Continental · 1903–1969
Theodor W. Adorno
Frankfurt philosopher, music theorist and critic of the culture industry
Adorno argued that modern society integrates everything into exchange and administration, so thought must resist by attending to what concepts leave out: a “negative dialectics” with no final reconciliation.
Life and thought
Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) was born in Frankfurt to a Jewish wine merchant and a Catholic singer, and trained in both philosophy and music, studying composition with Alban Berg in Vienna. Driven out by the Nazis, he spent years in Oxford, New York and Los Angeles, where he wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment with Horkheimer. After returning to Frankfurt in 1949 he became the Institute’s leading voice and a public intellectual of post-war Germany.
Adorno argued that modern society reduces everything to what can be exchanged, measured and administered, and that the “culture industry” of film, radio and popular music turns out standardised pleasures that keep people content with the system. Philosophy, he thought, cannot offer a final synthesis as Hegel did: “the whole is the false”. Negative dialectics instead attends to what concepts leave out, the particular and the suffering, without promising reconciliation. His remark that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric posed a question he later qualified himself.