Abstract

In 1931, in his inaugural lecture to the Frankfurt philosophy faculty, Adorno outlined a program for philosophy which he claimed was both “dialectic” and “materialist.” But it was not dialectical materialism — not in the orthodox Marxist sense, nor even in the sense of Lukács' redefinition of the term in History and Class Consciousness. Although Adorno was unquestionably indebted to Lukács' early work and he persistently viewed Marxism through “Hegelian glasses,” he rejected Hegel's identity theory, and with it the concept of proletarian consciousness which formed the crucial pivot around which Lukács' early Marxism turned.

In History and Class Consciousness, the concept of the proletariat as the identical subject-object of history was indispensable to Lukács' epistemology and his theory of history: correct knowledge was equated with viewing reality from the standpoint of the proletariat and the realization of proletarian self-interest was identified with history as “higher truth.”