Theodor W. Adorno

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (Frankfurt am Main, 11 September 1903 - Visp / Viège, Switzerland, 6 August 1969) was a German philosopher, sociologist, musicologist, composer and a member of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School of social theory and critical philosophy. He studied philosophy, sociology and psychology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, where, with a thesis on Husserl's phenomenology, he received his doctorate in philosophy in 1924. There he taught at the Institute for Social Research, and after National Socialism came to power he emigrated to Merton College in Oxford and later to the United States (New York and Los Angeles). Upon his return to Europe in 1949, he was director of the Institute for Social Research (since 1953) and professor of philosophy and sociology in Frankfurt am Main. His intellectual orientations can be divided into three basic parts: social philosophy, aesthetics, and music.
His most prominent works include The Authoritarian Personality (1950), Negative Dialectics (1966), Dialectics of the Enlightenment (1947), Philosophy of New Music (1949), In search of Wagner (1952), Against Epistemiology: A Metacritique (1956) and Aesthetic Theory (1970).

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