With Max Horkheimer, Adorno developed the critical theory of society most fully articulated in "Dialectic of Enlightenment" (1944, revised 1947), arguing that Enlightenment rationality, in seeking to master nature, dialectically reverts into a new mythology and domination through instrumental reason. His "Negative Dialectics" (1966) rejected Hegelian synthesis in favor of a philosophy attentive to the "non-identical" - the particular remainder that always exceeds any concept's claim to capture it - while his analysis of the "culture industry" and aesthetic theory examined how mass-produced culture manufactures conformity and forecloses critical thought.
Intellectual setting
A founding member of the Frankfurt School's Institute for Social Research, Adorno fled Nazi Germany in 1934 owing to his Jewish ancestry, working first in Oxford, then from 1938 in New York (with the Princeton Radio Research Project) and Los Angeles, where he collaborated with Horkheimer on "Dialectic of Enlightenment" and contributed to "The Authoritarian Personality" studies. He returned to Frankfurt in 1949-53 to help rebuild the Institute during West Germany's postwar reconstruction, and had a fraught, publicly contested relationship with the radical student movement of the late 1960s.
Key ideas
Dialectic of Enlightenment and instrumental reason
With Horkheimer, Adorno argued that the Enlightenment project of rational mastery over nature dialectically reverts into a new mythology and domination - including of human beings - because it reduces reason to calculative, instrumental control, a logic visible alike in fascism and in the levelling sameness of the culture industry.
Negative dialectics and the non-identical
Rejecting Hegel's claim that dialectical contradiction resolves into a higher synthesis or identity, Adorno insisted philosophy remain faithful to the "non-identical" - the particular that always exceeds and resists a concept's claim to fully capture it - as a form of resistance to totalizing, administered thought.
Legacy
A central figure of the Frankfurt School and critical theory, Adorno's critique of instrumental reason, the culture industry, and identity thinking profoundly shaped subsequent critical theory (notably Jürgen Habermas), cultural studies, and continental philosophy's engagement with modernity, fascism, and mass media; his claim that "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" remains a persistent touchstone in debates over art, ethics, and atrocity.