Matthew Klaassen and I were driving back to Toronto from the 2004 Critical Theory Roundtable in Montreal when I asked whether I should turn my recent work on Adorno into a book. Matt had just presented an excellent paper on Habermas's critique of Adorno, the topic of the master's thesis he would complete in 2005. He had attended my graduate seminars on Adorno's Negative Dialectics and on Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action. He had also been the research assistant for an encyclopedia entry on Adorno as well as for my book on Artistic Truth. No one else knew so well the themes of my recent research. So when Matt said yes, that was the signal I needed to begin a book on Adorno's social philosophy.

Substantial components had already been drafted. The earliest materials stem from an invited lecture for the Eslick Symposium at St. Louis University in 1998. In 1999 I revised the lecture into conference papers for the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and the American Society for Aesthetics and published it as “Autonomy, Negativity, and Illusory Transgression: Menke's Deconstruction of Adorno's Aesthetics,” Philosophy Today, SPEP Supplement (1999): 154–68. This essay forms the basis for Chapter 1. Materials for Chapter 5 come from papers I presented to the Critical Theory Roundtable in 2001 and to the American Society for Aesthetics in 2002.