This text offers an introduction to the social theory of Adorno through a reading of his lecture published in this issue, “Aspects of Contemporary Right-wing Radicalism.” The lecture analyzes political developments as taking place against the backdrop of a society that fails to manage the inherent tensions within it. The text focuses on the second aspect and complements that theory, considering how society acts in its usual routine in which it does succeed in managing those inherent tensions. These are the two complementary faces of the same Marxist explanatory framework to which Adorno is committed, a framework underlying which is the argument that the capitalist social reality is antagonistic and fundamentally full of contradictions. An additional point is the way in which Adorno seeks to combine a sociological-structural analysis with a psychological-experiential analysis. The psychological is not a simple mirroring of the sociological, but rather an effort to contend in various ways with the tensions within it that cannot be resolved. These arguments are presented through Adorno’s “flat society” thesis. The basic social structure is a class division between wealth and work, although this division is not manifested in the social life experience of any of the classes. The qualitative class difference is experienced by the classes as a quantitative continuum (all of us are consumers, all of us are investors, all of us are subject to economic circumstances over which we do not have full control). According to Adorno, this discrepancy between the structural and the experiential in itself becomes an active factor in social reproduction. The last part of the text deals with the concept of ideology and the question of whether Adorno established a convincing approach for a critique of ideology.