nature’ is only true, Adorno argues, ‘in a
sardonic sense’: lawful at the level of the fundamental structural
logic of capital, natural at the level of its presentation, and sar-
donic at the level of their combination. Whilst for Adorno, then,
‘reification itself is the reflection-form [Reflexionsform] of false
objectivity’, its formal appearance is not to be confused with the
conditions of its genesis and thus not to be taken as primary.

The cause of human suffering, meanwhile, will be glossed over rather

than denounced in the lament over reification. The trouble is with
the conditions that condemn mankind to impotence and apathy and
would yet be changeable by human action; it is not primarily with
people and with the way conditions appear to people. Against the
possibility of total catastrophe, reification is an epiphenomenon; even
more so is the alienation coupled with reification, the subjective state
of consciousness that corresponds to it.27

Returning to the remark that Marx’s exposition of the com-

modity form is simultaneously a commentary on classic German
philosophy helps underscore another major resource for Adorno’s
concept of reification, the work of Hegel. Beyond Negative
Dialectics, clues for this inheritance are to be found in Adorno’s
essay ‘The Experiential Content of Hegel’s Philosophy’, wherein
he outlines a Hegelian concept of reification via the critique of

24. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 190.

25. Ibid., translation amended.
26. Marx, Capital, Volume I, p. 163, translation amended.
27. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, translations amended.
 out takes 203

a false notion of objectivity operative in positivist science, the

claim that what is ‘true’ in science is that which corresponds to
its own criteria. On this reading, Immanuel Kant’s delimitation
of philosophical knowledge in the Critique of Pure Reason returns
as the limitations of consciousness to be criticized and overcome
in the progression of the Phenomenology. Hegel, according to
Adorno, confronts the rigidity and inadequacy of the structure
of positive scientific consciousness in those moments in which
consciousness reflects on these limitations, reflects, as moments
in which the shape of consciousness transforms, on the ways
in which it has distorted its object. This ‘contradiction between
scientific spirit and the critique of science’ is, in Hegel, ‘the
motor of philosophical activity’.28 On Adorno’s reading, the
Phenomenology thereby marshals an objection to

that rational science, which imagines itself to be the basis of truth’s

legitimacy, trims objects down to size and processes them until
they fit into the institutionalised, ‘positive’ disciplines, and does
so in the service of its own ordering concepts and their immanent
practicability and lack of contradiction.29

Hegel’s notion of reification, as Adorno reconstructs it,

exposes how science is theoretically inimical to its own pursuits,
having little to do ‘with the life of things’ themselves, little,
that is, with the attempt to think the object itself. Despite its
self-image – prominent, for instance, in the debates over value
freedom and value neutrality – positive science is confined by its
unacknowledged subjectivism, unreflectively stuck at the early
shapes of consciousness sketched in the Phenomenomology.30 In

28. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Experiential Content of Hegel’s Philosophy’, in Hegel:

Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1993, pp.
53–88, here p. 73.
29. Ibid.
30. In this, Adorno concurs with Herbert Marcuse: ‘The first three sections of the
Phenomenology are a critique of positivism and, even more, of reification.’ Herbert
Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, 2nd edn, Routledge,
London and New York, 2000, p. 112. It is this statement of Marcuse’s that Rose claims
‘may be the source of the mistaken belief that Hegel used the word. This widespread
204 futurethoughts

a sense, then, Hegel anticipates and criticizes ‘the institution of

positivist science, which increasingly presents itself the world
over as the sole legitimate form of knowledge’.31 Such a notion
of reification in Hegel offers us a critique of false or abstract
objectivity, of the ‘naiveté that confuses facts and figures, the
plaster model of the world, with its foundation’.32 And it is owing
to the social actuality of this problem, the problem of positive
social science’s dominance in the post-war period, that it is Hegel
who offers an occasion for returning to the concept of reification
that we find in Marx.
Pursuing an interpretation of these all-too-loaded and all-
too-brief passages, we must recognize that neither the Hegelian
nor the Marxian element should be jettisoned or minimized.
While Adorno finds Marx essential for thinking the genesis
of reification, remembering Adorno’s famous description of
historical materialism as the ‘anamnesis of the genesis’,33 Hegel
demonstrates where it becomes epistemologically operative. The
inclusion of Hegel is not simply the result of a ‘misattribution’,
but a central part of Adorno’s critique of sociological categories,
one that would seek to construct and theorize a notion of
reification that furthers its diagnostic force. Without Marx, the
Hegelian critique of science lacks a politics; without Hegel, the

misattribution has contributed to the debasement of the term.’ Rose, The Melancholy
Science, p. 38. In his defence, Marcuse makes no claims that the term Verdinglichung
appears or originates in Hegel, instead consistently underscoring that he is interpreting
the notion from a Marxian standpoint.
31. Adorno, ‘The Experiential Content of Hegel’s Philosophy’, p. 73.
32. Ibid., pp. 73–4.
33. This oft-quoted remark appears in a set of notes taken by Adorno from a
conversation about Sohn-Rethel’s ‘Historical Materialist Theory of Knowledge’ (1965),
stressing the conservative dimension of the philosophical practice of generating
concepts and categories: ‘The confrontation of the categories with one another does
not, however, take place in their purity, but with the object [am Objekt]. The constitution
of the categories, the reflection of the exchange abstraction as philosophy, demands the
abandonment (the forgetting) of their social genesis, or of genesis altogether. Historical
materialism is [the] anamnesis of the genesis.’ Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Notizen von einem
Gespräch zwischen Th. W. Adorno und Alfred Sohn-Rethel’, in Alfred Sohn-Rethel,
Schriften IV. Geistige und körperliche Arbeit. Theoretische Schriften 1947–1990. Teilband 1, ed
Carl Freytag, Oliver Schlaudt and Françoise Willmann), ça ira Verlag, Freiburg, 2018, pp.
129–33, here p. 131.
 out takes 205

Marxian notion recalls and critiques a genesis but occludes the

full extent of its consequences. Or, to state it alternatively, if the
issue of reification underpins the 1950s’ and 1960s’ confrontation
with positivism, Adorno requires Marx for it to be socio-political
and Hegel for it to be socio-epistemological.

Durkheim, a theory bewitched

Any fundamental claim about the method of a science and,

indeed, about its disciplinary legitimacy, coherence and
independence, The Rules of Sociological Method suggests, first
requires a thoroughgoing definition and exposition of its object.
As Durkheim therein conceived it, for sociology this involves
an account of those ‘facts termed “social”’.34 As is well known,
the opening chapters of this book make a case for the existence
of the social fact as a unique scientific object by arguing that
such an object cannot be accounted for by the existing sciences,
foremost biology, psychology and economics. This definite class
of facts, he argues, do not reside in the individual, though they
exert themselves in and through individuals:

they consist of manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to

the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue
of which they exercise control over him. Consequently, since they
consist of representations and actions, they cannot be confused
with organic phenomena, nor with psychical phenomena, which
have no existence save in and through the individual consciousness.
Thus they constitute a new species and to them must be exclusively
assigned the term social.35

Durkheim elaborates this claim by advancing two interlocking

lines of argument. The first identifies where, if neither in the

34. Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology
and Its Methodology, 2nd edn, trans. W.D. Halls, ed. Steven Lukes, Palgrave Macmillan,
Basingstoke, 2013, p. 20.
35. Ibid., p. 21.
206 futurethoughts

individual nor in physical material, the social fact resides – what,

in other words, it has as its ‘substratum’36 – and concludes that it
must be society, understood as a collective of individuals in as-
sociation, that constitutes this foundation. Moreover, in order for
it to cohere as a definite entity – in order, that is, for this associa-
tion to be constitutive over and above a mere agglomeration of
individuals – any given society must present a degree of consist-
ency, regularity and universality such that the same behaviours
are exhibited by different individuals in different contexts and
situations.37 Within this structure, social facts acquire ‘a shape,
a tangible form peculiar to them and constitute a reality sui
generis vastly distinct from the individual facts which manifest
that reality’.38 Society is thus a ‘condition of the group repeated
in individuals because it imposes itself upon them’, of which
the most important factor for the association’s cohesion is not
necessarily the physical proximity or density of this association,
but the strength of its moral bond.39 The second line of argument
looks to the available evidence for the existence of social facts –
how, that is, they can be identified. Towards this end, Durkheim
argues that social facts are made known to us through the
experience of an external coercive force, the contrainte sociale,
that they exercise over the individual.40 Such a force shapes those

36. Ibid.
37. A similar claim had already been advanced in Émile Durkheim, The Division of
Labour in Society, 2nd edn, trans. W.D. Halls, ed. Steven Lukes, Palgrave Macmillan,
Basingstoke, 2013, pp. 273–4.
38. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, pp. 23–4.
39. Ibid., p. 25.
40. On more than one occasion Adorno links Durkheim’s concept of social constraint
to that aspect of ‘logical compulsion’ required by Hegel’s philosophy of objective spirit,
to those ‘positive realities … defended in the Philosophy of Right … the realities that today
we would term coercive situations’. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy’,
Hegel: Three Studies, pp. 1–51, here p. 20; Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics:
Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966, trans. Rodney Livingstone, ed. Rolf Tiedemann,
Polity Press, Cambridge, 2008, p. 16. Cf. Axel Honneth, ‘Hegel and Durkheim: Contours
of an Elective Affinity’, in Nicola Marcucci, ed., Durkheim and Critique, pp. 19–41, Palgrave
Macmillan, Cham, 2021. This work is part of Honneth’s broader project of reviving a
non-Marxist theory of the division of labour for the theory of modern democracy. In this
regard, see Axel Honneth, Die arbeitende Souveräne. Eine normative Theorie der Arbeit,
Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2023.
 out takes 207

harder and softer behavioural norms, moral conventions, beliefs,

opinions and collective practices that constitute the social fabric
and is directly confronted, in the form of predetermined social
or institutionalized sanctions, when an individual acts against or
violates these standards. If a social fact has become sufficiently
general, a subtler, indirect variant of this constraint may also
be uncovered ‘by ascertaining how widespread it is within the
group’. Although he takes this to be mostly a variation on direct
constraint, this second, indirect social constraint, ‘as with that
exerted by an economic organisation’, is harder to immediately
and individually detect.41
In these lines of argument, Durkheim not only renders con-
straint the way in which social facts can be traced and evidenced,
but also makes it ‘intrinsically a characteristic’ of them.42 It is this
intrinsic bond between social fact and social constraint that inad-
vertently makes Durkheim’s work an important reference for the
critical theory of society. It will express, to use Adorno’s words,
‘the cruelty [Härte] with which the world repeatedly confronts
me’,43 that location ‘where we feel the friction, where we come
up against an obstacle, where our own impulses are subjected to
controls that are stronger than we are’.44 In this, Durkheim con-
structs a notion of social experience ‘on the model of what hurts’,45
on the experience of the individual’s ‘nullity [Nichtigkeit] in the
face of the power of society’.46 It is, to continue this thread, where
one confronts society as the ‘compulsion’ of the unintelligible,47

41. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, p.25.

42. Ibid., p. 21.
43. Theodor W. Adorno, Nachgelassene Schriften. Abteilung VI: Vorlesungen. Band 1:
Erkenntnistheorie, ed. Karel Markus, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2018, p. 186.
44. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy and Sociology, trans. Nicholas Walker, ed. Dirk
Braunstein, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2022, p. 56.
45. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Einleitung zu Emile Durkheim “Soziologie und Philosophie”’,
Gesammelte Schriften. Band 8: Soziologische Schriften I, pp. 245–79, here p. 250.
46. Gerhard Beuter, ‘29. May 1956. Protokoll’, in Die Frankfurter Seminare Theodor W.
Adornos. Band 1: Wintersemester 1949/50–Sommersemester 1957, ed. Dirk Braunstein, De
Gruyter, Berlin, 2021, 410–13, here p. 410.
47. Adorno, Philosophy and Sociology, p. 66.
208 futurethoughts

of ‘that which absolutely cannot be absorbed by the individual,

something incommensurable and impenetrable’.48 However,
Durkheim’s peculiar emphasis on the ‘thingness [Dinghaftigkeit]’
of social facts at once both sought ‘to arrest the decay of collective
consciousness threatened by the conflict of capital and labour’
and legitimated this conflict in a ‘pure science of facts’.49 Though
Adorno detects in this something of an authoritarian impulse – in
the attempt to withdraw this experience and its underlying
conditions from the scrutiny of critical reason – Durkheim is
judged to have accurately, albeit mystifyingly, described the form
of appearance of social relations under capital.
In other early works, such as The Division of Labour in
Society and Suicide, Durkheim does indeed appear to recognize,
describe and protest the corrosive aspects of capital through his
exposition of the generalized experience of anomie and social
unintegration, for instance. From the results of these studies,
Durkheim not only develops an account and image of modernity
and the various ills it causes, but also demonstrates how sociol-
ogy, as Ordnungswissenschaft, gains its practical and intervention-
ist imperatives. Much like in Auguste Comte, Durkheim operates
with a notion of the objectivity of social laws and maintains that
the comprehension of these laws allows, in contrast to Henri
de Saint-Simon and Marx, for the peaceful resolution of social
antagonism and conflict.50 But by concerning himself primarily

48. Adorno, ‘Einleitung zu Durkheim’, p. 250.

49. Ibid., pp. 248 and 250, respectively. Though not a direct reference to Durkheim,
Adorno would state elsewhere: ‘We believe that the concept of the fact is accordingly
so suspect because we persistently see that individual facts are, in real life, of such a
kind that they help to obscure capitalism.’ Theodor W. Adorno in Max Horkheimer
and Theodor W. Adorno, ‘[Diskussion über die Differenz zwischen Positivismus
und materialistischer Dialektik] [9. Verhältnis von Tatsache und Theorie (II):
Differenz zwischen den erkenntnisleitenden “Interessen” des Positivismus und der
materialistischen Dialektik (15 February 1939)]’, in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften.
Band 12: Nachgelassene Schriften 1931–1949, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Fischer Verlag,
Frankfurt am Main, 1985, pp. 476–83, here p. 477.
50. Alfred Müller, ‘15. Mai 1956. Protokoll’, in Die Frankfurter Seminare Theodor W.
Adornos. Band 1, pp. 405–9, here pp. 405–6. See also Adorno, ‘Introduction to the
Positivist Dispute’, p. 34.
 out takes 209

with observing, describing and classifying the existence of

moral and social facts, these studies fail to adequately recognize
and reflect on their historical presuppositions, leading him to
propose ‘cures’ to the ‘sickness’ of the ‘social body’ that are at
best a mere amelioration of a much graver condition.51 That is,
the normative character of Durkheim’s objective social laws is
articulated with a view to subjective intervention, not, as they
are in Marx, to their dissolution.52
Within this framework, Durkheim advances an ambiguous
account of a latent problem. Although he had been alert enough
to integrate, without properly naming it, a notion of reification
into his social theory, he simultaneously neglected the theoreti-
cal implications, which were a ‘blind spot, a formula to which
his work is bewitched’.53 Durkheim failed, that is, to adequately
reflect on its mechanisms, absolutizing it and allowing it to
furnish the criteria for sociology’s procedures, even inadvertently
elevating it to the level of scientific norm.54 Social control is a
feature Durkheim builds into his theory of the social itself. He
would not, Adorno suggests, have been able to properly recognize
a society without coercion.55 Rather, what interests Durkheim
in these mechanisms of coercion and compulsion is not their
prescription by definite historical social relations but their
demonstration of fixed limits through which the regularity of
social laws is expressed.56
To speak of a notion of reification in Durkheim is, therefore,
neither to claim that his sociological theory expresses a particular
allegiance to a reading of Hegel or Marx,57 nor to suggest that his
51. For just one particularly emotive instance of the corporeal analogy, see Durkheim,
The Division of Labour, p. 28.
52. Müller, ‘15. Mai 1956. Protokoll’, p. 406.
53. Adorno, ‘Einleitung zu Durkheim’, p. 250.
54. Adorno, Philosophy and Sociology, pp. 57, 67.
55. Gerhard Brandt, ‘12. Juni 1956. Protokoll’, in Die Frankfurter Seminare Theodor W.
Adornos. Band 1, pp. 417–22, here p. 421.
56. Beuter, ‘29. May 1956. Protokoll’, pp. 411ff.
57. There are two moments in which Durkheim reflects on Marx and Marxism: initially,
in the 1890s, around the time he was preparing both a lecture course on Marx and the
210 futurethoughts

theory anticipates, by nearly three decades, certain arguments

contained in Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness.
Rather, it is to claim that the outlines of the notion can be de-
tected in Durkheim’s work. Although this will not be sufficiently
developed or theoretically rich enough to offer a third source
for Adorno’s concept, it would offer something of a sociological
countermodel to the Weberian and Simmelian one at the centre
of Lukács’s account and it would allow Adorno to sharpen some
of the central elements of his theory.58 In a sense, then, Durkheim
stumbles into a quasi-Marxian, but ultimately deficient analysis
of reification. Where this analysis furthers the standard Marxian
account is where it allows us to think the double-sidedness of
Marx’s original claim that social relations between individuals
assume the phantasmagoric form of a relation between things.
Such a notion of reification cannot, of course, be a true descrip-
tion of the fetishism of the commodity form, but only of social
relations themselves, of their thing-like quality. Alternatively
restated, because Durkheim emphasizes the thing-like quality
of social relations, his work provides a conceptual resource
that complements the Marxian theory of reification. It allows
the thinking of the appearance of social relations themselves
as things.59 This rearticulates the standard Marxian phrase on
reification but with the intonation inverted. As Adorno claims:

first edition of The Rules; and then in the 1920s, with the publication of his Le socialisme.
For the most part, these minor writings have less to do with Marx himself than with
Marxists or readers of Marx (Antonio Labriola and Gaston Richard), the notion of
socialism (principally in Saint-Simon) and socialists (Saverio Merlino). For these writings,
see Émile Durkheim, Durkheim on Politics and the State, trans. W.D. Halls, ed. Anthony
Giddens, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 1986, pp. 97–153; and Émile Durkheim,
Socialism and Saint-Simon, trans. Charlotte Sattler, ed. Alvin W. Gouldner, Routledge,
Abingdon, 2010. Though there is a case to be made for the overlap between Hegel and
Durkheim, there are no significant commentaries on Hegel in Durkheim’s oeuvre.
58. For an account of Adorno’s criticisms of Lukács, see Timothy Hall, ‘Reification,
Materialism, and Praxis: Adorno’s Critique of Lukács’, Telos 155, Summer 2011, pp. 61–82,
and Konstantinos Kavoulakos, ‘Lukács’ Theory of Reification and the Tradition of Critical
Theory’, in Michael J. Thompson, ed., The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory, Palgrave
Macmillan, New York, 2017, pp. 67–85.
59. Cf. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998, pp.
45ff.
 out takes 211

In other words, if I may appeal to an old and famous formulation, in

the world that we inhabit, with its prevailing structure of exchange,
the relations between human beings are reflected back to us as if
these relations were really properties of things, and the objective
reason why the world appears to us in a thing-like way lies precisely
in the reified character of our own experience. Thus Durkheim’s
chosisme expresses a correct consciousness of the reification of the
world; it precisely and adequately reproduces the ossified character
of the world we encounter, and of positivism as a whole, insofar as it
makes use of intrinsically reified methods, is tailor-made to suit the
world as it is.60

On Adorno’s account, therefore, Durkheim is not wrong to

assert that social facts appear as things, to seek evidence of
their existence in social constraint, and to make these aspects
central to his sociological theory. However, by transforming this
analysis into the basic object of sociology, by establishing the
rules and methods for which sociology is to proceed, in failing
to identify the proper socio-historical cause of his concepts, and
in misrecognizing the consequent significance and implications
of his theory, Durkheim inadvertently confuses appearance
with social objectivity. Indeed, Durkheim makes a disciplinary
programme of his deficiencies, transforming reified social
relations into the object and ground concept of sociology and
producing an apology for this state. With this, the ‘reification of
society, a reification which always contains an element of mere
appearance, is accepted as an absolute’.61 This acceptance is what,
ultimately, motivates Adorno’s conclusion that

Durkheim’s concept of faits sociaux is utterly aporetic. He transposes

that negativity, in which, for the individual, the social is the opaque
and painfully foreign, into a methodological maxim: ‘you should not
comprehend’. With a positivistic scholarly attitude, he duplicates the
enduring myth of society as fate.62

60. Adorno, Philosophy and Sociology, pp. 66–7.

61. Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, p. 37.
62. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Notiz über sozialwissenschaftliche Objektivität’, Gesammelte
212 futurethoughts

The positive in the positivism dispute

In the post-war period, Adorno’s critique of sociological catego-

ries reached its apogee in the positivism dispute. Though regu-
larly maligned as an ill-fated clash between Adorno and Popper,
or, with more precision, as a clash between them and a shadowy
‘third man’,63 the dispute remains interesting for readers of
Adorno, not least because it offers a sociological counterpart to
his critique of the philosophically positive in Negative Dialectics,
and also because it presents one of the few explicit examples of
what is taken to be his critique of political economy.64
Later reflecting on the ‘scientific-practical consequences’ of the
dispute, Adorno would describe the separation of sociology from
‘critical social theory’ as running the risk of leaving empirical re-
search entirely to the former. Not only would this ignore that the
Institute had, ‘for more than 30 years, qualified itself on the basis
of empirical investigations’; it would also ensure that ‘[e]mpirical
research would become the sole prerogative of the empiricists’.65
For Adorno, it could not ‘be emphasized expressly enough’ that
the dispute was not ‘about empirical research or its cessation, but
about its interpretation, about the status assigned to it within
sociology’. Thus, what was at stake, in Adorno’s view, was

not a yes or no to the empirical, but the interpretation of the

empirical itself, particularly of the so-called empirical methods. Just
as dialectics, empiricism was once philosophy. If we instead admit
this, the word ‘philosophy’, a word held against us as if it were an
opprobrium, loses its horror and exposes itself as both a condition

Schriften. Band 8: Soziologische Schriften I, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Suhrkamp Verlag,

Frankfurt am Main, 1972, pp. 238–44, here p. 240.
63. Ralf Dahrendorf, ‘Remarks on the Discussion of the Papers by Karl R. Popper and
Theodor W. Adorno’, in Adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, pp.
123–30, here p. 125.
64. Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, trans. Adam Baltner, Brill,
Leiden, 2023, p. 3.
65. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Gesellschaftstheorie und empirische Forschung’, Gesammelte
Schriften. Band 8: Soziologische Schriften I, pp. 538–46, here pp. 538–9.
 out takes 213

and goal of a science that strives to be more than mere technique

and that will not bow to technocratic domination.66

How, though, did these interpretations of the empirical differ

and what were the substantial issues that motivated the dis-
agreement? To answer this, we need to briefly introduce a further
element, which Adorno alternatively describes as positivism’s
‘innermost contradiction’ and ‘the focal point of the controversy’:
positivist sociology’s subjective tendencies. In the attempt
to abstract the subject from sociological process, positivism
mistakenly ‘adheres to an objectivity which is most external to
its sentiments and purged of all subjective projections’. As Hegel
had already argued, such rigidity does not escape the various
issues or contradictions associated with the inclusion of the
subjective within social science, but, in insisting over and again
on objectivity and marshalling this as part of its rightful claim to
scientific authority, it ‘simply becomes all the more entangled in
the particularity of mere subjective, instrumental reason’.67
Adorno saw this as playing out in two senses. The first in that
positivist sociology ‘operates with catalogues of hypotheses or
schemata imposed upon the material’, that it ‘tends to accept
such categories as simply given, and probably untransformable’.
And the second in that it ‘takes as its starting point opinions,
modes of behaviour and the self-understanding of individual
subjects and of society’, believing that what must be examined is
‘the average consciousness or unconsciousness of societalized and
socially acting subjects, and not the medium in which they move’.
On both fronts, positive sociology eschews any kind of claim
to the objectivity of structure in which the empirical persists

66. Ibid., pp. 545–6.

67. Adorno, ‘Introduction to the Positivist Dispute’, pp. 5, 8. Though not here central, it
has not gone unnoticed that Adorno compares these subjective tendencies in sociology
to those in subjective economics. See Hans-Georg Backhaus, ‘Between Philosophy and
Science: Marxian Social Economy as Critical Theory’, trans. Gordon Finlayson and Ulrich
Haase, in Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn and Kosmas Psychopedis, eds, Open Marxism,
Volume One: Dialectics and History, Pluto Press, London, 1992, pp. 54–92.
214 futurethoughts

and forgoes that such structure provides the ‘condition and the
content of the social facts’ it examines. By treating empirical
material as the factual and limiting its investigation accordingly,
such sociology thereby indexes as true a partial perspective of
social reality and pre-emptively abandons ‘the emphatic idea of
objectivity’ that critical theory holds as essential.68 In place of this
idea, it codifies as objective processes associated with ‘the regu-
larity of repeated occurrences’,69 the statistically average, and the
‘law of large numbers’,70 or testable and demonstrable hypotheses
that subsequently allow for prediction and prognosis.71 Such an
account both dismisses and approximates a notion of social law,
of the lawlike structure of society.
The resemblance of Adorno’s critique here to his reading of
Durkheim is neither formal nor coincidental. Instead, it dem-
onstrates how he subtly figures the historical advancement and
prevalence of post-war sociological positivism as both a definite
continuity and a discontinuity with its precursors – or, seen in
reverse, how Durkheim deviates from the positivist tradition
that follows in his wake.72 Indeed, the contrast between the two
bodies of work and their critique is instructive for clarifying how
post-war sociology broadly represents something of a qualitative
regression internally to positivism. This is how we are to make
sense of the observation that, although Adorno inveighs against
sociological positivism for abandoning the emphatic notion
of objectivity in the assumption that the regular is the lawful,

68. Adorno, ‘Introduction to the Positivist Dispute’, pp. 7–8.

69. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Marx and the Basic Categories of Sociological Theory:
From a Seminar Transcript in the Summer Semester of 1962’, trans. Verena Erlenbusch-
Anderson and Chris O’Kane, in Bonefeld and O’Kane, eds, Adorno and Marx, pp. 241–51,
here p. 241.
70. Adorno, ‘Introduction to the Positivist Dispute’, p. 42, and Adorno, ‘Sociology
and Empirical Research’, in Adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, pp.
68–86, here p. 77.
71. Jürgen Habermas, ‘The Analytical Theory of Science and Dialectics: A Postscript to
the Controversy between Popper and Adorno’, in Adorno, et al., The Positivist Dispute in
German Sociology, pp. 131–62, here pp. 136ff.
72. Durkheim, that is, developed a rather ‘unusual theory for a positivist’. Beuter, ‘29.
May 1956. Protokoll’, p. 410.
 out takes 215

he simultaneously argues that Durkheim ‘had good reason for

associating the statistical laws, to which he also adhered, with
the contrainte sociale and even for recognizing in the latter the
criterion of society’s general law-like nature’.73 Again, what is
valuable in this conceptual schema is precisely its inbuilt ambi-
guity, paradoxes and contradictions. For all its shortcomings and
oversights, or, better, owing to its particular shortcomings and
oversights, Durkheim’s sociology ‘is superior to the main current
of positivism’ of the post-war period, a current ‘that has today
achieved near total dominance’.74
Understood as part of a critique of sociological categories,
Adorno’s encounter with Durkheim leverages the deficient truth
of the discipline’s concepts against the untrue conditions it
masks in scientistic replication. It drives one of these concepts,
that of the social fact, to the point of its critical inflection. This
will receive its most significant, though not comprehensive,
philosophical treatment in his unfinished magnum opus,
Aesthetic Theory. However, when viewed within the context of
Adorno’s interventions into sociology, Durkheim’s concept helps
underscore and subvert a complicity the discipline sustains. By
integrating compulsion into his sociological framework and base
object, by claiming this compulsion ‘to be the essence of the
social as such’, Durkheim gives expression, however limited and
incomplete, to ‘the guilt of reification’, a guilt to which contem-
porary sociology naively pleads its innocence.

73. Adorno, ‘Sociology and Empirical Social Research’, p. 75.

74. Adorno, ‘Einleitung zu Durkheim’, p. 250.