ABSTRACT
The year 1960 is often deemed a turning point in German postwar literature. The new literary public sphere, a new form of reception of art, was created only in the 1960s and by the works published then. In the period of the positivism dispute, the new philosophy and sociology were launched almost entirely by the young theorists who had received training from the Frankfurt School. The thematization of the life world and the idea, never explicitly pronounced but nonetheless supported, of the primacy of practical reason points, of course, in the same direction. Functioning as a good seismograph, the grand old man of the Frankfurt School translates the entire discussion into social terms. The chapter on positivism in Lukacs’ Ontology expresses the same attitude and is characterized by the same arguments. The positivism dispute shows what a great influence Adorno had on the forming of the new German theoretical public sphere.
