Theodor W. Adorno

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) was one of the twentieth century's most important thinkers. In light of two pivotal developments--the rise of fascism, which culminated in the Holocaust, and the standardization of popular culture as a commodity indispensable to contemporary capitalism--Adorno sought to evaluate and synthesize the essential insights of Western philosophy by revisiting the ethical and sociological arguments of his predecessors: Kant, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Marx. This book, first published in Germany in 1996, provides a succinct introduction to Adorno's challenging and far-reaching thought. Gerhard Schweppenhauser, a leading authority on the Frankfurt School of critical theory, explains Adorno's epistemology, social and political philosophy, aesthetics, and theory of culture.

After providing a brief overview of Adorno's life, Schweppenhauser turns to the theorist's core philosophical concepts, including post-Kantian critique, determinate negation, and the primacy of the object, as well as his view of the Enlightenment as a code for world domination, his diagnosis of modern mass culture as a program of social control, and his understanding of modernist aesthetics as a challenge to conceive an alternative politics. Along the way, Schweppenhauser illuminates the works widely considered Adorno's most important achievements: "Minima Moralia," "Dialectic of Enlightenment" (co-authored with Horkheimer), and "Negative Dialectics." Adorno wrote much of the first two of these during his years in California (1938-49), where he lived near Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann, whom he assisted with the musical aesthetics at the center of Mann's novel "Doctor Faustus."