Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape

Adorno’s name and legacy as a founding member of the Frankfurt School in the late 1920s is not so stirring to sociologists as it was between the publication of The Authoritarian Personality in 1950 and the heyday of critical theory in the 1970s, when his Negative Dialectics and Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Max Horkheimer) became nightstand reading for ambitious graduate students. The intimate connection with Jürgen Habermas and other critical theorists of the succeeding generation assigned Adorno a place in the pantheon which appeared immovable. Yet as he would have been the first to point out, history for an Hegelian is an ever-changing object of discourse and re-analysis. The scholarly and political values promoted by the Frankfurt School were given a surprise body-blow in the 1980s by the troika of conservative politicians (Reagan-Thatcher-Kohl) from which it has not yet recovered, despite a political-economic world crisis that should have re-welcomed its best ideas. Meanwhile, Adorno’s status in cultural studies and English departments soared via his Aesthetic Theory and books on music, literature, and the culture industry. Sometimes impenetrable, therefore untranslatable, ‘‘Adorno-sprache’’ is most evident in Minima Moralia and his other philosophically probing works. Yet in those empirically constructed labors jointly carried out by him and his colleagues, Adorno tried to speak more directly to his audience, perhaps because the Holocaust seemed a more broadly important topic than Alban Berg’s music. This ‘‘new’’ Adorno, ably introduced and translated by Jeffrey Olick and Andrew Perrin, is worlds removed from his famous studies of Mahler, Beethoven, Hegel, atonalism, and related high-cultural artifacts. In this study, little known in the United States, the Frankfurt School in 1949 assigned itself the huge task of figuring out how and why the German populace who supported Hitler’s genocidal policies could possibly come to terms with their shameful past following the Nazi defeat. In spite of some ‘‘substantive nonsense’’ (p. xi) and ‘‘incoherent and incomprehensible’’ (p. xii) portions of the work, it is far closer in tone to ordinary survey research than most of what the Frankfurt Schoolers wrote. Though Adorno had argued against Paul Lazarsfeld’s demands for empiricallygrounded social research while working under him at Columbia in the late 1930s, he and his colleagues obviously learned things there which they put to good use after they repatriated. This volume, the first of a pair, conveys the substantive conclusions of the research, and includes material from the large 1955 volume edited by Friedrich Pollack, Gruppenexperiment: Ein Studienbericht, plus a critique of that study by the psychologist Peter Hofstätter, Adorno’s fierce response, and concludes with a noted radio lecture by Adorno in 1960, ‘‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’’ (translated in 1998 by Henry Pickford). What the excellent introduction to the book, and the subsequent entries, proves is that Adorno was very interested in and quite competent in the realm of positivist social research of a distinctly American style, and that when he combined the results of these investigations with his own thundering theoretical imagination, sociology came alive in ways that it otherwise could not. As the contemporary cliché expresses it: ‘‘Who knew? ’’