by Lilia Endter
Mikko Immanen is an Academy Research Fellow in the Centre for European Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. His research focuses on modern German and European intellectual history. He has published two books with Cornell University Press: Toward a Concrete Philosophy: Heidegger and the Emergence of the Frankfurt School (2020) and, more recently, Adorno’s Gamble: Harnessing German Ideology (2025), the subject of this interview with Lilia Endter.
Lilia Endter: Both of your books approach critical theory through a sustained examination of how its principal figures, above all Adorno, philosophically engaged their intellectual antagonists. Adorno’s Gamble offers a novel reconstruction of Adorno’s critical confrontation with figures such as Oswald Spengler and Ludwig Klages. This mode of inquiry resonates with the dialectical imperative that you ascribe to Adorno himself: the necessity of engaging immanently with traditions and thinkers, even when one seeks to overcome them. To what extent would you say that this disposition towards learning from intellectual adversaries preceded your encounter with critical theory? Was it an existing orientation that predisposed you to critical theory’s philosophical commitments, or did it crystallize—perhaps even become methodologically decisive—through your engagement with Adorno?
Mikko Immanen: Toward a Concrete Philosophy seeks to show that, before Heidegger’s Nazi turn, the Critical Theorists’ relationship to him was characterized more by fruitful encounters than hostile confrontations. Underlying this book was my longstanding interest both in the Frankfurt School and Heidegger, who are typically considered philosophical archenemies. In this sense, there was a pre-existing orientation. This orientation, however, did not stem from Adorno, but rather reflected a more general hope to bridge a philosophical gulf that had been unduly magnified by political animosity. Adorno’s Gamble has a different intellectual background. Its argument concerning Adorno’s debts to Spengler and Klages did not arise from any interest in, let alone sympathy for, these figures. Rather, it began with a simple observation that Adorno’s remarks on Spengler and Klages are highly ambivalent. For instance, in Minima Moralia (1951), he writes, “Not least among the tasks now confronting thought is that of placing all the reactionary arguments against Western culture in the service of progressive enlightenment” (192).
LE: In Adorno’s Gamble, you treat Adorno’s engagement with thinkers like Spengler and Klages not merely as one of rhetorical opposition, but as reflective of a generative tension within his philosophical development. You emphasize that their role was not a matter of “simple influence,” instead involving a critical, immanent working-through of their ideas within a dialectical framework. At the same time, you are careful to stress Adorno’s fundamental opposition to the content of their reactionary politics, and you leave open just how far their influence extends. This raises a broader methodological issue: What does it mean to speak of “influence” when the relationship is one of critical transformation rather than direct inheritance? Intellectual history can allow a certain distance, while philosophy—especially when concerned with how we appropriate a thinker today—arguably demands a sharper decision about what is truly incorporated or negated. How do you navigate this tension in your reconstruction of Adorno’s relation to Spengler and Klages?
MI: One cannot overstate Adorno’s distance from the antidemocratic, antisocialist, and antisemitic agendas of Spengler and Klages. Nor should we overlook the fact that Adorno never took seriously Klages’s Manichean antagonism in The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul (1929–32)—often regarded as the locus classicus of interwar German Lebensphilosophie—or Spengler’s cultural morphology in The Decline of the West (1918/22). Such doctrines exemplified precisely that “crackpot religion” or “half-educated sectarianism” that Adorno univocally dismissed (Minima Moralia, 67). Yet Adorno also believed that the works of Klages and Spengler contained, albeit in distorted form, kernels of truth.
Adorno’s thought is typically understood as a mix of Marxism, Freudianism, aesthetic modernism, and Jewish tradition. Philosophically informed Marxism––grounded in Kant and Hegel––is undoubtedly the central component, but I would place Adorno’s intellectual struggle with Klages and Spengler on par with the other four. This is, admittedly, a polemical claim. Yet I contend that this struggle shaped three core themes of Adorno’s thought: reason, democracy, and history. Adorno’s critique of “identity thinking” in Negative Dialectics (1966) was stimulated by Klages’s rebuke of “logocentrism,” Western philosophy’s reduction of the world to its measurable aspects.Moreover, through his engagement with Spengler’s observations on “Caesarism,” Adorno developed a heightened sensitivity to the fragility of democracy. Finally, Adorno’s view of history in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) as a never-ending maturation process, threatened from without by myths and from within by reason’s mythic origins, owed not least to his confrontation with the anthropological theories of Klages and Spengler.
Adorno’s engagement with the ideas of Spengler and Klages was, indeed, one of critical appropriation rather than adoption. (Influence, granted, may not be the best term to describe such a relation, yet I have used it occasionally to underscore that Adorno’s thinking would not have evolved the way that it did without his encounter with the two radical conservatives.) Although my book is primarily a work of intellectual history, I hope it also meets the demands of rigorous philosophy. From “logocentrism,” Adorno drew the view of philosophy as sublimated self-preservation, but he rejected Klages’s conviction that all forms of conceptual thought violated “life.” In “Caesarism,” Adorno saw a masterclass in the defects of liberal democracy, but he accused Spengler of economic dilettantism and morphological oversimplification. Klages and Spengler taught Adorno about civilization’s entanglement with power; but he rejected Klages’s romanticization of prehistory and Spengler’s eternalization of domination.
LE: Given the relative scarcity of research on Ludwig Klages, what kinds of sources and interpretive strategies did you rely on to reconstruct his role in Adorno’s intellectual landscape? How did archival work (e.g., at the Adorno Archive) shape your methodological approach?
MI: During the 1930s, Adorno was preoccupied with what I call his “Klages project.” In the absence of Adorno’s review essay on Klages’s The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul, which he worked on in 1932–1933 but never finished, I have reconstructed this project by drawing on Adorno’s remarks on Klages in both his publications and correspondences from the 1930s. Adorno’s letters are particularly revealing. In a 1936 letter to Max Horkheimer, he described Klages as a sharp critic of “bourgeois ideology” (263) and in 1933 he admitted to Siegfried Kracauer that reading Klages had enabled him to gain a better understanding of “the mythical” (207). One of my interpretive choices was to read such remarks as expressions of Adorno’s early struggle with the problem of “constitutive subjectivity,” the reduction of the world to subjective thought categories, a theme central to Negative Dialectics. Adorno’s letters have been published, and thus archival work was not crucial. However, they were unavailable in the 1980s and 1990s, when most of the earlier studies on the topic were written. This allowed me to move beyond earlier studies’ almost exclusive focus on Dialectic of Enlightenment.
LE: You note that what intrigued Adorno about Spengler and Klages, despite the ideological gulf between him and them, was their “pessimistic philosophy of history” (18). In your reading, this pessimism appears less as strong metaphysical despair—as in Schopenhauer or Spengler’s anthropological fatalism, which Adorno critiques in his 1932 review of Der Mensch und die Technik—and more as a rejection of linear, progressivist conceptions of time. Yet Adorno’s non-progressive view of history is usually traced primarily to his dialogue with Benjamin, for whom even the critique of catastrophe retains a dialectical possibility of redemption—a reading you acknowledge remains plausible. Does emphasizing the influence of Klages and Spengler risk turning Adorno into the kind of pessimist Lukács accused him of being—one whose critique forecloses historical transformation? And given your commitment to a “presentist” intellectual history, would you agree that present concerns might require precisely the minimal hope that Benjamin preserves—a hope that a Spenglerian or Klagian model of pessimism might not sustain?
MI: Parallels, as previous scholars, such as Axel Honneth (42) and George Friedman (83), have noted, exist between Dialectic of Enlightenment and the anthropological assumptions in Spengler’s Mensch und die Technik and Klages’s The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul. All highlight the role of domination in history. Spengler and Klages are fatalists who identify reason, or civilization, with power tout court. Dialectic of Enlightenment criticizes the belief in linear progress and the countless ways reason has been, and remains, entangled with power. Despite the differences, I think that the works of Spengler and Klages served as springboards for Adorno and Horkheimer’s own conclusions. The models of pessimism, it bears repeating, are not identical. But the fact that Dialectic of Enlightenment often identifies Western history with “instrumental reason” suggests its proximity to right-wing Zivilisationskritik. As does Adorno’s view in Negative Dialectics of history as a path “from the slingshot to the megaton bomb” (320).
Another question is whether such views represent Adorno’s, or Horkheimer’s, final position. They planned a sequel to Dialectic of Enlightenment that would have articulated “positive,” as opposed to instrumental reason. Adorno’s public activity in the 1950s and 1960s appears incomprehensible if we cast him as a fatalist. As recently emphasized by Peter E. Gordon, alongside Adorno’s bleak moments are several evocations of happiness. Do these two sides coexist somehow, or is there a contradiction? If we stress Adorno’s hopeful, indeed Benjaminian, moments, Lukács’s verdict appears exaggerated. If we focus on Adorno’s ruthless judgment of the present, it seems more to the point. Adorno touches on this paradox in his response to Thomas Mann’s charge that his diagnosis of “damaged life” had nothing to say about the cure (93). Adorno refers to his philosophical “asceticism with regard to any unmediated expression of the positive,” a trait he allegedly adopted from Hegel and Marx, but he adds that “this truly is a case of asceticism,” since “the opposite impulse, a tendency to the unfettered expression of hope, really lies much closer to my own nature” (97). Did Adorno’s asceticism, however, stem only from Hegel and Marx? A good portion of it, I think, ensued from his attempt to redirect right-wing Zivilisationskritik for emancipatory ends.
LE: If you will bear with me for a moment, I would like to complicate a point in your framing of Klages’s and Spengler’s influence on Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. You argue that the project of Negative Dialectics was forged “three decades earlier as a critical rejoinder to Klages’s critique of ‘logocentrism’” (27), and you suggest that Adorno’s strategy echoes a maxim from Minima Moralia: to deploy “all the reactionary arguments against Western culture in the service of progressive enlightenment” (102). While I find this a compelling and provocative thread, I wonder if there is a risk of placing too much weight on this one maxim, as if it provides a straightforward blueprint for Adorno’s method. After all, immanent critique as Adorno practices it cannot be reduced to strategic repurposing, i.e., a tactical redeployment of concepts for new ends. When Adorno describes immanent critique as a ‘negative dialectics,’ he refers to its openness and resistance to closure. Immanent critique entails a complex interrogation of a tradition’s internal contradictions and truth-content. If we primarily treat immanent critique as the repurposing of reactionary arguments, do we not risk suggesting a closure of the dialectical movement that Adorno resists? How, in your view, should we think about the relation between critical appropriation, dialectical transformation, and non-closure in Adorno’s engagement with reactionary thinkers? In particular, how do we account for the moment of decision—of judging whether a particular concept (such as Klages’s critique of logocentrism) can be productively reworked for emancipatory purposes, or must rather be exposed as irredeemably contradictory?
MI: I certainly do not intend to reduce Negative Dialectics to a single maxim. At the same time, I think this maxim was not about “strategic repurposing” of random ideas. Rather, it reflected Adorno’s conviction that amid Klages’s and Spengler’s absurdities lay insights into essential concerns which serious social criticism should confront. This was urgent because mid-century progressives largely failed to address these concerns but left “consideration of the destructive side of progress to its enemies” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, xvi). One such insight was Klages’s provocative claim about reason’s inherent violence. Adorno’s reading of Klages is precisely a matter of “complex interrogation.” Some aspects are preserved while others (and there are many!) are rejected. In the movement from Klages’s logocentrism to Adorno’s identity thinking, what is lost is the assumption that discursive thought is categorically repressive. Adorno himself does not go so far, as this would signal the end of Enlightenment, though at times it might appear as if he does, e.g., when he accuses philosophy of perpetuating the “rage” against nature through its conceptual apparatus (Negative Dialectics, 22).
Can one rework Klages’s logocentrism for emancipatory ends? I pose this as a question of whether Adorno’s gamble with Klages succeeded. Negative Dialectics certainly appears timely today as instrumental reason, the reduction of thought to a pragmatic tool, has become pervasive in nearly all spheres of life. This would suggest that Adorno succeeded. Yet, considering his belief in the virtual omnipresence of such calculative rationality, I cannot but answer this question in the negative. It seems that one can rework Klages’s logocentrism only up to a point.
LE: You show that Adorno’s engagement with Klages was not about adopting his political content or narrative of cultural decline, but about appropriating a form of radical negativity, specifically a suspicion of closure, totality, or “whole” (pp. 24–25, 31, 69). You describe Adorno’s early position as “Hegelianism pressed through the specifically Klagesian mangle” (58) and emphasize that in his exchanges with Horkheimer, Adorno defines truth as “the negation of everything that is false,” rejecting the “whole” as an idealist construct (69). It seems that you are suggesting the methodological emphasis on negativity in Negative Dialectics—its refusal of closure—owes as much, if not more, to Klages’s critique of logocentrism as it does to Hegel. If so, would you say that Adorno’s “Klages project” radicalizes dialectical critique itself, rather than merely offering new historical content or cultural diagnoses? Does this imply that Adorno’s negative dialectic introduces an external moment, an influence outside the dialectical tradition? If so, might this revise the canonical understanding of Adorno’s relation to Hegel and Marxism? Would you agree, or am I drawing too strong a conclusion?
MI: Negative Dialectics is often understood as a variant of Hegelianism shaped by Nietzsche and Marx. Yet I would argue that animating it, too, was Klages’s challenge. The Horkheimer-Adorno exchange in 1939 (490–91) is indeed instructive here. Horkheimer sought a materialist twist of Hegel’s dictum that “the true is the whole” (11); psychological and sociological findings got their true meaning only when referred to the larger social totality that Marx called the “social life-process” (173). To lead this process autonomously, instead of being passively led by it, marked the difference between free and unfree societies. The notion of the “whole” thus provided Horkheimer a rational yardstick by which to critique capitalism. Adorno, however—anticipating his inversion of Hegel’s dictum in Minima Moralia, “the whole is the false” (50) —rejected the notion of the “whole” as an idealist construct and proposed that truth consists in “the negation of everything that is false.” For Horkheimer, this vague definition lacked a rational yardstick and pushed Adorno close to vitalists like Klages, who, in the name of “immediate life,” denounced rational thought as life-denying disturbance.
Let me explain further why I see Klages as crucial for Adorno’s early development of negative dialectics. It is well-known that in the mid-1930s Adorno began to embrace Hegel’s method of immanent critique as a form of mimetic rationality that did not sacrifice the particularity of its objects. For me it is significant that Adorno’s turn to Hegel coincided with his Klages project, and I read the former as a manifestation of the afore-cited maxim from Minima Moralia. Adorno appreciated Klages’s concern that conceptual abstraction tends to violate the particularity of objects. Yet Adorno’s turn to Hegel shows that he held dialectical reason, not irrational vitalism, as the best potential guardian of this concern.
It is accurate to say then that the result of Adorno’s Klages project was a radicalization of “dialectical critique itself.” Horkheimer, however, did not appreciate this. For him, Adorno’s version of dialectics had insufficient trust in reason. Adorno, in contrast, held that, negative as his dialectics was, it still expressed trust in conceptual thinking. You are also right to conclude that “Adorno’s negative dialectics introduces an external moment, an influence outside the dialectical tradition.” This does change our image of Adorno’s stance toward Hegel and Marx. At the same time one ought not to forget that Klages is hardly the only non-dialectical thinker present in Negative Dialectics—just think of Kant, Nietzsche, or the phenomenologists.
LE: You describe Adorno’s intellectual strategy in the book’s title as a “gamble.” What, in your view, is the payoff of this gamble? Is it primarily a political gain, an epistemological insight, or a broader philosophical breakthrough? Do you think that today’s scholars should embrace this kind of risky engagement with ideologically suspect figures, or is there a growing need for more caution in such intellectual explorations?
MI: The main payoff is an improved political analysis. In “Spengler Today” (1941), Adorno heeded Spengler’s observation of “tendencies inherent in democracy that threaten to make it turn into dictatorship”: the bureaucratization of the party system, the emergence of a new personality type susceptible to propaganda, and the rise of a manipulative mass media (306–7). Spengler’s observations, I contend, sharpened Adorno’s diagnosis of democracy’s fragility, e.g., in The Authoritarian Personality (1950). Recent Adornian analyses help us to see today’s political authoritarianism as not merely a crisis of political representation, but rather a sign of the erosion of the conditions of democratic subjectivity itself. Remarkably, the problems that these intriguing analyzes highlight—psychological propaganda (see Samir Gandesha), a manipulative culture industry (see Peter E. Gordon), and the decay of democratic virtues (see Max Pensky)—are the same ones to which Adorno drew attention in his reading of Spengler’s observations on Caesarism. In my view, these analyses thus owe some of their insights to Adorno’s gamble with Spengler.
Regarding Adorno’s understanding of history and reason, I believe that his gamble was less successful, as I noted earlier. Traces of Klages’s dark critique of civilization are discernible in his works. I would like to suggest, however, that something of Adorno’s concerns with instrumental and mimetic reason may be saved when disentangled from such exaggerations. One contemporary theorist who carries forward this dimension of Adorno’s thought—and thereby the legacy of his gamble with Klages—is Hartmut Rosa. I am aware of the many differences between the two. Nevertheless, a shared motif runs through their works; emancipation is not just about autonomy but also a specific responsiveness. Adorno’s vision of an “undamaged” life depends on a balance between self-determination and certain openness to impression. Rosa’s “resonant” life similarly requires that we acknowledge “the uncontrollability of the world.” This motif, I argue, has its origin in Klages. As Michael Grossheim writes in “’Die namenlose Dummheit, die das Resultat des Fortschritts ist.’ – Lebensphilosophische und dialektische Kritik der Moderne” (1996), Klages insisted that instrumental reason neglects “the non-measurable atmospheric, everything that actually makes an impression on a person when he views the world with open eyes” (114). Adorno welcomed aspects of this view, even as he abhorred Klages’s antisubjectivism, which had zero interest in advancing human autonomy. Adorno’s thought looks like an attempt to save Klages’s distorted intuition and make it a legitimate part of Critical Theory. Rosa’s “resonance,” an effort to rehabilitate Adorno’s ideas without his utter negativism, indicates that Adorno’s gamble with Klages ultimately paid off.
Should scholars today embrace Adorno’s strategy? No. I do not advocate any systematic risk-taking with ideologically dubious figures. It bears repeating that Adorno’s Gamble was never motivated by any sympathy for the literati on the radical right. Such a motivation was not on my mind when I set out to write the book. Nor has it preoccupied me since. For I do not see any compelling reason for contemporary progressives to draw on Spengler or Klages (or other intellectual godfathers of the New Right). I tend to think that Adorno rescued whatever is or was worth rescuing in their ideas.
LE: Given your reflections on Adorno’s critique of mass culture and authoritarian tendencies (107–112), what do you think his engagement with Spengler and Klages can teach us about the current resurgence of “reactionary modernisms,” in which technological savvy coexists with mythic nationalism?
MI: Adorno’s critique draws attention to the role of culture in the erosion of the conditions of democratic subjectivity. Adorno maintained that Spengler had observed, remarkably early on, how “centralized means of public communication” (308) can paralyze critical thinking and even lead, as in the Nazis’ euphemistically named “Kristallnacht” violence of 1938, to “manipulated pogroms and ‘spontaneous’ popular demonstrations” (57). Our digitalized social media age may seemingly bear little resemblance to the interwar world of newspaper and radio, yet the danger remains that the newest technological advances can, and indeed already do, support the irrational ends of “mythic nationalism.”
LE: Looking ahead, could you share a bit about your future research projects? Will you be continuing work in this vein, whether thematically (on critical theory) or methodologically (in the approach you’ve developed here)?
MI: I am currently working on postwar West Germany, whose much-discussed efforts at political renewal I aim to approach from the somewhat neglected vantage point of the hopes, fears, and disillusionments of Jewish émigré intellectuals. My goal is to move beyond the traditional focus in exile studies on a few major names and bring into dialogue both prominent (Adorno among them) and more marginal figures, men and women, whose tormented lives and overlooked contributions to our understanding of the Holocaust have been overshadowed by their more illustrious contemporaries.
Lilia Endter is a PhD student in the Philosophy Department at Villanova University, near Philadelphia. Her research centers on critical social theory and philosophy of technology, within the tradition of the Early Frankfurt School, especially the thought of Theodor W. Adorno.
Edited by Zac Endter.
Featured image: Georg Ehrlich, Tröstung (Consolation), 1920, lithograph.
