[11/1/10 : While what I say here is explicitly correct, at least with reference to New York, my understanding of Adorno and appreciation of the Frankfurt school have since altered radically.] 

            Thank God I developed my philosophy before I read 20th century philosophy, or even, in fact, western philosophy from the beginnings of the 19th century onward. I start to study the Frankfurt school and suddenly discover all the reasons I have always detested the 'New York' orientation, since the Frankfurt school plays directly into the late 19th and early 20th century history of New York, the confluence of the radical political speculation within parts of the immigrant communities as well as among the domestic bohemians, and the aesthetic radicalism that New York adopts wholesale and exclusively after the Armory show. Perhaps I can understand that the growing disaster of the first half of the 20th century might cause thinkers - particularly European thinkers - to reject the past, but the neo-Marxism, with its eclectic mix of other early 20th century 'isms', that can draw a direct, if implicit line between Romanticism and capitalism and fascism, is, by definition, an idiot philosophy. The wholesale rejection of individualism, because of the failure of philosophical conceptualism, is such an asinine misidentification as to warrant every adjective for the moronic, including profanity. It stands on a par with calling the present modes of capitalistic imperialism 'neo-liberalism'. Undoubtedly, early western economic theory was identified with the roots of 'liberal' political theory, since it was presumed that economic freedom and political freedom arose from and resolved into the same root. But the 19th century should have proven to anyone with a basic shred of humanity that 'economic freedom' is largely a misnomer, since economic force is at least as old as militarism as an instrument of imperialism, oppression and exploitation.
            And 'liberalism' was originally a term for 'freedom', that is, for personal liberty. One who is a 'liberal' is one who believes in personal liberty. Personal liberty is grounded in the concept of individualism, of personal rights, not the formless 'rights' of 'the masses'. And the philosophy of freedom began with Locke and epistemology, not with Rousseau and its emotional correlate, although we might say that Rousseau's emotionalism 'gave it a body'. But, of course, this latter-day rejection of 'the individual' is apparently a substantial part of the reason that 'epistemology' is no longer in good odor among 'serious' thinkers. Epistemology and empiricism are both pejorative nowadays, apparently because they reference individualism.
            How can we characterize this onus against 'the individual'? Is it simply good old New York self-hatred writ large? Is it the ultimate epitome of bourgeois guilt? since almost all of the writers and thinkers who have subscribed to these ideologies of 'the masses' are tenaciously bourgeois. Perhaps this justifies the towering paeans to shame and guilt that New York literature and serious theater have produced in the past century; because, of course, on the personal level, New York, as an 'ideal', is the epitome of individualist ambition. But how to explain its prevalence throughout the intellectual culture in the U.S. today? Are we supposed to be guilty because we are not working with our hands? and therefore are not 'real' workers? But, obviously, the issue is deeper than ideology. And yet, of course, such a 'philosophy' is the ultimate conclusion of Kant's rejection of 'psychology' within the frame of philosophy. But, of course, psychology is precisely what enters into both the neo-Marxism of the Frankfurt school and the New York attitudinizing that passes for philosophy. Somehow, the final, mechanical isolation of the individual leads to the near hysterical taboo on the individual.

            What failed is not individualism. What failed is conceptualist philosophy. The concept may be a mirror for the self. But the self is also the witness, something the concept can never be. And between the concept as self and the nature of the witness, we find the whole realm of volition and value, an array that grounds not only all human production, but the very nature of 'production' as something which begins, historically, in an act of creativity, the act which quite literally produces the self of self-awareness. Could it be that the shame and guilt of this post-individualist culture is precisely the sacrifice of the individual, a sacrifice which makes the bloody murder of human sacrifice seem relatively polite by comparison, since human sacrifice only takes one life, while this sacrifice of the self is pan-cultural and the actual base of the pragmatic reality of both fascism and communism as murderous state ideologies. Only the total abnegation of the individual can allow for the kind of programmatic holocausts of the fascist death camps and the gulags that followed on the cellars of the Cheka in the Soviet Union. Ideologies become excuses for raw power in the name of 'the masses', whether as a materialist revolution that, once unleashed, can justify all acts, since it is 'materialist history' and not responsible individuals that are involved, or a philosophy that elevates a generic elite over a generic 'mass', the latter thus being considered unfit for life, again supposedly invoking forces beyond individual responsibility.
            Granted that in the late stages, we find the Frankfurt school trying to escape from both the dilemma of conceptualist philosophy and the self-contradictions of common Marxist thought through a redefinition of 'production' as a relatively 'metaphysical' moment. But the metaphysical moment remains essentially divorced from the individual as a creative force. Thus, Adorno assigns it to the essential negative that stands outside the presumptive negative that is subsumed under the synthesis in Hegel's dialectical process. But what is this 'ultimate' negative. Either it has an empirical or epistemological base, or it is as hypothetical as Heidegger's Being. In fact, of course, it does have an empirical base. It is precisely the creative moment that stands outside the concept, whether defined as a formality or a process. But, like Marx, Adorno continues to reify production in terms of product. With Marx, 'means of production' are still 'capital goods', not human hands, much less human volition as an independent instrument. The ultimate negative exists. And, even in its own context, it remains a 'negative' in the sense that it cannot be addressed empirically as a 'positive' element in experience. It is the 'darkness' at the center of creativity. But, as such, it is the 'darkness' at the center of every moment of reflectivity, which is to say, the darkness at the center of every moment of our present experience. It is the 'moment' of 'the mirror' that allows us to see the present world as a 'field' of proto-conceptual 'objects'.
            But to resort to this ultimate negative requires, if it is to be effective, a resort once again to the individual and individualism. We cannot have it both ways. But first we have to recognize that the problem is precisely the rejection of the individual in the process of 19th century development. Social theory reverted to materialism in its attempt to establish itself as 'science'. But 19th century science did not so much reject individualism as shove it off the table, without comment, because consciousness and the process of thought remained not only inexplicable, from the 'scientific point of view', but also essentially problematic, since science is necessarily a process of mind and experience while its 'content' presumes to 'objectivity'. Science, to some extent, has tried to have it both ways, since science insists, on the one hand, that it is 'empirical', that is, experiential, but also presumes equally that its content is 'objective'. How this can be, without a metaphysics and epistemology, still remains to be explained. But it is far easier simply to sweep the philosophical issues away by only illuminating the 'content' of science. The fact that at the beginning of the 20th century, physics, the science of matter, brought the question back to the center of the table perhaps explains the progressive 'philosophical' deflection of the intimacy it suggests between 'matter' and 'consciousness'. No doubt, this is why the legitimately philosophical questions raised by the facts of relativity have been shunted around the outskirts of 'serious philosophy' or studiously ignored, thus becoming a special preserve for the 'new agers' with their wonderfully pantheistic theories. This, too, perhaps explains why we still consider 'quantum phenomena' as a novelty rather than a pressing and pivotal issue.

            Imagine concerning one's self with these topics at the same time that one stumbles on a copy of Ortega y Gasset's Rebellion of the Masses, with its thesis that the characteristic of the 20th century is the final universal acceptance of a 'democratic' equality, an acceptance that destroys the theoretical nature of democracy as an 'ideal' and makes equality not only a commonplace, but a universal basic assumption. Finally, the 'common man' takes his equality for granted. The translation has Ortega asserting that the change leads to 'the sovereignty of the unqualified individual', and one wonders if the ambiguity is present in the original. Is it the sovereignty of the 'unique' individual 'without qualification'? Or is it the presumptive sovereignty of the individual who has not in fact 'qualified' for 'sovereignty'?
            As a result of a recent conversation, I have had the thought that I might characterize myself as a 'Jeffersonian syndicalist anarchist'. In the late correspondence between Jefferson and Adams we have the famous conversation about 'natural aristocracy', in which both agree that democracy does not preclude a 'natural aristocracy', but in fact promotes it. The founders were not necessarily 'levelers' in any sense except the political, and within the political, perhaps only in terms of the law. The basis of democracy as a legal reality is equality before the law. But, even as a political reality, these founders did not envision an absolute leveling. Witness the range of limitations on voting that were untouched by the constitution. While there are elements in the constitution that were clearly opposed by the theoreticians behind the document - witness the infamous 'three-fifths clause', strictly expedient for ratification - the document itself was intended as a relatively pure 'democratic' statement, within the frame of representative government. Jacksonian democracy was not envisioned.
            We have to remember that the constitution was, for the most part, created by lawyers, and lawyers for the most part young when they committed their lives and careers to the revolution. The presumption that 'the best' would serve in government is the presumption of young and idealistic lawyers. But they also obviously believed or had begun to believe in the nature of vocation - that the force of democracy is not only an ideal of equality before the law, but also of a society of freedom in which one has the opportunity, essentially unhampered, to develop and express one's vocation, development and expression being understood as coterminous. Hence, the discussion between Jefferson and Adams.
            And, contrary to Allan Bloom, the 'partisan politics' that the founders abhorred is not the politics of minorities. Just the reverse, the models for 'democracy' which the founders had were the Athenian, Roman and Florentine republics, all of which were destroyed by the oligarchs using the 'parties' of the day as dueling puppets whose confrontations and arguments were all a dumb show and deflection from the fact that these parties were entirely subsidized, controlled and manipulated by the single party of the oligarchs. In late 18th century English, 'partisan politics' was the equivalent of our 'political party'. Thus we witness the more than mild horror on the part of a number of the founders when 'parties' instantly appear with the new government. Perhaps it is more than slightly ironic that one of the chief architects of this new regime of the 'parties' was Jefferson himself, the author not only of the Declaration, but of the body of the constitution itself (something which, for reasons that I cannot fathom, historians have either been unable to discover or unwilling to admit.) What the founders hoped for was a political body constituted on the basis of interest groups, quite literally, in the modern word, 'syndicalism'. And, if the political focus had remained on the individual, we could have called it syndicalist anarchism. But, of course, the force of the constitution is essentially federalist, both in the limited and the larger sense. Nevertheless, it was Jefferson that Thoreau was quoting when he cited 'that government is best which governs least'. Eventually, I presume that 'syndicalist anarchism' has to be a moral rather than a political understanding; just as moral force, according to Frances Fitzgerald, maintained equable land distribution in pre-colonial Vietnam, where land was wealth.
            If the young lawyers of the revolution who eventually created the constitution were naïve about economics, it was the naiveté of the age. The undeniable value of Marx is the increased emphasis on economics as a political force and the recognition of the specific nature and conditions of economic imperialism - precisely the change that should have prevented us from assigning the name of 'neo-liberalism' to international economic policies that are clearly imperialistic, and therefore inherently anti-liberal.

            Liberalism is still alive and viable. The United States, in its origins, is still a viable model for democracy. The 'representative democracy' that came out of the American Revolution was based on the understanding of freedom as defined by Locke - and not Rousseau - and interpreted through a separate history of development in this country, where Locke is the first serious 'contemporary' philosophy studied in depth. If Tom Paine found a ready ear here for his tracts, it was grounded in a discussion that had been ongoing for much of the 18th century in this country. That is to say, the political theory behind both the revolution and the constitution is indigenous. Its general ground may have its roots in Europe, in Locke and Montesquieu. But the formulation is peculiarly American, with modifications that may seem peripheral, but have profound import.
            At the same time, of course, being an indigenous product, it cannot be foisted on others. That oligarchs control our government is nothing new. Oligarchy is not the 'aristocracy' that Jefferson and Adams referred to, although, in their naiveté, they tended to equate aristocratic accomplishment with wealth - the political version of the essential Puritan heresy. But what this all says is that we have yet to 'realize' the 'democracy' implicit in the foundation of this country.
            Conceptual philosophy has self-destructed. But so have the products of conceptual philosophy, among which are the 'isms' of the 19th and 20th century. Technology has created incomprehensible concentrations of power. But so do both capitalism and socialism. Socialism is not 'the public sector'. Governments always have agendas in themselves. Only the continued education of the people in a democracy based on an individualism that is acquired and earned, and in an ethical environment that favors moral as well as legal equality, can we hope to find the preservation of the world as well as personal integrity or redemption.