Theodor Adorno 1903 – 1969

Theodor W. Adorno was a 20th-century German philosopher, sociologist, musicologist, and a leading figure of the first generation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. His 1947 book Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-written with Max Horkheimer, argued that the Enlightenment programme of demystification has produced its own forms of mythic domination in modern instrumental rationality and the culture industry. His major late work, Negative Dialectics, set out a critical philosophy aimed at thinking against the totalising tendencies of conceptual thought. He produced extensive writings on aesthetics, music, sociology, and the conditions of art and culture under late capitalism. Forced into exile by the Nazi regime, he spent the war years in the United States before returning to Frankfurt to help re-establish the Institute for Social Research.