Adorno's starting point: The double catastrophe
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Adorno’s philosophy responds to two historical experiences whose weight must not be underestimated. The first is Auschwitz: the industrial extermination of European Jews by a country that understood itself as heir to the Enlightenment, the Reformation, and classical German philosophy. The second is Stalinism: the perversion of Marxist liberation theory into a system of total control. Both experiences raise the question of whether reason itself is complicit in its own perversion — whether enlightenment turns into myth, whether liberation turns into domination.
This question is philosophically legitimate. It must be asked. And it must be asked in such a way that the answer is not cheap consolation. Adorno’s merit is to have posed this question with a relentlessness that refuses intellectual comfort. Therein lies his greatness, and therein lies the reason why his philosophy must be taken seriously even where it leads astray.
But the question of how Adorno answers it — which philosophical means he uses, which traditions he draws on, which presuppositions he makes — must be distinguished from the legitimacy of the question itself. The legitimacy of the question does not guarantee the correctness of the answer. And it is the answer, not the question, that is under examination here.
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