THE LIFE OF THEODOR ADORNO

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was born in 1903. It has been suggested that he dropped the middle name, Wisengrund, because it sounded Jewish. Adorno attended the University of Frankfurt where he studied philosophy, sociology, psychology, and music.
He received a doctorate in philosophy in 1924. Always interested in music Adomo went to Vienna to study composition under Alban Berg, and to publish articles on music, especially on the work of Schönberg. He submitted his Habilitationschrift in 1926 on Kant and Freud, entitled 'The concept of the unconscious in the transcendental theory of mind'.
This thesis was rejected, and as Buck-Morss (1977) suggests Adorno was not unduly surprised at this. In 1931, he completed another entitled Kierkegaard: The Construction of the Aesthetic which was published in 1933. Adorno then joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research after Max Horkheimer became director. Adorno and Horkheimer were to collaborate but also to pursue their own independent research inquiries. A useful account of this period can be found in David Held's Introduction to Critical Theory. Adorno took amore philosophical route whereas Horkheimer stressed the sociological.
To escape from Nazism, the Institute moved to Zürich in 1934, and Adorno moved to England. In 1938, Adorno rejoined the Institute, which was now located in New York, and worked on the Princeton Radio Research Project, under Paul Larzarsfeld. With Max Horkheimer, Adorno wrote the breathless and challenging Dialectic of Enlightenment which was first published in 1947.
In 1953, at the age of 50, Adorno returned to Frankfurt to take up a position with the Institute, and in 1959 he became its director following the retirement of Horkheimer. By the late 1960s Adorno became involved in a conflict with the students who occupied the Institute's offices. He was bitterly upset at what he saw as the students' misunderstandign of his work. Adorno died in 1969 in Switzerland while writing Aesthetic Theory.
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