Kritik des Spiels - Spiel als Kritik

What holds capitalist societies together: moral norms or rules of behaviour? Is social totality a normative order or is it a purposeless game? These alternatives divide critical theory and also prevent fruitful dialogue between French and German social philosophy.
Critical social theory is impossible if it does not trust in the social practices it criticises. Without maintaining that such practices produce normative ideals, through which it can then criticise those practices, social theory cannot justify its claim of being able to immanently criticise everything that exists. Since Habermas, many have suspected Adorno’s social philosophy of being unable to justify this claim. If one wants to present Adorno as a significant philosopher today, one has to be able to demonstrate that his philosophy, i.e. the truth in everything, can be found in constitutive social practices. The author of this study first reconstructs Adorno’s social theory and then shows how it can still be used to criticise our society.