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This chapter shows how Adorno identifies small-scale, modest, less visible “substantive democratic forms” in the United States that act as countertendencies that might be drawn out as a vaccine against more prevalent fascistic elements of pseudo-democracy in America. In his writings on American culture, we see Adorno employing the same mode of critique that Marx applies to the commodity, but with a different object: Adorno’s critique is directed toward an exploration of the radio or the Los Angeles Times’s astrology column, for example, as microcosms of the larger modern capitalist culture in the United States. But Adorno aims to illuminate how even seemingly insignificant cultural objects actually contain important nonidentical qualities—countertendencies—that protest against and can be used to unsettle the problematic conditions that they otherwise participate in and uphold. Adorno’s writings on American culture must be read in terms of his theory and practice of negative dialectics for our picture of him to avoid the problematic distortions it has been subjected to in the past. In this way, Adorno sees the potential for change—what might be—arising from the tensions and contradictions—the countertendencies—that exist within a problematic status quo.

Prior to the mass social acceptance of childhood immunization in the 1940s, diphtheria was one of the most prolific child killers in history. The formation of a leathery membrane in the lower airways induced death by suffocation and earned diphtheria the moniker ‘strangling angel of children’. It showed scant regard for social status and infiltrated Europe’s royal palaces as sinuously as her slums and hovels. For parents and children of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland, diphtheria represented the ‘most dreaded disease of childhood’ however, for their modern-day counterparts’ diphtheria has been relegated to a somewhat obscure disease. Few Irish doctors have seen a case of diphtheria, let alone treated one. In Ireland, diphtheria has been consigned to history, and so too have the horrors and mass fatalities once associated with it. But how was this achieved? Was active immunization received with open arms by public health authorities, the wider medical community, and the general public? This book tackles these questions by undertaking the first historical examination of the issues that underpin the origins of active immunization in Ireland. It explores the driving forces that shaped the national childhood immunization programme, and those that opposed them. In addition, it examines the complex social implications attendant on the introduction of this mass public health intervention.

The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the next millennium was characterized by an extraordinary burst of international cooperation on development. At the core of this cooperation was the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000 and the related agreement to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The U4 played a role both in the run-up to the MDG agreement and in linking the achievement of the MDG objective of ending poverty to collaborative efforts between donor and recipient, with partners in the driver’s seat setting their own priorities. This chapter starts with a discussion of the agreement to establish the MDGs at the UN and its implications for development. Then it turns to the perennial question of how much aid developed countries should commit to provide to developing countries, and what donors and recipients must do to make aid more effective, two central issues of the Monterrey Conference on Finance for Development in 2002. The last part discusses the special U4 and international community efforts to achieve universal primary education and to battle HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases.

A number of long-range research programs were initiated by the Red Army’s biological warfare facilities which would bring about the development and application of a range of civil and defense vaccines during the Second World War. As a result, 8.5 million Soviet troops were vaccinated against plague, 90,000 against anthrax and an unknown number against tularemia. In addition, botulinum toxoids and a vaccine against brucellosis were developed. Although the Red Army’s BW institutes made some useful contribution to the development of antibiotics production, it was UK and US scientists who made critical contributions of technology. The same BW facilities also launched a program for the manufacture of bacteriophage preparations which drew heavily on technology developed in Tbilisi.