ABSTRACT
Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-1969) was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His academic career is marked by a series of remarkable and influential encounters. While at the University of Frankfurt, in addition to music composition, Adorno studied sociology and psychology with Siegfried Kracauer. Music remained a lifelong interest for Adorno, who even trained as a concert pianist under Alban Berg. His first published essays were on the modernist composer and pioneer of atonalism, Arnold Schönberg. In 1926, Adorno’s first attempt at the Habilitationsschrift (a document required for promotion to a university position), titled The Concept of the Unconscious or The Transcendental Theory of the Mind was rejected. But his second attempt, which has become a widely influential work, Kierkegaard: The Construction of the Aesthetic (1933), was successful. Adorno established the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt with his longtime friend and collaborator Max Horkheimer in 1931. With the rise of Nazism in Germany, Adorno and other Jewish intellectuals were expelled from their university posts. As a result, he went into exile in Oxford, England, before departing to the United States, where he lived and worked in New York City, Los Angeles, and Berkeley. Adorno returned to Frankfurt after the
war, where he reestablished the Institute of Social Research in 1949. The intellectuals, economists, and sociologists associated with the Institute included Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas, among others. It is this group of thinkers who comprise the first generation of what has been termed “critical theory.” Upon Horkheimer’s retirement in 1959, Adorno assumed the role of director and held that post until the late 1960s. The student uprisings and social unrest in Paris during May 1968 spilled into West Germany, where students occupied the Institute’s buildings. Adorno’s comments on the protests were widely ridiculed and he fled to Switzerland, where he died in 1969 while working on his unfinished magnum opus Aesthetic Theory (1970).
