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wideawake, thank you for your posts, which are gems.

[Schmitt] was staunchly anti-Communist throughout the 1920s and critiqued the parliamentary system of Weimar Germany very harshly.

This jibes with what I've read about Schmitt. I agree with TopQuark that "cowardly" may be too harsh a word for Schmitt.

He advocated invoking the famous 48th article of the Weimar Constitution - a provision allowing the President to declare himself a dictator in order to deal with a domestic crisis (specifically, in Schmitt's fears, a Communist coup d'etat).

Irony of ironies - today Arnulf Baring bemoans that Germany no longer has Article 48!

BTW, here in Frankfurt, where I live, Adorno and his academic collaborator Horkheimer are "Säulenheilige", i.e., revered as cerebral giants by those who fashion themselves "intellectuals". The "dialectical method", which Adorno championed, is a sterile, witless exercise in hair-splitting and not-so-crypto-Marxian exegesis. But immensely popular among the chattering classes.

I was saved from falling into this trap by reading at age 17 the clueless, condescending, anti-sensual putdown by Adorno of jazz music. But I wasn't a conservative yet then, which meant that for many years afterward I remained conflicted, confused and lonely.

Thanks for the post. I notice that things come full circle: we're discussing Adorno, and remember that in the Broder article we translated a Swiss academic said that not only did the attack on America occur on September 11, but that September 11 was also Adorno's birthday. He said that he and his friends prefer to celebrate it that way and that in the future the world will realize that Adorno's birth was the more important event.

Since I went to college in America in the 90s, I've been forced to read more Adorno than I would ever have voluntarily read - but I've never read his essay on jazz. I'm a big jazz fan, and I'd like to hear more about his, presumably stupid, anti-jazz comments.