Introduction to Sociology by Theodor W. Adorno

Author:Theodor W. Adorno
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Polity
Published: 2012-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

LECTURE THIRTEEN

27 June 1968

Ladies and Gentlemen,

In my last lecture I tried to define in principle the peculiar position of sociology in relation to the neighbouring disciplines. I described it as the social self-reflection of these various disciplines, not a specialist subject in the usual sense. Of course, there are all kinds of things which can be considered specifically sociological in terms of method, factual content and the history of dogma, and which – to see the matter from the practical side – can be learned by students of sociology. Perhaps I should draw all this together by saying that sociology is an attempt – even if a necessarily limited and partial one – to remedy the scholarly division of labour by relating the subject matter of scholarship back to the whole, which is society, yet cannot be grasped as an immediate fact.

You may perhaps have read some comments in the press in the last few days in which colleagues of mine, such as Herr Scheuch, have recommended that sociology be studied primarily as a subsidiary subject.1 Now, on the question of major and subsidiary subjects, I would say that this is a matter for each individual to judge, although, of course, the difficult situation sociologists face in finding professional employment does make it advisable, from the point of view of self-preservation, not to rely entirely on sociology in one’s studies. I have already said this to you and I would like to repeat it here. But even leaving aside the practical situation, there is, of course, something to be said for combining sociology with a ‘hard science’, as Scheuch recommends. If a discipline is to be pursued in a meaningful way and not reduced to tedious fact-finding, if it consists essentially in reflection and not in the primary assimilation of facts, it naturally runs the risk of suffering a certain atrophy. There is a danger that reflection will finish up by positing itself, so that the situation arises which Hegel characterized – and I hope I will not bore you by quoting the formulation again – by referring to those who are above the matter because they are not in it.2 Sociology can lead quite easily to what Max Weber – though in a somewhat spiteful formulation which is not to my taste – called ‘mind mania’ [Geisthuberei] in contradistinction to ‘fact mania’ [Stoffhuberei].3 This refers to a situation in which, in a sense, one knows in advance the answer to any question with which one is confronted regarding one’s special subject matter. An essential attribute of the concept of reflection is that upon which one can reflect – in exactly the same way as the concept of the mediated, which, as I have tried to explain in these lectures, is constitutive of sociology, always presupposes something immediate running through these mediations and captured by them. In this sense I believe it is important to study what would earlier have been called a ‘craft’ in addition to sociology, although this craft certainly does not need to be what is called a ‘hard discipline’.

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