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.

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.

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.

Adorno ’ s own recently published Minima Moralia was not only well received in the press, but also met with great admiration from Thomas Mann, who wrote to Adorno from America in 1952:

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.

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.

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 further disruptions to his lectures, Adorno canceled the lectures for the rest of the seminar, continuing only with his philosophy seminar.

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.

The inherent danger of the culture industry is the cultivation of false psychological needs that can only be met and satisfied by the products of capitalism ; thus Adorno and Horkheimer especially perceived mass-produced culture as dangerous to the more technically and intellectually difficult high arts.

Dutch musicologist Henk de Velde, alluding to Adorno speaking of Alban Berg, called Scelsi " the Master of the yet smaller transition ," to which Harry Halbreich added that " in fact, his music is only transition.

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.

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.

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.

After receiving an invitation from Horkheimer to visit the Institute in New York, Adorno sailed for New York on June 9, 1937 and stayed there for two weeks.

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.

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.

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.

At the invitation of Wolfgang Steinecke, Adorno took part in the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music in Kranichstein from 1951 to 1958.

During the winter semester of 1968-9 Adorno was on sabbatical leave from the university and thus able to dedicate himself to the completion of his book of aesthetics.

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.

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.

After months of strained relations, Horkheimer and Adorno reestablished their essential theoretical alliance during meetings in Paris.

In his theoretical work, Strauss showed the influence of the ancient classics, Nietzsche, Heidegger as well as Adorno, but his outlook was also radically anti-bourgeois.

The problems posed by the rise of fascism with the demise of the liberal state and the market ( together with the failure of a social revolution to materialize in its wake ), constitute the theoretical and historical perspective that frames the overall argument of the book – the two theses that “ Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology .” The history of human societies, as well as that of the formation of individual ego or self, is re-evaluated from the standpoint of what Horkheimer and Adorno perceived at the time as the ultimate outcome of this history: the collapse or “ regression ” of reason, with the rise of National Socialism, into something resembling the very forms of superstition and myth out of which reason had supposedly emerged as a result of historical progress or development.

* Horkheimer, Max ; Adorno, Theodor W. ( 1944 /' 47 ) Dialectic of Enlightenment

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.

Although he never returned to Germany to live, he remained one of the major theorists associated with the Frankfurt School, along with Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno ( among others ).

Weber has influenced many later social theorists, such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, György Lukács and Jürgen Habermas.

Out of the Frankfurt School, thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Jürgen Habermas combined Marxian and Freudian perspectives.

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.

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

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

In light of this situation, Horkheimer soon found a permanent post for Adorno at the Institute.

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

“ In view of what is now threatening to engulf Europe ,” Horkheimer wrote, “ our present work is essentially destined to pass things down through the night that is approaching: a kind of message in a bottle ” As Adorno continued his work in New York with radio talks on music and a lecture on Soren Kierkegaard's doctrine of love, Benjamin fled Paris and attempted to make an illegal border crossing.

" 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.

In November 1941 Adorno followed Horkheimer to what Thomas Mann called " German California ," setting up house in a Pacific Palisades neighborhood of German emigres which included Bertolt Brecht and Arnold Schoenberg.