German musicologist, social critic, and political philosopher; author of Philosophie der neuen Musik (The Philosophy of Modern Music) (1949) and Noten zur Literatur (Notes to Literature) (1958-74). A leading member of the Frankfurt school, Adorno traced the development and failure of Western reliance on reason in his Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment) (1947) . The abstract concepts of rationality, he argued, separate individual human beings from their sensuous nature as knowing subjects. Negative Dialektik (Negative Dialectics) (1966) openly defends the critical task of exposing, dissolving, and undermining the harmful influence of rigid conceptual schemes. In The Authoritarian Personality (1951) Adorno described the ways conformity to the demands of social propriety imposes paradox and contradiction on the lives of individual human beings.

Recommended Reading: The Adorno Reader, ed. by Brian O'Connor (Blackwell, 2000); Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 1998); Martin Jay, Adorno (Harvard, 1984); Yvonne Sherratt, Adorno's Positive Dialectic (Cambridge, 2002); Jay Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge, 2001); Hauke Brunkhorst, Adorno and Critical Theory (U of Wales, 1999); and The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno and the Postmodern, ed. by Max Pensky (SUNY, 1997).

Also see SEP, EB, ELC, and Andy Blunden.