Consensus and Crisis

Adorno and the ideology of post-war German integration

Abstract

Since his return from the exile, Adorno remained sceptical about the social consensus around the “restorative” reconstruction of Germany. The integration of the proletariat into bourgeois society was, also in the post-war period, part of the basis for the stabilization of capitalism in Europe and the United States: workers had been definitively included in the system, social conflicts had been institutionalized, and the disruptive elements of order had been neutralized. This totally administered society had substantially altered labour relations, the link between economy and politics, as well as the relations of individuals with themselves. According to Adorno, on the one hand, integration is an objective phenomenon – inasmuch as the society had become a totality, fully mediated by the commodity form – and, on the other, it is a socially necessary appearance, insofar that it represents social antagonisms as pacified. This paper addresses Adorno’s critique on the ideology of integration in his time and aims to understand conceptions implicated in terms like “social partnership” and “pluralism”, as well as in doctrines such as the theory of social conflict. Furthermore, this article confronts the critical notion of integration, in Adorno, and the apologetic formulation of “healthy integration”, advocated by the ordoliberal doctrine, in particular by Alexander Rüstow