Theodor W.

Adorno

(April 1964)

Born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund

September 11, 1903
Frankfurt am Main, Hesse-Nassau, Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire

Died August 6, 1969 (aged 65)

Visp, Valais, Switzerland

Residence Germany

Nationality German

Era 20th-century philosophy

Region Western philosophy

School Continental philosophy

Frankfurt School critical theory
Western Marxism

Main Social theory

interests Sociology
Psychoanalysis
Aesthetics
 Epistemology
Musicology
Mass media

Notable Criticism of actionism (left-wing anti-intellectualism)[1]

ideas Criticism of the
"culture industry"[2][3][4]
Maturity (Mündigkeit)[5]
Negative dialectics
Paradox of aesthetics[6]
Social totality

Influences
Immanuel Kant
G. W. F. Hegel
Søren Kierkegaard
Friedrich Nietzsche
Edmund Husserl
Karl Marx
Sigmund Freud
Georg Lukács
Ernst Bloch
Max Weber
Georg Simmel
Max Horkheimer
Hans Cornelius
Walter Benjamin
Arnold Schoenberg
Alban Berg
Charles Baudelaire
Marcel Proust
Franz Kafka
Oswald Spengler
Siegfried Kracauer
Thomas Mann

Influenced[hide]
Jürgen Habermas
Herbert Marcuse
Max Horkheimer
Fredric Jameson
Raymond Geuss
Alain Badiou

Part of a series on the

Frankfurt School
Major works

Reason and Revolution

The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Eclipse of Reason
Escape from Freedom
Minima Moralia
Eros and Civilization
One-Dimensional Man
Negative Dialectics
The Structural Transformation
of the Public Sphere
The Theory of Communicative Action
Dialectic of Enlightenment

Notable theorists

Herbert Marcuse · Theodor Adorno

Max Horkheimer · Walter Benjamin
Erich Fromm · Friedrich Pollock
Leo Löwenthal · Jürgen Habermas
Alfred Schmidt · Axel HonnethSiegfried Kracauer · Otto Kirchheimer

Important concepts

Critical theory · Dialectic · Praxis

Psychoanalysis · Antipositivism
Popular culture · Culture industry
Advanced capitalism
Privatism · Non-identity
Communicative rationality
Legitimation crisis

Theodor W. Adorno (/əˈdɔːrnoʊ/;[7] German: [aˈdɔɐ̯no]; born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund; September 11, 1903 –
August 6, 1969) was a German philosopher, sociologist, and composer known for his critical theory of society.
He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with
thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the works of Freud,
Marx, and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society. He is widely regarded as one of the 20th century's
foremost thinkers on aesthetics and philosophy, as well as one of its preeminent essayists. As a critic of both fascism
and what he called the culture industry, his writings—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Minima Moralia
(1951) and Negative Dialectics (1966)—strongly influenced the European New Left.
Amidst the vogue enjoyed by existentialism and positivism in early 20th-century Europe, Adorno advanced a
dialectical conception of natural history that critiqued the twin temptations of ontology and empiricism through studies
of Kierkegaard and Husserl. As a classically trained pianist whose sympathies with the twelve-tone technique of
Arnold Schoenberg resulted in his studying composition with Alban Berg of the Second Viennese School, Adorno's
commitment to avant-garde music formed the backdrop of his subsequent writings and led to his collaboration with
Thomas Mann on the latter's novel Doctor Faustus, while the two men lived in California as exiles during the Second
World War. Working for the newly relocated Institute for Social Research, Adorno collaborated on influential studies of
authoritarianism, antisemitism and propaganda that would later serve as models for sociological studies the Institute
carried out in post-war Germany.
Upon his return to Frankfurt, Adorno was involved with the reconstitution of German intellectual life through debates
with Karl Popper on the limitations of positivist science, critiques of Heidegger's language of authenticity, writings on
German responsibility for the Holocaust, and continued interventions into matters of public policy. As a writer of
polemics in the tradition of Nietzsche and Karl Kraus, Adorno delivered scathing critiques of contemporary Western
culture. Adorno's posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, which he planned to dedicate to Samuel Beckett, is the
culmination of a lifelong commitment to modern art which attempts to revoke the "fatal separation" of feeling and
understanding long demanded by the history of philosophy and explode the privilege aesthetics accords to content
over form and contemplation over immersion.

Contents

1Life and career

1.1Early years: Frankfurt
1.2Vienna, Frankfurt, and Berlin
1.3Exile: Oxford, New York, Los Angeles
1.4Post-war Europe
1.4.1Return to Frankfurt University
1.4.2Essays on fascism
1.4.3Public events
1.4.4More essays on mass culture and literature
1.4.5Public figure
1.4.6Post-war German culture
1.4.7Confrontations with students
2Theory
2.1Music
2.1.1The five components of recognition
2.2Marxist criticisms
3Standardization
3.1Adorno's responses to his critics
4Adorno's sociological methods
5Adorno translated into English
6Works
6.1Musical works
7See also
8References
9External links
Life and career

Early years: Frankfurt

Theodor W. Adorno (alias: Theodor Adorno-Wiesengrund) was born as Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund in Frankfurt am
Main on September 11, 1903, the only child of Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund (1870–1946) and Maria Calvelli-Adorno
della Piana (1865–1952). His mother, a devout Catholic from Corsica, was once a professional singer, while his
father, an assimilated Jew who had converted to Protestantism, ran a successful wine-export business. Proud of her
origins, Maria wanted her son's paternal surname to be supplemented by the addition of her own name: Adorno. Thus
his earliest publications carried the name Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno; upon his application for US citizenship, his
name was modified to Theodor W. Adorno. His childhood was marked by the musical life provided by his mother and
aunt: Maria was a singer who could boast of having performed in Vienna at the Imperial Court, while her sister,
Agathe, who lived with them, had made a name for herself as both a singer and pianist. He was not only a precocious
child but, as he recalled later in life, a child prodigy who could play pieces by Beethoven on the piano by the time he
was twelve.[8] At the age of six, he attended the Deutschherren middle school before transferring to the
Kaiser-Wilhelm Gymnasium, where he studied from 1913 to 1921. Prior to his graduation at the top of his class,
Adorno was already swept up by the revolutionary mood of the time, as is evidenced by his reading of Georg
Lukács's The Theory of the Novel that year, as well as by his fascination with Ernst Bloch's The Spirit of Utopia, of
which he would later write:
Bloch's was a philosophy that could hold its head high before the most advanced literature; a philosophy that was not
calibrated to the abominable resignation of methodology ... I took this motif so much as my own that I do not believe I
have ever written anything without reference to it, either implicit or explicit.[9]
Yet Adorno's intellectual nonconformism was no less shaped by the repugnance he felt towards the nationalism which
swept through the Reich during the First World War. Along with future collaborators like Walter Benjamin, Max
Horkheimer, and Ernst Bloch, Adorno was profoundly disillusioned by the ease with which Germany's intellectual and
spiritual leaders—among them Max Weber, Max Scheler, Georg Simmel, as well as his friend Siegfried
Kracauer—came out in support of the war. The younger generation's distrust for traditional knowledge arose from the
way in which this tradition had discredited itself.[10] Over time, Oscar Wiesengrund's firm established close
professional and personal ties with the factory of Karplus & Herzberger in Berlin. The eldest daughter of the Karplus
family, Margarete, or Gretel, moved in the intellectual circles of Berlin, where she was acquainted with Walter
Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Bloch, each of whom Adorno would become familiar with during the mid-1920s;
after fourteen years, Gretel and Theodor were married in 1937. At the end of his schooldays, Adorno not only
benefited from the rich concert offerings of Frankfurt—where one could hear performances of works by Schoenberg,
Schreker, Stravinsky, Bartók, Busoni, Delius and Hindemith—but also began studying music composition at the Hoch
Conservatory while taking private lessons with well-respected composers Bernhard Sekles and Eduard Jung. At
around the same time, he befriended Siegfried Kracauer, the Frankfurter Zeitung's literary editor, of whom he would
later write:
For years Kracauer read [Kant's] Critique of Pure Reason with me regularly on Saturday afternoons. I am not
exaggerating in the slightest when I say that I owe more to this reading than to my academic teachers ... Under his
guidance I experienced the work from the beginning not as mere epistemology, not as an analysis of the conditions of
scientifically valid judgments, but as a kind of coded text from which the historical situation of spirit could be read, with
the vague expectation that in doing so one could acquire something of truth itself.[11]
Notable teachers

Hans Cornelius

Notable students

Jürgen Habermas
Leaving gymnasium to study philosophy, psychology and sociology at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in
Frankfurt, Adorno continued his readings with Kracauer, turning now to Hegel and Kierkegaard, and began publishing
concert reviews and pieces of music for distinguished journals like the Zeitschrift für Musik, the Neue Blätter für Kunst
und Literatur and later for the Musikblätter des Anbruch. In these articles, Adorno championed avant-garde music at
the same time as he critiqued the failings of musical modernity, as in the case of Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale,
which he called in 1923 a "dismal Bohemian prank."[12] In these early writings, he was unequivocal in his
condemnation of performances which either sought or pretended to achieve a transcendence which Adorno, in line
with many intellectuals of the time, regarded as impossible: "No cathedral," he wrote, "can be built if no community
desires one."[13] In the summer of 1924, Adorno received his doctorate with a study of Edmund Husserl under the
direction of the unorthodox neo-Kantian Hans Cornelius. Before his graduation, Adorno had already met with his most
important intellectual collaborators, Max Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin. Through Cornelius's seminars, Adorno
met his future collaborator Max Horkheimer, through whom he was then introduced to Friedrich Pollock.

Vienna, Frankfurt, and Berlin

During the summer of 1924, the Viennese composer Alban Berg's "Three Fragments from Wozzeck", op. 7 premiered
in Frankfurt, at which time Adorno introduced himself to Berg and both agreed the young philosopher and composer
would study with Berg in Vienna. Upon moving to Vienna in February 1925, Adorno immersed himself in the musical
culture which had grown up around Schoenberg: in addition to his twice-weekly sessions with Berg, Adorno continued
his studies on piano with Eduard Steuermann and befriended the violinist Rudolf Kolisch. In Vienna, he attended
public lectures of the satirist Karl Kraus with Berg and met Lukács, who had been living in Vienna after the failure of
the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Alban Berg, the man Adorno referred to as "my master and teacher", was among the
most prescient of his young pupil's early friends:
[I am] convinced that, in the sphere of the deepest understanding of music ... you are capable of supreme
achievements and will undoubtedly fulfill this promise in the shape of great philosophical works.[14]
After leaving Vienna, Adorno traveled through Italy, where he met with Kracauer, Benjamin, and the economist Alfred
Sohn-Rethel, with whom he developed a lasting friendship, before returning to Frankfurt. In December 1926 Adorno's
"Two Pieces for String Quartet", op. 2 were performed in Vienna, which provided a welcome interruption from his
preparations for the Habilitation. After writing the "Piano Pieces in strict twelve-tone technique", as well as songs later
integrated into the Six Bagatelles for Voice and Piano, op. 6, Adorno presented his Habilitation manuscript, The
Concept of the Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of the Psyche (Der Begriff des Unbewußten in der
transzendentalen Seelenlehre), to Cornelius in November 1927. Cornelius advised Adorno to withdraw his application
on the grounds that the manuscript was too close to his own way of thinking. In this manuscript, Adorno attempted to
underline the epistemological status of the unconscious as it emerged from Freud's early writings. Against the
function of the unconscious in both Nietzsche and Spengler, Adorno argued that Freud's notion of the unconscious
serves as a "sharp weapon ... against every attempt to create a metaphysics of the instincts and to deify full, organic
nature."[15] Undaunted by his academic prospects, Adorno threw himself once again into composition. In addition to
publishing numerous reviews of opera performances and concerts, Adorno's "Four Songs for Medium Voice and
Piano", op. 3 was performed in Berlin in January 1929. Between 1928 and 1930 Adorno took on a greater role within
the editorial committee of the Musikblätter des Anbruch. In a proposal for transforming the journal, Adorno sought to
use Anbruch for championing radical modern music against what he called the "stabilized music" of Pfitzner, the later
Strauss, as well as the neoclassicism of Stravinsky and Hindemith. During this period he published the essays "Night
Music", "On Twelve-Tone Technique" and "Reaction and Progress". Yet his reservations about twelve-tone orthodoxy
became steadily more pronounced: According to Adorno, twelve-tone technique's use of atonality can no more be
regarded as an authoritative canon than can tonality be relied on to provide instructions for the composer.
At this time, Adorno struck up a correspondence with the composer Ernst Krenek, with whom he discussed problems
of atonality and twelve-tone technique. In a letter of 1934 Adorno sounded a related criticism of Schoenberg:
Twelve-tone technique alone is nothing but the principle of motivic elaboration and variation, as developed in the
sonata, but elevated now to a comprehensive principle of construction, namely transformed into an a priori form and,
by that token, detached from the surface of the composition.[16]
At this point Adorno reversed his earlier priorities: now his musical activities came second to the development of a
philosophical theory of aesthetics. Thus, in the middle of 1929 he accepted Paul Tillich's offer to present an
Habilitation on Kierkegaard, which Adorno eventually submitted under the title The Construction of the Aesthetic. At
the time, Kierkegaard's philosophy exerted a strong influence, chiefly through its claim to pose an alternative to
Idealism and Hegel's philosophy of history. Yet when Adorno turned his attention to Kierkegaard, watchwords like
"anxiety," "inwardness" and "leap"—instructive for existentialist philosophy—were detached from their theological
origins and posed, instead, as problems for aesthetics.[17] As the work proceeded—and Kierkegaard's overcoming of
Hegel's idealism was revealed to be a mere interiorization—Adorno excitedly remarked in a letter to Berg that he was
writing without looking over his shoulder at the faculty who would soon evaluate his work. Receiving favourable
reports from Professors Tillich and Horkheimer, as well as Benjamin and Kracauer, the University conferred on
Adorno the venia legendi in February 1931; on the very day his revised study was published, 23 March 1933, Hitler
seized dictatorial powers.[18]
Several months after qualifying as a lecturer in philosophy, Adorno delivered an inaugural lecture at the Institute for
Social Research, an independent organization which had recently appointed Horkheimer as its director and, with the
arrival of the literary scholar Leo Lowenthal, social psychologist Erich Fromm and philosopher Herbert Marcuse,
sought to exploit recent theoretical and methodological advances in the social sciences. His lecture, "The Actuality of
Philosophy," created a scandal. In it, Adorno not only deviated from the theoretical program Horkheimer had laid out a
year earlier, but challenged philosophy's very capacity for comprehending reality as such: "For the mind," Adorno
announced, "is indeed not capable of producing or grasping the totality of the real, but it may be possible to penetrate
the detail, to explode in miniature the mass of merely existing reality."[19] In line with Benjamin's The Origin of German
Tragic Drama and preliminary sketches of the Arcades Project, Adorno likened philosophical interpretation to
experiments which should be conducted "until they arrive at figurations in which the answers are legible, while the
questions themselves vanish." Having lost its position as the Queen of the Sciences, philosophy must now radically
transform its approach to objects so that it might "construct keys before which reality springs open."[20]
Following Horkheimer's taking up the directorship of the Institute, a new journal, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, was
produced to publish the research of Institute members both before and after its relocation to the United States.
Though Adorno was not himself an Institute member, the journal nevertheless published many of his essays,
including "The Social Situation of Music" (1932), "On Jazz" (1936), "On the Fetish-Character in Music and the
Regression of Listening" (1938) and "Fragments on Wagner" (1938). In his new role as social theorist, Adorno's
philosophical analysis of cultural phenomena heavily relied on the language of historical materialism, as concepts like
reification, false consciousness and ideologycame to play an ever more prominent role in his work. At the same time,
however, and owing to both the presence of another prominent sociologist at the Institute, Karl Mannheim, as well as
the methodological problem posed by treating objects—like "musical material"—as ciphers of social contradictions,
Adorno was compelled to abandon any notion of "value-free" sociology in favour of a form of ideology critique which
held on to an idea of truth. Before his emigration in autumn 1934, Adorno began work on a Singspiel based on Mark
Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer entitled The Treasure of Indian Joe, which he would, however, never
complete; by the time he fled Hitler's Germany Adorno had already written over a hundred opera or concert reviews
and an additional fifty critiques of music composition.
As the Nazi party became the largest party in the Reichstag Horkheimer's 1932 observation proved typical for his
milieu: "Only one thing is certain", he wrote, "the irrationality of society has reached a point where only the gloomiest
predictions have any plausibility."[21] In September Adorno's right to teach was revoked; in March, as the swastika was
run up the flag pole of town hall, the Institute's offices were searched by the Frankfurt criminal police. Adorno's house
on Seeheimer Strasse was similarly searched in July and his application for membership in the Reich Chamber of
Literature was denied on the grounds that membership was limited to "persons who belong to the German nation by
profound ties of character and blood. As a non-Aryan," he was informed, "you are unable to feel and appreciate such
an obligation."[22] Soon afterwards Adorno was forced into fifteen years of exile.

Exile: Oxford, New York, Los Angeles

After the possibility of transferring his habilitation to the University of Vienna came to nothing, Adorno considered
relocating to Britain upon his father's suggestion. With the help of the Academic Assistance Council, Adorno
registered as an advanced student at Merton College, Oxford, in June 1934. During the next four years at Oxford,
Adorno made repeated trips to Germany to see both his parents and Gretel, who was still working in Berlin. Under the
direction of Gilbert Ryle, Adorno worked on a dialectical critique of Husserl's epistemology. By this time, the Institute
for Social Research had relocated to New York City and began making overtures to Adorno. After months of strained
relations, Horkheimerand Adorno reestablished their essential theoretical alliance during meetings in Paris. Adorno
continued writing on music, publishing "The Form of the Phonograph Record" and "Crisis of Music Criticism" with the
Viennese musical journal 23, "On Jazz" in the Institute's Zeitschrift, "Farewell to Jazz" in Europäische Revue. Yet
Adorno's attempts to break out of the sociology of music were, at this time, twice thwarted: neither the study of
Mannheim he had been working on for years nor extracts from his study of Husserl were accepted by the Zeitschrift.
Impressed by Horkheimer's book of aphorisms, Dawn and Decline, Adorno began working on his own book of
aphorisms, what would later become Minima Moralia. While at Oxford, Adorno suffered two great losses: his Aunt
Agathe died in June 1935, while Alban Berg died in December of the same year. To the end of his life, Adorno never
abandoned the hope of completing Berg's unfinished Lulu.
At this time, Adorno was in intense correspondence with Walter Benjamin on the subject of the latter's Arcades
Project. After receiving an invitation from Horkheimer to visit the Institute in New York, Adorno sailed for New York on
June 9, 1937 and stayed there for two weeks. While in New York, Max Horkheimer's essays "The Latest Attack on
Metaphysics" and "Traditional and Critical Theory," which would soon become instructive for the Institute's
self-understanding, were the subject of intense discussion. Soon after his return to Europe, Gretel moved to Britain,
where she and Adorno were married on September 8, 1937; a little over a month later, Horkheimer telegrammed from
New York with news of a position Adorno could take up with the Princeton Radio Project, then under the directorship
of the Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld. Yet Adorno's work continued with studies of Beethoven and Richard
Wagner (published in 1939 as "Fragments on Wagner"), drafts of which he read to Benjamin during their final
meeting, in December on the Italian Riviera. According to Benjamin, these drafts were astonishing for "the precision
of their materialist deciphering," as well as the way in which "musical facts ... had been made socially transparent in a
way that was completely new to me."[23] In his Wagner study, the thesis later to characterize Dialectic of
Enlightenment—man's domination of nature—first emerges. Adorno sailed for New York on February 16, 1938. Soon
after settling into his new home on Riverside Drive, Adorno met with Lazarsfeld in Newark to discuss the Project's
plans for investigating the impact of broadcast music.
Although he was expected to embed the Project's research within a wider theoretical context, it soon became
apparent that the Project was primarily concerned with data collectionto be used by administrators for establishing
whether groups of listeners could be targeted by broadcasts specifically aimed at them. Expected to make use of
devices with which listeners could press a button to indicate whether they liked or disliked a particular piece of music,
Adorno bristled with distaste and astonishment: "I reflected that culture was simply the condition that precluded a
mentality that tried to measure it."[24] Thus Adorno suggested using individual interviews to determine listener
reactions and, only three months after meeting Lazarsfeld, completed a 160-page memorandum on the Project's
topic, "Music in Radio." Adorno was primarily interested in how the musical material was affected by its distribution
through the medium of radio and thought it imperative to understand how music was affected by its becoming part of
daily life. "The meaning of a Beethoven symphony," he wrote, "heard while the listener is walking around or lying in
bed is very likely to differ from its effect in a concert-hall where people sit as if they were in church."[25] In essays
published by the Institute's Zeitschrift, Adorno dealt with that atrophy of musical culture which had become
instrumental in accelerating tendencies—towards conformism, trivialization and standardization—already present in
the larger culture. Unsurprisingly, Adorno's studies found little resonance among members of the project. At the end
of 1939, when Lazarsfeld submitted a second application for funding, the musical section of the study was duly left
out. Yet during the two years during which he worked on the Project, Adorno was nevertheless prolific, publishing
"The Radio Symphony", "A Social Critique of Radio Music", and "On Popular Music", texts which, along with the draft
memorandum and other unpublished writings, are now found in Robert Hullot-Kentor's recent translation, Current of
Music. In light of this situation, Horkheimer soon found a permanent post for Adorno at the Institute.
In addition to helping with the Zeitschrift, Adorno was expected to be the Institute's liaison with Benjamin, who soon
passed on to New York the study of Charles Baudelaire he hoped would serve as a model of the larger Arcades
Project. In correspondence, the two men discussed the difference in their conceptions of the relationship between
critique and artworks which had become manifest through Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical
Reproducibility". At around the same time Adorno and Horkheimer began planning for a joint work on "dialectical
logic", which would later become Dialectic of Enlightenment. Alarmed by reports from Europe, where Adorno's
parents suffered increasing discrimination and Benjamin was interned in Colombes, their joint study could entertain
few delusions about its practical effects. "In view of what is now threatening to engulf Europe," Horkheimer wrote,
"our present work is essentially destined to pass things down through the night that is approaching: a kind of
message in a bottle."[26] As Adorno continued his work in New York with radio talks on music and a lecture on Søren
Kierkegaard's doctrine of love, Benjamin fled Paris and attempted to make an illegal border crossing. After learning
that his Spanish visa was invalid and fearing deportation back to France, Benjamin took an overdose of morphine
tablets. In light of recent events, the Institute set about formulating a theory of antisemitism and fascism. On one side
were those who supported Franz Neumann's thesis according to which National Socialism was a form of "monopoly
capital"; on the other were those who supported Friedrich Pollock's "state capitalist theory." Horkheimer's
contributions to this debate, in the form of the essays "The Authoritarian State", "The End of Reason", and "The Jews
and Europe" served as a foundation for what he and Adorno planned to do in their book on dialectical logic.
In November 1941 Adorno followed Horkheimer to what Thomas Mann called "German California",[27] setting up
house in a Pacific Palisades neighborhood of German émigrés which included Bertolt Brecht and Arnold Schoenberg.
Adorno arrived with a draft of his Philosophy of New Music, a dialectical critique of twelve-tone music, which Adorno
himself felt, while writing, was already a departure from the theory of art he had spent the previous decades
elaborating. Horkheimer's reaction to the manuscript was wholly positive: "If I have ever in the whole of my life felt
enthusiasm about anything, then I did on this occasion," he wrote after reading the manuscript.[28] The two set about
completing their joint work, which transformed itself from a book on dialectical logic to a rewriting of the history of
rationality and the Enlightenment. First published in a small mimeographed edition in May 1944 as Philosophical
Fragments, the text would wait another three years before achieving book form when it was published with its
definitive title, Dialectic of Enlightenment, by the Amsterdam publisher Querido Verlag. This "reflection on the
destructive aspect of progress" proceeded through the chapters which treated rationality as both the liberation from
and further domination of nature, interpretations of both Homer's Odyssey and the Marquis de Sade, as well as
analyses of the culture industry and antisemitism.
With their joint work completed, the two turned their attention to studies on antisemitism and authoritarianism in
collaboration with the Nevitt Sanford-led Public Opinion Study Group and the American Jewish Committee. In line
with these studies, Adorno produced an analysis of the Californian radio preacher Martin Luther Thomas. Fascist
propaganda of this sort, Adorno wrote, "simply takes people for what they are: genuine children of today's
standardized mass culture who have been robbed to a great extent of their autonomy and spontaneity"[29] The result
of these labors, the 1950 study The Authoritarian Personality was pioneering in its combination of quantitative and
qualitative methods of collecting and evaluating data as well as its development of the F-scale.
After the USA entered the war in 1941, the situation of the émigrés, now classed "enemy aliens", became
increasingly restricted. Forbidden from leaving their homes between 8pm and 6am and prohibited from going more
than five miles from their houses, émigrés like Adorno, who would not be naturalized until November 1943, were
severely restricted in their movements.
In addition to the aphorisms which conclude Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno put together a collection of aphorisms
in honor of Horkheimer's fiftieth birthday that would later be published as Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged
Life. These fragmentary writings, inspired by a renewed reading of Nietzsche, treated issues like emigration,
totalitarianism, and individuality, as well as everyday matters such as giving presents, dwelling and the impossibility
of love. In California, Adorno made the acquaintance of Charlie Chaplin and became friends with Fritz Lang and
Hanns Eisler, with whom he completed a study of film music in 1944. In this study, the authors pushed for the greater
usage of avant-garde music in film, urging that music be used to supplement, not simply accompany, the visual
aspect of films. Additionally, Adorno assisted Thomas Mann on his novel Doctor Faustus after the latter asked for his
help. "Would you be willing," Mann wrote, "to think through with me how the work—I mean Leverkühn's work—might
look; how you would do it if you were in league with the Devil?"[30]
At the end of October 1949, Adorno left America for Europe just as The Authoritarian Personality was being
published. Before his return, Adorno had not only reached an agreement with a Tübingen publisher to print an
expanded version of Philosophy of New Music, but completed two compositions: Four Songs for Voice and Piano by
Stefan George, op.7, and Three Choruses for Female Voices from the Poems of Theodor Däubler, op. 8.

Post-war Europe

Return to Frankfurt University

Upon his return, Adorno helped shape the political culture of West Germany. Until his death in 1969, twenty years
after his return, Adorno contributed to the intellectual foundations of the Federal Republic, as a professor at Frankfurt
University, critic of the vogue enjoyed by Heideggerian philosophy, partisan of critical sociology, and teacher of music
at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music. Adorno resumed his teaching duties at the university
soon after his arrival,[when?] with seminars on "Kant's Transcendental Dialectic", aesthetics, Hegel, "Contemporary
Problems in the Theory of Knowledge", and "The Concept of Knowledge". Adorno's surprise at his students'
passionate interest in intellectual matters did not, however, blind him to continuing problems within Germany: The
literary climate was dominated by writers who had remained in Germany during Hitler's rule, the government
re-employed people who had been active in the Nazi apparatus and people were generally loath to own up to their
own collaboration or the guilt they thus incurred. Instead, the ruined city of Frankfurt continued as if nothing had
happened,[citation needed] holding on to ideas of the true, the beautiful, and the good despite the atrocities, hanging on to a
culture that had itself been lost in rubble or killed off in the concentration camps. All the enthusiasm Adorno's students
showed for intellectual matters could not erase the suspicion that, in the words of Max Frisch, culture had become an
"alibi" for the absence of political consciousness.[31] Yet the foundations for what would come to be known as "The
Frankfurt School" were soon laid: Horkheimer resumed his chair in social philosophy and the Institute for Social
Research, rebuilt, became a lightning rod for critical thought.

Essays on fascism
Starting with his 1947 essay Wagner, Nietzsche and Hitler,[32] Adorno produced a series of influential works to
describe psychological fascist traits. One of these works was The Authoritarian Personality (1950),[33] published as a
contribution to the Studies in Prejudice performed by multiple research institutes in the US, and consisting of a
'qualitative interpretations' that uncovered the authoritarian character of test persons through indirect questions.[citation
needed]
The books have had a major influence on sociology and remain highly discussed and debated. In 1951 he
continued on the topic with his essay Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda, in which he said that
"Psychological dispositions do not actually cause fascism; rather, fascism defines a psychological area which can be
successfully exploited by the forces which promote it for entirely non-psychological reasons of self-interest."[34]
In 1952 Adorno participated in a group experiment, revealing residual National Socialist attitudes among the recently
democratized Germans. He then published two influential essays, The Meaning of Working Through the Past (1959),
and Education after Auschwitz (1966), in which he argued on the survival of the uneradicated National Socialism in
the mind-sets and institutions of the post-1945 Germany, and that there is still a real risk that it could rise again.[35]
Later on, however, Jean Améry—who had been tortured at Auschwitz—would sharply object that Adorno, rather than
addressing such political concerns, was exploiting Auschwitz for his metaphysical phantom "absolute negativity"
("absolute Negativität"), using a language intoxicated by itself ("von sich selber bis zur Selbstblendung entzückte
Sprache").[36]

Public events
In September 1951 Adorno returned to the United States for a six-week visit, during which he attended the opening of
the Hacker Psychiatry Foundation in Beverly Hills, met Leo Lowenthal and Herbert Marcuse in New York and saw his
mother for the last time. After stopping in Paris, where he met Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Michel Leiris and René
Leibowitz, Adorno delivered a lecture entitled "The Present State of Empirical Social Research in Germany" at a
conference on opinion research. Here he emphasized the importance of data collection and statistical evaluation
while asserting that such empirical methods have only an auxiliary function and must lead to the formation of theories
which would "raise the harsh facts to the level of consciousness."[37]
With Horkheimer as dean of the Arts Faculty, then rector of the university, responsibilities for the Institute's work fell
upon Adorno. At the same time, however, Adorno renewed his musical work: with talks at the Kranichsteiner
Musikgesellschaft, another in connection with a production of Ernst Krenek's opera Leben des Orest, and a seminar
on "Criteria of New Music" at the Fifth International Summer Course for New Music at Kranichstein. Adorno also
became increasingly involved with the publishing house of Peter Suhrkamp, inducing the latter to publish Benjamin's
Berlin Childhood Around 1900, Kracauer's writings and a two-volume edition of Benjamin's writings. Adorno's own
recently published Minima Moralia was not only well received in the press, but also met with great admiration from
Thomas Mann, who wrote to Adorno from America in 1952:
I have spent days attached to your book as if by a magnet. Every day brings new fascination ... concentrated
nourishment. It is said that the companion star to Sirius, white in colour, is made of such dense material that a cubic
inch of it would weigh a tonne here. This is why it has such an extremely powerful gravitational field; in this respect it
is similar to your book.[38]
Yet Adorno was no less moved by other public events: protesting the publication of Heinrich Mann's novel Professor
Unrat with its film title, The Blue Angel; declaring his sympathy with those who protested the scandal of big-game
hunting and penning a defense of prostitutes.

More essays on mass culture and literature

Because Adorno's American citizenship would have been forfeited by the middle of 1952 had he continued to stay
outside the country, he returned once again to Santa Monica to survey his prospects at the Hacker Foundation. While
there he wrote a content analysis of newspaper horoscopes (now collected in The Stars Down to Earth), and the
essays "Television as Ideology" and "Prologue to Television"; even so, he was pleased when, at the end of ten
months, he was enjoined to return as co-director of the Institute.
Back in Frankfurt, he renewed his academic duties and, from 1952 to 1954, completed three essays: "Notes on
Kafka", "Valéry Proust Museum", and an essay on Schoenberg following the composer's death, all of which were
included in the 1955 essay collection Prisms. In response to the publication of Thomas Mann's The Black Swan,
Adorno penned a long letter to the author, who then approved its publication in the literary journal Akzente. A second
collection of essays, Notes to Literature, appeared in 1958. After meeting Samuel Beckett while delivering a series of
lectures in Paris the same year, Adorno set to work on "Trying to Understand Endgame," which, along with studies of
Proust, Valéry, and Balzac, formed the central texts of the 1961 publication of the second volume of his Notes to
Literature. Adorno's entrance into literary discussions continued in his June 1963 lecture at the annual conference of
the Hölderlin Society. At the Philosophers' Conference of October 1962 in Münster, at which Habermas wrote that
Adorno was "A writer among bureaucrats", Adorno presented "Progress".[39]
Although the Zeitschrift was never revived, the Institute nevertheless published a series of important sociological
books, including Sociologica (1955), a collection of essays, Gruppenexperiment (1955), Betriebsklima, a study of
work satisfaction among workers in Mannesmann, and Soziologische Exkurse, a textbook-like anthology intended as
an introductory work about the discipline.

Public figure
Throughout the fifties and sixties, Adorno became a public figure, not simply through his books and essays, but also
through his appearances in radio and newspapers. In talks, interviews and round-table discussions broadcast on
Hessen Radio, South-West Radio and Radio Bremen, Adorno discussed topics as diverse as "The Administered
World" (September 1950), "What is the Meaning of 'Working Through the Past?"' (February 1960) to "The Teaching
Profession and its Taboos" (August 1965). Additionally, he frequently wrote for Frankfurter Allgemeine, Frankfurter
Rundschau and the weekly Die Zeit.
At the invitation of Wolfgang Steinecke, Adorno took part in the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music in
Kranichstein from 1951 to 1958. Yet conflicts between the so-called Darmstadt school, which included composers like
Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, Karel Goeyvaerts, Luciano Berio and Gottfried
Michael Koenig, soon arose, receiving explicit expression in Adorno's 1954 lecture, "The Aging of the New Music",
where he argued that atonality's freedom was being restricted to serialism in much the same way as it was once
restricted by twelve-tone technique. With his friend Eduard Steuermann, Adorno feared that music was being
sacrificed to stubborn rationalization. During this time Adorno not only produced a significant series of notes on
Beethoven (which was never completed and only published posthumously), but also published Mahler: A Musical
Physiognomy in 1960. In his 1961 return to Kranichstein, Adorno called for what he termed a "musique informelle",
which would possess the ability "really and truly to be what it is, without the ideological pretense of being something
else. Or rather, to admit frankly the fact of non-identity and to follow through its logic to the end."[40]

Post-war German culture

At the same time Adorno struck up relationships with contemporary German-language poets such as Paul Celan and
Ingeborg Bachmann. Adorno's 1949 dictum—"To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric"—posed the question of
what German culture could mean after Auschwitz; his own continual revision of this dictum—in Negative Dialectics,
for example, he wrote that "Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream";
while in "Commitment," he wrote in 1962 that the dictum "expresses in negative form the impulse which inspires
committed literature"—was part of post-war Germany's struggle with history and culture. Adorno additionally
befriended the writer and poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger as well as the film-maker Alexander Kluge.
In 1963, Adorno was elected to the post of chairman of the German Sociological Society, where he presided over two
important conferences: in 1964, on "Max Weber and Sociology" and in 1968 on "Late Capitalism or Industrial
Society". A debate launched in 1961 by Adorno and Karl Popper, later published as the Positivist Dispute in German
Sociology, arose out of disagreements at the 1959 14th German Sociology Conference in Berlin.
Adorno's critique of the dominant climate of post-war Germany was also directed against the pathos that had grown
up around Heideggerianism, as practiced by writers like Karl Jaspers and Otto Friedrich Bollnow, and which had
subsequently seeped into public discourse. His 1964 publication of The Jargon of Authenticity took aim at the halo
such writers had attached to words like "angst", "decision" and "leap". After seven years of work, Adorno completed
Negative Dialectics in 1966, after which, during the summer semester of 1967 and the winter semester of 1967–68,
he offered regular philosophy seminars to discuss the book chapter by chapter. Among the students at these
seminars were the Americans Angela Davis and Irving Wohlfarth. One objection which would soon take on ever
greater importance, was that critical thought must adopt the standpoint of the oppressed, to which Adorno replied that
negative dialectics was concerned "with the dissolution of standpoint thinking itself."

Confrontations with students

At the time of Negative Dialectics' publication, the fragility of West German democracy led to increasing student
protests. Monopolistic trends in the media, an educational crisis in the universities, the Shah of Iran's 1967 state visit,
German support for the war in Vietnam and the emergency laws combined to create a highly unstable situation. Like
many of his students, Adorno too opposed the emergency laws, as well as the war in Vietnam, which, he said, proved
the continued existence of the "world of torture that had begun in Auschwitz".[41] The situation only deteriorated with
the police shooting of Benno Ohnesorg at a protest against the Shah's visit. This death, as well as the subsequent
acquittal of the responsible officer, were both commented upon in Adorno's lectures. As politicization increased, rifts
developed within both the Institute's relationship with its students as well as within the Institute itself. Soon Adorno
himself would become an object of the students' ire. At the invitation of Peter Szondi, Adorno was invited to the Free
University of Berlin to give a lecture on Goethe's Iphigenie in Tauris. After a group of students marched to the lectern,
unfurling a banner that read "Berlin's left-wing fascists greet Teddy the Classicist," a number of those present left the
lecture in protest after Adorno refused to abandon his talk in favour of discussing his attitude on the current political
situation. Adorno shortly thereafter participated in a meeting with the Berlin Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund
(SDS) and discussed "Student Unrest" with Szondi on West German Radio. But as 1968 progressed, Adorno became
increasingly critical of the students' disruptions to university life. His isolation was only compounded by articles
published in the magazine alternative, which, following the lead of Hannah Arendt's articles in Merkur, claimed
Adorno had subjected Benjamin to pressure during his years of exile in Berlin and compiled Benjamin's Writings and
Letters with a great deal of bias. In response, Benjamin's longtime friend Gershom Scholem, wrote to the editor of
Merkur to express his disapproval of the "in part, shameful, not to say disgraceful" remarks by Arendt. [42]
Relations between students and the West German state continued deteriorating. In spring 1968, a prominent SDS
spokesman, Rudi Dutschke, was gunned down in the streets; in response, massive demonstrations took place,
directed in particular against the Springer Press, which had led a campaign to vilify the students. An open appeal
published in Die Zeit, signed by Adorno, called for an inquiry into the social reasons that gave rise to this
assassination attempt as well as an investigation into the Springer Press' manipulation of public opinion. At the same
time, however, Adorno protested against disruptions of his own lectures and refused to express his solidarity with
their political goals, maintaining instead his autonomy as a theoretician. Adorno rejected the so-called unity of theory
and praxis advocated by the students and argued that the students' actions were premised upon a mistaken analysis
of the situation. The building of barricades, he wrote to Marcuse, is "ridiculous against those who administer the
bomb."[43]
In September 1968 Adorno went to Vienna for the publication of Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link. Upon his
return to Frankfurt, events prevented his concentrating upon the book on aesthetics he wished to write: "Valid student
claims and dubious actions," he wrote to Marcuse, "are all so mixed up together that all productive work and even
sensible thought are scarcely possible any more."[44] After striking students threatened to strip the Institute's sociology
seminar rooms of their furnishings and equipment, the police were brought in to close the building.
Adorno began writing an introduction to a collection of poetry by Rudolf Borchardt, which was connected with a talk
entitled "Charmed Language," delivered in Zurich, followed by a talk on aesthetics in Paris where he met Beckett
again. Beginning in October 1966, Adorno took up work on Aesthetic Theory. In June 1969 he completed
Catchwords: Critical Models. During the winter semester of 1968–69 Adorno was on sabbatical leave from the
university and thus able to dedicate himself to the completion of his book of aesthetics.
For the summer semester Adorno planned a lecture course entitled "An Introduction to Dialectical Thinking," as well
as a seminar on the dialectics of subject and object. But at the first lecture Adorno's attempt to open up the lecture
and invite questions whenever they arose degenerated into a disruption from which he quickly fled: after a student
wrote on the blackboard "If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease," three women students approached
the lectern, bared their breasts and scattered flower petals over his head.[45]Yet Adorno continued to resist blanket
condemnations of the protest movement which would have only strengthened the conservative thesis according to
which political irrationalism was the result of Adorno's teaching. After further disruptions to his lectures, Adorno
canceled the lectures for the rest of the seminar, continuing only with his philosophy seminar. In the summer of 1969,
weary from these activities, Adorno returned once again to Zermatt, Switzerland, at the foot of Matterhorn to restore
his strength. On August 6 he died of a heart attack.

Theory

Part of a series on the

Frankfurt School

Major works
Reason and Revolution
The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Eclipse of Reason
Escape from Freedom
Minima Moralia
Eros and Civilization
One-Dimensional Man
Negative Dialectics
The Structural Transformation
of the Public Sphere
The Theory of Communicative Action
Dialectic of Enlightenment

Notable theorists

Herbert Marcuse · Theodor Adorno

Max Horkheimer · Walter Benjamin
Erich Fromm · Friedrich Pollock
Leo Löwenthal · Jürgen Habermas
Alfred Schmidt · Axel HonnethSiegfried Kracauer · Otto Kirchheimer

Important concepts

Critical theory · Dialectic · Praxis

Psychoanalysis · Antipositivism
Popular culture · Culture industry
Advanced capitalism
Privatism · Non-identity
Communicative rationality
Legitimation crisis

v
t
e
Adorno's work sets out from a central insight he shares with all early 20th century avant-garde art: the recognition of
what is primitive in ourselves and the world itself. Neither Picasso's fascination with African sculpture nor Mondrian's
reduction of painting to its most elementary component—the line—is comprehensible outside this concern with
primitivism Adorno shared with the century's most radical art. At that time, the Western world, beset by world-wars,
colonialist consolidation and accelerating commodification, sank into the very barbarism civilization had prided itself in
overcoming. According to Adorno, society's self-preservation had become indistinguishable from societally
sanctioned self-sacrifice: of "primitive" peoples, primitive aspects of the ego and those primitive, mimetic desires
found in imitation and sympathy. Adorno's theory proceeds from an understanding of this primitive quality of reality
which seeks to counteract whatever aims either to repress this primitive aspect or to further those systems of
domination set in place by this return to barbarism. From this perspective, Adorno's writings on politics, philosophy,
music and literature are a lifelong critique of the ways in which each tries to justify self-mutilation as the necessary
price of self-preservation. According to Adorno's translator Robert Hullot-Kentor, the central motive of Adorno's work
thus consists in determining "how life could be more than the struggle for self-preservation".[46] In this sense, the
principle of self-preservation, Adorno writes in Negative Dialectics, is nothing but "the law of doom thus far obeyed by
history."[47] At its most basic, Adorno's thought is motivated by a fundamental critique of this law.
Adorno was chiefly influenced by Max Weber's critique of disenchantment, Georg Lukács's Hegelian interpretation of
Marxism, as well as Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history. Adorno, along with the other major Frankfurt School
theorists Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, argued that advanced capitalism had managed to contain or
liquidate the forces that would bring about its collapse and that the revolutionary moment, when it would have been
possible to transform it into socialism, had passed. As he put it at the beginning of his Negative Dialectics (1966),
philosophy is still necessary because the time to realise it was missed. Adorno argued that capitalism had become
more entrenched through its attack on the objective basis of revolutionary consciousness and through liquidation of
the individualism that had been the basis of critical consciousness. Adorno, as well as Horkheimer, critiqued all forms
of positivism as responsible for technocracy and disenchantment and sought to produce a theory that both rejected
positivism and avoided reinstating traditional metaphysics. Adorno and Horkheimer have been criticized for
over-applying the term "positivism," especially in their interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper as
positivists.[48]

Music
Adorno criticized jazz and popular music, viewing it as part of the culture industry, that contributes to the present
sustainability of capitalism by rendering it "aesthetically pleasing" and "agreeable".[49]
In his early essays for the Vienna-based journal Anbruch, Adorno claimed that musical progress is proportional to the
composer's ability to constructively deal with the possibilities and limitations contained within what Adorno called the
"musical material." For Adorno, twelve-tone serialism constitutes a decisive, historically developed method of
composition. The objective validity of composition, according to Adorno, rests with neither the composer's genius nor
the work's conformity with prior standards, but with the way in which the work coherently expresses the dialectic of
the material. In this sense, the contemporary absence of composers of the status of Bach or Beethoven is not the
sign of musical regression; instead, new music is to be credited with laying bare aspects of the musical material
previously repressed: The musical material's liberation from number, the harmonic series and tonal harmony. Thus,
historical progress is achieved only by the composer who "submits to the work and seemingly does not undertake
anything active except to follow where it leads." Because historical experience and social relations are embedded
within this musical material, it is to the analysis of such material that the critic must turn. In the face of this radical
liberation of the musical material, Adorno came to criticize those who, like Stravinsky, withdrew from this freedom by
taking recourse to forms of the past as well as those who turned twelve-tone composition into a technique which
dictated the rules of composition.
Adorno saw the culture industry as an arena in which critical tendencies or potentialities were eliminated. He argued
that the culture industry, which produced and circulated cultural commodities through the mass media, manipulated
the population. Popular culture was identified as a reason why people become passive; the easy pleasures available
through consumption of popular culture made people docile and content, no matter how terrible their economic
circumstances. "Capitalist production so confines them, body and soul, that they fall helpless victims to what is
offered them."[50] The differences among cultural goods make them appear different, but they are in fact just variations
on the same theme. He wrote that "the same thing is offered to everybody by the standardized production of
consumption goods" but this is concealed under "the manipulation of taste and the official culture's pretense of
individualism".[51] By doing so, the culture industry appeals to every single consumer in a unique and personalized
way, all while maintaining minimal costs and effort on their behalf. Consumers purchase the illusion that every
commodity or product is tailored to the individual's personal preference, by incorporating subtle modifications or
inexpensive "add-ons" in order to keep the consumer returning for new purchases, and therefore more revenue for
the corporation system. Adorno conceptualized this phenomenon as pseudo-individualisation and the
always-the-same.[citation needed]
Adorno's analysis allowed for a critique of mass culture from the left which balanced the critique of popular culture
from the right. From both perspectives—left and right—the nature of cultural production was felt to be at the root of
social and moral problems resulting from the consumption of culture. However, while the critique from the right
emphasized moral degeneracy ascribed to sexual and racial influences within popular culture, Adorno located the
problem not with the content, but with the objective realities of the production of mass culture and its effects, e.g. as a
form of reverse psychology.[citation needed] Thinkers influenced by Adorno believe that today's society has evolved in a
direction foreseen by him, especially in regard to the past (Auschwitz), morals, or the Culture Industry. The latter has
become a particularly productive, yet highly contested term in cultural studies. Many of Adorno's reflections on
aesthetics and music have only just begun to be debated, as a collection of essays on the subject, many of which had
not previously been translated into English, has only recently been collected and published as Essays on Music.[52]
Adorno's work in the years before his death was shaped by the idea of "negative dialectics", set out especially in his
book of that title. A key notion in the work of the Frankfurt School since Dialectic of Enlightenment had been the idea
of thought becoming an instrument of domination that subsumes all objects under the control of the (dominant)
subject, especially through the notion of identity, i.e. of identifying as real in nature and society only that which
harmonized or fit with dominant concepts, and regarding as unreal or non-existent everything that did not.[citation needed]
Adorno's "negative dialectics" was an attempt to articulate a non-dominating thought that would recognize its
limitations and accept the non-identity and reality of that which could not be subsumed under the subject's concepts.
Indeed, Adorno sought to ground the critical bite of his sociological work in his critique of identity, which he took to be
a reification in thought of the commodity form or exchange relation which always presumes a false identity between
different things. The potential to criticise arises from the gap between the concept and the object, which can never go
into the former without remainder. This gap, this non-identity in identity, was the secret to a critique of both material
life and conceptual reflection.[citation needed]
Adorno's reputation as a musicologist has been in steady decline since his death. His sweeping criticisms of jazz and
championing of the Second Viennese School in opposition to Stravinsky have caused him to fall out of favour. The
distinguished American scholar Richard Taruskin[53] declared Adorno to be "preposterously over-rated." The eminent
pianist and critic Charles Rosen saw Adorno's book The Philosophy of New Music as "largely a fraudulent
presentation, a work of polemic that pretends to be an objective study." [54] Even a fellow Marxist such as the historian
and jazz critic Eric Hobsbawm saw Adorno's writings as containing "some of the stupidest pages ever written about
jazz".[55] The British philosopher Roger Scruton saw Adorno as producing "reams of turgid nonsense devoted to
showing that the American people are just as alienated as Marxism requires them to be, and that their cheerful
life-affirming music is a ‘fetishized’ commodity, expressive of their deep spiritual enslavement to the capitalist
machine." [56] Irritation with Adorno's tunnel vision started even while he was alive. He may have championed
Schoenberg, but the composer notably failed to return the compliment: "I have never been able to bear the fellow [...]
It is disgusting, by the way, how he treats Stravinsky." [57] On the other hand, the scholar Slavoj Žižek has written a
foreword to Adorno's In Search of Wagner,[58] where Žižek attributes an "emancipatory impulse" to the same book,
although Žižek suggests that fidelity to this impulse demands "a betrayal of the explicit theses of Adorno's Wagner
study."[59]

The five components of recognition

Adorno states that a start to understand the recognition in respect of any particular song hit may be made by drafting
a scheme which divides the experience of recognition into its different components. All the factors people enumerate
are interwoven to a degree that would be impossible to separate from one another in reality. Adorno's scheme is
directed towards the different objective elements involved in the experience of recognition, than the actual experience
felt for the individual.[60]
Vague remembrance
Actual identification
Subsumption by label
Self-reflection and act of recognition
Psychological transfer of recognition-authority to the object

Marxist criticisms
Adorno posits social totality as an automatic system.[61] According to Horst Müller's Kritik der kritischen Theorie
("Critique of Critical Theory"), this assumption is consistent with Adorno's idea of society as a self-regulating system,
from which one must escape (but from which nobody can escape). For him it was existent, but inhuman. Müller
argues against the existence of such a system and claims that critical theory provides no practical solution for societal
change. He concludes that Jürgen Habermas, in particular, and the Frankfurt School in general, misconstrue Marx.
Standardization

The phenomenon of standardization is "a concept used to characterize the formulaic products of capitalist-driven
mass media and mass culture that appeal to the lowest common denominator in pursuit of maximum profit".[62]
According to Adorno we inhabit a media culture driven society which has product consumption as one of its main
characteristics. Mass media is employed to deliver messages about products and services to consumers in order to
convince these individuals to purchase the commodity they are advertising. Standardization consists of the
production of large amounts of commodities to then pursue consumers in order to gain the maximum profit possible.
They do this, as mentioned above, by individualizing products to give the illusion to consumers that they are in fact
purchasing a product or service that was specifically designed for them. Adorno highlights the issues created with the
construction of popular music, where different samples of music used in the creation of today's chart-topping songs
are put together in order to create, re-create, and modify numerous tracks by using the same variety of samples from
one song to another. He makes a distinction between "Apologetic music" and "Critical music". Apologetic music is
defined as the highly produced and promoted music of the "pop music" industry: music that is composed of variable
parts and interchanged to create several different songs. "The social and psychological functions of popular music
[are that it] acts like a social cement"[63] "to keep people obedient and subservient to the status quo of existing power
structures."[64]
Serious music, according to Adorno, achieves excellence when its whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The
example he gives is that of Beethoven's symphonies: "[his] greatness shows itself in the complete subordination of
the accidentally private melodic elements to the form as a whole."[65][incomplete short citation]
Standardization not only refers to the products of the culture industry but to the consumers as well: many times every
day consumers are bombarded by media advertising. Consumers are pushed and shoved into consuming products
and services presented to them by the media system. The masses have become conditioned by the culture industry,
which makes the impact of standardization much more important. By not realizing the impact of social media and
commercial advertising, the individual is caught in a situation where conformity is the norm. "During consumption the
masses become characterized by the commodities which they use and exchange among themselves."[66]

Adorno's responses to his critics

As a pioneer of a self-reflexive sociology who prefigured Bourdieu's ability to factor in the effect of reflection on the
societal object, Adorno realized that some criticism (including deliberate disruption of his classes in the 1960s) could
never be answered in a dialogue between equals if, as he seems to have believed, what the naive ethnographer or
sociologist thinks of a human essence is always changing over time.[67]
The "Adorno-Ampel" (Adorno-traffic light) on Senckenberganlage, a street which divides the Institute for Social
Research from Goethe University Frankfurt—Adorno requested its construction after a pedestrian death in 1962, and
it was finally installed 25 years later.[68]

Adorno's sociological methods

As Adorno believed that sociology needs to be self-reflective and self-critical, he also believed that the language the
sociologist uses, like the language of the ordinary person, is a political construct in large measure that uses, often
unreflectingly, concepts installed by dominant classes and social structures (such as our notion of "deviance" which
includes both genuinely deviant individuals and "hustlers" operating below social norms because they lack the capital
to operate above: for an analysis of this phenomenon, cf. Pierre Bourdieu's book The Weight of the World). He felt
that those at the top of the Institute needed to be the source primarily of theories for evaluation and empirical testing,
as well as people who would process the "facts" discovered...including revising theories that were found to be false.
For example, in an essay published in Germany on Adorno's return from the USA, and reprinted in the Critical Models
essays collection (ISBN 0-231-07635-5), Adorno praised the egalitarianismand openness of US society based on his
sojourn in New York and the Los Angeles area between 1935 and 1955: "Characteristic for the life in America [...]is a
moment of peacefulness, kindness and generosity". ("Dem amerikanischen Leben eignet [...] ein Moment von
Friedlichkeit, Gutartigkeit und Großzügigkeit".)[69]
One example of the clash of intellectual culture and Adorno's methods can be found in Paul Lazarsfeld, the American
sociologist for whom Adorno worked in the late 1930s after fleeing Hitler. As Rolf Wiggershaus recounts in The
Frankfurt School, Its History, Theories and Political Significance (MIT 1995), Lazarsfeld was the director of a project,
funded and inspired by David Sarnoff (the head of RCA), to discover both the sort of music that listeners of radio liked
and ways to improve their "taste", so that RCA could profitably air more classical music. Lazarsfeld, however, had
trouble both with the prose style of the work Adorno handed in and what Lazarsfeld thought was Adorno's "lack of
discipline in ... presentation".[70]
Adorno himself provided the following personal anecdote:
What I mean by reified consciousness, I can illustrate—without elaborate philosophical contemplation—most simply
with an American experience. Among the frequently changing colleagues which the Princeton Project provided me
with, was a young lady. After a few days, she had gained confidence in me, and asked most kindly: "Dr Adorno,
would you mind a personal question?". I said, "It depends on the question, but just go ahead", and she went on:
"Please tell me: are you an extrovert or an introvert?". It was as if she, as a living being, already thought according to
the model of multi-choice questions in questionnaires.[71]

Adorno translated into English[edit]

While even German readers can find Adorno's work difficult to understand, an additional problem for English readers
is that his German idiom is particularly difficult to translate into English. A similar difficulty of translation is true of
Hegel, Heidegger, and a number of other German philosophers and poets. As a result, some early translators tended
toward over-literalness. In recent years, Edmund Jephcott and Stanford University Press have published new
translations of some of Adorno's lectures and books, including Introduction to Sociology, Problems of Moral
Philosophy and his transcribed lectures on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Aristotle's "Metaphysics", and a new
translation of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Professor Henry Pickford, of the University of Colorado at Boulder, has
translated many of Adorno's works such as "The Meaning of Working Through the Past." A new translation has also
appeared of Aesthetic Theory and the Philosophy of New Music by Robert Hullot-Kentor, from the University of
Minnesota Press. Hullot-Kentor is also currently working on a new translation of Negative Dialectics. Adorno's
correspondence with Alban Berg, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction, and the letters to Adorno's parents,
have been translated by Wieland Hoban and published by Polity Press. These fresh translations are slightly less
literal in their rendering of German sentences and words, and are more accessible to English readers.[citation needed] The
Group Experiment, which had been unavailable to English readers, is now available in an accessible translation by
Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin on Harvard University Press, along with introductory material explaining its
relation to the rest of Adorno's work and 20th-century public opinion research.
Works[edit]

Main article: Theodor W. Adorno bibliography

Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (1933)
Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Max Horkheimer, 1944)
Composing for the Films (1947)
Philosophy of New Music (1949)
The Authoritarian Personality (1950)
Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951)
In Search of Wagner (1952)
Prisms (1955)
Against Epistemology: A Metacritique; Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies (1956)
Dissonanzen. Musik in der verwalteten Welt (1956)
Notes to Literature I (1958)
Sound Figures (1959)
Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy (1960)
Notes to Literature II (1961)
Hegel: Three Studies (1963)
Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (1963)
Quasi una Fantasia (1963)
The Jargon of Authenticity (1964)
Night Music: Essays on Music 1928–1962 (1964)
Negative Dialectics (1966)
Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link (1968)
Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (1969)
Aesthetic Theory (1970)
Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music; Fragments and Texts (1993)
The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses (2000)
Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' (2002)
Current of Music (2006)

Musical works
Kinderjahr – Piano piece
1921 – Piano piece
2 Pieces for string quartet, Op. 2
1934 – 3 Short Pieces for piano
7 short works for orchestra, Op.4
2 songs for voice & orchestra after Mark Twain's "Indian Joe"
2 songs with orchestra
3 stories by T Däubler for female chorus
1921 – String quartet
1920 – 6 studies for string quartet
1919: Für Sebastian Wedler

See also

Positivism dispute
References

Notes
Jump up^ Christine Fillion, "Adorno's Marginalien zu Theorie und Praxis: In Praise of Discontinuity", Humanitas,
Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2012.
Jump up^ Adorno/Horkheimer, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.
Jump up^ Theodor W. Adorno (trans. Francis McDonagh), "Commitment" [based on a March 1962 radio broadcast
under the title "Engagement oder künstlerische Autonomie"] in Andrew Arato, Eike Gebhardt (eds.), The Essential
Frankfurt School Reader, Continuum, 1978, pp. 300–318 (modernist art as an opposition to the conventional
experience of the mass media).
Jump up^ Gary Day, Literary Criticism: A New History , Edinburgh University Press, 2008, p. 265.
Jump up^ Adorno defined maturity as the courage and the ability to use one's own understanding independently of
dominant heteronomous patterns of thought; see Macdonald, Iain (2011), "Cold, cold, warm: Autonomy, intimacy and
maturity in Adorno", Philosophy & Social Criticism, 37(6), 669–689.
Jump up^ "[Art's] paradoxical task is to attest to the lack of concord while at the same time working to abolish
discordance" (Adorno quoted by James Martin Harding in Adorno and "a Writing of the Ruins", SUNY Press, 1997, p.
30); variant translation by Robert Hullot-Kentor in Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1997, University of Minnesota Press, p.
168: "Paradoxically, art must testify to the unreconciled and at the same time envision its reconciliation; this is a
possibility only for its nondiscursive language."
(Original German: "Paradox hat sie das Unversöhnte zu bezeugen und gleichwohl tendenziell zu versöhnen; möglich
ist das nur ihrer nicht-diskursiven Sprache.").
Jump up^ Oxford Dictionary of English
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 28
Jump up^ Adorno 1992, p. 212
Jump up^ Claussen 2008, p. 66–9
Jump up^ Adorno 1992, p. 58–59
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 46
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 48
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 98
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 105
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 118
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 123
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 129
Jump up^ Adorno 2000, p. 38
Jump up^ Adorno 2000, p. 35
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 175
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 178
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 237, 239
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 247
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 249
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 262
Jump up^ Claussen 2008, p. 116
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 275
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 293
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 316
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 332
Jump up^ Adorno, TW (1947) Wagner, Nietzsche and Hitler in Kenyan Review Vol.ix (1)
Jump up^ Adorno, Politics and Economics in the Interview Material, ch.17
Jump up^ Hammer, Espen (2006) Adorno and the political, pp.56–7
Jump up^ Hammer (2006) p.69
Jump up^ Andreas Dorschel, 'Der Geist ist stets gestört', in: Süddeutsche Zeitung nr. 129 (7 June 2004), p. 14.
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 338
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 343
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 362
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 397
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 451
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 458
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 463
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 464
Jump up^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 475
Jump up^ Durão 2008
Jump up^ Adorno 2003, p. 167
Jump up^ Josephson-Storm, Jason (2017). The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the
Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 242-5. ISBN 0-226-40336-X.
Jump up^ Scruton, R. 'The Uses of Pessimism: and the Danger of False Hope' 2010, p.89, Oxford University Press
Jump up^ Laughey 2007, 123.
Jump up^ Arato & Gephart 1982, p. 280
Jump up^ Adorno 2002
Jump up^ Taruskin, Richard. The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University Press, 2005, p.xiv.
Jump up^ Rosen, C. (2000, p117) Critical Entertainments: Music Old and New. Harvard University Press.
Jump up^ Hobsbawm, Eric (1993, p. 300) The Jazz Scene . New York, Pantheon.
Jump up^ Scruton, R. 'The Uses of Pessimism: and the Danger of False Hope' 2010, p.89, Oxford University Press
Jump up^ Letter of 5 December 1949, quoted in Stuckenschmidt, Arnold Schoenberg: His Life, World and Work,
trans. H. Searle London: John Calder, 1977.
Jump up^ Adorno, Theodor (2005). In Search of Wagner. London and New York: Verso.
Jump up^ Žižek, Slavoj. (2005). Foreword: Why Is Wagner Worth Saving? In: Adorno, Theodor. (2005). In Search of
Wagner. London and New York: Verso.
Jump up^ Adorno, Theodor (1941). "Popular Music". Essays on Music.
Jump up^ Zuidervaart, Lambert. "Theodor W. Adorno". In Zalta, Edward N. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
According to Adorno, society and culture form a sociohistorical totality, such that the pursuit of freedom in society is
inseparable from the pursuit of enlightenment in culture.
Jump up^ Laughey 2007, 204.
Jump up^ Adorno 1990,[page needed].
Jump up^ Laughey 2007, 125.
Jump up^ Laughey 2010, 125.
Jump up^ Laughey 2007, 124.
Jump up^ For a comparison of Adorno's and Bourdieu's rather divergent conceptions of reflexivity, see: Karakayali,
Nedim. 2004. "Reading Bourdieu with Adorno: The Limits of Critical Theory and Reflexive Sociology," Sociology
(Journal of the British Sociological Association), 38(2), pp. 351–368.
Jump up^ Berger, Frank; Setzepfandt, Christian (2011-05-07). "Frankfurt gnadenlos entdecken". Rezensionen.
Retrieved 2012-12-16.
Jump up^ Theodor W. Adorno, Stichworte. Kritische Modelle 2, 2nd edition. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969, p.145
Jump up^ Wiggershaus 1995, p. 242
Jump up^ Theodor W. Adorno, Stichworte. Kritische Modelle, 2nd edition. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969, p. 122
(also cited in Friedemann Grenz, Adornos Philosophie in Grundbegriffen. Auflösung einiger Deutungsprobleme.
Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974, p. 43.).
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor (1990). "On Popular Music", translated by George Simpson. In On Record: Rock, Pop, and the
Written Word, edited by Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, 301–14. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-05306-4; ISBN
0-415-05305-6; ISBN 0-679-72288-2; New York: Pantheon. ISBN 0-415-05305-6; ISBN 978-0-394-56475-3; ISBN
0-415-05306-4; ISBN 0-679-72288-2.
Adorno, Theodor (1992). Notes to Literature: Volume two. New York: Columbia University Press.
Adorno, Theodor (2000). Brian O'Connor, ed. The Adorno Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Adorno, Theodor (2002). Essays on Music. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Adorno, Theodor (2003). Negative Dialectics. New York: Continuum.
Arato, Andrew; Gephart, Eike, eds. (1982). The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York: Continuum.
Claussen, Detlev (2008). Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Durão, Fabio Akcelrud (July–August 2008). "Robert Hullot-Kentor in Conversation with Fabio Akcelrud Durão". The
Brooklyn Rail: Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture. Retrieved 28 November 2011.
Laughey, Dan (2007). Key Themes in Media Theory. England: Open University Press.
Müller-Doohm, Stefan (2005). Adorno: A Biography. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Wiggershaus, Rolf (1995). The Frankfurt School, Its History, Theories and Political Significance. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Further reading
Edwards, Peter. "Convergences and Discord in the Correspondence Between Ligeti and Adorno", Music & Letters,
96/2, 2015.
Gerhardt, Christina (ed.). "Adorno and Ethics". New German Critique 97 (2006): 1–3.
Brunger, Jeremy. 2015. "The Administered World of Theodor Adorno". Numero Cinq magazine (5 May).
Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno. Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
Jarvis, Simon. Adorno: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity, 1998.
Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research
1923–1950. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996.
Jay, Martin. Adorno. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1984.
Jeffries, Stuart. Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School. New York: Verso, 2016.
Paddison, Max. Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture: Essays on Critical Theory. London: Kahn & Averill, 2004.
ISBN 1-871-08281-1.
Morgan, Ben. The project of the Frankfurt School, Telos, Nr. 119 (2001), 75–98
Scruton, Roger. Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2015.

External links[edit]

Wikiquote has quotations

related to: Theodor Adorno

Wikimedia Commons has

media related to Theodor
Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno.

Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. University of Minnesota Press, 1996

"Theodor Adorno". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Zuidervaart, Lambert. "Theodor W. Adorno". In Zalta, Edward N. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Theodor W. Adorno at Find a Grave
Illuminations – The Critical Theory Project
Odysseus and the Siren Call of Reason: The Frankfurt School Critique of Enlightenment published in Other Voices,
n.1 v.1, 1997.
"Adorno during the 1950s" by Juergen Habermas
Daniel Sherer, "Adorno's Reception of Loos: Modern Architecture, Aesthetic Theory, and the Critique of Ornament,"
Potlatch 3 (Spring 2014), 19–31.
Online works by Adorno
Works by or about Theodor W. Adorno at Internet Archive
The Adorno Reference Archive at Marxists.org. Contains complete texts of Enlightenment as Mass Deception,
Supramundane Character of the Hegelian World Spirit and Minima Moralia.
Negative Dialectics at efn.org.
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