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1  1 Adorno is alluding to an aphorism of Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) from the little section ‘Hardware’ in his One Way Street: ‘Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out, armed, and relieve the idle stroller of his conviction’ (Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt am Main, 1991, vol. IV.1, p. 138; Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA, vol. 1, One Way Street, p. 481).

2  2 Comte formulates his ‘law of the three stages’ as follows:Every branch of our knowledge passes, in this order, through three different theoretical states (stages), namely the theological or fantastical state, the metaphysical or abstract state, and the scientific or positive state. In other words, in all of its investigations the human mind employs, as it advances, quite different and even opposed methods when it philosophizes; firstly the theological method, then the metaphysical method, and finally the positive method. The first method is the point where knowledge begins; the third represents the secure and final state, whereas the second serves simply as a transition from the first to the third. (Auguste Comte, Die Soziologie: Die positive Philosophie im Auszug, ed. Friedrich Blaske, Leipzig, 1933, p. 2. See also NaS IV. 14, p. 15. Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Polity, 2000, p. 5; NaS IV, 15, pp. 219f.; Introduction to Sociology, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Cambridge, 2000, p. 131.)There is a partial English translation of some of the texts to which Adorno refers in these lectures in Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy, trans. H. Martineau, New York, 1974.

3  3 Adorno may be thinking here of a passage from Hegel’s early Jena essay Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie:The only aspect of speculation visible to common sense is its nullifying activity; and even this nullification is not visible in its entire scope. If common sense could grasp this scope, it would not believe speculation to be its enemy. For in its highest synthesis of the conscious and the non-conscious, speculation also demands the nullification of consciousness itself. Reason thus drowns itself and its knowledge and its reflection of the absolute identity, in its own abyss: and in this night of mere reflection and of the calculating intellect, in this night which is the noonday of life, common sense and speculation can meet one another. (G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, Michel and Moldenhauer, vol. 2, p. 35; The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf, New York, 1987, p. 103)

4  4 In fact three years later Oskar Negt (b. 1934), a student of Adorno’s, obtained his doctorate under Adorno and Horkheimer with a dissertation on this very subject. See Oskar Negt, Strukturbeziehungen zwischen den Gesellschaftslehren Comtes und Hegels, Frankfurt am Main, 1964. In their joint introduction to the published version, Adorno and Horkheimer wrote:The merit of Negt’s book is to provide a close comparative analysis of the Hegelian and Comtean theories of society. The results of this analysis diverge significantly from the current view on these issues. Even in the past it was by no means clear that one could simply locate positivism on the side of emphatic progress and speculative philosophy on the side of ideology … The parallels and the contrasts between Hegel and Comte are actually so striking that it is astonishing that the discipline of sociology has paid so little attention to this question to the present day. As an exception one could only really mention Gottfried Salomon-Delatour’s article ‘Comte ou Hegel’, published in the Revue positiviste internationale, Paris 1935/6. (See GS 20.2, p. 660; see also NaS IV.15, p. 218; Introduction to Sociology, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Cambridge, 2000, p. 178, n. 6)

5  5 ‘In the metaphysical state, which is only a mutation of the previous one, supernatural powers are replaced by abstract forces or entities which are supposed to inhere in the different beings in the world’ (Auguste Comte, Die Soziologie: Die positive Philosophie im Auszug (see note 2 above), p. 2.

6  6 Comte, Die Soziologie: Die positive Philosophie im Auszug.

7  7 Adorno is referring to the German edition of Comte, Die Soziologie, 3 vols, trans. Valentine Dorn, 2nd edn, Jena, 1923.

8  8 Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) founded the journal L’Année Sociologique in 1898. He acted as the editor for the next twelve years, and it effectively became an organ for disseminating the ideas of his own school of sociology. See Adorno, Einleitung zu Emile Durkheim, Soziologie und Philosophie, GS 8, p. 246.

9  9 Adorno formulates this idea in a very similar way in his essay ‘The Current State of German Sociology’: ‘The National Socialists were not remotely disturbed by the fact that sociology, their bogeyman, had often claimed, by virtue of scientific objectivity, to occupy a social standpoint beyond the play of social forces and to be able to direct society from that position, something that Plato had already recommended’ (GS 8, p. 501).

10 10 See NaS IV.15, pp. 27f. Adorno claims that society as a totality, despite its internal social dynamics, still ‘always remains the same – the persistence of “prehistory” – but is realized as constantly different, unforeseen, exceeding all expectation, the faithful shadow of developing productive forces’ (GS 4, pp. 267f.; Minima Moralia, Jephcott, p. 234). This constant development of productive forces is itself the expression of the ‘remorseless domination of nature’ and a blind aspect of the ever-same, which Adorno sees in terms of mythic repetition (Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie: Zur Einleitung, vol. 2, ed. Rudolf zur Lippe, Frankfurt am Main, 1974, p. 187).

11 11 In his lecture ‘Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?’, Adorno pointed out how ‘Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, where bourgeois ideology and the dialectic of civil society are so deeply intertwined, had once invoked the state, allegedly beyond the play of social forces, as an agency that could intervene from without, applying special administrative measures, to ameliorate the antagonisms produced by the immanent dialectic of a society which, according to Hegel, would otherwise disintegrate’ (GS 8, p. 367). On this question, see also Adorno’s lecture of 21 February 1963 on the character of philosophical terminology (Philosophische Terminologie, vol. 2 [see note 10 above], pp. 305–19).

12 12 In his book Ideology and Utopia (first published in Bonn in 1929) Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) described the ‘socially unattached intelligentsia’ as that ‘relatively classless stratum’ whose members were best placed, through reflection on their own position, to effect the ‘synthesis’ between the socially conditioned character of knowledge on the one hand and the search for truth – conceived as independent of spatial and temporal factors – on the other (Ideologie und Utopie, 3rd edn, Frankfurt am Main, 1952, p. 135; Ideology and Utopia, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils, London, 1991, pp. 137–8).

13 13 The human being can neither be inherited, nor sold, nor given away; he cannot be the property of anyone because he is his own property, and must remain so. Deep within his breast he bears a spark of divinity which raises him above the animals and makes him a fellow citizen in a world the highest member of which is God – this is his conscience. It commands him utterly and unconditionally – to will this and not that, to do so freely and on one’s own initiative, without external compulsion of any kind. (Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Zurückforderung der Denkfreiheit von den Fürsten Europas, die sie bisher unterdrückten, in Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s sämtliche Werke, ed I. A. Fichte, Bonn, 1834–, and Berlin, 1845–, vol. 6, p. 11.

14 14 See, for example, J. G. Fichte, Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums über die französische Revolution, ibid., pp. 37–79, and especially p. 61.

15 15 In the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes ‘ratiocination’ [das räsonnieren] as ‘freedom from all content and an attitude of vanity in regard to it’ (Hegel, Werke, vol. 3, Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 56; Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford, 1970, p.35 (translation modified).

16 16 ‘The history of mankind can be seen, in the large, as the realization of Nature’s secret plan to bring forth a perfectly constituted state as the only condition in which the capacities of mankind can be fully developed, and also bring forth that external relation among states which is perfectly adequate to this end’ (I. Kant, Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht, in Werke in sechs Bänden, vol. 6, p. 45 [A 403]; Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, trans. Lewis White Beck, in Kant Selections, ed. L. W. Beck, New York, 1988, p. 422.

17 17 In his book Spirit of the Laws of 1748, Montesquieu (1689–1755) had developed John Locke’s constitutionalism and argued for the division of powers between the legislative, the judiciary and the executive.

18 18 Auguste Comte, Soziologie (see note 7 above), vol. 1, p. 45. Contrary to what Adorno says, this passage is included in the Blaschke edition of excerpts from Comte (pp. 47f.).

19 19 In his book Système de politique positive (Paris, 1851–4) Comte presented his conception of a ‘religion of humanity’. Thus he writes:The positivist priesthood must also renew all those functions which refer to our own perfection, in calling upon science to study humanity, poetry to produce song, morality to cultivate love, in order that, through the irresistible cooperation of all three, politics may unceasingly serve humanity. The cult endorsed by the positivists, in contrast to that of the theologians, is by no means directed towards an absolute, isolated and unintelligible being, whose existence cannot be proved and which brooks no comparison with anything else. No mystery shall impair the spontaneous self-evidence which attaches to the new Supreme Being. The latter can only be celebrated, and loved, and served, in accordance with a proper knowledge of the different natural laws which govern its existence, and which are the most complex laws we are capable of observing. (Auguste Comte, System der positiven Politik, trans. Jürgen Brankl, Vienna, 2004, pp. 341f.)

20 20 In his lectures on Kant’s first Critique, Adorno characterizes the kind of ‘Yes, but’ objection which prevents us from asking the questions that really need to be asked as ‘infantile’: ‘For that is precisely what children do when they reply, Yes, but …, to every explanation you give, and when they find that they cannot stop asking questions because they do not understand the matter in hand, but instead just keep on asking questions mechanically. That is to say, they just keep on asking for the sake of asking without ever responding to the resistance in the matter in hand, the resistance created by what it actually refers to’ (NaS IV.4, p. 31; Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Livingstone, p. 16).

21 21 Adorno goes into more detail in this regard in his ‘Introduction’ to The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology:Comte, whose sociology reveals an apologetic, static orientation, is the first enemy of both metaphysics and fantasy simultaneously. The defamation of fantasy, or the way it is forced to become a field for specialists subject to the division of labour, is a primal phenomenon of the regression of the bourgeois spirit – not however, as some avoidable error, but more in thrall to that fatal character that couples instrumental reason, which society indeed requires, with the taboo on fantasy. That the latter is only tolerated in reified form, as abstractly opposed to reality, weighs no less heavily on art than it does on science. Legitimate fantasy seeks despairingly to lose this burden. Fantasy is less a question of free invention than of working with a free mind without instant recourse to a realized facticity. (GS 8, p. 336; Adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans. G. Adey and D. Frisby, London, 1976, p. 51)

22 22 For the ‘very important concept of second nature’, see T. W. Adorno/Walter Benjamin, Briefwechsel 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, Frankfurt am Main, 1955, p. 145; Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, trans. Nicholas Walker, Cambridge, 1999, p. 110. The concept of ‘second nature’ had been employed by Georg Lukács (1885–1971) – who perhaps derived it from §4 of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – in his early Theory of the Novel to describe the nature-like appearance of what has been socially produced (G. Lukács, Theorie des Romans: Ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der grossen Epik, 2nd edn, 1963, p. 61; The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock, London, 1978, pp. 62f. See also G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, Michel and Moldenhauer, vol. 7: Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse, p. 46; Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, trans. T. Malcom Knox, rev. and ed. Stephen Houlgate, Oxford, 2008, p. 26). Adorno used the expression very early on to describe ‘the world of things created by human beings and also lost by them’ (GS 1, p. 355). See also Negative Dialektik, GS 6, pp. 350f.; Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton, London, 1973, pp. 356f.

23 23 Adorno underlined the word ‘political’ here.

24 24 See Lecture 1, note 2.