Alexis de Tocqueville is often described as a critic of American culture and modern democracy. Yet, as Alan Levine argues, there is an important difference between Tocqueville’s friendly criticisms of parts of American culture he finds wanting and other ideological critiques by “anti-American” thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and the Frankfurt School. Several factors separate Tocqueville from this European tradition of “Anti-Americanism.” Tocqueville’s criticisms are balanced by an appreciation of the virtues of American democracy and a recognition that these defects are hardly unique to America. His criticisms also take their root in empirical considerations of the complexities of American culture. Although the Frankfurt School and other influential critics often claim Tocqueville as inspiration for their complaints about mass society, they are ideologically motivated, ignore America’s redeeming virtues, and fault America uniquely for widely shared flaws of modernity.

Theodor Adorno was the most erudite and most challenging of Mahler’s critical apologists. A deeply cultured thinker whose family background represented a coming together of the twin poles of German rationalism and Italian lyricism, he acquired in his youth a vast knowledge of European classical musical repertoire (mostly by playing piano duets), which he deployed in profound critical readings of a wide range of music. His principal statements on Mahler are surveyed here, from early attempts such as “Mahler Today” (1930) – a concise but wide-ranging essay challenging the prevailing view that Mahler was a late Romantic who had been superseded by the modernist trends of the 1920s – to the monograph Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy (1960) and the centenary address that served as its distillation. A distillation of Adorno’s broader project vis-à-vis late capitalism serves as introduction.