Persona

Immanen reconsiders Adorno’s surprising intellectual debt to Oswald Spengler and Ludwig Klages, showing how their reactionary philosophies served as foils against which Adorno sharpened his thinking about reason, democracy, and history. Far from being simple influences, these encounters reveal a dialectical strategy of immanent critique: appropriating fragments of antithetical thought in order to expose its contradictions and redirect whatever insights it does offer toward emancipatory ends. The result, Immanen argues, is a radicalization of Adorno’s negative dialectics—an intellectual gamble that underscores both the fragility of democracy and the continuing dangers of authoritarianism in modernity.

“Adorno’s critique draws attention to the role of culture in the erosion of the conditions of democratic subjectivity. Adorno maintained that Spengler had observed, remarkably early on, how ‘centralized means of public communication’ can paralyze critical thinking and even lead, as in the Nazis’ euphemistically named ‘Kristallnacht’ violence of 1938, to ‘manipulated pogroms and “spontaneous” popular demonstrations. Our digitalized social media age may seemingly bear little resemblance to the interwar world of newspaper and radio, yet the danger remains that the newest technological advances can, and indeed already do, support the irrational ends of ‘mythic nationalism.’”

The Kenyan-Omani historian Ali Mazrui’s notion of “Afrabia” highlighted the deep historical, cultural, and political ties linking Africa and the Arab world, despite colonial efforts to draw stark boundaries across the Sahara. European racial science, from Kant and Hegel onward, entrenched the division between “North Africa” and “sub-Saharan Africa,” shaping colonial governance, academic categories, and even postcolonial international institutions. The essays in this issue of Souffles revisit slavery’s legacies, anticolonial solidarities, and the cross-pollination between Afro-Arab and pan-African thoughts, proposing an “Afro-Arab continuum” as a way to understand the intertwined histories and identities of the regions.

“If the boundary between Africa and the Arab world is a political artifact, the essays in this issue probe how ‘Afro-Arab’ is also a construct, and invariably a political response to colonial social engineering. It was European colonialists who first decided that the Red Sea and the Sahara were to be boundaries or divides. Decades ago Ali Mazrui traced the incongruous trajectory of the term Africa (Mazrui, 1986, p. 25), ‘Ifriqiya,’ once the Berber/Amazigh word for the northern coast of Africa, which would morph into ‘Africa’ and be adopted by Afrikaners at the southern tip of the continent, and then be embraced by African American thinkers who conceived of Africa from Cairo to the Cape; and yet, nowadays the term has come to connote Africa below the Sahara. The migration of the name reflects historic struggles within the continent and in the African diaspora over how to define and demarcate the African land mass. How Africa’s internal and external borders are drawn has political, social, and cultural repercussions, defining not only boundaries of citizenship and inclusion but also patterns of racial exclusion and domination.”

Williams dismantles the “post-materialism” narrative according to which class divisions have been displaced from politics: far-right parties have thrived not because class has disappeared, but because it has been recast as a cultural gulf between cosmopolitan elites and middle-status workers. Elites valorize self-development, mobility, and sophistication, while non-elites cling to self-discipline, rootedness, and institutions—family, religion, nation—which confer honor outside the capitalist hierarchy.

“What post-materialism captured was not the end of class, but a change in the way class conflict is expressed through politics. After elites centred post-materialist issues, a ‘representation gap’ arose, political scientists document: people who held progressive economic but culturally conservative values weren’t represented in mainstream parties in either Europe or the US. Far right parties stepped in to fill the gap. If mainstream parties want to lure back middle-status voters who are now voting with the far right, they need to embrace progressive economic policies, and learn how to build bridges between the divergent cultural values of elites and non-elites. That alone is the path past populism.”