Working for the newly relocated Institute for Social Research, Adorno collaborated on influential studies of authoritarianism, anti-semitism and propaganda that would later serve as models for sociological studies the Institute carried out in post-war Germany.

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:

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.

7 premiered in Frankfurt, at which time Adorno introduced himself to Berg and both agreed the young philosopher and composer would study with Berg in Vienna.

As the work proceeded — and Kierkegaard's overcoming of Hegel's idealism is revealed to be a mere interiorization — Adorno excitedly remarks in a letter to Berg that he is writing without looking over his shoulder at the faculty who would soon evaluate his work.

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.

In addition to helping with the Zeitschrift Adorno was expected to be the Institute's liaison with Benjamin, who soon passed on to New York the study of Charles Baudelaire he hoped would serve as a model of the larger Arcades Project.

" At around the same time Adorno and Horkheimer began planning for a joint work on " dialectical logic ," which would later become Dialectic of Enlightenment.

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.

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.

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.

One objection which would soon take on ever greater importance, was that critical thought must adopt the standpoint of the oppressed, to which Adorno replied that negative dialectics was concerned " with the dissolution of standpoint thinking itself.

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

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, 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.

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.

But Adorno felt that the culture industry would never permit a sufficient core of challenging material to emerge on to the market that might disturb the status quo and stimulate the final communist state to emerge.

This would deny Adorno contemporary political significance, arguing that politics in a prosperous society is more concerned with action than with thought.

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.

In 1947 Theodor W. Adorno defined what would be later called " blaming the victim ," as " one of the most sinister features of the Fascist character ".

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.

As a pioneer of a self-reflexive sociology who prefigured Bourdieu's ability to factor in the effect of reflection on the societal object, Adorno realized that some criticism ( including deliberate disruption of his classes in the 1960s ) could never be answered in a dialogue between equals if, as he seems to have believed, what the naive ethnographer or sociologist thinks of a human essence is always changing over time.

Theorists who have had an influence on this field include Karl Deutsch and Theodor Adorno.

Other famous scholars who have taught at the University of Vienna are: Theodor W. Adorno, Manfred Bietak, Theodor Billroth, Ludwig Boltzmann, Franz Brentano, Anton Bruckner, Rudolf Carnap, Conrad Celtes, Viktor Frankl, Sigmund Freud, Eduard Hanslick, Edmund Hauler, Hans Kelsen, Adam František Kollár, Johann Josef Loschmidt, Fran Miklošič, Oskar Morgenstern, Otto Neurath, Johann Palisa, Pope Pius II, Baron Carl von Rokitansky, August Schleicher, Moritz Schlick, Ludwig Karl Schmarda, Joseph von Sonnenfels, Josef Stefan, Leopold Vietoris, Jalile Jalil, Carl Auer von Welsbach, and Olga Taussky-Todd.

Some scholars have therefore limited their view of the Frankfurt School to Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Lowenthal and Pollock.

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

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.

" After Adorno, also other authors, like professor Kriss Ravetto, have described victim blaming as a characteristic fascist trait.

Theodor Adorno suggested that culture industries churn out a debased mass of unsophisticated, sentimental products which have replaced the more ' difficult ' and critical art forms which might lead people to actually question social life.

According to Bruckner, modern philosophers from Heidegger to Gadamer, Derrida, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno have mounted a broad attack on the Enlightenment, claiming that " all the evils of our epoch were spawned by this philosophical and literary episode: capitalism, colonialism, totalitarianism.

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.

Thea Dorn's pseudonym alludes to Theodor Adorno, whose works she read and found hard to understand.

Though unsatisfied with Adorno and Horkeimer's thought presented in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Habermas shares the view that, in the form of instrumental rationality, the era of modernity marks a move away from the liberation of enlightenment and toward a new form of enslavement.

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.

Books from the group, like Adorno ’ s and Horkheimer ’ s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Adorno ’ s Negative Dialectics, critiqued what they saw as the failure of the Enlightenment project and the problems of modernity.

Critical theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Zygmunt Bauman propose that modernity or industrialization represents a departure from the central tenets of the Enlightenment and towards nefarious processes of alienation, such as commodity fetishism and the Holocaust ( Adorno 1973 ; Bauman 1989 ).

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.