(1903-1969) German philosopher, social theorist, musicologist, and critic of culture. Adorno was the main contributor to The Authoritarian Personality 1950, a psychoanalytical and social research project stemming partly from Erich Fromm’s ideas, in which the F-scale (F standing for fascism) was constructed. His early writings show the influence of the Marxist thinking of Georg Lukacs and Ernst Bloch, as well as considerable interest in Sigmund Freud.
Adorno was a leading member of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) at Frankfurt, which he joined 1930. When the Nazis came to power, the institute moved with its director, Max Horkheimer, to the US and Adorno eventually followed, acquiring US citizenship. In the 1940s he collaborated with Horkheimer on Dialectic of Enlightenment 1947, arguing that rationality had still not freed human beings from their mythic past and that domination of the natural world had led to the control of the social world. “Progress” had turned out to be barbarism, and science the instrument of dehumanization. He returned to Germany 1949.
Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life 1951 is a series of aphorisms in the style of Friedrich Nietzsche, many of which are concerned with the problems of exile. In Negative Dialects 1966 he is critical of all philosophers because they believed in some nonexistent absolute or ultimate entity that would explain everything else. This was dangerous, he argued, because it led to totalitarian and oppressive thinking that turned the individual into an object to be manipulated. Adorno also wrote extensively on the esthetics and sociology of music and art, including Die Philosophie der neuen Musik/The Philosophy of Modern Music 1947.