Horkheimer and Adorno on Social Change: Problems and Potential in Light of “History from Below”1
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I critique Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's post-1940 pessimism regarding the potential for social change in modern society. The basis for this critique is the “history from below” perspective, a perspective which has particular relevance to the discussion since Horkheimer and Adorno's critical theory and history from below share certain core theoretical presuppositions. History from below's re-appropriation of past struggles and relational analysis of domination provide a useful antidote to critical theory's excessive focus on past suffering and its fatalistic interpretation of domination. The history from below perspective helps to demonstrate that Horkheimer and Adorno's pessimism was neither theoretically consistent nor inevitable.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it