Theodor W. Adorno

Born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund in 1903, he trained as a classical musician and studied composition with Alban Berg, drawn early to Arnold Schoenberg's difficult modernism. That commitment to the avant-garde carried into his philosophy: as a leading voice of the Frankfurt School, he fused Marx, Freud, and Hegel into a critique of both fascism and the mass-produced comfort of Western life. During the Second World War he lived in California, collaborating with Thomas Mann on Doctor Faustus and working at the relocated Institute for Social Research on studies of authoritarianism and antisemitism that would shape post-war sociology. Back in Frankfurt, he spent his last decades in pitched intellectual combat - debating Popper on science, dismantling Heidegger's language of authenticity, writing on German responsibility for the Holocaust. He died in 1969, a year before Aesthetic Theory appeared, the unfinished work he'd planned to dedicate to Beckett.