Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno (September 11, 1903 – August 6, 1969) was a
GermanGermany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium,...
-born international
intellectualAn intellectual is a person who uses his or her intelligence and analytical thinking, either in a professional or a personal capacity.-Terminology and endeavours:...
,
sociologistSociology is the scientific or systematic study of human societies. It is a branch of social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social structure and activity, often with the goal of applying such...
,
philosopherPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned...
,
musicologistMusicology 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...
, and
composerA composer is a person who creates music, usually by musical notation, for interpretation and performance. The level of distinction between composers and other musicians varies, which affects issues such as copyright and the deference given to individual interpretations of a particular piece of...
. He was a member of the
Frankfurt SchoolThe Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist sociology and philosophy in the tradition of critical theory, which was associated with the early Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main...
along with
Max HorkheimerMax Horkheimer was a German philosopher and sociologist. He is well known for being a leader in the Frankfurt School, for his work with critical theory and his most important works: The Eclipse of Reason , The Dialectic of Enlightenment and Critical Theory: Selected Essays...
,
Walter BenjaminWalter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist philosopher-sociologist, literary critic, translator and essayist. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory...
,
Herbert MarcuseHerbert Marcuse was a German-Jewish philosopher, political theorist and sociologist, and a member of the Frankfurt School. Celebrated as the "Father of the New Left," his best known works are Eros and Civilization, One-Dimensional Man and The Aesthetic Dimension...
,
Jürgen HabermasJürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and American 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...
, and others. He was also the Music Director of the
Radio ProjectThe Radio Project was a social research project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to look into the effects of mass media on society.In 1937, the Rockefeller Foundation started funding research to find the effects of new forms of mass media on society, especially radio...
from 1937 to 1941, in the U.S.
Already as a young
music criticA music critic is someone who reviews music and publishes writing on them in books or journals...
and amateur sociologist, Adorno was primarily a philosophical thinker. The label
social philosopher emphasizes the socially critical aspect of his philosophical thinking, which from 1945 onwards took an intellectually prominent position in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.
The early Frankfurt years
Theodor (or "Teddie") was born in
FrankfurtFrankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2008 population of 670,000. The urban area had an estimated population of 2.26 million in 2001...
as an only child to the wealthy
wineWine 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...
merchant Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund (1870–1941, of Jewish descent, converted to
ProtestantismProtestantism is a branch within Christianity, containing many denominations with some differing practices and doctrines, that principally originated in the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. It is considered to be one of the major divisions within Christianity, together with the Roman...
) and the
CatholicThe Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church. With more than a billion members, over half of all Christians and more than one-sixth of the world's population, the Catholic Church is a communion of the Western, or Latin Rite Church, and...
singer Maria Barbara, born Calvelli-Adorno. It was the second half of this name that he adopted as his
surnameA 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 first appeared in 1375. Many dictionaries define "surname" as a synonym of "family name". It is also known as a "last name". In some cultures, the surname may...
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
pianoThe piano is a musical instrument which is played by means of a keyboard. Widely used in Western music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music, and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...
; he especially liked four-handed playing because, he later wrote, the need for coordination increased his skill and appreciation. His childhood joy was increased by the family's annual summer sojourn in
AmorbachAmorbach is a town in the Miltenberg district in the Regierungsbezirk of Lower Franconia in Bavaria, Germany with some 4,100 inhabitants .- Location :...
. He attended the
Kaiser-Wilhelm-GymnasiumA 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...
where he proved to be a highly gifted student: at the exceptionally early age of 17 he graduated from the
Gymnasium at the top of his class. In his free time he took private lessons in composition with
Bernhard SeklesBernhard Sekles was a German composer, conductor, pianist and pedagogue....
and read
KantImmanuel Kant was an 18th-century German philosopher from the Prussian city of Königsberg...
's
Critique of Pure ReasonThe 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...
together with his friend
Siegfried KracauerSiegfried Kracauer was aGerman-Jewish writer, journalist, sociologist, cultural critic, and film theorist.-Biography:...
— 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 FrankfurtUniversity of Frankfurt may refer to several German universities:*Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main in Frankfurt am Main...
(today's
Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität) he studied philosophy, musicology,
psychologyPsychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the systematic, and sometimes scientific, study of human or animal mental functions and behavior...
and sociology. There he wrote his first academic work, a review of
Schoenberg'sSchoenberg is the surname of several persons.* Arnold Schoenberg , Austrian-American composer of 20th Century music* Isaac Jacob Schoenberg , Romanian mathematician...
Pierrot LunaireDreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds 'Pierrot lunaire', , commonly known as Pierrot Lunaire , Op. 21, is a melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg...
. He completed his studies swiftly: by the end of 1924 he graduated with a dissertation on
Edmund HusserlEdmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher who is deemed the founder of phenomenology...
. Before his graduation, Adorno had already met with his most important intellectual collaborators,
Max HorkheimerMax Horkheimer was a German philosopher and sociologist. He is well known for being a leader in the Frankfurt School, for his work with critical theory and his most important works: The Eclipse of Reason , The Dialectic of Enlightenment and Critical Theory: Selected Essays...
and
Walter BenjaminWalter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist philosopher-sociologist, literary critic, translator and essayist. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory...
.
Vienna intermezzo
During his student years in Frankfurt Adorno had written a number of music critiques. He believed composition and music criticism would be his future profession. With this goal envisioned, he used his relationship to
Alban BergAlban Maria Johannes 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.-Life and work:Berg was born in...
to pursue studies in
ViennaVienna is the capital of the Republic of Austria and also one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.7 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre. It is the 10th largest city by...
beginning in January, 1925. He also formed contacts with other greats of the
Viennese SchoolThe Second Viennese School is the term generally used in English-speaking countries to denote the group of composers that comprised Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils and close associates in early 20th century Vienna, where, with breaks, he lived and taught between 1903 and 1925...
,
Anton WebernAnton 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...
and
Arnold SchoenbergArnold Schoenberg was an Austrian and later American composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School...
. Berg complimented Adorno's
Two Pieces for String Quartet Op. 2 to Schoenberg, writing that "in its seriousness and concision and above all in the uncompromising purity of its whole structure, it may be described as belonging to Schoenberg's school (and to no other!)" Schoenberg’s revolutionary
atonalityAtonality 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...
particularly inspired the 22-year-old to pen philosophical observations on the
new musicThe New Musicology is a term applied to a wide body of musicology with increased focus upon the cultural study, analysis, and criticism of music, with influences from feminism, gender studies, gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies, the work of some French structuralist and...
, 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 researchSocial research refers to research conducted by social scientists , but also within other disciplines such as social policy, human geography, political science, social anthropology and education...
er to flourish. He did however remain editor-in-chief of the
avant-gardeAvant-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 KrausKarl 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...
, 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...
whose
Theory of the Novel had already enthused him while attending
Gymnasium and whose
History and Class Consciousness- Georg Lukács' 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...
he had reviewed a year previously.
The intermediate Frankfurt years
After returning from Vienna, Adorno experienced another setback. After his dissertation supervisor
Hans CorneliusJohannes Wilhelm Cornelius was a German neo-Kantian philosopher.Born in Munich, he originally studied mathematics, physics, and chemistry, graduating with a Ph.D. in 1886, before turning to philosophy...
and Cornelius' 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, after submitting the manuscript
Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen ("Construction of the Aesthetic") to his new supervisor,
Paul TillichPaul Johannes Tillich was a German-American theologian and Christian existentialist philosopher. Tillich was, along with his contemporaries Rudolf Bultmann , Karl Barth , and Reinhold Niebuhr , one of the four most influential Protestant theologians of the 20th century...
. 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
totalityTotality Corporation was a publicly-traded professional services and managed services provider based out of San Francisco, from the years 1999 to 2005.Totality was previously named "MimEcom", prior to the company going public in December of 2000....
for the first time, anticipating his famous formula (directed against
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich HegelGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism, and along with Immanuel Kant, one of the most influential philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment....
) that the whole is the untrue (from
Minima MoraliaMinima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben is a seminal text in Critical Theory. Theodor W. Adorno wrote it during World War II, while he lived as an exile in America...
). However, Adorno's credential was revoked by the
NazisNazism, known officially in German as National Socialism , is the totalitarian ideology and practices of the Nazi Party or National Socialist German Workers’ Party under Adolf Hitler, and the policies adopted by the dictatorial government of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945.Nazism is often considered...
, along with those of all professors of non-
AryanAryan is an English language loanword denoting variously*in historical or dated usage,**the Indo-Iranian languages and their speakers, viz. the Iranian and Indo-Aryan peoples**the Indo-European languages more generally and their speakers,...
descent, in 1933.
Among Adorno's first courses was a seminar on Benjamin's treatise
The Origin of German Tragic Drama. His 1932 essay
Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik ("On the Social Situation of Music") was Adorno's contribution to the first issues of Horkheimer's
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung ("Journal for Social Research") ; it wasn't until 1938 that he joined the
Institute for Social ResearchThe 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
BerlinBerlin is the capital city and one of sixteen states of Germany. With a population of 3.4 million within its city limits, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city and the eighth most populous urban area in the European Union...
, Adorno established close relations with
Walter BenjaminWalter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist philosopher-sociologist, literary critic, translator and essayist. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory...
and
Ernst BlochErnst Simon Bloch was a German Marxist philosopher.Bloch was influenced by both Hegel and Marx. He was also interested in music and art . He established friendships with Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill and Theodor W. Adorno...
; Adorno had become acquainted with Bloch's first major work,
Geist der Utopie, in 1921. Moreover, the German capital, Berlin, was also home of
chemistChemistry is the science concerned with the composition, behavior, structure, and properties of matter, as well as the changes it undergoes during chemical reactions...
Margarethe ('Gretel') Karplus (1902-1993), whom Adorno would marry in London in 1937. In 1934, fleeing from the
NaziNazism, known officially in German as National Socialism , is the totalitarian ideology and practices of the Nazi Party or National Socialist German Workers’ Party under Adolf Hitler, and the policies adopted by the dictatorial government of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945.Nazism is often considered...
regime, he emigrated to
EnglandEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the North Sea to the east, with the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
, with hopes of obtaining a professorship at
OxfordOxford is a city, and the county town of Oxfordshire, in South East England. The city 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...
. Though Adorno was not appointed professor at Oxford, he undertook an in depth study of Husserl's philosophy as a postgraduate at Merton College. Adorno spent the summer holidays with his fiancée in Germany every year. In 1936, the
Zeitschrift featured one of Adorno's most controversial texts, "On Jazz" ("
Über Jazz"). It should be noted that "
jazzJazz is a musical art form which 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....
" 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 industryCulture industry is a term coined by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer , who argued in "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods - through film, radio and magazines – to manipulate the masses into...
. Adorno believed the culture industry was a system by which society was controlled though a top-down creation of standardized culture that intensified the commodification of artistic expression. Extensive correspondence with Horkheimer, who was then living in exile in the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, led to an offer of employment in America.
Émigré in the USA (1938-1949)
After visiting
New YorkNew York is the most populous city in the United States, and the center of the New York metropolitan area, which is among the most populous urban areas in the world. A leading global city, New York exerts a powerful influence over worldwide commerce, finance, culture, fashion and entertainment...
for the first time in 1937 he decided to resettle there. In
BrusselsBrussels , officially the Brussels Region or Brussels-Capital Region , is the de facto capital city of the European Union and the largest urban area in Belgium...
he bade his parents, who followed in 1939, farewell, and said goodbye to Benjamin in
SanremoSanremo is a city with about 57,000 inhabitants on the Mediterranean coast of western Liguria in north-western Italy. It was founded in Roman times and is now best known as a tourist destination on the Italian Riviera and the host of cultural events such as the Sanremo Music Festival and the...
. Benjamin opted to remain in
EuropeEurope is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally divided from Asia to its east by the water divide of the Ural Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus Mountains , and the Black Sea to the southeast...
, 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 ResearchThe 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....
, which was then resettled at
Columbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City...
, and the remainder as musical director on the '
Radio ProjectThe Radio Project was a social research project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to look into the effects of mass media on society.In 1937, the Rockefeller Foundation started funding research to find the effects of new forms of mass media on society, especially radio...
' (also known as Lazarsfeld/Stanton Analysis Programme) directed by the
AustriaAustria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.3 million people in Central Europe. It borders both Germany and the Czech Republic to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west...
n sociologist
Paul LazarsfeldPaul Felix Lazarsfeld was one of the major figures in 20th-century American sociology. The founder of Columbia University's Bureau for Applied Social Research, he exerted a tremendous influence over the techniques and the organization of research...
at
Princeton UniversityPrinceton University a private university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League and is considered one of the Colonial Colleges....
. That arrangement lasted until 1941. Very soon, however, 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 CaliforniaThe University of California, Los Angeles is a research university located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, in the United States. It was founded in 1919 and is the second-oldest general-purpose campus in the University of California system...
. Their collective work found its first major expression in the first edition of their book
Dialectic of EnlightenmentDialectic of Enlightenment , is the core text of Critical Theory explaining the socio-psychological status quo that had been responsible for, what the Frankfurt School considered, the failure of the Enlightenment.Written by Frankfurt School philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W...
(
Dialektik der Aufklärung) in 1947. Faced with the unfolding events of
the HolocaustThe Holocaust , also known as The Shoah is the term generally used to describe the genocide of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, a program of systematic state-sponsored extermination by Nazi Germany,...
, 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.'
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
reasonReason is the mental faculty that is able to generate conclusions from assumptions or premisses.Reason in this sense is often contrasted with authority, intuition, emotion, mysticism, superstition, and faith, and is thought by rationalists to be more reliable than these in discovering what is true...
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
FascismFascism, , comprises a radical and authoritarian nationalist political ideology and a corporatist economic ideology developed in Italy. Fascists believe that nations and/or races are in perpetual conflict whereby only the strong can survive by being healthy, vital, and by asserting themselves in...
and other totalitarian regimes. Consequently, Adorno did not consider rationalism a path towards human
emancipationFreedom is the right to act according to ones will without being held up by the power of others. From a philosophical point of view, it can be defined as the capacity to determine your own choices...
. For that, he looked toward the
artArt is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature, film, sculpture, and paintings...
s.
After 1945 he ceased to work as a composer. By taking this step he conformed to his own famous maxim: 'To still write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric'. He later retracted this statement, saying that: 'Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream... hence it may have been wrong to say that no poem could be written after Auschwitz.' He was consulted at length by
Thomas MannThomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual...
on the musicological details of the latter's
novelA novel is a long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
Doktor FaustusDoctor Faustus is a German novel written by Thomas Mann, begun in 1943 and published in 1947 as Doktor Faustus. Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde Doctor Faustus (in German, Doktor Faustus) is a German novel written by Thomas Mann, begun in 1943 and...
. Apart from that, he worked on his 'philosophy of the new music' (Philosophie der neuen Musik) in the 1940s, and on
Hanns EislerHanns Eisler was a German and Austrian composer.-Family Background:Eisler was born in Leipzig where his Jewish father, Rudolf Eisler, was a professor of philosophy...
's
Composing for the films. He also contributed '
qualitative interpretationQualitative research is a field of inquiry applicable to many disciplines and subject matters. Qualitative researchers aim to gather an in-depth understanding of human behavior and the reasons that govern such behavior. The qualitative method investigates the why and how of decision making, not...
s' to the
Studies in Prejudice performed by multiple research institutes in the US that uncovered the
authoritarianAuthoritarianism describes a form of government characterized by an emphasis on the authority of state in a republic or union. It is a political system controlled by typically non-elected rulers who usually permit some degree of individual freedom....
character of test persons through indirect questions.
Late Frankfurt years (1949-1969)
After the
warWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, 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. His collection of
aphorismThe word aphorism denotes an original thought, spoken or written in a laconic and easily memorable form....
s,
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
FascismFascism, , comprises a radical and authoritarian nationalist political ideology and a corporatist economic ideology developed in Italy. Fascists believe that nations and/or races are in perpetual conflict whereby only the strong can survive by being healthy, vital, and by asserting themselves in...
,
StalinismStalinism was the political system and ideology of the Soviet Union under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union from 1928–1953...
and Culture Industry, which seemingly offered no political or economic alternatives: "Wrong life cannot be lived rightly" (
Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen). The work raised Adorno to the level of a foundational intellectual figure in the
West GermanWest Germany is a common English name for the period of the Federal Republic of Germany between its' formation in May 1949 to German reunification in October 1990, when the German Democratic Republic was dissolved and the five states on its territory joined the Federal Republic of Germany,...
republic, after a last attempt to get him involved in research in the USA failed in 1953.
Here is a list of his multifaceted accomplishments:
- In 1952 he participated in a group experiment, revealing residual National Socialist
Nazism, known officially in German as National Socialism , is the totalitarian ideology and practices of the Nazi Party or National Socialist German Workers’ Party under Adolf Hitler, and the policies adopted by the dictatorial government of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945.Nazism is often considered...
attitudes among the recently democratizedDemocracy is a system of government in which either the actual governing is carried out by the people governed , or the power to do so is granted by them...
Germans (commented on critically by Peter R. HofstätterPeter R. Hofstätter was an Austrian social psychologist.He was the only child of Robert Matthias Hofstätter, M.D who for many years was the Professor of Gynecology at the University of Vienna...
).
- From 1954 onwards, he taught musicology in the summer academies in Kranichstein in Darmstadt
Darmstadt is a city in the Bundesland of Hesse in Germany, located in the southern part of the Rhine Main Area.The city of Darmstadt was founded by the Counts of Katzenelnbogen in 1330, though settlement in the area is known to have been present as early as the late 11th century...
.
- Numerous radio
Radio is the transmission of signals by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...
debateDebate or debating is a formal method of interactive and representational argument. Debate is a broader form of argument than logical argument, which only examine the consistency from axiom, and factual argument, which only examine what is or isn't the case or rhetoric which is technique of...
s (among others with Ernst BlochErnst Simon Bloch was a German Marxist philosopher.Bloch was influenced by both Hegel and Marx. He was also interested in music and art . He established friendships with Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill and Theodor W. Adorno...
, Elias CanettiElias Canetti was a Bulgarian-born novelist and non-fiction writer of Sephardi Jewish ancestry who wrote in German. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981.-Life:...
and Arnold GehlenArnold Gehlen was an influential conservative German philosopher and sociologist.-Biography:His major influences while studying philosophy were Hans Driesch, Nicolai Hartmann and especially Max Scheler....
)
- Numerous lectures in Berlin and around Europe (Paris
Paris is the capital of France and the country's most populous city. It is situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, Vienna, ItalyItaly , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia. Italy shares its northern, Alpine boundary with France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia...
, at the 'documentadocumenta is an exhibition of modern and contemporary art which now takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. It was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau which took place in Kassel at that time...
' in KasselKassel Kassel Kassel and of the district (Kreis) of the same name...
in 1959, in CzechoslovakiaCzechoslovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
in 1968)
- Release of Walter Benjamin
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist philosopher-sociologist, literary critic, translator and essayist. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory...
's letters and writings
- In 1961 he initiated the positivism debate (Positivismusstreit)
Positivismusstreit is the German word for debate about positivism and refers to a well known philosophical dispute between Critical rationalism and the Frankfurt School in 1961, about the methodology of the social sciences...
at a meeting of the German Sociological Association in TübingenTübingen, a traditional university town in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, is situated 30 km southwest of Stuttgart, on a ridge between the Neckar and Ammer rivers.-History:...
.
- 1963-1967, he was Chairman of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie.
- In his capacity, he headed 1964 the 15th sociology conference, Max Weber
Maximilian Carl Emil Weber was a German lawyer, politician, historian, sociologist and political economist, who profoundly influenced social theory and the remit of sociology itself. His major works dealt with the rationalization, bureaucratization, and 'disenchantment' he associated with the...
and Sociology Today and in 1968 he headed the 16th sociology conference, Late Capitalism or Industrial Society.
Final years (1967-1969)
In 1966 extraparliamentary opposition (APO) formed against the grand
coalitionA coalition government is a cabinet of a parliamentary government in which several parties cooperate. The usual reason given for this arrangement is that no party on its own can achieve a majority in the parliament...
of Germany's two major parties
CDUThe Christian Democratic Union of Germany is a Christian democratic and conservative political party in Germany....
/
CSUThe Christian Social Union in Bavaria is a Christian democratic and conservative political party in Germany. It was founded as a continuation of the Weimar-era Catholic Bavarian People's Party. It operates only in the state of Bavaria, while its sister party, the Christian Democratic Union ,...
and
SPDThe Social Democratic Party of Germany is Germany's oldest political party. The party governed at the federal level in a grand coalition with the Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union until conceding defeat in the federal election of September 2009...
, 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 OhnesorgBenno Ohnesorg was a German university student killed during a demonstration in West Berlin.- Death :On June 2, 1967, Ohnesorg participated in a protest held near the Deutsche Oper, aimed against the state visit of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was attending a performance of...
was shot by a police officer at a
demonstrationA demonstration is a form of nonviolent action by groups of people in favor of a political or other cause, normally consisting of walking in a march and a meeting to hear speakers...
against a visit by the
ShahShah is a Persian term for a king that has been adopted in many other languages.-Word history:"Shāh" was the title of Iranian kings including the Achaemenid dynasty which unified Persia and created a vast intercontinental empire...
of
IranIran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran is a country in Western Asia. The name Iran has been in use natively since the Sassanid period and came into international use from 1935, before which the country was known internationally as Persia...
, 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'. It is said that Adorno asked for the help of police to remove the students that had occupied the Frankfurt Institute in fear of vandalism. 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" On the other side of the spectrum, the right accused him of providing the intellectual basis for leftist
violenceViolence is the expression of physical or verbal force against self or other, compelling action against one's will on pain of being hurt. Variant uses of the term refer to the destruction of non-living objects . Worldwide, violence is used as a tool of manipulation and also is an area of concern...
. 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 BeckettSamuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish writer, dramatist and poet. Beckett's work offers a bleak outlook on human culture and both formally and philosophically became increasingly minimalist....
, he wrote: "The feeling of suddenly being attacked as a reactionary at least has a surprising note."
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
totalitarianismTotalitarianism is a political system where the state, usually under the control of a single party or faction, recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible...
. He left with his wife on a vacation to
SwitzerlandSwitzerland , officially the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 states named cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities...
. Despite warnings by his doctor, he attempted to ascend a 3,000 meter high
mountainA mountain is a large landform that stretches above the surrounding land in a limited area usually in the form of a peak. A mountain is generally steeper than a hill. The adjective montane is used to describe mountainous areas and things associated with them...
, resulting in heart palpitations. The same day, he and his wife drove to the nearby town
VispVisp is the capital of the district of Visp in the canton of Valais in Switzerland.Its population is around 6,700.The two valleys are Mattertal and Saastal. It borders with Brig-Glis....
, 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 attackMyocardial infarction or acute myocardial infarction , commonly known as a heart attack, is the interruption of blood supply to part of the heart, causing some heart cells to die...
.
Theory
Adorno was chiefly influenced by
Max WeberMaximilian Carl Emil Weber was a German lawyer, politician, historian, sociologist and political economist, who profoundly influenced social theory and the remit of sociology itself. His major works dealt with the rationalization, bureaucratization, and 'disenchantment' he associated with the...
's critique of
disenchantmentDisenchantment in social sciences refers to the devaluation of mysticism. The concept was introduced by Max Weber to describe the character of modernized, secularized society, where scientific understanding is more highly valued than belief....
,
Georg Lukacs----György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. Most scholars consider him to be the founder of the tradition of Western Marxism...
's Hegelian interpretation of Marxism, as well as
Walter BenjaminWalter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist philosopher-sociologist, literary critic, translator and essayist. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory...
's philosophy of history, although Weber's influence has until recently been underestimated. Adorno, along with the other major Frankfurt School theorists
Max HorkheimerMax Horkheimer was a German philosopher and sociologist. He is well known for being a leader in the Frankfurt School, for his work with critical theory and his most important works: The Eclipse of Reason , The Dialectic of Enlightenment and Critical Theory: Selected Essays...
and
Herbert MarcuseHerbert Marcuse was a German-Jewish philosopher, political theorist and sociologist, and a member of the Frankfurt School. Celebrated as the "Father of the New Left," his best known works are Eros and Civilization, One-Dimensional Man and The Aesthetic Dimension...
, 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". Adorno conceptualised this phenomenon as
pseudo-individualization and the
always-the-same. He saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness. But the subtle dialectician was also able to say that the problem with capitalism was that it blurred the line between false and true needs altogether.
The work of Adorno and Horkheimer heavily influenced intellectual discourse on
popular culturePopular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture...
and scholarly
popular culture studiesPopular culture studies is the academic discipline studying popular culture. It is generally considered as a combination of communication studies and cultural studies....
. At the time Adorno began writing, there was a tremendous unease among many intellectuals as to the results of mass culture and mass production on the character of individuals within a nation. By exploring the mechanisms for the creation of mass culture, Adorno presented a framework which gave specific terms to what had been a more general concern.
At the time this was considered important because of the role which the state took in cultural production; 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 psychologyReverse psychology is a persuasion technique involving the false advocacy of a belief or behavior contrary to the belief or behavior which is actually being advocated...
.
Many aspects of Adorno's work are relevant today and have been developed in many strands of contemporary critical theory, media theory, and sociology. Thinkers influenced by Adorno believe that today's
societySociety or human society is the manner or condition in which the members of a community live together for their mutual benefit. By extension, society denotes the people of a region or country, sometimes even the world, taken as a whole....
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 studiesCultural studies is an academic field which combines political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, museum studies and art history/criticism to study cultural phenomena in various societies...
. 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.
His work on the culture industry has been criticized by such writers as Christian Bethune, who point out both that Adorno's critique is not based on a thorough knowledge of popular cultural forms, but also that it has an "end of history" tone to it. Taking Adorno's critique of popular music to its logical conclusion, one would have to conclude that Blues or rocknroll, jazz, rap or punk, were also simply one hundred percent commercial inventions for profit, with no contradictions within them.
Adorno, again along with the other principal thinkers of the Frankfurt school, attacked positivism in the social sciences and in philosophy. He was particularly harsh on approaches that claimed to be
scientificScience is in its broadest sense to any systematic knowledge-base or prescriptive practice that is capable of resulting in a prediction or predictable type of outcome...
and
quantitativeQuantitative analysis may refer to:* Quantitative analyst, in finance, someone who applies mathematics, among others stochastic calculus, to finance...
, although the collective work
The Authoritarian PersonalityThe Authoritarian Personality is an influential 1950 book by Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, researchers working at the University of California, Berkeley, during and shortly after World War II...
that appeared partly under Adorno's name was an influential empirical study in the social sciences in America after its publication in 1950.
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. 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.
Adorno and his critics
Critiques of Adorno's theories include other Marxists. Other critics include
Ralf DahrendorfRalf Gustav Dahrendorf, Baron Dahrendorf, KBE, FBA was a German-British sociologist, philosopher, political scientist and liberal politician....
and
Karl PopperSir Karl Raimund Popper, CH, FRS, FBA was an Austrian and British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics. He is considered one of the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century, and also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy...
, positivist philosophers, neoconservatives, and many students frustrated by Adorno's style. Many Marxists accuse the Critical Theorists of claiming the intellectual heritage of Karl Marx without feeling the obligation to apply theory for
politicalPolitics is a process by which groups of people make decisions. The term is generally applied to behavior within civil governments, but politics has been observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic and religious institutions...
action.
Marxist criticisms
According to
Horst MüllerHorst Müller was an East German luger who competed during the mid 1970s. He won three medals at the FIL World Luge Championships with two silvers and a bronze ....
'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 HabermasJürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and American 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...
, in particular, and the Frankfurt School in general, misconstrue Marx.
Georg Lukacs----György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. Most scholars consider him to be the founder of the tradition of Western Marxism...
, a Marxist philosopher, infamously described Adorno as having taken up residence in the 'Grand Hotel Abyss', in his 1962 preface to
The Theory of the Novel. This was understood to mean that Lukacs (who at the time supported "socialist realism" and in general the Marxism of the East German regime) associated Adorno with a dated proto-Marxism, that indulged in despair, despite a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle.
Positivist criticisms
PositivistPositivism is a philosophy that holds that the only authentic knowledge is that which is based on actual sense experience. Metaphysical speculation is avoided...
philosophers accuse Adorno of theorizing without submitting his theories to empirical tests, basing their critique on
Karl PopperSir Karl Raimund Popper, CH, FRS, FBA was an Austrian and British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics. He is considered one of the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century, and also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy...
's revision of
Logical PositivismLogical positivism is a school of philosophy that combines empiricism, the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge of the world, with a version of rationalism incorporating mathematical and logico-linguistic constructs and deductions in epistemology.[See, e.g., : ...]
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.
Conservative criticism
Drawing on the Positivist critique, conservatives also deride Adorno as a theorist unwilling to submit to experimental verification.
However, a more intricate criticism is offered by the followers of
Leo StraussLeo Strauss was a German-born American political philosopher who specialized in classical political philosophy...
, who also believe in a
hermeneuticsHermeneutics is the study of interpretation theory, and can be defined as either the art of interpretation, or the theory and practice of interpretation. Traditional hermeneutics - which includes Biblical hermeneutics - refers to the study of the interpretation of written texts, especially texts in...
of
cultureCulture is a term that has different meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
, and often echo many of Adorno's criticisms of accessibility and art. Their critique rests on the anti-capitalist nature of Adorno's orientation, arguing that while mass culture may consist of
bread and circuses"Bread and circuses" is a metaphor for handouts and petty amusements that politicians use to gain popular support, instead of gaining it through sound policy...
, these are essential for social function and their removal or reduction in importance as "useful lies" would threaten the continued operation of the market and society, as well as higher philosophical truth.
Adorno's responses to his critics
Adorno's defenders 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.
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.
Adorno's sociological methods
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
Pierre Bourdieu was an acclaimed French sociologist.Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life...
's book
The Weight of the World).
Thus Adorno 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. Prior to going to the USA, and as shown in his rather infamous essay "On Jazz", Adorno seems to have thought that the USA was a cultural wasteland in which people's minds and responses were formed by what he called "the music of slaves".
One example of the clash of intellectual culture and Adorno's methods can be found in
Paul LazarsfeldPaul Felix Lazarsfeld was one of the major figures in 20th-century American sociology. The founder of Columbia University's Bureau for Applied Social Research, he exerted a tremendous influence over the techniques and the organization of research...
, 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
RCA Corporation, founded as Radio Corporation of America, was an electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986. Currently, the RCA trademark is owned by the French conglomerate Thomson SA through RCA Trademark Management S.A., a company owned by Thomson...
), 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.
Adorno, however, rather than being arrogant, seems to have had a depressive personality, and Rolf Wiggershaus tells an anecdote which doesn't fit the image formed of an arrogant pedant: he noted that the typists at the
Radio Research ProjectThe Radio Project was a social research project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to look into the effects of mass media on society.In 1937, the Rockefeller Foundation started funding research to find the effects of new forms of mass media on society, especially radio...
liked and understood what Adorno was saying about the actual effect of modern media. They may have responded to comments similar to that found in
Dialectic of EnlightenmentDialectic of Enlightenment , is the core text of Critical Theory explaining the socio-psychological status quo that had been responsible for, what the Frankfurt School considered, the failure of the Enlightenment.Written by Frankfurt School philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W...
, written by Adorno with his close associate
Max HorkheimerMax Horkheimer was a German philosopher and sociologist. He is well known for being a leader in the Frankfurt School, for his work with critical theory and his most important works: The Eclipse of Reason , The Dialectic of Enlightenment and Critical Theory: Selected Essays...
, that it appeared that movie-goers were less enthralled with the content even of "blockbusters" of the era, films that are now lauded by Hollywood mavens as "art", than by the air-conditioned comfort of the theaters—an observation reflected in movie business at the time by the expression that one found a good place to sell popcorn and built a theatre around it.
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 PressThe Stanford University Press is the publishing house of Stanford University. In 1892, an independent publishing company was established at the university. The first use of the name "Stanford University Press" in a book's imprinting occurred in 1895...
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 ReasonThe 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...
and Aristotle's "Metaphysics", and a new translation of the
Dialectic of EnlightenmentDialectic of Enlightenment , is the core text of Critical Theory explaining the socio-psychological status quo that had been responsible for, what the Frankfurt School considered, the failure of the Enlightenment.Written by Frankfurt School philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W...
. 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 the
Philosophy of New Music by Robert Hullot-Kentor, from
University of Minnesota PressThe University of Minnesota Press is a university press that is part of the University of Minnesota.Founded in 1925, the University of Minnesota Press is best known for its books in social and cultural thought, critical theory, race and ethnic studies, urbanism, feminist criticism, and media...
, and of the correspondence with Alban Berg,
Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction, and the letters to Adorno's parents, all 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.
Adorno and Music Theory
- See also: Critical Theory
Critical theory is the examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two quite different meanings with different origins and histories, one originating in social theory and the other in literary criticism...
, New musicologyThe New Musicology is a term applied to a wide body of musicology with increased focus upon the cultural study, analysis, and criticism of music, with influences from feminism, gender studies, gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies, the work of some French structuralist and...
.
Adorno's theoretical method is closely related to his understanding of music and
Arnold SchoenbergArnold Schoenberg was an Austrian and later American composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School...
and other contemporary composers' atonal (less so "twelve-tone") techniques (Adorno had studied composition for several years with
Alban BergAlban Maria Johannes 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.-Life and work:Berg was born in...
), which challenged the hierarchical nature of traditional
tonalityTonality is a system of music in which specific hierarchical pitch relationships are based on a key "center" or tonic. The term tonalité originated with Alexandre-Étienne Choron and was borrowed by François-Joseph Fétis in 1840...
in composition. For even if "the whole is untrue", for Adorno we retain the ability to form partial critical conceptions and submit them to a test as we progress towards a "higher" awareness. This role of a critical consciousness was a common concern in the
Second Viennese SchoolThe Second Viennese School is the term generally used in English-speaking countries to denote the group of composers that comprised Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils and close associates in early 20th century Vienna, where, with breaks, he lived and taught between 1903 and 1925...
prior to the Second World War, and demanded that composers relate to the traditions more as a canon of taboos rather than as a canon of masterpieces that should be imitated. For the composer (poet, artist, philosopher) of this era, every work of art or thought was thus likely to be shocking or difficult to understand. Only through its "corrosive unacceptability" to the commercially-defined sensibilities of the middle class could new art hope to challenge dominant cultural assumptions.
Adorno's followers argue that he seems to have managed the very idea that one can abandon tonality while still being able to rank artistic and ethical phenomena on a tentative scale, not because he was a sentimentalist about this ability but because he saw the drive towards totality (whether the Stalinist or Fascist totality of his time) as derivative of the ability to make ethical and artistic judgement, which, following Kant, Adorno thought part of being human. Thus his method (better: anti-method) was to use language and its "big" concepts tentatively and musically, partly to see if they "sound right" and fit the data.
Adorno was concerned that a genuine sociology retain a commitment to truth including the willingness to self-apply. Today, his life can be read as a protest against what he would call the "
reificationReification is the consideration of an abstraction, relation or object as if it had human or living existence and abilities; at the same time it implies the...
" of political polls and spin as well as a culture that in being aggressively "anti"
high cultureHigh culture is a term, now used in a number of different ways in academic discourse, whose most common meaning is the set of cultural products, mainly in the arts, held in the highest esteem by a culture. In more popular terms, it is the culture of an elite such as the aristocracy or intelligentsia...
, seems every year to make more and more cultural artifacts of less and less quality that are consumed with some disgust by their "fans", viewed as objects themselves.
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
The Authoritarian Personality is an influential 1950 book by Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, researchers working at the University of California, Berkeley, during and shortly after World War II...
(et al. 1950). New York: Harper.
- Negative Dialectics. 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
Dialectic of Enlightenment , is the core text of Critical Theory explaining the socio-psychological status quo that had been responsible for, what the Frankfurt School considered, the failure of the Enlightenment.Written by Frankfurt School philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W...
(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
Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben is a seminal text in Critical Theory. Theodor W. Adorno wrote it during World War II, while he lived as an exile in America...
(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).
External links
Online works by Adorno