The Adorno Legacy

Abstract

Adorno's legacy to social psychology has little to do with the F-Scale of The Authoritarian Personality (1950). Instead, his contribution to this study was the method of qualitative con tent-analysis used in interpreting the interview material. The method can be identified as a dialectical, materialist, hermeneu tics. It construes the statements of respondents as "texts" that must be "deciphered," and emphasizes the way language unintention ally expresses the material structure of social reality. The larg er significance of Adorno's effort to merge science and art is that it begins to reinstate art as a legitimate mode of knowledge while at the same time recognizing the moment of "fantasy" in the proce dures of social science. Implied here is a new alternative to the natural science paradigm, the ideological content and inadequacies of which Adorno and his colleagues at the Frankfurt Institute did so much to expose.

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References

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