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.

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.

In recent years, Edmund Jephcott and Stanford University Press 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 Reason and Aristotle's " Metaphysics ", and a new translation of the Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Adorno's correspondence with Alban Berg, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction, and the letters to Adorno's parents, have been translated by Wieland Hoban and published by Polity Press.

Because each aphoristic essay is rather short, this work is considered one of the best introductions to Adorno's denser and more convoluted Aesthetic Theory than Dialectic of Enlightenment ( written with Max Horkheimer ).

* Paralipomena, the final chapter in Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory

Yet Adorno's intellectual nonconformism was no less shaped by the repugnance he felt towards the nationalism which swept through the Reich during the First World War.

In December 1926 Adorno's " Two Pieces for String Quartet ," op. 2 were performed in Vienna, which provided a welcome interruption from his preparations for the Habilitation.

Yet conflicts between the so-called Darmstadt school, which included composers like Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Karel Goeyvaerts, Luciano Berio and Gottfried Michael Koenig, soon arose, receiving explicit expression in Adorno's 1954 lecture, " The Aging of the New Music ", where he argued that atonality's freedom was being restricted to serialism in much the same way as it was once restricted by twelve-tone technique.

Adorno's critique of the dominant climate of post-war Germany was also directed against the pathos that had grown up around Heideggerianism, as practiced by writers like Karl Jaspers and Otto Friedrich Bollow, and which had subsequently seeped into public discourse.

But at the first lecture Adorno's attempt to open up the lecture and invite questions whenever they arose degenerated into a disruption from which he quickly fled: after a student wrote on the blackboard " If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease ," three women students approached the lectern, bared their breasts and scattered flower petals over his head.

Yet Adorno continued to resist blanket condemnations of the protest movement which would have only strengthened the reactionary thesis according to which political irrationalism was the result of Adorno's teaching.

Adorno's theory proceeds from an understanding of this primitive quality of reality which seeks to counteract whatever aims to either repress this primitive aspect or further those systems of domination set in place by this return to barbarism.

From this perspective, Adorno's writings on politics, philosophy, music and literature could be described as a lifelong critique of the ways in which each tries to justify self-mutilation as the necessary price of self-preservation.

Adorno's analysis allowed for a critique of mass culture from the left which balanced the critique of popular culture from the right.

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.

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 ).

The Group Experiment, which had been unavailable to English readers, is now available in an accessible translation by Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin on Harvard University Press, along with introductory material explaining its relation to the rest of Adorno's work and 20th century public opinion research.

Consequently he rejected Adorno's negative dialectics which he regarded as seeking a " therapeutic resolution in the framework of a religion, here the religion of history ".

Wiggershaus ( 1994 ) notes that the young generation of critical theorists largely ignore Adorno's work which, in part, stems from Adorno ’ s inability to draw practical conclusions from his theories.

The locus classicus of this view is Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's " Dialectic of Enlightenment " ( 1947 ), which traces the degeneration of the general concept of enlightenment from ancient Greece ( epitomised by the cunning ' bourgeois ' hero Odysseus ) to 20th century fascism.

The early studies focused on conservatives, beginning with Theodor W. Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality ( 1950 ).

As a classically trained pianist whose sympathies with the twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg resulted in his studying composition with Alban Berg of the Second Viennese School, Adorno's commitment to avant-garde music formed the backdrop of his subsequent writings and led to his collaboration with Thomas Mann on the latter's novel Doctor Faustus, while the two men lived in California as exiles during the Second World War.

In his new role as social theorist, Adorno's philosophical analysis of cultural phenomena heavily relied on the language of historical materialism, as concepts like reification, false consciousness and ideology came to play an ever more prominent role in his work.

Adorno's house on Seeheimer Strasse was similarly searched in July and his application for membership in the Reich Chamber of Literature was denied on the grounds that membership was limited to " persons who belong to the German nation by profound ties of character and blood.

Yet Adorno's attempts to break out of the sociology of music were, at this time, twice thwarted: neither the study of Mannheim he had been working on for years nor extracts from his study of Husserl were accepted by the Zeitschrift.

Zerzan's theories draw on Theodor Adorno's concept of negative dialectics to construct a theory of civilization as the cumulative construction of alienation.

Adorno's own radical comments on gender, ethnicity and sexuality are rarely taken into account.

A Sample of Adorno's ideas on the culture industry and popular music

Drawing upon Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno's books on totalitarianism and the Enlightenment, Bauman developed the argument that the Holocaust should not simply be considered to be an event in Jewish history, nor a regression to pre-modern barbarism.

Adorno's work sets out from a central insight he shares with all early 20th century avant-garde art: The recognition of what is primitive in ourselves and the world itself.

" At its most basic, Adorno's thought is motivated by a fundamental critique of this law.

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.

Some critics speculate that it was his Arcades Project in a final form ; this is very unlikely as the author's plans for the work had changed in the wake of Adorno's criticisms in 1938, and it seems clear that the work was flowing over its containing limits in his last years.

Adorno's idea that the mass of the people are only objects of the culture industry is linked to his feeling that the time when the working class could be the tool of overthrowing capitalism is over.

" In September Adorno's right to teach was revoked ; in March, as the swastika was run up the flag pole of town hall, the Institute's offices were searched by the Frankfurt criminal police.

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.

The essay " Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality " in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment ( 1947 ) analyzes Juliette as the embodiment of the philosophy of enlightenment.

In philosophy, Theodor Adorno's writings include the lecture Was bedeutet die Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?

According to Whitesell, Paddison quotes Adorno's 1930 essay " Reaktion und Fortschritt " as saying " Insofar as surrealist composing makes use of devalued means, it uses these as devalued means, and wins its form from the ' scandal ' produced when the dead suddenly spring up among the living " ( Whitesell 2004, 107 and 118n18 ).

In addition to publishing numerous reviews of opera performances and concerts, Adorno's " Four Songs for Medium Voice and Piano ", op. 3 was performed in Berlin in January 1929.

All the enthusiasm Adorno's students showed for intellectual matters could not erase the suspicion that, in the words of Max Frisch, culture had become an " alibi " for the absence of political consciousness.

This death, as well as the subsequent acquittal of the responsible officer, were both commented upon in Adorno's lectures.

According to Adorno's translator Robert Hullot-Kentor, the central motive of Adorno's work thus consists in determining " how life could be more than the struggle for self-preservation.