ABSTRACT
Before I can attempt to answer the question ‘Why Adorno?’ an even more basic and pressing question needs to be addressed: what was Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69)? This question has an unusually long list of answers. Adorno was a philosopher, a sociologist, a musicologist, a critic of music and literature, and, indeed, a composer. He was also defined by Hitler’s National Socialist regime as being ‘of half-Jewish origin’ and, in order to avoid otherwise inevitable persecution, became a refugee, first in Great Britain and then in America. Adorno was a prominent intellectual in postwar West Germany, where he was involved in widely broadcast and controversial debates with other intellectual figures. He was a stringent critic of modern society, diagnosing the precariousness of a world with the potential either to establish peace and security for all its inhabitants, or to slide at any moment into unimaginable horror. He died during the period of self-proclaimed revolutionary agitation by the student movements of the late 1960s, with which he had, in many ways, a particularly uncomfortable relationship.
