Student activists in the 1960s who had absorbed Adorno's critique of “the administered world” became impatient with his apparent lack of political alternatives. They asked, in effect, “What is to be done?” According to Adorno's social philosophy, however, V. I. Lenin's famous question can no longer be posed in the same way. That is one of the sobering lessons to be retained by a social philosophy after Adorno. Yet the question will not disappear so long as one thinks that society as a whole needs to be transformed.

When Adorno said that wrong life cannot be lived rightly, he did not mean that relatively good actions and dispositions are impossible. His point, instead, was that no individual is immune from the corrupting power of a “false society.” Further, any attempt to reflect critically on contemporary political or moral prospects must take into account the societal mediation of each individual's life. Adorno's own “reflections from damaged life” begin with the following self-admonition: “[One] who wishes to know [erfahren] the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize its estranged form, the objective powers that determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses” (MM, p. 15/13).