With Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, Dirk Braunstein has produced one of the most comprehensive accounts to date of both the historical development of Adorno’s concept of economy, and of the importance of the critique of political economy to his philosophy. In doing so, Braunstein quotes Adorno extensively in order to refute a tendency in the secondary literature to play down or disparage this aspect of his thought.
In translating Braunstein’s study from German into English, I have had the fortune of being able to draw upon the work of numerous translators, thanks to whom a great deal of Adorno’s writings have already been made accessible in English. Unless otherwise noted in the footnotes, any use of brackets in quoted passages from translated texts mark modifications or insertions I have made, either to avoid ambiguity or correct translation errors. Otherwise, I have faithfully reproduced existing translations – hence, the coexistence of British and American spellings in this book, and of some other minor inconsistencies in some technical terms (for example, ‘class-conscious’ versus ‘class consciousness’, ‘use-value’ versus ‘use value’, ‘praxis’ versus ‘practice’, and so on). All direct quotations from non-English sources were translated by myself. Whenever sources are referred to in the body of the text which have not been translated into English, I have reproduced their German titles and given English translations of these in parentheses.
My warmest thanks are due to the Historical Materialism Book Series team for asking me to be involved with this project and providing support and encouragement throughout, and to Dirk Braunstein for his immensely helpful feedback and suggestions – although it goes without saying that any errors in this final English version are my fault alone.
Adam Baltner
Vienna, September 2022