Adorno, Theodor

Adorno, Theodor (Wiesengrund)

(born Sept. 11, 1903, Frankfurt am Main, Ger.—died Aug. 6, 1969, Visp, Switz.) German philosopher. He immigrated to England in 1934 to escape Nazism. He lived for 10 years in the U.S. (1938–48) before returning to Frankfurt, where he taught and headed the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (see Frankfurt School). He is notable for his books and essays on philosophy, literature, psychology, sociology, and music (which he studied with Alban Berg). For Adorno, the great task of modernist music, literature, and art was to keep alive the possible social alternatives to capitalism, which philosophy and political theory could no longer imagine. His works include Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947; with Max Horkheimer), Minima Moralia (1951), and Notes to Literature (4 vols., 1958–74).