In 1953, sociologist Theodor W. Adorno conducted a study of the astrology column of a Los Angeles newspaper as part of a project examining mass culture in capitalist society.

One of the nuns in this group was Saint Catharine Fieschi Adorno, who died on September 14, 1510.

Berg passed this on to his students, one of whom, Theodor Adorno, stated: " The main principle he conveyed was that of variation: everything was supposed to develop out of something else and yet be intrinsically different ".

This finding was echoed by Theodor Adorno.

Critical theory was established as a school of thought by five Frankfurt School theoreticians: Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Jürgen Habermas.

" For Adorno and Horkheimer, this posed the problem of how to account for the apparent persistence of domination in the absence of the very contradiction that, according to traditional critical theory, was the source of domination itself.

Another paradigmatic exhortation was articulated by philosopher and composer Theodor Adorno, who, in the 1940s, challenged conventional surface coherence and appearance of harmony typical of the rationality of Enlightenment thinking.

A paradigmatic modernist exhortation was articulated by philosopher and composer Theodor Adorno, which in the 1940s, invited to challenge conventional surface coherence and appearance of harmony:

Mustafa took refuge in the city of Gallipoli but the sultan, who was greatly aided by a Genoese commander named Adorno, besieged him there and stormed the place.

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.

Theodor Adorno produced numerous reports on the effects of " atomized listening " which radio supported and of which he was highly critical.

Theodor W. Adorno (; ; born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund ; September 11, 1903 – August 6, 1969 ) was a German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society.

Upon his return to Frankfurt, Adorno was influential to the reconstitution of German intellectual life through debates with Karl Popper on the limitations of positivist science, critiques of Heidegger's jargon of authenticity, writings on German responsibility for the Holocaust, and continued interventions into matters of public policy.

Thus his earliest publications carried the name Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno ; upon his application for US citizenship, his name was modified to Theodor W. Adorno.

Prior to his graduation at the top of his class, Adorno was already swept up by the revolutionary mood of the time, as is evidenced by his reading of Georg Lukacs's The Theory of the Novel that year, as well as by his fascination with Ernst Bloch's The Spirit of Utopia, of which he would later write:

Along with future collaborators like Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Ernst Bloch, Adorno was profoundly disillusioned by the ease with which Germany's intellectual and spiritual leaders — among them Max Weber, Max Scheler, Ernst Simmel, as well as his friend Siegfried Kracauer — came out in support of the war.

The eldest daughter of the Karplus family, Margarete, or Gretel, moved in the intellectual circles of Berlin, where she was acquainted with Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Bloch, each of whom Adorno would become familiar with during the mid-20s ; after fourteen years, Gretel and Theodor were married in 1937.

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.

Through Cornelius's seminars, Adorno met his future collaborator Max Horkheimer, through whom he was then introduced to Friedrich Pollock.

Alban Berg, the man Adorno referred to as " my master and teacher ," was among the most prescient of his young pupil's early friends:

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

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.

After leaving Vienna, Adorno traveled through Italy, where he met with Kracauer, Benjamin, and the economist Alfred Sohn-Rethel, with whom he developed a lasting friendship, before returning to Frankfurt.

Soon after his return to Europe, Gretel moved to Britain, where she and Adorno were married on September 8, 1937 ; a little over a month later, Horkheimer telegrammed from New York with news of a position Adorno could take up with the Princeton Radio Project, then under the directorship of the Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld.

“ 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.

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.

After stopping in Paris, where he met Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Michel Leiris and Rene Leibowitz, Adorno delivered a lecture entitled " The Present State of Empirical Social Research in Germany " at a conference on opinion research.

In 1963, Adorno was elected to the post of chairman of the German Sociological Society, where he presided over two important conferences: in 1964, on " Max Weber and Sociology " and in 1968 on " Late Capitalism or Industrial Society ".

Adorno began writing an introduction to a collection of poetry by Rudolf Borchardt, which was connected with a talk entitled " Charmed Language ," delivered in Zurich, followed by a talk on aesthetics in Paris where he met Beckett again.

Adorno perceived this in terms of what he called the " culture industry ", where the art is controlled and formulated by the needs of the market and given to a passive population which accepts it — what is marketed is art that is non-challenging and formally incoherent, but which serves its purpose of giving the audience leisure and something to watch or observe.

Between 1924 and 1927 he remained in Italy, " mainly in Capri, where Benjamin and Bloch were staying ", meeting Adorno and Kracauer also at Capri in 1924.

Theodor Adorno ( 1903 – 1969 ) also investigated authoritarian individuals and anti-Semitism.

Adorno ( 1950 ) explained that individuals with an authoritarian personality type had been stunted in terms of developing an ability to control the sexual and aggressive id impulses.

However, because of profound methodological disagreements with Lazarsfeld over the use of techniques like listener surveys and " Little Annie " ( Adorno thought both grossly simplified and ignored the degree to which expressed tastes were the result of commercial marketing ), Adorno left the project in 1941.

Yet when Adorno turned his attention to Kierkegaard, watchwords like " anxiety ," " inwardness " and " leap "— instructive for existentialist philosophy — were detached from their theological origins and posed, instead, as problems for aesthetics.

Forbidden from leaving their homes between 8pm and 6am and prohibited from going more than five miles from their houses, émigrés like Adorno, who would not be naturalized until November 1943, were severely restricted in their movements.

“ 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.

Adorno rejected the so-called unity of theory and praxis advocated by the students and argued that the students ' actions were premised upon a mistaken analysis of the situation.

Adorno saw the culture industry as an arena in which critical tendencies or potentialities were eliminated.

The most prominent philosophers with which the so-called ' Frankfurt School ' is associated were Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas and Max Horkheimer.

His often polemical views of music history and aesthetics were crucial to many of the 20th century's significant musicologists and critics, including Theodor Adorno, Charles Rosen, and Carl Dahlhaus.

Adorno believed people with authoritarian personalities were the most likely to be prejudiced against groups of lower status.

Theodor Adorno criticized the belief in a spontaneity of the masses: according to him, the masses were an artificial product of " administrated " modern life.

The competing influences — Brecht ’ s Marxism, Adorno ’ s critical theory, Gerschom Scholem ’ s Jewish mysticism — were central to his work, although their philosophic differences remained unresolved.

From the early 20th century until the 1960s, continental philosophers were only intermittently discussed in British and American universities, despite an influx of continental philosophers, particularly German Jewish students of Nietzsche and Heidegger, to the United States on account of the persecution of the Jews and later World War II ; Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Theodor W. Adorno, and Walter Kaufmann are probably the most notable of this wave, arriving in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

" Thus Adorno conceded that Spengler's insights were often more profound than those of his more liberal contemporaries, and his predictions more far-reaching.

Adorno and Horkheimer were key members of the Frankfurt School.

Horkheimer and Adorno were influenced heavily by major developers of social, political and economic theory, most notably:

A range of slightly later composers in West Germany, including Helmut Lachenmann, Nicolaus A. Huber ( both of whom were students of Nono ), and Mathias Spahlinger responded to political concerns in a more abstract fashion, reflecting to some extent the ideas of Theodor Adorno and writing in opposition to the perceived demands made upon music ( in terms of passive listening, audience pleasing, and so on ) made by the culture industry.

The Adorno family was a patrician family in Genoa, Italy, of the Ghibelline party, several of whom were Doges of the republic.