I picked up a copy of J.M. Bernstein's Adorno: Disenchantment and the Ethics today. It is a companion volume to his earlier Recovering Ethical Life: Jurgen Habermans and the Future of Critical Theory (1994).

The lack of concern with the ethical in the social sciences has always suprised me, given the interest in poverty, social deprivation, social deviance and social development; the implicit evaluative critique with its ethos for changing society, and the deep concern with ethics in everyday life. There has been a closure around the ethical field. Hence the significance of the work of Habermas.

In the Introduction to the Adorno text Bernstein writes:

The project of modernity has failed politically and ethically...The simplest, most widely recognized, and most economical way of stating the ethical failure of modernity is through Nietzsche's notion of nihilism: "What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devalue themselves. The aim is lacking; 'why'? finds no answer. By seeking to provide a wholly secular form of life we have espoused, above all, the values of scientific rationality and truth; in pursuing these values, in ordering our intellectual and practical lifes in accordance with their dictates, all other values and ideals tendentially lose their rational appeal until, eventually, even the worth of scientific rationality and truth become problematic for us. Modern, secular reason is self-undermining.

Bernstein says that the effect of nihilism has been the increasing rational incoherence of modern moral values and ideals, and their consequent increasing practical inadequacy for the purposes of orientating and giving meaning to everyday life. That helps to make sense of the conservative return to the Judaic/Christian tradition as the ethical foundation of western civilization.