Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903–69)

(This is Adorno’s first major work, and it includes all the major themes – the critique of existentialism as abstract, the role of aesthetics, the thematics of sacrifice – that will come to dominate his thought. The introduction to the translation by Hullot-Kentor is helpful.)

(This is the founding document of first-generation Critical Theory in which the critique of instrumental reason comes to displace the critique of political economy. It includes Adorno’s famous treatment of Odysseus as already enacting the Enlightenment sacrifice of the particular to the universal, and his analysis of the culture industry.)

(Adorno’s classic defence of Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system as the high point of musical modernism. Its conception of modern music was the crucial source for Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus.)

(One hundred and fifty-three dazzling aphorisms, in which Adorno reflects on the vanishing of concrete, individual experience in modern, bourgeois society. Its fluent mixture of philosophy and cultural criticism makes it the most accessible of Adorno’s works.)

(A dense reading of Husserl’s phenomenology, with the emphasis on the inevitable abstractness of the phenomenological method, and hence its loss of the very concreteness it seeks.)

(Includes essays by Popper, Habermas, Dahrendorf, Harald Pilot and Hans Albert, among others. The translation also includes a review of the original by Popper, and a helpful introduction by David Frisby.)

(These very essayistic explorations of Hegel elaborate the competing ideals of rationality in dialectical and deductive thinking.)

(Adorno’s fiercely critical account of Martin Heidegger’s existentialism as abstract and ahistorical.)

(This work pursues an immanent critique of the idealism of Kant and Hegel as the vehicle for a critique of modern instrumental reason. It contains Adorno’s most sustained arguments concerning the nature of human conceptuality, and his famous reflections on the meaning of philosophy ‘after Auschwitz’.)

(Arguably this is the premier work of twentieth-century philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Transforming the central concepts of modern aesthetics accordingly, Adorno contends that the works of high modernism model a suppressed conception of human rationality that challenges that of Enlightenment rationalism.)

(Adorno’s account of the thought and influence of his early tutor.)

(Chapters 4 and 5 detail the argument of §5.)

(Contains twenty of the best journal articles on the whole range of Adorno’s output, including influential pieces by Jürgen Habermas on Dialectic of Enlightenment and Albrecht Wellmer on Aesthetic Theory.)

(Expounds the analysis of concepts and rationality in §3, and relates it to the ethical vision animating Adorno’s philosophy.)

(An intellectual biography of Adorno that usefully focuses on the deep influence of his friend Walter Benjamin in the formation of several of the key concepts in Adorno’s theory.)

(An illuminating study that tracks Adorno’s Hegelianism and his use of the idea of determinate negation through the breadth of his work.)

(A clear introduction for the general reader, but without a sharp, philosophical focus.)

(An advanced introduction, particularly strong on reification and the concept of dialectic.)

(Elaborates the suggestion about language made in §3 in Wittgensteinian terms.)

(A sound study of Adorno’s aesthetics, especially useful on the central terms of Adorno’s argument in Aesthetic Theory. Zuidervaart is critical of Adorno’s strong cognitivist approach to art.)