Theodor W. Adorno

Adorno was born in Frankfurt to a wealthy wine merchant, a Jew converted to Protestantism, and a singer; his aunt was a pianist, and he grew up in music, reading Kant every week as a teenager with Kracauer, fourteen years his senior. He studied philosophy, musicology and psychology at Frankfurt, took his doctorate in 1924 on Husserl, went to Vienna to study composition with Berg, entered Schoenberg's circle and wrote extensively on music, regarding himself throughout as both philosopher and composer.

He qualified to teach in 1931 and was stripped of his post by the Nazis in 1933, going first into exile at Oxford and in 1938 to New York to join Horkheimer's Institute, working on the Princeton Radio Research Project and never at ease with American empirical sociology. In 1941 he followed Horkheimer to Los Angeles, where they wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment; he also advised Thomas Mann on the music in Doctor Faustus and wrote Philosophy of New Music and the aphorisms of Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, whose first section says 'there is no right life in the wrong one'. After the war he took part in The Authoritarian Personality, measuring fascist tendencies with psychological scales.

He returned to Frankfurt in 1949, became deputy director of the Institute in 1953 and director in 1958, and was West Germany's most influential philosopher and social critic. His essay 'Cultural Criticism and Society' declared that 'to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric', a sentence endlessly quoted and misread; he later qualified it: the sufferer has the right to expression as the tortured man has the right to scream. His 'positivism dispute' with Popper was a watershed of post-war German sociology. Negative Dialectics (1966) is his philosophical masterwork: thought by its nature identifies, subsuming the different under concepts, and philosophy's task is precisely to use concepts to reach beyond concepts, to speak for what cannot be identified, for the concreteness of suffering.

In 1969 the student movement made him a target: he called the police to clear the Institute, and students bared their breasts in his lecture hall to disrupt him. He died of a heart attack on holiday in Switzerland at sixty-five. The posthumous Aesthetic Theory holds that art is the 'social antithesis of society', that genuine art preserves the memory of another life by refusing to communicate. His prose is notoriously difficult, deliberately so, he said, because fluent writing had already been captured by the culture industry. Habermas was his assistant and his most important heir and critic.