Theodor W. Adorno (September 11, 1903 – August 6, 1969) was a German A region named Germania, inhabited by several Germanic peoples, has been known and documented before AD 100. Beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire, which lasted until 1806. During the 16th century, northern Germany became the centre of the Protestant Reformation. As a modern nation-state,-born international sociologist Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social activity, often with the goal of applying such knowledge to the pursuit of social welfare. Subject matter, philosopher Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. It is distinguished from other ways of addressing fundamental questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational argument. The word "philosophy" comes from the, and musicologist Musicology is the scholarly study of music. The word is used in narrow, broad and intermediate senses. In the narrow sense, musicology is confined to the music history of Western culture. In the intermediate sense, it includes all relevant cultures and a range of musical forms, styles, genres and traditions. In the broad sense, it includes all. He was a member of the Frankfurt School The Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main. The school initially consisted of dissident Marxists who believed that some of Marx's followers had come to parrot a narrow selection of Marx's ideas, usually of social theory along with Max Horkheimer Max Horkheimer was a German philosopher-sociologist, famous for his work in critical theory as a member of the 'Frankfurt School' of social research. His most important works include The Eclipse of Reason (1947) and, in collaboration with Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Through the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer planned,, Walter Benjamin Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German philosopher, sociologist, literary critic, translator and essayist. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. His turn to Marxism in the 1930s was influenced by his friend Bertolt Brecht, who had developed his own critical aesthetics, which asked for the emotional, Herbert Marcuse Herbert Marcuse (July 19, 1898 – July 29, 1979) was a German philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Celebrated as the "Father of the New Left," his best known works are Eros and Civilization, One-Dimensional Man and The Aesthetic Dimension, Jürgen Habermas Jürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his work on the concept of the public sphere, the topic of his first book entitled The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. His work focuses on the foundations of social theory and epistemology, the, and others. He was also the Music Director of the Radio Project from 1937 to 1941, in the U.S.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 The early Frankfurt years 1.2 Vienna intermezzo 1.3 The intermediate Frankfurt years 1.4 Commuter between Berlin and Oxford (1934-1937) 1.5 Émigré in the USA (1938-1949) 1.6 Late Frankfurt years (1949-1969) 1.7 Final years (1967-1969) 2 Theory 2.1 Marxist criticisms 2.2 Positivist criticisms 2.3 Adorno's responses to his critics 3 Adorno's sociological methods 4 Adorno translated into English 5 Select bibliography (by publication in English) 6 References 7 External links 7.1 Online works by Adorno

Biography

The early Frankfurt years

Theodor Ludwig Adorno Wiesengrund was born in Frankfurt Frankfurt am Main (German pronunciation: [ˈfʁaŋkfʊɐt am ˈmaɪn] , English: /ˈfræŋkfərt/), commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2009 population of 667,330. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,295,000 in 2010. The city is at the centre as an only child to the wealthy wine Wine is an alcoholic beverage, typically made of fermented grape juice. The natural chemical balance of grapes is such that they can ferment without the addition of sugars, acids, enzymes or other nutrients. Wine is produced by fermenting crushed grapes using various types of yeast. Yeast consumes the sugars found in the grapes and converts them merchant Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund (1870–1941, of Jewish The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation. Converts to Judaism, whose status as Jews within the Jewish ethnos descent, converted to Protestantism Protestantism is one of the four major divisions within Christianity together with the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox Churches, and the Roman Catholic Church. The term is most closely tied to those groups that separated from the Roman Catholic Church in the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation) and the Catholic The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with more than a billion members. The Church's leader is the Pope who holds supreme authority in concert with the College of Bishops of which he is the head. A communion of the Western church and 22 autonomous Eastern Catholic churches (called singer Maria Barbara, born Calvelli-Adorno. It was the second half of this name that he adopted as his surname A surname is a name added to a given name and is part of a personal name. In many cases, a surname is a family name; the family-name meaning of "surname" first appeared in 1375. Many dictionaries define "surname" as a synonym of "family name". It is also commonly known as a "last name", though in Hungary and upon becoming a naturalized American citizen in the 1930s ("Wiesengrund" was abbreviated to "W"). His musically talented aunt Agathe also lived with the family. The young Adorno passionately engaged the piano The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is widely known as one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in Classical music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music, and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal. Although not portable and often expensive,.^[1] He attended the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gymnasium A gymnasium is a type of school providing secondary education in some parts of Europe, comparable to English grammar schools or sixth form colleges and U.S. college preparatory high schools. The word γυμνάσιον (gymnasion) was used in Ancient Greece, meaning a locality for both physical and intellectual education of young men (see where he did well, graduating at the age of 17 at the top of his class. In his free time he took private lessons in composition with Bernhard Sekles and read Kant Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was an 18th-century German philosopher from the Prussian city of Königsberg. Kant was the last influential philosopher of modern Europe in the classic sequence of the theory of knowledge during the Enlightenment beginning with thinkers John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume's Critique of Pure Reason The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant, first published in 1781, second edition 1787, is one of the most influential works in the history of philosophy. Also referred to as Kant's "first critique," it was followed by the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgement. In the last section of the introduction (section VII: together with his friend Siegfried Kracauer — 14 years his elder — on Saturday afternoons. Later he would proclaim that he owed more to these readings than to any of his academic teachers. At the University of Frankfurt (today's Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität) he studied philosophy, musicology, psychology Psychology is the scientific study of human or other animal mental functions and behaviors. In this field, a professional practitioner or researcher is called a psychologist. Psychologists are classified as social or behavioral scientists. Psychological research can be considered either basic or applied. Psychologists attempt to understand the and sociology, graduating in 1924 with a dissertation A dissertation or thesis is a document submitted in support of candidature for a degree or professional qualification presenting the author's research and findings. In some countries/universities, the word thesis or a cognate is used as part of a bachelor's or master's course, while dissertation is normally applied to a doctorate, whilst, on Edmund Husserl Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher who is deemed the founder of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, believing that experience is the source of all knowledge, while at the same time he elaborated critiques of psychologism and historicism. Before his graduation, Adorno had already met with his most important intellectual collaborators, Max Horkheimer Max Horkheimer was a German philosopher-sociologist, famous for his work in critical theory as a member of the 'Frankfurt School' of social research. His most important works include The Eclipse of Reason (1947) and, in collaboration with Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Through the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer planned, and Walter Benjamin Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German philosopher, sociologist, literary critic, translator and essayist. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. His turn to Marxism in the 1930s was influenced by his friend Bertolt Brecht, who had developed his own critical aesthetics, which asked for the emotional.

Vienna intermezzo

During his student years in Frankfurt Adorno had written a number of music critiques, but primarily wanted to be a composer. With this goal envisioned, he used his relationship to Alban Berg Alban Maria Johanne Berg was an Austrian composer. He was a member of the Second Viennese School with Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, and produced compositions that combined Mahlerian Romanticism with a personal adaptation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique to pursue studies in Vienna Vienna is the capital of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.7 million (2.3 million within the metropolitan area,[citation needed] more than 25% of Austria's population), and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and beginning in January, 1925, making contacts with members of the Viennese School The principal members of the school, besides Schoenberg, were Alban Berg and Anton Webern, who were among his first composition pupils. Both of them had already produced copious and talented music in a late-Romantic idiom but felt they gained new direction and discipline from Schoenberg's teaching. Other pupils of this generation included Heinrich, Anton Webern Anton Webern was an Austrian composer and conductor. He was a member of the Second Viennese School. As a student and significant follower of Arnold Schoenberg, he became one of the best-known exponents of the twelve-tone technique; in addition, his innovations regarding schematic organization of pitch, rhythm and dynamics were formative in the and Arnold Schoenberg Arnold Schoenberg (13 September 1874 – 13 July 1951) was an Austrian and later American composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. He used the spelling Schönberg until after his move to the United States in 1934 (Steinberg 1995, 463), "in deference to American. Schoenberg's revolutionary atonality Atonality in its broadest sense describes music that lacks a tonal center, or key. Atonality in this sense usually describes compositions written from about 1908 to the present day where a hierarchy of pitches focusing on a single, central tone is not used and the notes of the chromatic scale function independently of one another . More narrowly, particularly inspired the 22-year-old to pen philosophical observations on the new music The New Musicology is an obscure term applied to a wide body of musicology with focus upon the cultural study, analysis, and criticism of music, with influences from feminism, gender studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies, the work of some French structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers, and to a lesser extent the critical theory of, though they were not well received by its proponents. The disappointment over this caused him to cut back on his music critiques to enable his career as academic teacher and social researcher Social research refers to research conducted by social scientists. Social research methods may be divided into two broad categories: to flourish.^{[citation needed]} He did however remain editor-in-chief of the avant-garde Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English, to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics magazine Anbruch. His musicological writing already displayed his philosophical ambitions. Other lasting influences from Adorno's time in Vienna included Karl Kraus Karl Kraus was an Austrian writer and journalist, known as a satirist, essayist, aphorist, playwright and poet. He is regarded as one of the foremost German-language satirists of the 20th century, especially for his witty criticism of the press, German culture, and German and Austrian politics, whose lectures he attended with Alban Berg, and Georg Lukács György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. Most scholars consider him to be the founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He contributed the ideas of reification and class consciousness to Marxist philosophy and theory, and his literary criticism was influential in thinking about realism and about the novel as a whose Theory of the Novel had already enthused him while attending Gymnasium and whose History and Class Consciousness Class consciousness, as described by Georg Lukács's famous History and Class Consciousness , is opposed to any psychological conception of consciousness, which forms the basis of individual or mass psychology (see Freud or, before him, Gustave Le Bon). According to Lukács, each social class has a determined class consciousness which it can he had reviewed a year previously.^[2][3]

The intermediate Frankfurt years

After returning from Vienna, Adorno experienced another setback. After his dissertation supervisor Hans Cornelius and Cornelius's assistant Max Horkheimer had voiced their concerns about Adorno's professorial thesis—a comprehensive philosophical-psychological treatise—he withdrew it in early 1928. Adorno took three more years before he received the venia legendi Habilitation is the highest academic qualification a person can achieve by their own pursuit in certain European and Asian countries. Earned after obtaining a research doctorate , the habilitation requires the candidate to write a postdoctoral thesis based on independent scholarly accomplishments, reviewed by and defended before an academic, after submitting the manuscript Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen ("Construction of the Aesthetic") to his new supervisor, Paul Tillich Paul Johannes Tillich was a German-American theologian and Christian existentialist philosopher. Tillich was, along with his contemporaries Rudolf Bultmann (Germany), Karl Barth (Switzerland), and Reinhold Niebuhr (United States), one of the four most influential Protestant theologians of the 20th century. Among the general populace, he is best.^{[citation needed]}

The topic of Adorno's inaugural lecture was the Current Importance of Philosophy, a theme he considered programmatic throughout his life. In it, he questioned the concept of totality for the first time, anticipating his famous formula (directed against Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 – November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism) that the whole is the untrue (from Minima Moralia). However, Adorno's credential was revoked by the Nazis Nazism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany. It was a unique variety of fascism that involved biological racism and anti-Semitism. Nazism presented itself as politically syncretic, incorporating policies, tactics and philosophies from right- and left-wing ideologies; in practice, Nazism was a far right form of, along with those of all professors of non-Aryan As an adaptation of the Latin Arianus, referring to Iran, 'Aryan' has "long been in English language use". Its history as a loan word began in the late 1700s, when the word was borrowed from Sanskrit ā́rya- to refer to speakers of North Indian languages. When it was determined that Iranian languages — both living and ancient — used descent, in 1933.^{[citation needed]}

Adorno's 1932 essay Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik ("On the Social Situation of Music") was his contribution to the first issues of Horkheimer's Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung ("Journal for Social Research")^[4]; it wasn't until 1938 that he joined the Institute for Social Research The Institute for Social Research is a research organization covering topics such as sociology and continental philosophy, best known as the institutional home of the Frankfurt School.

Commuter between Berlin and Oxford (1934-1937)

Beginning in the late 1920s during stays in Berlin Berlin (English pronunciation: /bɜrˈlɪn/; German pronunciation: [bɛɐ̯ˈliːn] ) is the capital city and one of 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.4 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the eighth most populous urban area in the European Union. Located in northeastern, Adorno established close relations with Walter Benjamin Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German philosopher, sociologist, literary critic, translator and essayist. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. His turn to Marxism in the 1930s was influenced by his friend Bertolt Brecht, who had developed his own critical aesthetics, which asked for the emotional and Ernst Bloch Ernst Simon Bloch was a German Marxist philosopher; Adorno had become acquainted with Bloch's first major work, Geist der Utopie, in 1921. Moreover, the German capital, Berlin, was also home of chemist Chemistry is the science of matter and the changes it undergoes. The science of matter is also addressed by physics, but while physics takes a more general and fundamental approach, chemistry is more specialized, being concerned with the composition, behavior, structure, and properties of matter, as well as the changes it undergoes during chemical Margarethe ('Gretel') Karplus (1902-1993), whom Adorno would marry in London in 1937. In 1934, fleeing from the Nazi Nazism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany. It was a unique variety of fascism that involved biological racism and anti-Semitism. Nazism presented itself as politically syncretic, incorporating policies, tactics and philosophies from right- and left-wing ideologies; in practice, Nazism was a far right form of regime, he emigrated to England The area now called England has been settled by people of various cultures for about 35,000 years, but it takes its name from the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes who settled during the 5th and 6th centuries. England became a unified state in AD 927, and since the Age of Discovery, which began during the 15th century, has had a significant, with hopes of obtaining a professorship at Oxford Oxford (pronounced /ˈɒksfərd/ ) is a city, and the county town of Oxfordshire, in South East England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 151,000 living within the district boundary. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through Oxford and meet south of the city centre. For a distance.^{[citation needed]}

In 1936, the Zeitschrift featured one of Adorno's most controversial texts, "On Jazz" ("Über Jazz"). It should be noted that "jazz Jazz is a music genre that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States from a confluence of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th century American popular music. Its West African pedigree" was frequently used to refer to all popular music at the time of Adorno's writing. This article was less an engagement with this style of music than a first polemic against the blooming entertainment and culture industry.^{[citation needed]} Adorno believed the culture industry was a system by which society was controlled through a top-down creation of standardized culture that intensified the commodification of artistic expression. This topic is also discussed in his essay On the Fetish-Character in Music (Zeitschrift, 1938), in which Adorno formulated his famous quote "every pleasure which emancipates itself from the exchange-value takes on subversive features".^[5]

Extensive correspondence with Horkheimer, who was then living in exile in the United States, led to an offer of employment in America.^{[citation needed]}

Émigré in the USA (1938-1949)

After visiting New York City for the first time in 1937 he decided to resettle there. In Brussels he bade his parents, who followed two years later, goodbye. He said goodbye to Benjamin in Sanremo. Benjamin opted to remain in Europe, thus limiting their very rigorous future communication to letters. Adorno's relocation was enabled under an arrangement whereby part of his time was committed to the Institute for Social Research, which was then resettled at Columbia University, and the remainder as musical director on the 'Radio Project' (also known as Lazarsfeld/Stanton Analysis Programme) directed by the Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld at Princeton University. ^[6]

That arrangement lasted until 1941. His attention shifted to direct collaboration with Horkheimer. They moved to Los Angeles together, where he taught for the following seven years and served as the co-director of a research unit at the University of California. Their collective work found its first major expression in the first edition of their book Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der Aufklärung) in 1947. Faced with the unfolding events of the Holocaust, the work begins with the words:

'In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.'^[7]

In this book, which was virtually ignored until republished in 1969, Adorno and Horkheimer posit a dynamic within civilization that tends towards self-destruction. They argue that the concept of reason was transformed into an irrational force by the Enlightenment. As a consequence, reason came to dominate not only nature, but also humanity itself. It is this rationalization of humanity that was identified as the primary cause of Fascism and other totalitarian regimes.

After 1945 he ceased to work as a composer. He worked on his 'philosophy of the new music' (Philosophie der neuen Musik) in the 1940s, and on Hanns Eisler's Composing for the films. He also contributed 'qualitative interpretations' to the Studies in Prejudice performed by multiple research institutes in the US that uncovered the authoritarian character of test persons through indirect questions.^{[citation needed]}

Late Frankfurt years (1949-1969)

After the war, Adorno, who had been homesick, did not hesitate long before returning to Germany. Due to Horkheimer's influence he was given a professorship in Frankfurt in 1949/1950, allowing him to continue his academic career after a prolonged hiatus. This culminated in a position as double Ordinarius (of philosophy and of sociology). In the Institute, which was affiliated with the university, Adorno's leadership status became ever more and more apparent, while Horkheimer, who was eight years older, gradually stepped back, leaving his younger friend the sole directorship in 1958/1959.^{[citation needed]}

His collection of aphorisms, Minima Moralia, led to greater prominence in post-war Germany when it was released by the newly founded publishing house of Peter Suhrkamp. It proposed a 'melancholy science' against the dark background of Fascism, Stalinism and Culture Industry, which seemingly offered no political or economic alternatives: "Wrong life cannot be lived rightly" (Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen).^[8] The work raised Adorno to the level of a foundational intellectual figure in the West German republic, after a last attempt to get him involved in research in the United States failed in 1953.

Here is a partial list of his accomplishments:

• In 1952 he participated in a group experiment, revealing residual National Socialist attitudes among the recently democratized Germans (commented on critically by Peter R. Hofstätter).
• From 1954 onwards, he taught musicology in the summer academies in Kranichstein in Darmstadt.
• Numerous radio debates (among others with Ernst Bloch, Elias Canetti and Arnold Gehlen)
• Numerous lectures in Berlin and around Europe (Paris, Vienna, Italy, at the 'documenta' in Kassel in 1959, in Czechoslovakia in 1968)
• Release of Walter Benjamin's letters and writings
• In 1961 he initiated the positivism debate (Positivismusstreit) at a meeting of the German Sociological Association in Tübingen.
• 1963-1967, he was Chairman of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie.
  • In his capacity, he headed 1964 the 15th sociology conference, Max Weber and Sociology Today and in 1968 he headed the 16th sociology conference, Late Capitalism or Industrial Society.

Adorno Monument in Frankfurt (desk, chair, lamp, carpet and other utilities like the metronome of his working room).

Final years (1967-1969)

In 1966 extraparliamentary opposition (APO) formed against the grand coalition of Germany's two major parties CDU/CSU and SPD, directed primarily against the planned Notstandgesetze (emergency laws). Adorno was an outspoken critic of these policies, which he displayed by his participation in an event organized by the action committee Demokratie im Notstand ("Democracy in a State of Emergency"). When the student Benno Ohnesorg was shot by a police officer at a demonstration against a visit by the Shah of Iran, the left-wing APO became increasingly radicalized, and the universities became a place of unrest. To a considerable extent it was students of Adorno who interpreted a theory of revolt, thus executing a "praxis" from Critical Theory. On 31 January 1969, Adorno asked for the help of police to remove the students that had occupied the Frankfurt Institute in fear of vandalism, resulting in the arrest of 76 members of Rudi Dutschke's SDS socialist youth.^[9] Therefore Adorno in particular became a target of student action. He sharply criticised the anti-intellectual trend in the 60's Left, which he called a "pseudo-activity" attempting to overcome the separation of theory and praxis but getting caught up in its own publicity; he argued instead for "open thinking": "beyond all specialised and particular content, thinking is actually and above all the force of resistance" ^[10] In 1969 the disturbances in his lecture hall, most famously as female students occupied his speaker's podium bare-breasted, increased to an extent that Adorno discontinued his lecture series. In a letter to Samuel Beckett, he wrote: "The feeling of suddenly being attacked as a reactionary at least has a surprising note."

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One biographer on Adorno, Stefan-Müller Doohm, contends that he was convinced the attacks by the students were directed against his theories as well as his person and that he feared that the current political situation might lead to totalitarianism. He left with his wife on a vacation to Switzerland. Despite warnings by his doctor, he attempted to ascend a 3,000 meter high mountain, resulting in heart palpitations. The same day, he and his wife drove to the nearby town Visp, where he suffered heart palpitations once again. He was brought to the town's clinic. In the morning of the following day, August 6, he died of a heart attack, aged 65.

Theory

Part of a series on the
Frankfurt School
Major works
Reason and Revolution Dialectic of Enlightenment Minima Moralia Eros and Civilization One-Dimensional Man Negative Dialectics The Theory of Communicative Action
Notable theorists
Max Horkheimer · Theodor Adorno Herbert Marcuse · Walter Benjamin Franz Neumann · Friedrich Pollock Erich Fromm · Leo Löwenthal Helmut Reichelt · Jürgen Habermas
Important concepts
Critical theory · Dialectic · Praxis Psychoanalysis · Antipositivism Popular culture · Culture industry Advanced capitalism · Privatism

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.

Whilst Adorno's work focuses on art, literature and music as key areas of sensual, indirect critique of the established culture and modes of thought, there is also a strand of distinctly political utopianism evident in his reflections especially on history. The argument, which is complex and dialectic, dominates his Aesthetic Theory, Philosophy of New Music and many other works.

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. 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 standardised production of consumption goods" but this is concealed under "the manipulation of taste and the official culture's pretense of individualism".^[11] Adorno conceptualised this phenomenon as pseudo-individualization 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.^{[citation needed]}

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]}

Marxist criticisms

According to Horst Müller's Kritik der kritischen Theorie ("Critique of Critical Theory"), Adorno posits totality as an automatic system. This 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.

Positivist criticisms

Positivist philosophers accuse Adorno of theorizing without submitting his theories to empirical tests, basing their critique on Karl Popper's revision of Logical Positivism in which Popper substituted "falsifiability" as a criterion of scientificity for the original "verifiability" criterion of meaning proposed by A.J. Ayer and other early Logical Positivists. In particular, interpreters of Karl Popper apply the test of "falsifiability" to Adorno's thought and find that he was elusive when presented with contrary evidence.^{[citation needed]}

Adorno's responses to his critics

Adorno's defenders^[who?] reply to his positivist and conservative critics by pointing to his extensive numerical and empirical research, notably the "F-scale" in his work on Fascist tendencies in individual personalities in The Authoritarian Personality. And in fact, quantitative research using questionnaires and other tools of the modern sociologist was in full use at Adorno's Institute for Social Research. Adorno also argued that the authoritarian personality would, of course, use culture and its consumption to exert social control, but that such control is inherently degrading to those who are subjected to it, and instead such personalities would project their own fear of loss of control on to society as a whole.^{[citation needed]}

However, 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 sociologists thinks of a human essence is always changing over time.^[12]

Adorno's sociological methods

"Institut" and "Adorno-Ampel" (Adorno-traffic light) at "Senckenberganlage" in Frankfurt am Main

Because Adorno believed that sociology needs to be self-reflective and self-critical, he 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 individual 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 essays 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 egalitarianism and openness of US society based on his sojourn in New York and the Los Angeles area between 1935 and 1955.^{[citation needed]}

One example of the clash of intellectual culture and Adorno's methods can be found in Paul Lazarsfeld, the American (and Americanized) sociologist for whom Adorno worked in the middle 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...Sarnoff was, it appears, genuinely concerned with the low level of taste in this era of "Especially for You" and other forgotten hits, but needed assurance that RCA could viably air opera on Saturday afternoons. Lazarsfeld, however, had trouble both with the prose style of the work Adorno handed in and what Lazarsfeld thought was Adorno's habit of "jumping to conclusions" without being willing to do the scut work of collecting data.^{[citation needed]}

Adorno translated into English

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 University of Minnesota Press. 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 less literal in their rendering of German sentences and words, and are more accessible to English readers.^{[citation needed]}

Select bibliography (by publication in English)

• Composing for the Films (1947 with Hanns Eisler), New York: Oxford University Press. Recent reprints: London & Atlantic Highlands: Athlone, 2005. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2006 (ed. Johannes C. Gall, with a noteworthy bilingual DVD)
• Philosophy of Modern Music (1949)
• The Authoritarian Personality (et al. 1950). New York: Harper.
• Negative Dialectics[1]. Translated by E.B. Ashton, London: Routledge, 1973 (Published in German in 1966)
• Prisms (1967)
• Aesthetic Theory (Published in German in 1970)
• Dialektik der Aufklärung (1944 with Horkheimer). Translations:
  • Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1973.
  • Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, Cal.:Stanford University Press, 2002.
• Minima Moralia (1974)
• “The Actuality of Philosophy”. Telos 31 (Spring 1977). New York: Telos Press.
• Against Epistemology: A Metacritique; Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies (1983).
• Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (1989).
• Notes to Literature: Volume One (1991).
• Notes to Literature: Volume Two (1992).
• Critical Theory Since Plato (1992).
• Hegel: Three Studies (1993).
• Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music (1998).
• Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (1998).
• Metaphysics: Concept and Problems (2000).
• Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' (2001).

References

1. ^ See his 1933 essay, "Vierhändig, noch einmal," reprinted in Adorno, Impromptus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968), 142-45.
2. ^ Melissa Ursula Dawn Goldsmith, "Adorno on Strauss, Mahler, and Berg" (master's thesis, Smith College, 1995), pp. 32-34.
3. ^ ET Individuals website
4. ^ Blomster, Wes (1978). "Introduction to Adorno Essays". Telos (35): 123.
5. ^ Adorno (1938) On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. This essay will be republished in the 1956 collection Dissonanzen. Musik in der verwalteten Welt.
6. ^ Letter from Adorno to Benjamin, November 27, 1937 in "The Complete Correspondence 1928-1940", Polity Press, 1999
7. ^ Dialectic of Enlightenment, tr.John Cumming, Verso ed.London 1979 p.3. = 'Seit je hat Aufklärung im umfassendsten Sinn fortschreitenden Denkens das Ziel verfolgt, von den Menschen die Furcht zu nehmen und sie als Herren einzusetzen. Aber die vollends aufgeklärte Erde strahlt im Zeichen triumphalen Unheils.' German ed.Querido, Amsterdam,1947 reprinted S.Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main,1969 p.1
8. ^ Quotes: Theodor W. Adorno
9. ^ Leslie, Esther (1999). "Introduction to Adorno/Marcuse Correspondence on the German Student Movement". New Left Review (I/233, January-February 1999): 118–122.
10. ^ Adorno, Theodor (1969). "Resignation". Telos (35): 165–168.
11. ^ Adorno, Theodor (1938), "On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening", The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, Blackwell, pp. 280
12. ^ 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), v.38, n.2, pp.351-368.

External links

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

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Theodor Adorno

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno

• "Theodor W. Adorno" article by Lambert Zuidervaart in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Gravesite
• Illuminations - The Critical Theory Project
• Theodor Adorno
• 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
• "Context, Theme, and Tone in Adorno’s Writings about Mahler and His Music," in Naturlaut, by Melissa Ursula Dawn Goldsmith

Online works by Adorno

• 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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Persondata
NAME	Adorno, Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	German philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH	September 11, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH	Frankfurt, Germany
DATE OF DEATH	August 6, 1969
PLACE OF DEATH	Visp, Switzerland

Categories: 1903 births | 1969 deaths | People from Frankfurt | 20th-century philosophers | Continental philosophers | Frankfurt School | German composers | German literary critics | German Marxists | German music critics | German musicologists | Second Viennese school | German philosophers | Social psychologists | German sociologists | German-language philosophers | Marxist theorists | Naturalized citizens of the United States | People from Hesse-Nassau | University of Frankfurt alumni | University of Frankfurt faculty

 

 

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