1

Theodor W. Adorno
Name Theodor W. Adorno

Birth September 11, 1903 (Frankfurt, Germany)

Death August 6, 1969 (Visp, Switzerland)

School/traditio
critical theory
n

Main interests social theory, psychoanalysis, musicology, cultural studies

Culture industry, Authoritarian Personality, negative

Notable ideas
dialectics, non-conformist conformist

Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber,

Influenced by
Freud, Husserl

Jürgen Habermas, Edward W. Said, Jean Baudrillard,

Influenced
Pierre Bourdieu, John Zerzan, Michael Jackson

Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno (September 11, 1903 – August 6, 1969) was a German
sociologist, philosopher, musicologist, and composer. He was a member of the Frankfurt School along
with Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, and others. He was also
the Music Director of the Radio Project.

Already as a young music critic and amateur sociologist, Theodor W. 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 Frankfurt as an only child to the wine merchant Oscar Alexander
Wiesengrund (1870–1941, of Jewish descent, converted to Protestantism) and the Catholic singer
Maria Barbara, born Calvelli-Adorno. It was the second half of this name that he adopted as his
surname 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; he especially liked four-handed playing because, he later wrote, the
need for coordination increased his skill and appreciation.[1] His childhood joy was increased by the
family's annual summer sojourn in Amorbach. He attended the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gymnasium 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 Sekles and read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason 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 and sociology. There
he wrote his first academic work, a review of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. He completed his studies
swiftly: by the end of 1924 he graduated with a dissertation on Edmund Husserl. Before his
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graduation, Adorno had already met with his most important intellectual collaborators, Max
Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin.

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 Berg to pursue studies in Vienna beginning in January, 1925. He also formed
contacts with other greats of the Viennese School, namely to Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg.
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!)" [2] Schoenberg’s revolutionary
atonality particularly inspired the 22-year-old to pen philosophical observations on the new music,
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 to flourish.
He did however remain editor-in-chief of the avant-garde magazine Anbruch. His musicological
writing already displayed his philosophical ambitions. Other lasting influences from Adorno's time in
Vienna included Karl Kraus, whose lectures he attended with Alban Berg, and Georg Lukács whose
Theory of the Novel had already enthused him while attending Gymnasium and whose History and
Class Consciousness he had reviewed a year previously.[3]

The intermediate Frankfurt years

After returning from Vienna, Adorno experienced another setback. After his dissertation supervisor
Hans Cornelius 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: Construction of the aesthetic (Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen)
to his new supervisor, Paul Tillich. 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 — the whole is the untrue (from Minima Moralia). However,
Adorno's credential was revoked by the Nazis, along with those of all professors of non-Aryan
descent, in 1933.

Among Adorno's first courses was a seminar on Benjamin's treatise The Origin of German Tragic
Drama. His 1932 essay "On the Social Situation of Music" ("Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik")
was Adorno's 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.

Commuter between Berlin and Oxford (1934-1937)

Beginning in the late 1920s during stays in Berlin, Adorno established close relations with Walter
Benjamin and Ernst Bloch; 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 Margarethe
('Gretel') Karplus (1902-1993), whom Adorno would marry in London in 1937. In 1934, fleeing from
the Nazi regime, he emigrated to England, with hopes of obtaining a professorship at Oxford. 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"
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("Über Jazz"). It should be noted that "jazz" 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. 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 States, led to an offer of employment in America.

Émigré in the USA (1938-1949)

After visiting New York for the first time in 1937 he decided to resettle there. In Brussels he bade his
parents, who followed in 1939, farewell, and 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. [5] 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 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.' [6]

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. Consequently, Adorno did
not consider rationalism a path towards human emancipation. For that, he looked toward the arts.

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'[7]. 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 Mann on the musicological details of the latter's novel Doktor Faustus. Apart from that, 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.

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. His
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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 purported a 'sad science'
under the impression of Fascism, Stalinism and Culture Industry, which seemingly offered no
alternative: "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 USA failed in 1953.

Here is a list of his multifaceted 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.
 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.
o 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.

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'. 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" [9] On the other side of the spectrum, the right accused him of providing the intellectual
basis for leftist violence. 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."

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
 5
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.

Theory
Adorno was chiefly influenced by Max Weber's critique of disenchantment, Georg Lukacs's Hegelian
interpretation of Marxism, as well as Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history, although the influence
of the former has until recently been underestimated. 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 sensuous, 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". [10] 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 culture and
scholarly popular culture 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 psychology.
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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 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.

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
scientific and quantitative, although the collective work The Authoritarian Personality 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 Dahrendorf and Karl
Popper, 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 political action.

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, while Müller argues against the existence of such a system. In his argument, he
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.
 7
Georg Lukacs, 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

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.

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 Strauss, who also believe in a
hermeneutics of culture, 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, that 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[citation needed].

Adorno's responses to his critics

Adorno's defenders[who?] reply to his positivist and neoconservative 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

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

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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).

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, rather nastily,
called "the music of slaves".

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.

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 Project 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 Enlightenment, written by Adorno with his close associate Max Horkheimer, 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 Press have published new translations of some of Adorno's lectures
 9
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 the Philosophy of New Music by Robert Hullot-Kentor, from
University of Minnesota Press, 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

Adorno's theoretical method is closely related to his understanding of music and Arnold Schoenberg
and other contemporary composers' atonal (less so "twelve-tone") techniques (Adorno had studied
composition for several years with Alban Berg), which challenged the hierarchical nature of traditional
tonality 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 School 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, or globalization of the market today) 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 "reification" of
political polls and spin as well as a culture that in being aggressively "anti" high culture, 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[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. 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:
 10
o Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1973.
o 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).