The Method

A radio preacher nobody remembers, taken apart device by device by a man who would rather have been writing about music.

A course on the thought of Martin Luther Thomas.

Rhetoric

What you will learn

State what Adorno means by pigeonholing, and why it is not the same as arguing badly.
Identify an argument whose form is intact and whose conclusion was settled in advance.
Explain why an appeal to unity with no content is more useful to an agitator than a specific one.
Recognise the move by asking what a proposed unity would require of the person proposing it.
State why the terror devices work as a graded series rather than as separate tricks.
Explain Adorno's claim that terroristic propaganda works only "on the spot", and what follows from it.
Explain why a movement terrorises its own members more reliably than its enemies.
State what Adorno says counterpropaganda should do with this device, and why.

Everything is decided before the argument starts — The first device is not a claim but a shape. Thomas keeps every outward form of reasoning — examples, deductions, conclusions — while the conclusions were fixed before he opened his mouth.
Unity, emptied — What a movement without a programme offers instead of one. Adorno finds the appeal is not to any particular unity but to unity as such — a container whose emptiness is the feature.
The strategy of terror, graded — Adorno groups five devices as one apparatus and the grouping is the lesson: fear is not applied at full strength but on a dial, from the hint of something withheld to the announcement that time has…
Be careful within — The device that surprises everyone: the terror is aimed hardest at the speaker's own followers. Adorno dates its most blatant instance to 30 June 1934.
Let us be practical — The closing device, and the one that outlasts the movement. Not a promise that things will be better, but a standing assurance that they cannot be — and that expecting otherwise is a punishable kind…

The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas' Radio Addresses — Adorno's device-by-device dissection of an American radio agitator, written in English around 1943 for the Institute of Social Research in exile and unpublished in his lifetime.
The Fine Art of Propaganda — The Institute for Propaganda Analysis's 1939 study of Father Coughlin's speeches, which Adorno cites — the contemporary American attempt to do the same job.

flight of ideas, pigeonholing, the unity trick, the strategy of terror, innuendo, Feme, Realpolitik

Part of the Simposeum course library.