German philosopher, sociologist, musicologist, and composer; with Max Horkheimer the central figure of the first generation of the Frankfurt School and the most ambitious twentieth-century philosopher of art, the culture industry, and the persistence of authoritarianism after the catastrophe. His work is among the most demanding in modern philosophy and his sentences among the most quoted, on both counts because he believed — with a directness that his prose disguises — that thinking honestly about the world after Auschwitz required forms of difficulty that would resist absorption into the very machinery he was trying to describe.
Adorno was born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund-Adorno in Frankfurt in 1903, the son of an assimilated Jewish wine merchant and a Catholic Corsican-Italian singer. He took a doctorate in philosophy at Frankfurt under Hans Cornelius and went to Vienna in the late 1920s to study composition with Alban Berg and piano with Eduard Steuermann — a musical training that remained at the center of his work for the rest of his life. He joined the Institute for Social Research in 1938 in its New York exile, after the Nazi rise had forced the Institute and its members out of Germany, and spent the war years in California, where he co-authored Dialectic of Enlightenment with Horkheimer (1944) and contributed centrally to the empirical The Authoritarian Personality (1950). He returned to Frankfurt in 1949, became director of the rebuilt Institute in 1958, and remained at its head until his death.
The major works fall into three families. Dialectic of Enlightenment and the related essay "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" argue that Enlightenment rationality has turned against itself — that the project of mastering nature through instrumental reason produces, when extended to society, a totally administered world in which everything (people, art, nature itself) is reduced to fungible material for domination, and in which mass-produced culture functions not as the people's expression but as a system of pacification. The argument has had an immense afterlife and an immense critical literature; it remains the indispensable starting point for any serious thinking about culture under capitalism.
The aphoristic Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951), written in California exile and dedicated to Horkheimer, is Adorno's most accessible book and the one most likely to be read for pleasure: 153 short numbered fragments on the impossibility of "the right life in the wrong one" ("es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen"), on exile, on the small humiliations of late capitalism, on memory and music and the forms of damaged thought. It is the book to start with if you have not read him.
The third family is the late philosophical and aesthetic work: Negative Dialectics (1966), the major statement of his refusal of the Hegelian move toward synthesis and his insistence on the priority of the non-identical (the part of reality that thought cannot subsume); and the posthumous Aesthetic Theory (1970), the major book on art, in which the artwork's autonomy from the marketplace becomes the last refuge of the truth-content that the rest of culture has betrayed.
The "no poetry after Auschwitz" sentence — "Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch" — comes from the 1949 essay "Cultural Criticism and Society," and is the most-quoted and most-misread thing Adorno ever wrote. He qualified it later, in Negative Dialectics and elsewhere: "Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems." The full position is more difficult and more interesting than the slogan.
Adorno died of a heart attack in Switzerland in August 1969, weeks after a notorious incident in which student radicals in Frankfurt — frustrated by what they saw as the gap between his theoretical radicalism and his refusal to endorse their tactics — disrupted his lecture and bared their breasts on the lecture stage. The "Busenattentat" haunted his last weeks; he was sixty-five.
Adorno is on the graph because he is the central figure of the Frankfurt School and the most consequential twentieth-century philosopher of mass culture, the persistence of authoritarianism, and art's possible relation to a damaged world; without him the graph's existing pages on Marcuse and Habermas dangle from a missing source. He is also the indispensable reference for the graph's commitments to taking culture seriously as a political object and to keeping the question of Auschwitz inside the philosophical conversation rather than alongside it.