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 interests

Social theory

Sociology
Psychoanalysis

Aesthetics

Epistemology

Musicology

Mass media

Notable ideas

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

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

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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