Philosophy and Sociology: 1960. Theodor W. Adorno

Comte can really stand in for the positivist position in its entirety – supposes and essentially starts from the idea that all connections between social facts are fictive in character, or, as we might put this today in slightly more polite, friendly and elegant terms, are simply scientific models, while the only thing that is true, by comparison, are the facts themselves. The problem that I am trying to draw to your attention here is this: this assumption, in which you are unreflectively raised as sociologists, already downplays the possibility that social relations and connections precede and pre-form the individual data. I am talking about the kind of approach that says: ‘But something like a system of society doesn’t really exist at all, it’s just something that exists in the heads of philosophers!’ – and here that means: in the heads of certain backward sociologists who are not scientifically respectable in the first place. The objector might continue: ‘Something like a social system is not actually present, and it is highly questionable whether we can even speak of social systems at all; the only real thing here are the facts which can be observed and collected on the basis of our questionnaires and controlled experiments, the facts which can be captured in our protocol sentences, the facts we can take home with us.’ Here is the reason, to state it very simply, why I believe we should hold on to a philosophical concept of society in the context of modern sociology – a discipline which is now even proud to be a ‘sociology without society’, as René König puts it.¹³ To state the matter simply once again: it is surely impossible to avoid recognizing that we actually live in an all-encompassing social system, that the facts we find and the things we encounter within this system are already significantly pre-formed through this system. All the individual social acts that we perform as social beings are interrelated, and not in some merely arbitrary way but in accordance with certain rules within a quite specifically organized context. Even in our immediate experience we find that we encounter individual social facts within the context of a system that cannot be pinned down as readily as facts themselves may be, and this is the justification for continuing to hold on to the idea of society, of critical reflection, of an interconnected whole, of a predetermining structure, of a system, in short, for continuing to hold on to the social categories which sociology originally took over from philosophy. Here, of course, we encounter an objection which is frequently raised by the philosophy of science and by contemporary empirical sociology – the objection which Helmut Schelsky specifically raised against me quite recently, something about which I shall have a lot more to say later on in these lectures¹⁴ – runs like this: ‘You all talk about a social system that somehow goes beyond the individual facts; you say there is an exchange society in which equivalent elements are exchanged for one another, in which we encounter real things that at the same time are not real things;¹⁵ you make all kinds of clever remarks in this connection, but where, after all, is the system you talk about, the system that allegedly stands behind the facts, if you don’t also have the facts themselves? Are you just relying on some special intuition? That would surely be a very curious or indeed laughable situation for someone who appeals to self-conscious reason as emphatically as you do. Or are you just trying to play off your own so-called simple pre-scientific or pre-reflective experience against the demands of science? You certainly won’t get far with that, for if you want to be rigorously scientific in your approach this kind of pre-scientific experience can only be regarded as basically dogmatic, as something that is not ultimately binding at all! You have to start by bracketing out such experience and subjecting it to the scrutiny and control of science if it is to serve as a reliable source of truth!’ Now I do not wish to go into this question fully at this point. But it strikes me like this: the idea that the system which we ourselves experience as an extreme form of compulsion itself requires theoretical justification in terms of individual facts already implies a kind of reversal of the order of knowing, of the process of experience, a reversal that is already framed in terms of the basic rules of the established sciences.¹⁶

But I think I may venture to say, even at this point in today’s lecture, that we experience the social pre-formation in question whenever in our own social behaviour we try to act in a way other than that which the pre-existing social system essentially requires of us. This is a fact which was accorded an undeniably central place even by empirical sociology in relatively recent times – and I would say …;¹⁷ I am referring to Durkheim, whom we shall soon have more to say about in a different context, and to his concept of ‘contrainte sociale’ or social compulsion.¹⁸ Durkheim effectively put it like this: ‘If you want to know what society is, just ask where it hurts; it’s where you come up against something that is so much stronger than your own action and your own behaviour that you cannot really do anything about it or even resist it without provoking the most tangible and specific consequences.’ I think you have only to perform the thought experiment of imagining what would happen to any one of you if you no longer consistently observed the rules of exchange, if you no longer subjected your labour to the law of equivalent exchange, if you no longer arranged your private life in such a way that you also get something back for what you give, if you were no longer prepared to put your life on anything unless you expected to receive the equivalent in return. You cannot just discover this ubiquitous principle of exchange, this omnipresent principle, as another fact precisely because it expresses a structural totality which is never simply or exhaustively given in any finite or particular case. But this fundamental aspect of social compulsion – in other words, the way you have to conform to the regular norms of the organized already existing whole – is something you can directly experience for yourselves from the resistance you meet as soon as you try to act otherwise. This force of the social, which finds its most powerful expression in the so-called folkways,¹⁹ in the established mores and practices of a specific culture, had such a tremendous impact on Durkheim’s sociology that he even employed the concept of ‘chose’, or thing, to capture it.²⁰ He not only made this ‘contrainte sociale’, this alien compulsion that is opaque to us and to every individual, into the social as such but also regarded it as the ultimate fact: the fact that appears largely independent of ourselves precisely because we do not experience it as our own. Instead we experience it as something alien and opposed to us, almost like a brick wall we must bang our head against. With a positivistically inclined sociologist such as Emile Durkheim – and perhaps he is the last sociologist of whom this may be said – you find that a central question of philosophy – the conceptual entwinement of social facts through the system that goes beyond these individual social facts – is transformed into the ultimate social given. This immediately leads to a considerable problem, since Durkheim, who was particularly hostile to any tendency to hypostasize concepts, here goes down the same road precisely by hypostasizing something that is itself mediated and conceptual in character and turning it into an ultimate criterion. This is not something purely immediate in character: it is a nexus of facts rather some particular fact in the sense in which we use the word in the context of experimental observation, for example. I just wanted to point this out here to show you how the simple exercise of reason, even in what you might call a pre-philosophical sense, already reveals how we can go beyond the concept of particular observable facts without thereby falling into fanciful speculation.

      Let me just close for today by saying that philosophical concepts, if they are worth anything at all, are not concepts that dwell in some other separate world, in ill-famed higher spheres that lie far beyond the particular sciences or disciplines. On the contrary, philosophy is ultimately nothing but rigorous self-conscious reflection upon the actual world, upon what you encounter in the experience of your own field of research or investigation. This should already suggest that, while we have indeed begun by exploring the difference between the spheres of philosophy and sociology, these disciplines are not merely antithetical but also constitute a functional or dynamic unity.

Notes

      1  1 Reading ‘biology’ for ‘philosophy’ here.

      2  2 Since Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) expressly defended an evolutionary theory of society, he has often been seen as a forerunner of Social Darwinism. In his later lecture course ‘Introduction to Sociology’, Adorno recommended that the students should take a look at Spencer’s ‘system of sociology’, since his ‘Principles of Sociology, although long-winded, contains, unlike the work of Comte, an abundance of concrete social insights and real social