Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund

(1903-69)

A leading member of the Frankfurt School of Social Research, who worked in America during the Second World War, returning to West Germany after the allied victory. He was a man of immense learning, and complex, often obscure and difficult ideas. His work covered aesthetic theory, literary and musical theory, general cultural criticism, social psychology, and philosophy. For the sociologist, his major work was (with numerous others) The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a (much criticized) empirical and theoretical investigation into the psychological roots of authoritarianism.

In the face of modern culture, he was concerned at the outset to avoid the subjectivism of existentialism and easy objectivism of positivism , but this modified as he became more pessimistic about the modern world. His aesthetic and cultural criticism and his philosophy became increasingly concerned with form rather than content: the form of a work of art, or of a system of ideas, offered the clearest demonstration of the limits and contradictions imposed upon us by society, as well as of the possibilities it offers. His own difficult style was allegedly an attempt to avoid what he saw as the false integration of modern industrial society. Perhaps his clearest statement of his view of modernity can be found in Minima Moralia (1951), a collection of aphorisms, which state that the notion of totality was once part of a liberating philosophy, but over the last century has been absorbed into a totalizing social system , a real or potentially totalitarian regime. Against this we must not seek knowledge, but emphasize paradox and ambiguity; temporarily, at least, truth might lie in the experience of the individual.

For examples of his cultural criticism see Prisms (1955), and for his philosophy Negative Dialectics (1966). For a critique which characterizes his work as-among other things-a pretentious, obscure, sterile, and increasingly desperate borrowing of ideas uncritically from a succession of earlier failed Marxisms, see volume three of’s Main Currents of Marxism (1981). See also authoritarian personality ; critical theory.