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.

This surrealism is further differentiated from a fourth type of music, the so-called Gebrauchsmusik of Paul Hindemith and Hanns Eisler, which attempts to break through alienation from within itself, even at the expense of its immanent form ( Adorno 2002, 396 – 97 ).

A film like Patton is popular art which intends controversy in a world of social order and unity which, according to Adorno, is regressing into a cultural blandness.

Discussing Theodor Adorno, Max Paddison ( 1993, 90 ) defines surrealist music as that which " juxtaposes its historically devalued fragments in a montage-like manner which enables them to yield up new meanings within a new aesthetic unity ," though Lloyd Whitesell says this is Paddison's gloss of the term ( Whitesell 2004, 118 ).

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.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of critical theory, as Adorno and Horkheimer elaborated in their Dialectic of Enlightenment ( 1947 ), is a certain ambivalence concerning the ultimate source or foundation of social domination, an ambivalence which gave rise to the “ pessimism ” of the new critical theory over the possibility of human emancipation and freedom.

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.

" 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.

Such work may be based on feminist, gender studies, queer theory, or postcolonial theory, or the work of Theodor Adorno.

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.

At this point Adorno reversed his earlier priorities: now his musical activities came second to the development of a philosophical theory of aesthetics.

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.

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.

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

Theodor Adorno, a leading philosopher of the Frankfurt School, who was strongly influenced by Hegel, tried to take a middle path between these extremes: Adorno contradicted Hegel's motto " the true is the whole " with his new version, " the whole is the false ," but he wished to preserve critical theory as a negative, oppositional version of the utopia described by Hegel's " spirit.

Beyond literary criticism or historical analysis, Schmitt's book also lays out a comprehensive theory of the relationship between aesthetics and politics that responds to alternative ideas developed by Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno.

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

Marx's theory depended on the willingness of the working class to overthrow the ruling class, but Adorno and Horkheimer postulated that the culture industry has undermined the revolutionary movement.

Diametrically opposed to the aristocratic view would be the theory of culture industry developed by Frankfurt School critical theorists such as Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse.

Furthermore, Karl Polanyi, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Niccolò Machiavelli, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault are cited as major sources within the Critical theory of International Relations.

Their lyrics make reference to Anna Karina, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer & the Frankfurt School, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Attali, Guy Debord, and other aspects of European critical theory and culture.

The authoritarian personality is a syndrome theory that was developed by the researchers Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, Levinson and Sanford ( 1950 ) at The University of California.

During the same period members of the Frankfurt school, such as Theodor W. Adorno ( 1903 – 1969 ) and Max Horkheimer ( 1895 – 1973 ), developed critical theory, integrating the historical materialistic elements of Marxism with the insights of Weber, Freud and Gramsci — in theory, if not always in name — often characterizing capitalist modernity as a move away from the central tenets of enlightenment.

This finding was echoed by Theodor Adorno.

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.

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.

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.

Amidst the vogue enjoyed by existentialism and positivism in early 20th century Europe, Adorno advanced a dialectical conception of natural history that critiqued the twin temptations of ontology and empiricism through studies of Kierkegaard and Husserl.

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

At the end of his schooldays, Adorno not only benefited from the rich concert offerings of Frankfurt-in which one could hear performances of works by Schoenberg, Schreker, Stravinsky, Bartók, Busoni, Delius and Hindemith-but also began studying music composition at the Hoch Conservatory while taking private lessons with well-respected composers Bernhard Sekles and Eduard Jung.

" Undaunted by his academic prospects, Adorno threw himself once again into composition.

At the same time, however, and owing to both the presence of another prominent sociologist at the Institute, Karl Mannheim, as well as the methodological problem posed by treating objects-like " musical material "-as ciphers of social contradictions, Adorno was compelled to abandon any notion of " value-free " sociology in favor of a form of ideology critique which held on to an idea of truth.

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.

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.

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.

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 ".

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.

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.

Soon Adorno himself would become an object of the students ' ire.

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.

But as 1968 progressed, Adorno became increasingly critical of the students ' disruptions to university 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.

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.

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.

Among his students in Frankfurt were Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.

His composition students included Paul Hindemith, Rudi Stephan, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Rudolf, and Erich Schmid.