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.

Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) was the most influential philosopher of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Born in Frankfurt to a Jewish wine merchant and a Catholic singer, he studied philosophy and music in Frankfurt and Vienna (with Berg and Schoenberg), held a position at the Institute for Social Research, fled Nazi Germany for Oxford and then for Los Angeles, and returned to Frankfurt after the war to direct the reconstituted Institute.

Adorno's collaboration with Max Horkheimer produced Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, revised 1947), one of the most influential single works of twentieth-century critical theory. The book argues that the same instrumental reason that liberated humanity from myth has produced the administered society, mass culture, and the conditions of fascism. The Authoritarian Personality (1950) — a collaborative empirical study — extended the analysis. Adorno's solo masterpiece, Negative Dialectics (1966), develops a philosophical method that refuses the affirmative synthesis Hegelian and orthodox Marxist dialectics had claimed.

Adorno's writings on music — Philosophy of New Music, Mahler, the essays on jazz and on the culture industry — are among the most rigorous and contested philosophical accounts of musical modernism. His final work, the unfinished Aesthetic Theory (published posthumously in 1970), is the most sustained twentieth-century philosophical aesthetics. He died of a heart attack in Switzerland in 1969 during a year of intense political confrontation with German student radicals who found the Frankfurt School's refusal of revolutionary practice intolerable.