Theodor Adorno is one of the most exciting, controversial, difficult, and misrepresented philosophers of the twentieth century.This book consists initially of this introduction which serves to bring Adorno’s life, works, and the reception of his ideas into focus for those to whom this is not well known.
- From the early 1930s until his death in 1969, Adorno wrote dozens of key texts which mirrored several of the projects of other members of the Early Frankfurt School, in particular Horkheimer, Lowenthal, and Marcuse.
- Generally speaking, Adorno’s work belongs within the framework adopted by the Frankfurt School: he was animated by the same motivation – to understand how and why Western civilisation decayed to Nazi barbarism.
- The most important texts of Adorno’s critique of enlightenment span contributions to German philosophy and embrace key works of social criticism, the philosophy of history, epistemology, aesthetics, and, of course, the deployment of Freudian psychoanalysis.