672021, issue 2
Intellectual Bad Conscience and Solidarity with the Underdogs
Titus Stahl
There are few aphorisms in Minima Moralia that display a less sympathetic attitude
towards their subject than “They, the people” (§ 7). Adorno denounces the “amor intel-
lectualis for [the] kitchen personnel” in the subsequent aphorism, but “They, the people”
already seems to conrm all suspicions about the alleged elitism of critical theory. The
idea that intellectuals mostly encounter those less educated when “illiterates come to
intellectuals wanting letters written for them” is laughable, even for the 1950s, and the
claim that, among the “underdogs”, “envy and spite surpass anything seen among literati
or musical directors” (ibid.) oozes with contempt, no matter how much Adorno insists
that these alleged character decits result from the social structures in which unedu-
cated, working class people nd themselves.
Yet the point of Adorno’s remarks is not to disprove a deferential form of a
Lukácsian “standpoint theory”, according to which workers are epistemically and/or
perhaps even morally superior to the intellectuals who take up their cause. Rather,
he wishes to criticize those intellectuals who promote such theories because of the
“justied guilt-feelings of those exempt from physical work”. While Horkheimer had
already criticized those who were “satised to proclaim with reverent admiration […]
the creative strength of the proletariat” as evading intellectual eort in “Traditional
and Critical Theory” (1975, 124), Adorno oers a social-psychological explanation of
persistence of this form of deferential standpoint theory: It is a species of bad conscience
arising from the fact “that intellectuals are […] beneciaries of a bad society” as he puts
it later in Minima Moralia (§ 86).
This critique seems to have become obsolete, however. Not only is it a mistake
to read Lukács’ original argument as entailing that working-class people have superior
knowledge even before any theoretical eort—an insight of which feminists such as
Hartsock (1983), who took up Lukács’s argument in the 1970s to formulate more well-
known versions of “standpoint theory”, were well aware—no serious theory espouses
anything close to such an uncritical deference to the working class, the existence of
which is in any case up for debate.
What, then, remains of Adorno’s argument? What remains is the question of
whether there is a distinctive standpoint characteristic of intellectuals, rooted in their
social situation—one that induces a systematic “guilty conscience” that prevents a real-
istic assessment of their own situation.
Being exempt from hard physical labor is no longer a distinctive character-
istic of intellectual professions. What makes intellectual—including academic—labor
dierent from other forms is that it is impossible to control it by spelling out in advance
the steps that intellectuals must perform and how to perform them. Those tasked with
coming up with theories, narratives, or justications must be accorded a certain amount
of autonomy in their work if they are to perform it at all.
This has always made intellectuals suspect in the eyes of their managers, since
there seems to be no completely reliable way to ensure the subordination of their
activities to institutional imperatives. The desperate attempts to quantify “academic
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output” and the equally desperate attempts of humanities departments to show that
they produce some sort of predictable benets for society (in the form of “critical
thinking skills”) are evidence of a desire to dissolve these suspicions.
In the “Culture Industry” chapter of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno spec-
ulates that the “remnant of autonomy” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 105) which
intellectuals still enjoy, is on the brink of being replaced by their total subordination
to the interests of the market or, more directly, economic-political rulers. His claim
that ideology is being replaced by direct command has been proven false, however,
and intellectual production has not disappeared as a functional requirement for social
integration.
Yet intellectuals face suspicion not only from those who, more or less grudg-
ingly, grant them the freedom to perform their function in the cultural and educa-
tional sphere, but also from those whose work is more directly subordinated to social
imperatives. It is a cliché among academics that their relatives openly wonder how
one can earn a living doing things that one cannot really explain. There is always a
ne line between this skepticism and open resentment of the fact that intellectuals
are not subject to those forms of subordination and control that others face in their
daily working lives. Not a small part of the hatred directed towards “liberal elites” may
derive from this resentment. The bad conscience of intellectuals that results from their
internalization of this resentment, and their acceptance of the claim that they enjoy
substantive privileges, can still be detected everywhere, even if it is no longer expressed
by an attempt to subordinate themselves to the cause of “the workers”.
This bad conscience is not a feeling that leads to any form of progress, however.
It leads those in intellectual professions to overstate the amount of freedom they enjoy,
which is always conditioned in any case, and it causes them to come up with uncon-
vincing justications for why they, in particular, should be exempt from direct subordi-
nation under the prot motive. Such justications tacitly agree with the idea that there is
something special about intellectual labor that justies granting it a degree of autonomy
not aorded to other kinds of labor. The bad conscience of the intellectual thereby
begins to legitimize the “real subsumption” of other forms of labor (Marx 1992, 1028).
As those who resent the fact that intellectuals are granted such autonomy
correctly perceive, this idea is unconvincing—not because intellectual work could be
equally well subordinated, but because all forms of work require autonomy, creativity,
and knowledge on the part of those who perform it. More often than not, and in
almost all jobs, managerial control keeps people from doing their job well. This is most
obviously the case with care work, where attention to the particular needs of others
systematically resists external control. But even those who perform work that is cul-
turally seen as requiring less creative eort, such as cleaning, understand themselves as
engaged in a creative task that often requires them to subvert the rules imposed by their
managers if they are to do their job well (Tweedie and Holley 2016, 1889).
It is therefore neither a unique form of creativity nor a special need for auton-
omy that distinguishes intellectual work from other forms, but only a dierence in the
degree to which those in control are willing to grant such autonomy to dierent kinds
of work. If intellectuals were less concerned with proving the usefulness of their specic
692021, issue 2
type of work to a society that serves neither their own interests nor those of others, and
if they were more interested in challenging the prevailing standards of usefulness which
justify denying that autonomy to others who deserve it to the same degree, then their
bad conscience could make way for a form of solidarity that rejects a distinction in
normative status between intellectual and non-intellectual work. Such solidarity is not
envisioned by Adorno, however. In fact, he reserves his few positive remarks on solidar-
ity in Minima Moralia for relations among intellectuals (§ 83). Attention to a wider form
of solidarity that overcomes the isolation of intellectual work is needed, however, both
to remove the sting of Adorno’s remarks and to develop a politically reective theory of
the social standpoint of the intellectual.
References
Adorno, Theodor. 2006. Minima Moralia: Reflections
from Damaged Life: Reflections on a Damaged Life.
London: Verso.
Hartsock, Nancy. 1983. “The Feminist Standpoint.”
In Discovering Reality, edited by Sandra Harding
and Merrill B. Hintikka, 283–310. Dordrecht:
Reidel.
Horkheimer, Max. 1975. “Traditional and Critical
Theory.” In Critical Theory: Selected Essays,
188–243. New York: Continuum.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. 2002.
Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments.
Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Marx, Karl. 1992. “Appendix: Results of the
Immediate Process of Production.” In Capital:
A Critique of Political Economy, edited by Ernest
Mandel, 1:948–1084. New York: Penguin.
Tweedie, Dale, and Sasha Holley. 2016. “The
Subversive Craft Worker: Challenging
‘Disutility’ Theories of Management Control.”
Human Relations 69 (9): 1877–1900. https://
doi.org/10.1177/0018726716628971.
Titus Stahl is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at
the University of Groningen where he does research
on contemporary and historical issues in Critical
Theory, theories of oppression, domination, ideology,
the philosophy of hope and the ethics of privacy.
His most recent publication is Immanent Critique
(Rowman and Littlefield, 2021).
Biography
