Theodor Adorno
born Sept. 11, 1903, Frankfurt am
Main, Ger.
died Aug. 6, 1969, Visp, Switz.
German philosopher who also wrote on
sociology, psychology, and musicology.
Adorno obtained a degree in philosophy
from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University
in Frankfurt in 1924. His early
writings, which emphasize aesthetic
development as important to historical
evolution, reflect the influence of
Walter Benjamin’s application of Marxism
to cultural criticism. After teaching
two years at the University of
Frankfurt, Adorno immigrated to England
in 1934 to escape the Nazi persecution
of the Jews. He taught at the University
of Oxford for three years and then went
to the United States (1938), where he
worked at Princeton (1938–41) and then
was codirector of the Research Project
on Social Discrimination at the
University of California, Berkeley
(1941–48). Adorno and his colleague Max
Horkheimer returned to the University of
Frankfurt in 1949. There they rebuilt
the Institute for Social Research and
revived the Frankfurt school of critical
theory, which contributed to the German
intellectual revival after World War II.
One of Adorno’s themes was
civilization’s tendency to
self-destruction, as evinced by Fascism.
In their widely influential book
Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947;
Dialectic of Enlightenment), Adorno and
Horkheimer located this impulse in the
concept of reason itself, which the
Enlightenment and modern scientific
thought had transformed into an
irrational force that had come to
dominate not only nature but humanity
itself. The rationalization of human
society had ultimately led to Fascism
and other totalitarian regimes that
represented a complete negation of human
freedom. Adorno concluded that
rationalism offers little hope for human
emancipation, which might come instead
from art and the prospects it offers for
preserving individual autonomy and
happiness. Adorno’s other major
publications are Philosophie der neuen
Musik (1949; Philosophy of Modern
Music), The Authoritarian Personality
(1950, with others), Negative Dialektik
(1966; Negative Dialectics), and
Ästhetische Theorie (1970; “Aesthetic
Theory”).
