Adorno in two minutes.

was written by special request to introduce Adorno to newcomers; it accompanied a lecture on Adorno at an inter-discipilnary seminar on National Identity held at Queen Mary's College, London University, 1994.

• Born in 1903 in Frankfurt am Main, Theodor Wiesengrund, son of a Jewish wine merchant Oskar Wiesengrund and of a non-Jewish, Catholic mother, the singer, Maria Calvelli Adorno.
• In his teens met Siegfried Kracauer, pioneer of writing on film as a serious art form which Adorno at first thought it wasn't. [Kracauer is much neglected and worthy of attention in his own right] The two of them read philosophy (Kant) together.
• After university Adorno went to Vienna to study composition with Berg. Began to write as a music critic. Continued to write on music all his life with great brilliance. (Books include Wagner, Berg and Philosophy of Modern Music)
• Failed as a composer. failed his first Ph D. too.
• 1931-33 Thesis for Tillich (a Christian) on Kierkegaard. Passed this time. But Nazis  came to power so Adorno could not teach at Frankfurt after all. He emigrated.
• 1934-7 to Oxford to do a D. Phil. at Merton College. The D. Phil was never completed but a book in German on Husserl developed from it.
• No job in England so 1938 - by now married to Gretel Karplus(she was Jewish and a friend of Walter Benjamin) - Adorno went to work on Columbia University Radio Project in the USA.
• His friends and mentors from the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt (now in exile in the USA) suggested he took the name Adorno to get an American visa..
• There he joined Horkheimer to write "The Dialectic of the Enlightenment", joined Pollock to write on Anti-semitism (The Authoritarian Personality) and finally on his own managed one of his best books "Minima Moralia".
• After war, returned to Frankfurt and eventually became Director of the Institute for Social Research. More Books. Negative Dialectic. Hegel. Jargon of Authenticity, Aesthetic Theory.
• But 1968-9 Professor Adorno failed to support the student revolution even though he was seen by the authorities as a radical. So everyone blamed him. He left the University under a cloud and died almost at once of a heart attack.
• So became a martyr and a hero of the city of Frankfurt.

What did he look like?
For a picture of Adorno at his piano, visit his German publishers Suhrkamp.
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Why was he famous?

1. Didn't like pure Marxism or any pure system of thought for that matter. Therefore a critique which pre-dated French structuralists and deconstruction.
2. Aesthetics - role of culture and specially music in a mechanised society; propaganda and enslavement. Reification as in Marxism. Culture as a commodity. BUT modernism to the rescue
3. Anti-semitism and social psychology, writings on. Qualitative versus quantitative research.
4. He was the one who said (who is accused of stupidly saying) that after Auschwitz it was barbaric to write poetry.

Why  is he liked? by Edward Said etc. as Outsider. By many others because difficult (status)

Why disliked?  Elitist, snob, undemocratic. because (too) difficult.

Why not read some Adorno now?  see  Reading Adorno