Born in Frankfurt, Germany, on September 11, 1903, into an upper-class bourgeois family, the son of a German Jewish father and Italian Catholic mother, Adorno studied philosophy, psychology, and musicology at the University of Frankfurt where he received his PhD in 1924. With the rise to power of Hitler’s fascism, Adorno first emigrated to England and then joined the Institute for Social Research in exile at Columbia University in New York.
During the 1930s, he became closely connected with the Institute’s attempt to develop a critical theory of society. This involved Adorno in one of the first attempts to develop a Marxian critique of mass culture, which Adorno and the Institute discerned was becoming ever more significant as an instrument of ideological manipulation and social control in democratic capitalist, fascist, and communist societies. Working with the “father of mass communications,” Paul Lazarsfeld, at the Princeton Radio Project and then at Columbia University, Adorno participated in one of the first sustained research projects on the effects of popular music. Later, Adorno was also to work on one of the first attempts to develop a critical analysis of television, producing an article on “How to Look at Television” in 1954.
Adorno was a key member of the interdisciplinary social research projects at the Institute and worked on their studies of fascism and anti-Semitism. Adorno and Institute director Max Horkheimer went to California in the early 1940s, where they worked closely on the book that became Dialectic of Enlightenment (1948 [trans. 1972]). In Minima Moralia (1974) and other essays of the period, Adorno continued the Institute’s studies of the growing hegemony of capitalism and the integration of the working class as a conservative force of the capitalist system. In such a situation, deeply influenced by his sojourn in New York and California, Adorno only saw the possibility of individual revolt. He also feared, however, the resurgence of authoritarianism in the United States and collaborated on a groundbreaking collective study of The Authoritarian Personality (1950) with a group of Berkeley researchers. The project embodied the Institute’s desire to merge theoretical construction with empirical research and produced a portrait of a disturbing authoritarian potential in the United States. Adorno was responsible for elaborating the theoretical implications and helped design the research apparatus.
In the early 1950s, Adorno returned with Horkheimer to Germany to reestablish the institute in Frankfurt. Here, Adorno continued his studies in sociology and culture, though he turned primarily to philosophy in the last years of his life. During the 1950s, he participated in the Institute’s sociological studies of education, students, workers, and the potential for democracy. Adorno wrote many sociological essays at this time and participated in the debates published in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (1976). In these debates, Adorno defended the Institute’s conception of dialectical social theory against positivism and the “critical rationalism” defended by Karl Popper and other neopositivists.
Increasingly critical of communism and skeptical of Marxism, Adorno primarily engaged in cultural criticism and studies of philosophy and aesthetics during his last decade. As he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1969, his magnum opus, Aesthetic Theory, was published posthumously (1984).
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