“Running in the street conveys an impression of terror. The victim’s fall is already mimed in his attempt to escape it. The position of the head, trying to hold itself up, is that of a drowning man, and the straining face grimaces as if under torture. He has to look ahead, can hardly glance back without stumbling, as if treading the shadow of a foe whose features freeze the limbs. Once people ran from dangers that were too desperate to turn and face, and someone running after a bus unwittingly bears witness to past terror.
Traffic regulations no longer need allow for wild animals, but they have not pacified running. It estranges us from bourgeois walking. The truth becomes visible that something is amiss with security that the unleashed powers of life, be they mere vehicles, have to be escaped. The body’s habituation to walking as normal stems from the good old days. It was the bourgeois form of locomotion physical demythologization, free of the spell of hieratic pacing, roofless wandering, and breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right to walk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror.
The walk, the stroll, was private ways of passing time, the heritage of the feudal romenade in the nineteenth century” Theodor Adorno. Theodor Adorno stated that in the 19th century thus when he was born in Frankfurt. As an only child to the wine merchant Oscar Wiesengrund, and of a catholic singer named Maria Barbara. His aunt Agatha also lived with him. As a child Theodor engaged in four-handed piano playing, he attended school at the Kaiser-Wilhem where he proved to be a highly gifted student at the low age of 17 he graduated from Kaiser-Wilhem at the top of his class.
After high school Theodor began college at Frankfurt. By this time he had already composed a number of musical critiques. After college Theodor went back to Vienna Theodor was not spared another failure: after his dissertation supervisor Hans Cornelius his assistant Max Horkheimer voiced their concerns about his professorial thesis, a comprehensive philosophical-psychological treatise, he withdrew it in early 1928. It would take him three more years until he received the venia legendi (which was revoked in 1933) with the manuscript Kierkegaard: Construction of the aesthetic that he submitted to Paul Tillich.
The topic of his inaugural lecture was the ‘Current Importance of Sociology, a theme he considered programmatic throughout his life. In it, he questioned the concept of totality for the first time, anticipating his famous formula – directed against George Hegel. Among his first courses was a seminar on Benjamin’s treatise The Origin of German Tragic Drama, his 1932 essay “On the Social Situation of Music” was Adorno’s contribution to the first issue of Horkheimer’s; it wasn’t until 1938 that he joined the Institute for Social Research.
In the late 1920’s during Theodor’s stays in Berlin, He had established closer relations with Walter Benjamin and also with Ernst Bloch, with whose first major work Geist der Utopie he had lready become acquainted in 1921. The German capital held an even greater attraction to him due to the presence of chemist Margarethe (‘Gretel’) Karplus, whom he would marry in London in 1937. In 1934, fleeing from the Nazi regime, he immigrated to England to regain his professor status in Oxford, which never happened however, but as a postgraduate there, he undertook an in depth study of Hegel’s philosophy.
He could not resist spending the summer holidays with his fiance in Germany every year. In 1936, the Zeitschrift newspaper featured one of Adorno’s most controversial texts, “On Jazz”. This was less an engagement with this style of music than a first polemic against the blooming entertainment and culture industry, a system by which he believed society was controlled by a top-down creation of standardized culture to intensify commodification. Intense epistolary contact with Horkheimer, who was living in American exile, led to an offer of an interesting and profitable employment on the other side of the Atlantic.
In 1937 Theodor visited New York for the first time he decided to resettle there. In Brussels he bade his parents, who followed in 1939, farewell, and said goodbye to Benjamin in San Remo. Benjamin opted to remain in Europe, thus limiting their very rigorous future communication to letters. Shortly after arriving in New York, Horkheimer’s Institute for Social Research accepted Adorno as an official member. His first job was directing the “Radio Project” together with the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld. He also took up a post at Princeton University between 1938 and 1941.
Very soon, however, his attention shifted to direct collaboration with Horkheimer. They moved to Los Angeles together, where he taught for the following seven years he spent as the co-director of a esearch unit at the University of California. Their collective found its first major expression in the first edition of their essay collection “Dialectic of Enlightenment” in 1944. Faced with the unfolding events of the Holocaust, the work begins with the words “In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty.
Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant. ” Theodor, 1973 it was published in 1947. In this influential book, Adorno and Horkheimer outline civilization’s tendency towards self- destruction. They argue that the concept of reason was transformed into an irrational force by the Enlightenment. As a consequence, reason came to dominate not only nature, but also humanity itself. It is this rationalization of humanity that was identified as a cause of fascism and other totalitarian regimes. Consequently, Adorno did not consider rationalism a path towards human emancipation.
For that he looked toward the arts. This is one of Theodor’s greater findings, saying that we want power. We want to be irrational and we are because of the force by the enlightenment. After 1945 Theodor ceased to work as a composer. He was ntrusted with the honorable task to advise Tomas Mann on the musicological details of his novel Dr. Faustus. Apart from that he worked on his ‘philosophy of the new music’ in the 1940s, and on Hanns Eislers’s composing for the films. He also contributed ‘Qualitative Interpretations’ in anti-Semitic.
Qualitative in social science means “makes no attempt to measure, count, or classify, but rather tries to capture the full complexity of social phenomena through descriptive analyses that focus on the details and nuances of people’s words and actions. ” Qualitative techniques were first developed in ethnography but are now used in most ocial sciences. In psychological and some other social sciences, when formal qualitative techniques became available in the 1990s, the decision to use them often reflected a philosophical or ideological belief that quantitative measures were inappropriate or inadequate in a human science.
Nowadays, however, most social scientists would see qualitative and quantitative techniques as complementary. Still though it’s performed by multiple research institutes in the US that uncovered the authoritarian character of test persons through indirect questions. After the war, Theodor, who had been homesick, did not esitate long before returning to Germany. Due to Horkheimer’s influence he was given a professorship in Frankfurt in 1949/1950, allowing him to continue his academic career after a prolonged hiatus.
This culminated in a position as double Ordinarius or of philosophy and of sociology. In the Institute, which was affiliated with the university, Adorno’s leadership status became ever more and more apparent, while Horkheimer, who was eight years older, gradually stepped back, leaving his younger friend the sole directorship in1958. Despite his pessimistic stance, the work raised Theodor Adorno to the level of a foundational intellectual figure in the West German republic, after a last attempt to get him involved in research in the USA failed in 1953.
In 1952 he participated in a group experiment, revealing residual national socialist attitudes among the recently democratized Germans. In 1954 onwards, he taught musicology in the summer academies in Kranichstein. Numerous radio stations had debates with Theodor on them among others like Ernst Bloch, Elias Canetti and Arnold Gehlen. In 1961 he initiated the positivism debate at a meeting of the German Society for Sociology in Tubingen. In 1964 he headed the 15th sociology conference, where Max Weber and Sociology today and in 1968 he headed the 16th sociology conference, Late Capitalism or Industrial Society.
In 1966 extra parliamentary opposition formed against the grand coalition of Germany’s two major parties and was directed primarily against the planned emergency laws. Theodor was an outspoken critic of these politics, which he displayed by his participation in an event organized by the action committee Demokratie in Nostand. When the student Benno Ohnesorg was shot by a police officer at a demonstration against a visit by the Shah of Iran, he left wing APO became increasingly radicalized, and the universities became a place of unrest.
To a considerable extent it was students of Theodor Adorno who represented the spirit of revolt thus drawing ‘practical’ consequences from ‘Critical Theory’. The leading figures of the Frankfurt School were not prepared, despite empathizing with the students’ causes, to support their activism. Therefore Adorno in particular became a target of student action. On the other side of the spectrum, the right accused him of providing the intellectual basis for leftist violence. In 1969 the disturbances in his lecture hall increased to an xtent that Adorno discontinued his lecture series.
Adorno became increasingly exhausted and fed up with the situation on campus. His biographer Stefan Doohm contends that he was convinced the attacks by the students were directed against his theories as well as his person and that he feared that the current political situation may lead to totalitarianism. He left with his wife on a vacation to Switzerland. Despite warnings by his doctor, he attempted to ascend a 3,000 meter high mountain, resulting in heart palpitations. The same day, he and his wife drove to the nearby town, where he suffered heart palpitations once again.
He was brought to the town’s clinic. In the morning of the following day, August 6, where he died of a heart attack. Though he was gone Theodor Adorno had left his Theories behind. Theodor Adorno was to a great extent influenced by Walter Benjamin’s application of Karl Marx’s thoughts. Unlike Marx, however, Adorno did not consider capitalism on the verge of collapse this was one of Theodor’s points that he hit on. Instead he shows that capitalism has become more entrenched. Additionally, Adorno focused on culture rather than economics as Marx did. He argued that critical theory must keep a certain standard.
On this ground Adorno attacked many approaches commonly used in social studies he took out some big questions that sociologist were facing during this time. He was particularly harsh on approaches that claimed to be scientific and quantitative proving that they were wrong. He is probably best known for his critique of “mass culture” in contemporary societies. He argued that culture industries manipulated the masses. Popular culture was identified as a reason why people become passive; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture made people docile and content, no matter how terrible their conomic circumstances.
It is culture industries that produce standardized cultural goods like factories. There are differences between the cultural goods that make them appear different, but they are in fact just variations of the same theme. Adorno called this phenomenon pseudo-individualization. Theodor saw this mass produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity or genuine happiness. Some of the work on mass culture Adorno ndertook together with Maz Horkheimer.
Despite a certain timeliness of Adorno’s work, many aspects of it are relevant today and have been developed in many strands of contemporary critical theory though many have there are still tons of his work that hasn’t be applied to modern day. Theodor did some hard long studies threw out his life, the top 3 theories that I feel are the most important are the Critical Social theory, the Aesthetic Theory, and the Negative Dialects theory. These 3 theories are the most important the Aesthetic theory is one of the most applied theories today. The Critical Social theory is not used as much but is being used more and more.
Thinkers influenced by Adorno believe that today’s society has evolved in a direction foreseen by him, especially in regard to the past, morals or the Culture Industry. The latter has become a particularly productive, yet highly contested term in cultural studies. Many of his reflections on music have only just begun to be debated, as a collection of essays on the subject, many of which had not previously been translated into English, have only recently been collected and published as Essays on Music. Critiques of Adorno’s theories come primarily from Marxist.
Other critics include Ralf Dahrendorf and Karl Popper and positivist philosophers. Many Marxists accuse the Critical Theorists of claiming the intellectual heritage of Karl Marx without feeling the obligation to apply theory for political action. So in conclusion this is paper is about Theodor Adorno’s life and some of his ideas of society. Theodor was one of the greatest sociologists in Germany after World War 2. He had created many theories and proved many to be wrong. But I do feel as though he primarily viewed society as a self-regulating system, “from which one must escape” being Adorno’s exact words.
For him it was existent, but inhuman, while others argue against the existence of such a system. In his argument, he claims that Critical Theory provides no practical solution for societal change. This I agree with and I feel as though there is no practical solution for societal change. Thus concluding my paper on Theodor Adorno I hope you learned as much about his life and some of his thoughts about life as meritorious as I did. He lived a very interesting life and had chances to change the world with his thoughts. Some of the greatest sociologists were listed in this paper but out of all of them Theodor was the greatest.
