Oxford Dictionary of Sociology

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Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund

Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903–69)
A leading member of the Frankfurt School of Social Research, who worked in America during the Second World War, returning to West Germany after the allied victory. He was a man of immense learning, and complex, often obscure and difficult ideas. His work covered aesthetic theory, literary and musical theory, general cultural criticism, social psychology, and philosophy. A major work was (with numerous others) The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a (much criticized) empirical and theoretical investigation into the psychological roots of authoritarianism.

In the face of modern culture, he was concerned at the outset to avoid the subjectivism of existentialism and easy objectivism of positivism, but this modified as he became more pessimistic about the modern world. His aesthetic and cultural criticism and his philosophy became...

[The entire page is 397 words long]

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