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.

" 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 sees the rise of the Nazis as confirmation of Spengler's ideas about " Caesarism " and the triumph of force-politics over the market.

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

Adorno also criticizes Spengler's use of language, which overly relies on fetishistic terms like " Soul ", " Blood " and " Destiny.

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.

For Adorno and Horkheimer ( relying on the economist Friedrich Pollock ’ s thesis on National Socialism ), state intervention in the economy had effectively abolished the tension in capitalism between the " relations of production " and " material productive forces of society ," a tension which, according to traditional Critical Theory, constituted the primary contradiction within capitalism.

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.

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.

After he was exiled from Genoa amid political disputes compromising main families Fregoso and Adorno, Antonio de Noli ( Navy captain, and cartography expert ) sailed to Portugal ca 1447 in command of a small expedition of three vessels and with his brother Bartholomew ( a Genoa lawyer ) and nephew Raphael.

Adorno arrived with a draft of his Philosophy of New Music, a dialectical critique of twelve-tone music, which Adorno himself felt, while writing, was already a departure from the theory of art he had spent the previous decades elaborating.

Rescued by two Neapolitan barons who had sided for Louis, Raimondello Orsini and Tommaso di Sanseverino, after six months of siege he succeeded in making his escape to Genoa with six galleys sent him by doge Antoniotto Adorno.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Additionally, Adorno assisted Thomas Mann on his novel Doctor Faustus after the latter asked for his help.

Until his death in 1969, twenty years after his return, Adorno contributed to the intellectual foundations of the Federal Republic, as a professor at Frankfurt University, critic of the vogue enjoyed by Heideggerian philosophy, partisan of critical sociology and teacher of music at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music.

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 ’ 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.

After seven years of work, Adorno completed Negative Dialectics in 1966, after which, during the summer semester of 1967 and the winter semester of 1967-8, he offered regular philosophy seminars to discuss the book chapter by chapter.

After a group of students marched to the lectern, unfurling a banner that read " Berlin ’ s left-wing fascists greet Teddy the Classicist ," a number of those present left the lecture in protest after Adorno refused to abandon his talk in favor of discussing his attitude on the current political situation.

One example of the clash of intellectual culture and Adorno's methods can be found in Paul Lazarsfeld, the American sociologist for whom Adorno worked in the middle 1930s after fleeing Hitler.

Perhaps the culmination of the school took place at Darmstadt almost immediately after WWII, at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, wherein Schoenberg — who was invited but too ill to travel — was ultimately usurped in musical ideology by the music of his pupil, Webern, as composers and performers from the Second Viennese School ( e. g. Leibowitz, Rufer, Adorno, Kolisch, Stadlen, Stuckenschmidt, Scherchen ) converged with the new serialists ( e. g. Boulez, Stockhausen, Maderna, Nono, et al.

Hofmann 2005 ) from philosopher Theodor W. Adorno that " to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric " ( Adorno 1981, 34 ).

For Adorno and Horkheimer state intervention in the economy had effectively abolished the tension in capitalism between the " relations of production " and " material productive forces of society ," a tension which, according to traditional critical theory, constituted the primary contradiction within capitalism.

As early as 1938, Theodor Adorno had already identified a trend toward the dissolution of " a culturally dominant set of values " ( Beard and Gloag 2005, 141 ), citing the commodification of all genres as beginning of the end of genre or value distinctions in music ( Adorno 2002, 293 – 95 ).

Before his graduation, Adorno had already met with his most important intellectual collaborators, Max Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin.

Upon moving to Vienna in January 1925, Adorno immersed himself in the musical culture which had grown up around Schoenberg: in addition to his twice-weekly sessions with Berg, Adorno continued his studies on piano with Eduard Steuermann and befriended the violinist Rudolf Kolisch.

In it, Adorno not only deviated from the theoretical program Horkheimer had laid out a year earlier, but challenged philosophy's very capacity for comprehending reality as such: " For the mind ," Adorno announced, " is indeed not capable of producing or grasping the totality of the real, but it may be possible to penetrate the detail, to explode in miniature the mass of merely existing reality.

Before his emigration in autumn 1934, Adorno began work on a Singspiel based on Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer entitled The Treasure of Indian Joe, which he would, however, never complete ; by the time he fled Hitler's Germany Adorno had already written over a hundred opera or concert reviews and an additional fifty critiques of music composition.

By this time, the Institute for Social Research had relocated to New York City and began making overtures to Adorno.

“ 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.

Before his return, Adorno had not only reached an agreement with a Tübingen publisher to print an expanded version of Philosophy of New Music, but completed two compositions: Four Songs for Voice and Piano by Stefan George, op. 7, and Three Choruses for Female Voices from the Poems of Theodor Daubler, op.

Because Adorno ’ s American citizenship would have been forfeited by the middle of 1952 had he continued to stay outside the country, he returned once again to Santa Monica to survey his prospects at the Hacker Foundation.

Like many of his students, Adorno too opposed the emergency laws, as well as the war in Vietnam, which, he said, proved the continued existence of the " world of torture that had begun in Auschwitz ” The situation only deteriorated with the police shooting of Benno Ohnesorg at a protest against the Shah's visit.

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.

According to Adorno, society's self-preservation had become indistinguishable from societally sanctioned self-sacrifice: of " primitive " peoples, primitive aspects of the ego and those primitive, mimetic desires found in imitation and sympathy.

It has also been closely identified with certain kinds of artistic and cultural practice by Cornelius Castoriadis, Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Ranciere, and Theodor Adorno.

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.

Adorno, along with the other major Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, argued that advanced capitalism had managed to contain or liquidate the forces that would bring about its collapse and that the revolutionary moment, when it would have been possible to transform it into socialism, had passed.

Adorno argued that capitalism had become more entrenched through its attack on the objective basis of revolutionary consciousness and through liquidation of the individualism that had been the basis of critical consciousness.

Despite the central arguments of Greenberg, Adorno and others, the term " avant-garde " has been co-opted and misapplied by various sectors of the mainstream culture industry since the 1960s, chiefly as a marketing tool to publicise popular music and commercial cinema.

He has been widely described, most notably by Theodor Adorno, as a negative Jewish stereotype, with his race expressed through " distorted " music and " muttering " speech ; other critics, however, disagree with this assessment.

As the last finished piece of work from Benjamin, the Theses on the Philosophy of History ( noted above ) is often cited ; Adorno claimed this had been written in the spring of 1940, weeks before the Germans invaded France.

Mimesis has been theorised by thinkers as diverse as Plato, Aristotle, Philip Sidney, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Adam Smith, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Erich Auerbach, Luce Irigaray, René Girard, Nikolas Kompridis, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Michael Taussig, Merlin Donald, and Homi Bhabha.

In the later twentieth century, following Adorno, the 1755 earthquake has sometimes been compared to the Holocaust as a catastrophe that transformed European culture and philosophy.

The critical theorists Adorno and Marcuse have been severely criticized by Alasdair MacIntyre in Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and Polemic.

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 ).

Some critics have been troubled by the problem that, as Theodor Adorno put it, " there is something peculiar about the Missa solemnis.

Many postmodern writers and some feminists ( e. g. Jane Flax ) have made similar arguments, likewise seeing the Enlightenment conception of reason as totalitarian, and as not having been enlightened enough since, for Adorno and Horkheimer, though it banishes myth it falls back into a further myth, that of individualism and formal ( or mythic ) equality under instrumental reason.

In particular, the latter's strong disdain for popular forms of art and literature — archetypically expressed in Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis of the culture industry — has been criticised as a proponent of monoglossia ; practitioners of cultural studies have used Bakhtin's conceptual framework to theorise the critical reappropriation of mass-produced entertainment forms by the public.

It was especially central to the concerns of Walter Benjamin, whose 1935 / 36 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction has been highly influential, as has the work of Theodor Adorno. Gramscianism can see elite culture as " an instrument of social control ".

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.