In these articles, Adorno championed avant-garde music at the same time as he critiqued the failings of musical modernity, as in the case of Stravinsky ’ s The Soldier ’ s Tale, which he called in 1923 a “ dismal Bohemian prank .” In these early writings, he was unequivocal in his condemnation of performances which either sought or pretended to achieve a transcendence which Adorno, in line with many intellectuals of the time, regarded as impossible: “ No cathedral ,” he wrote, “ can be built if no community desires one .” In the summer of 1924, Adorno received his doctorate with a study of Edmund Husserl under the direction of the unorthodox neo-Kantian Hans Cornelius.

At this time, Adorno was in intense correspondence with Walter Benjamin on the subject of the latter ’ s Arcades Project.

Yet Adorno ’ s work continued with studies of Beethoven and Richard Wagner ( published in 1939 as " Fragments on Wagner "), drafts of which he read to Benjamin during their final meeting, in December on the Italian Riviera.

Soon after settling into his new home on Riverside Drive, Adorno met with Lazarsfeld in Newark to discuss the Project ’ s plans for investigating the impact of broadcast music.

Expected to make use of devices with which listeners could press a button to indicate whether they liked or disliked a particular piece of music, Adorno bristled with distaste and astonishment: “ I reflected that culture was simply the condition that precluded a mentality that tried to measure it .” Thus Adorno suggested using individual interviews to determine listener reactions and, only three months after meeting Lasarzfeld, completed a 160-page memorandum on the Project ’ s topic, “ Music in Radio .” Adorno was primarily interested in how the musical material was affected by its distribution through the medium of radio and thought it imperative to understand how music was affected by its becoming part of daily life.

“ The meaning of a Beethoven symphony ,” he wrote, “ heard while the listener is walking around or lying in bed is very likely to differ from its effect in a concert-hall where people sit as if they were in church .” In essays published by the Institute ’ s Zeitschrift, Adorno dealt with that atrophy of musical culture which had become instrumental in accelerating tendencies-towards conformism, trivialization and standardization-already present in the larger culture.

Unsurprisingly, Adorno ’ s studies found little resonance among members of the project.

Yet during the two years during which he worked on the Project, Adorno was nevertheless prolific, publishing “ The Radio Sympthony ,” “ A Social Critique of Radio Music ” and “ On Popular Music ,” texts which, along with the draft memorandum and other unpublished writings, which are now found in Robert Hullot-Kentor ’ s recent translation, Current of Music.

Alarmed by reports from Europe, where Adorno ’ s parents suffered increasing discrimination and Benjamin was interned in Colombes, their joint study could entertain few delusions about its practical effects.

" Horkheimer ’ s contributions to this debate, in the form of the essays " The Authoritarian State ," " The End of Reason " and " The Jews and Europe " served as a foundation for what he and Adorno planned to do in their book on dialectical logic.

Fascist propaganda of this sort, Adorno wrote, " simply takes people for what they are: genuine children of today ’ s standardized mass culture who have been robbed to a great extent of their autonomy and spontaneity " The result of these labors, the 1950 study The Authoritarian Personality was pioneering in its combination of quantitative and qualitative methods of collecting and evaluating data as well as its development of the F-scale.

In addition to the aphorisms which conclude Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno put together a collection of aphorisms in honor of Horkheimer ’ s fiftieth birthday that would later be published as Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life.

“ Would you be willing ," Mann wrote, " to think through with me how the work-I mean Leverkuhn ’ s work-might look ; how you would do it if you were in league with the Devil ?” At the end of October 1949, Adorno left America for Europe just as The Authoritarian Personality was being published.

Adorno resumed his teaching duties at the university soon after his arrival, with seminars on " Kant ’ s Transcendental Dialectic ," aesthetics, Hegel, “ Contemporary Problems in the Theory of Knowledge ” and “ The Concept of Knowledge .” Adorno ’ s surprise at his students ' passionate interest in intellectual matters did not, however, blind him to continuing problems within Germany: The literary climate was dominated by writers who had remained in Germany during Hitler's rule, the government re-employed people who had been active in the Nazi apparatus and people were generally loath to own up to their own collaboration or the guilt they thus incurred.

At the same time, however, Adorno renewed his musical work: with talks at the Kranichsteiner Musikgesellschaft, another in connection with a production of Ernst Krenek ’ s opera Leben des Orest, and a seminar on “ Criteria of New Music ” at the Fifth International Summer Course for New Music at Kranichstein.

Proud of her origins, Maria wanted her son's paternal surname to be supplemented by the addition of her own name: Adorno.

Cornelius advised Adorno to withdraw his application on the grounds that the manuscript was too close to his own way of thinking.

Impressed by Horkheimer's book of aphorisms, Dawn and Decline, Adorno began working on his own book of aphorisms, what would later become Minima Moralia.

Adorno ’ s 1949 dictum —" To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric "— posed the question of what German culture could mean after Auschwitz ; his own continual revision of this dictum — in Negative Dialectics, for example, he wrote that " Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream "; while in “ Commitment ,” he wrote in 1962 that the dictum " expresses in negative form the impulse which inspires committed literature "— was part of post-war Germany ’ s struggle with history and culture.

At the same time, however, Adorno protested against disruptions of his own lectures and refused to express his solidarity with their political goals, maintaining instead his autonomy as a theoretician.

One theory is that of Theodore Adorno, who has suggested that ‘ music recites itself, is its own context, narrates without narrative ’.

Adorno also draws parallels between Spengler's critique of Enlightenment and his own analysis of Enlightenment's self-destructive tendencies.

Theodor W. Adorno, who had worked under Lazarsfeld at the Radio Project, came to represent an intellectual tradition that contrasted with Lazarsfeld's own dedication to empiricism and willingness to collaborate with industry.

Several months after qualifying as a lecturer in philosophy, Adorno delivered an inaugural lecture at the Institute for Social Research, an independent organization which had recently appointed Horkheimer as its director and, with the arrival of the literary scholar Leo Lowenthal, social psychologist Erich Fromm and philosopher Herbert Marcuse, sought to exploit recent theoretical and methodological advances in the social sciences.

In 1952 Adorno participated in a group experiment, revealing residual National Socialist attitudes among the recently democratized Germans.

More recently, the Critical Theory of Adorno and Marcuse has been criticized as being a degeneration of the original Frankfurt school, particularly the work of empirical psychologist Erich Fromm, who did surveys and experiments to study the development of personality in response to economic stress and social change ( Michael Macoby's Preface to Fromm's Social Character in a Mexican Village ).

Another member of the Frankfurt school, Theodor Adorno, published The Authoritarian Personality, in 1950, which was an influential sociological book which could be taken as something of a proto-psychohistorical book.

Receiving favorable reports from Professors Tillich and Horkheimer, as well as Benjamin and Kracauer, the University conferred on Adorno the venia legendi in February 1931 ; on the very day his revised study was published, in March 1933, Hitler seized dictatorial powers.

Though Adorno was not himself an Institute member, the journal nevertheless published many of his essays, including " The Social Situation of Music " ( 1932 ), " On Jazz " ( 1936 ), " On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening " ( 1938 ) and " Fragments on Wagner " ( 1938 ).

During this time Adorno not only produced a significant series of notes on Beethoven ( which was never completed and only published posthumously ), but also published Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy in 1960.

A debate launched in 1961 by Adorno and Karl Popper, later published as the Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, arose out of disagreements at the 1959 14th German Sociology Conference in Berlin.

His isolation was only compounded by articles published in the magazine alternative, which, following the lead of Hannah Arendt ’ s articles in Merkur, claimed Adorno had subjected Benjamin to pressure during his years of exile in Berlin and compiled Benjamin ’ s Writings and Letters with a great deal of bias.

An open appeal published in Die Zeit, signed by Adorno, called for an inquiry into the social reasons that gave rise to this assassination attempt as well as an investigation into the Springer Press ' manipulation of public opinion.

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.

A manuscript of Benjamin's " On the Concept of History " was passed to Theodor Adorno by Hannah Arendt, who crossed the French-Spanish border at Portbou a few months later, and was subsequently published by the Institute for Social Research ( temporarily relocated to New York ) in 1942.

When Theodor W. Adorno, a founder of Critical Theory, published a study with his colleagues on The Authoritarian Personality in 1954, it had at first an enormous intellectual impact.

In 1950, Theodor W. Adorno published an essay entitled " Spengler after the Downfall " ( in German: Spengler nach dem Untergang ) to commemorate what would have been Oswald Spengler's 70th birthday.

It published work by Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, El Lissitsky, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Antonio Gramsci, and Louis Althusser, and interviewed Jean-Paul Sartre, Georg Lukács, and Lucio Colletti.

Shortly after Adorno and others at the Berkley research group formulated their influential and highly debated F-scale ( F for fascist ), published in The Authoritarian Personality ( 1950 ), which included among the fascist traits of the scale the " contempt for everything discriminated against or weak.

Before his many books were published Hans Albert was already known to a broader audience for his contributions to the positivism dispute answering his opponents of the so called Frankfurt School ( school of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer at Frankfurt's Institute of Sociology ).

Dialectic of Enlightenment () is a book of philosophy and social criticism written by Frankfurt School philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno and first published in 1944.