Theodor W. Adorno (September 11, 1903 – August 6, 1969) was a German sociologist, philosopher, and musicologist. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers, like Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, for whom Freud, Marx and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society. He is widely regarded as one of the 20th century's foremost thinkers on aesthetics and philosophy, as well as one of its preeminent essayists. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the Culture Industry, his writings - such as Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralia and Negative Dialectics - strongly influenced the European New Left.

Amidst the vogue enjoyed by Existentialism and positivism in early 20th century Europe, Adorno advanced a dialectical conception of natural - history which critiqued the twin temptations of ontology and empiricism though studies of Kierkegaard and Husserl. As a classically trained pianist whose sympathies with the twelve tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg resulted in his studying with Alben Berg of the Second Viennese School, Adorno's commitment to avant - garde music formed the backdrop of his subsequent writings and led to his collaboration with Thomas Mann on the latter's novel, Doctor Faustus, while the two men lived in California as exiles during the Second World War. Working for the newly relocated Institute for Social Research, Adorno collaborated on influential studies of authoritarianism, anti - semitism and propaganda which would later serve as models for sociological studies the Institute carried out in post - war Germany. Upon his return to Frankfurt, Adorno was influential to the reconstitution of German intellectual life through debates with Karl Popper on the limitations of positivist science, critiques of Heidegger's jargon of authenticity, writings on German responsibility for the Holocaust, and continued interventions into matters of public policy. As a writer of polemics in the tradition of Nietzsche and Karl Kraus, Adorno delivered scathing critiques of contemporary Western culture at the same time as he mobilized the resources of that culture to create a form of critique which would salvage what Enlightenment thought had long repressed in order to secure its own destructive self - preservation. Adorno's posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, which he planned on dedicating to Samuel Beckett, is the culmination of a life long commitment to modern art which attempts to revoke the "fatal separation" of feeling and understanding long demanded by the history of philosophy and explode the privilege aesthetics accords to content over form and contemplation over immersion.

Theodor Ludwig Adorno - Wiesengrund was born in Frankfurt am Main on September 11, 1903, the only child of Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund (1870 – 1941) and Maria Calvelli - Adorno della Piana (1865 - 1952). His mother, a devout Catholic from Corscia, was once a professional singer, while his father, an assimilated Jew who had converted to Protestantism, ran a successful wine export business. Proud of her origins, Maria wanted her son's paternal surname to be supplemented by the addition of her own name: Adorno. Thus his earliest publications carried the name Theodor Wiesengrund - Adorno; upon his application for US citizenship, his name was modified to Theodor W. Adorno. His childhood was marked by the musical life provided by his mother and aunt: Maria was a singer who could boast of having performed in Vienna at the Imperial Court, while her sister, Agathe, who lived with them, had made a name for herself as both a singer and pianist. He was not only a precocious child but, as he recalled later in life, a child prodigy who could play pieces by Beethoven on the piano by the time he was twelve. At the age of six, he attended the Deutschherren middle school before transferring to the Kaiser - Wilhelm Gymnasium, where he studied from 1913 to 1921. Prior to his graduation at the top of his class, Adorno was already swept up by the revolutionary mood of the time, as is evidenced by his reading of Georg Lukacs's The Theory of the Novel that year, as well his fascination with Ernst Bloch's The Spirit of Utopia, of which he would later write:

"Bloch's was a philosophy that could hold its head high before the most advanced literature; a philosophy that was not calibrated to the abominable resignation of methodology … I took this motif so much as my own that I do not believe I have ever written anything without reference to it, either implicit or explicit."

Over time, Oscar Wiesebgrund's firm established close professional and personal ties with the factory of Karplus & Herzberger in Berlin. The eldest daughter of the Karplus family, Margarete, or Gretel, moved in the intellectual circles of Berlin, where she was acquainted with Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Bloch, each of whom Adorno would become familiar with during the mid 20s; after fourteen years, Gretel and Theodor were married in 1937. At the end of his schooldays, Adorno not only benefited from the rich concert offerings of Frankfurt - in which one could hear performances of works by Schoenberg, Schreker, Stravinsky, Bartók, Busoni, Frederick Delius and Hindemith - but also began studying music composition at the Hoch Conservatory while taking private lessons with well respected composers Bernhard Sekles and Eduard Jung. At around the same time, he befriended Siegfried Kracauer, the Frankfurter Zeitung’s literary editor, of whom he would later write:

“For years Kracauer read [Kant’s] Critique of Pure Reason with me regularly on Saturday afternoons. I am not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that I owe more to this reading than to my academic teachers … Under his guidance I experienced the work from the beginning not as mere epistemology, not as an analysis of the conditions of scientifically valid judgments, but as a kind of coded text from which the historical situation of spirit could be read, with the vague expectation that in doing so one could acquire something of truth itself.”

Leaving gymnasium to study philosophy, psychology and sociology at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Adorno continued his readings with Kracauer, turning now to Hegel and Kierkegaard, and began publishing concert reviews and pieces of music for distinguished journals like the Zeitschrift für Musik, the Neue Blätter für Kunst und Literatur and later for the Musikblätter des Anbruch. In these articles, Adorno championed avant - garde music at the same time as he critiqued the failings of musical modernity, as in the case of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, which he called in 1923 a “dismal Bohemian prank.” In these early writings, he was unequivocal in his condemnation of performances which either sought or pretended to achieve a transcendence which Adorno, in line with many intellectuals of the time, regarded as impossible: “No cathedral,” he wrote, “can be built if no community desires one.” In the summer of 1924, Adorno received his doctorate with a study of Edmund Husserl under the direction of the unorthodox neo - Kantian Hans Cornelius. Before his graduation, Adorno had already met with his most important intellectual collaborators, Max Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin. Through Cornelius's seminars, Adorno met his future collaborator Max Horkheimer, through whom he was then introduced to Friedrich Pollack.

During the summer of 1924, the Viennese composer Alban Berg's Three Fragments from Wozzeck, op. 7 premiered in Frankfurt, at which time Adorno introduced himself to Berg and both agreed the young philosopher and composer would study with Berg in Vienna. Upon moving to Vienna in January 1925, Adorno immersed himself in the musical culture which had grown up around Schoenberg: in addition to his twice - weekly sessions with Berg, Adorno continued his studies on piano with Eduard Steuermann and befriended the violinist Rudolf Kolisch. In Vienna, he attended public lectures of the satirist Karl Kraus with Berg and met Lukács, who had been living in Vienna after the failure of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Alban Berg, the man Adorno referred to as "my master and teacher," was among the most prescient of his young pupil's early friends:

"[I am] convinced that, in the sphere of the deepest understanding of music ... you are capable of supreme achievements and will undoubtedly fulfill this promise in the shape of great philosophical works."

After leaving Vienna, Adorno traveled through Italy, where he met with Kracauer, Benjamin and the economist Alfred Sohn - Rethel, with whom he developed a lasting friendship, before returning to Frankfurt. In December 1926 Adorno's "Two Pieces for String Quartet," op.2 were performed in Vienna, which provided a welcome interruption from his preparations for the Habilitation. After writing the "Piano Pieces in strict twelve - tone technique," as well as songs later integrated into the Six Bagatelles for Voice and Piano, op. 6, Adorno presented his Habilitation manuscript, The Concept of the Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of the Psyche, to Cornelius in November 1927.Cornelius advised Adorno to withdraw his application on the grounds that the manuscript was too close to his own way of thinking. In this manuscript, Adorno attempted to underline the epistemological status of the unconscious as it emerged out of Freud's early writings. Against the function of the unconscious in both Nietzsche and Spengler, Adorno argued that Freud's notion of the unconscious serves as a "sharp weapon ... against every attempt to create a metaphysics of the instincts and to deify full, organic nature." Undaunted by his academic prospects, Adorno threw himself once again into composition. In addition to publishing numerous reviews of opera performances and concerts, Adorno's "Four Songs for Medium Voice and Piano", op.3 was performed in Berlin in January 1929. Between 1928 and 1930 Adorno took on a greater role within the editorial committee of the Musikblätter des Anbruch. In a proposal for transforming the journal, Adorno sought to use Anbruch for championing radical modern music against what he called the "stabilized music" of Pfitzner, the later Strauss, as well as the neoclassicism of Stravinsky and Hindemith. During this period he published the essays "Night Music", "On Twelve - Tone Technique" and "Reaction and Progress". Yet his reservations about twelve - tone orthodoxy became steadily more pronounced: According to Adorno, twelve - tone technique's use of atonality can no more be regarded as an authoritative canon than can tonality be relied on to provide instructions for the composer.

At this time, Adorno struck up a correspondence with the composer Ernst Krenek, with whom he discussed problems of atonality and twelve - tone technique. In a letter of 1934 Adorno sounded a related criticism of Schoenberg:

"Twelve - tone technique alone is nothing but the principle of motivic elaboration and variation, as developed in the sonata, but elevated now to a comprehensive principle of construction, namely transformed into an a priori form and, by that token, detached from the surface of the composition."

At this point Adorno reversed his earlier priorities: now his musical activities came second to the development of a philosophical theory of aesthetics. Thus, in the middle of 1929 he accepted Paul Tillich's offer to present an Habilitation on Kierkegaard, which Adorno eventually submitted under the title The Construction of the Aesthetic. At the time, Kierkegaard's philosophy exerted a strong influence, chiefly through its claim to pose an alternative to Idealism and Hegel's philosophy of history. Yet when Adorno turned his attention to Kierkegaard, watchwords like "anxiety," "inwardness" and "leap" - instructive for existentialist philosophy - were detached from their theological origins and posed, instead, as problems for aesthetics. As the work proceeded - and Kierkegaard's overcoming of Hegel's idealism is revealed to be a mere interiorization - Adorno excitedly remarks, in a letter to Berg, that he is writing without looking over his shoulder at the faculty who would soon evaluate his work. Receiving favorable reports from Professors Tillich and Horkheimer, as well as Benjamin and Kracauer, the University conferred on Adorno the venia legendi in February 1931; on the very day his revised study was published, in March of 1933, Hitler seized dictatorial powers.

Several months after qualifying as a lecturer in philosophy, Adorno delivered an inaugural lecture at the Institute of Social Research, an independent organization which had recently appointed Horkheimer as its director and, with the arrival of the literary scholar Leo Lowenthal, social psychologist Erich Fromm and philosopher Herbert Marcuse, sought to exploit recent theoretical and methodological advances in the social sciences. His lecture, "The Actuality of Philosophy," created a scandal. In it, Adorno not only deviated from the theoretical program Horkheimer had laid out a year earlier, but challenged philosophy's very capacity for comprehending reality as such: "For the mind," Adorno announced, "is indeed not capable of producing or grasping the totality of the real, but it may be possible to penetrate the detail, to explode in miniature the mass of merely existing reality." In line with Benjamin's Origin of the German Tragic Drama and preliminary sketches of the Arcades Project, Adorno likened philosophical interpretation to experiments which should be conducted "until they arrive at figurations in which the answers are legible, while the questions themselves vanish." Having lost its position as the Queen of the Sciences, philosophy must now radically transform its approach to objects so that it might "construct keys before which reality springs open."

Following Horkheimer's taking up the directorship of the Institute, a new journal, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, was produced to publish the research of Institute members both before and after its relocation to the United States. Though Adorno was not himself an Institute member, the journal nevertheless published many of his essays, including "The Social Situation of Music" (1932), "On Jazz" (1936), "On the Fetish - Character in Music and the Regression of Listening" (1938) and "Fragments on Wagner" (1938). In his new role as social theorist, Adorno's philosophical analysis of cultural phenomena heavily relied on the language of historical materialism, as concepts like reification, false consciousness and ideology came to play an ever more prominent role in his work. At the same time, however, and owing to both the presence of another prominent sociologist at the Institute, Karl Mannheim, as well as the methodological problem posed by treating objects - like "musical material" - as ciphers of social contradictions, Adorno was compelled to abandon any notion of "value - free" sociology in favor of a form of ideology critique which held onto an idea of truth. Before his emigration in autumn 1934, Adorno began work on a Singspiel based on Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer entitled The Treasure of Indian Joe, which he would, however, never complete; by the time he fled Hitler's Germany Adorno had already written over a hundred opera or concert reviews and an additional fifty critiques of music composition. As the Nazi party became the largest party in the Reichstag, Horkheimer's 1932 observation proved chillingly prophetic: "Only one thing is certain," he wrote, "the irrationality of society has reached a point where only the gloomiest predictions have any plausibility." In September Adorno's right to teach was revoked; in March, as the swastika was run up the flag pole of town hall, the Institute's offices were searched by the Frankfurt criminal police. Adorno's house on Seeheimer Strasse was similarly searched in July and his application for membership in the Reich Chamber of Literature was denied on the grounds that membership was limited to "persons who belong to the German nation by profound ties of character and blood. As a non - Aryan," he was informed, "you are unable to feel and appreciate such an obligation." Soon afterwards Adorno was forced into fifteen years of exile.

After the possibility of transferring his habilitation to the University of Vienna came to nothing, Adorno considered relocating to Britain upon his father's suggestion. With the help of the Academic Assistance Council, Adorno registered as an advanced student at Merton College, Oxford, in June 1934. During the next four years at Oxford, Adorno made repeated trips to Germany to see both his parents and Gretel, who was still working in Berlin. Under the direction of Gilbert Ryle, Adorno worked on a dialectical critique of Husserl's epistemology. By this time, the Institute for Social Research had relocated to New York City and began making overtures to Adorno. After months of trained relations, Horkheimer and Adorno reestablished their essential theoretical alliance during meetings in Paris. Adorno continued writing on music, publishing "The Form of the Phonograph Record" and "Crisis of Music Criticism" with the Viennese musical journal 23, "On Jazz" in the Institute's Zeitschrift, "Farewell to Jazz" in Europäischen Revue. Yet Adorno's attempts to break out of the sociology of music were, at this time, twice thwarted: neither the study of Mannheim he had been working on for years nor extracts from his study of Husserl were accepted by the Zeitschrift. Impressed by Horkheimer's book of aphorisms, Dawn and Decline, Adorno began working on his own book of aphorism, what would later become Minima Moralia. While at Oxford, Adorno suffered two great losses: his Aunt Agathe died in June 1935, while Alban Berg died in December of the same year. To the end of his life, Adorno never abandoned the hope of completing Berg's unfinished Lulu.

After visiting New York City for the first time in 1937 he decided to resettle there. In Brussels he bade his parents, who followed two years later, goodbye. He said goodbye to Benjamin in Sanremo. Benjamin opted to remain in Europe, thus limiting their very rigorous future communication to letters. Adorno's relocation was enabled under an arrangement whereby part of his time was committed to the Institute for Social Research, which was then resettled at Columbia University, and the remainder as musical director on the 'Radio Project' (also known as Lazarsfeld / Stanton Analysis Programme) directed by the Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld at Princeton University.

That arrangement lasted until 1941. His attention shifted to direct collaboration with Horkheimer. They moved to Los Angeles together, where he taught for the following seven years and served as the co-director of a research unit at UCLA. Their collective work found its first major expression in the first edition of their book Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der Aufklärung) in 1947. 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.'

In this book, which was largely ignored until its republication in 1969, Adorno and Horkheimer posit a dynamic within civilization that tends 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 the primary cause of Fascism and other totalitarian regimes.

After 1945 he ceased to work as a composer. He worked on his 'philosophy of the new music' (Philosophie der neuen Musik) in the 1940s, and on Hanns Eisler's Composing for the films.

Starting with his 1947 essay Wagner, Nietzsche and Hitler, Adorno produced a series of influential works to describe psychological fascist traits. One of these works was The Authoritarian Personality (1950), published as a contribution to the Studies in Prejudice performed by multiple research institutes in the US, and consisted on a 'qualitative interpretations' that uncovered the authoritarian character of test persons through indirect questions. The book has had a major influence on sociology and remains highly debated. In 1951 he continued on the topic with his essay Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda, in which he said that "Psychological dispositions do not actually cause fascism; rather, fascism defines a psychological area which can be successfully exploited by the forces which promote it for entirely non - psychological reasons of self - interest."

In 1952 Adorno participated in a group experiment, revealing residual National Socialist attitudes among the recently democratized Germans. He then published two influential essays, The Meaning of Working Through the Past (1959), and Education after Auschwitz (1966), in which he argued on the survival of the uneradicated National Socialism in the mindsets and institutions of the post 1945 Germany, and that there is still a real risk that it could raise again.

After the war, Adorno, who had been homesick, did not hesitate 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 (of philosophy and of sociology). In the Institute, which was affiliated with the university, Adorno's leadership status became ever more apparent, while Horkheimer, who was eight years older, gradually stepped back, leaving his younger friend the sole directorship in 1958 / 1959.

His collection of aphorisms, Minima Moralia, led to greater prominence in post war Germany when it was released by the newly founded publishing house of Peter Suhrkamp. It proposed a 'melancholy science' against the dark background of Fascism, Stalinism and Culture Industry, which seemingly offered no political or economic alternatives: "Wrong life cannot be lived rightly" (Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen). The work raised 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 United States failed in 1953.

Here is a partial list of his accomplishments:

• In 1952 he participated in a group experiment, revealing residual National Socialist attitudes among the recently democratized Germans (Peter R. Hofstätter, who worked for the Nazi regime from 1937 to 1943, commented critically on Adorno's work).
• From 1954 onwards, he taught musicology in the summer academies in Kranichstein in Darmstadt.
• Numerous radio debates (among others with Ernst Bloch, Elias Canetti and Arnold Gehlen)
• Numerous lectures in Berlin and around Europe (Paris, Vienna, Italy, at the 'documenta' in Kassel in 1959, in Czechoslovakia in 1968)
• Release of Walter Benjamin's letters and writings
• In 1961 he initiated the positivism debate (Positivismusstreit) at a meeting of the German Sociological Association in Tübingen.
• 1963 – 1967, he was Chairman of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie.
  • In his capacity, he headed 1964 the 15th sociology conference, Max Weber and Sociology Today and in 1968 he headed the 16th sociology conference, Late Capitalism or Industrial Society.

In 1966 extra - parliamentary opposition (Außerparlamentarische Opposition) formed against the grand coalition of Germany's two major parties CDU / CSU and SPD, directed primarily against the planned Notstandgesetze (emergency laws). Adorno was an outspoken critic of these policies, which he displayed by his participation in an event organized by the action committee Demokratie im Notstand ("Democracy in a State of Emergency"). When the student Benno Ohnesorg was shot by a police officer at a demonstration against a visit by the Shah of Iran, the left - wing APO became increasingly radicalized, and the universities became a place of unrest. To a considerable extent it was students of Adorno who interpreted a theory of revolt, thus executing a "praxis" from Critical Theory. On January 31, 1969, Adorno asked for the help of police to remove the students that had occupied the Frankfurt Institute in fear of vandalism, resulting in the arrest of 76 members of Rudi Dutschke's SDS socialist youth. Therefore Adorno in particular became a target of student action. He sharply criticized the anti - intellectual trend in the 60's Left, which he called a "pseudo - activity" attempting to overcome the separation of theory and praxis but getting caught up in its own publicity; he argued instead for "open thinking": "beyond all specialized and particular content, thinking is actually and above all the force of resistance". In 1969, the disturbances in his lecture hall, most famously as female students occupied his speaker's podium bare - breasted, increased to an extent that Adorno discontinued his lecture series. In a letter to Samuel Beckett, he wrote: "The feeling of suddenly being attacked as a reactionary at least has a surprising note."

One biographer on Adorno, Stefan Müller - 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 might 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 Visp, where he suffered heart palpitations once again. He was brought to the town's clinic. In the morning of the following day, August 6, he died of a heart attack, aged 65.

Adorno's work sets out from a central insight he shares with all early 20th century avant - garde art: The recognition of what is primitive in ourselves and the world itself. Neither Picasso's fascination with African sculpture nor Mondrian's reduction of painting to its most elementary component - the line - is comprehensible outside this concern with primitivism Adorno shared with the century's most radical art. At the same time, the Western world, beset by world wars, colonialist consolidation and accelerating commodification, sank into the very barbarism civilization had prided itself in overcoming. According to Adorno, society's self - preservation had become indistinguishable from societally sanctioned self - sacrifice: of "primitive" peoples, primitive aspects of the ego and those primitive, mimetic desires found in imitation and sympathy. Adorno's theory proceeds from an understanding of this primitive quality of reality which seeks to counteract whatever aims to either repress this primitive aspect or further those systems of domination set in place by this return to barbarism. From this perspective, Adorno's writings on politics, philosophy, music and literature could be described as a life long critique of the ways in which each tries to justify self - mutilation as the necessary price of self - preservation. According to Adorno's translator Robert Hullot - Kentor, the central motive of Adorno's work thus consists in determining "how life could be more than the struggle for self - preservation." In this sense, the principle of self - preservation, Adorno writes in Negative Dialectics, is nothing but "the law of doom thus far obeyed by history." At its most basic, Adorno's thought is motivated by a fundamental critique of this law.

Adorno was chiefly influenced by Max Weber's critique of disenchantment, Georg Lukács's Hegelian interpretation of Marxism, as well as Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history. Adorno, along with the other major Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, argued that advanced capitalism had managed to contain or liquidate the forces that would bring about its collapse and that the revolutionary moment, when it would have been possible to transform it into socialism, had passed. As he put it at the beginning of his Negative Dialectics (1966), philosophy is still necessary because the time to realize it was missed. Adorno argued that capitalism had become more entrenched through its attack on the objective basis of revolutionary consciousness and through liquidation of the individualism that had been the basis of critical consciousness.

In his early essays for the Vienna based journal Anbruch, Adorno claimed that musical progress is proportional to the composer's ability to constructively deal with the possibilities and limitations contained within what Adorno called the "musical material." For Adorno, twelve - tone serialism constitutes a decisive, historically developed method of composition. The objective validity of the composition, according to Adorno, rests with neither the composer's genius nor the work's conformity with prior standards, but with the way in which the work coherently expresses the dialectic of the material. In this sense, the contemporary absence of composers of the status of Bach or Beethoven is not the sign of musical regression; instead, new music is to be credited with laying bare aspects of the musical material previously repressed: The musical material's liberation from number, the harmonic series and tonal harmony. Thus, historical progress is only achieved by the composer who "submits to the work and seemingly does not undertake anything active except to follow where it leads." Because historical experience and social relations are embedded within this musical material, it is to the analysis of such material that the critic must turn. In the face of this radical liberation of the musical material, Adorno came to criticize those who, like Stravinsky, withdrew from this freedom by tasking recourse to forms of the past as well as those who turned twelve - tone composition into a technique which dictated the rules of composition.

Adorno saw the culture industry as an arena in which critical tendencies or potentialities were eliminated. He argued that the culture industry, which produced and circulated cultural commodities through the mass media, manipulated the population. 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 economic circumstances. The differences among cultural goods make them appear different, but they are in fact just variations on the same theme. He wrote that "the same thing is offered to everybody by the standardized production of consumption goods" but this is concealed under "the manipulation of taste and the official culture's pretense of individualism". Adorno conceptualized this phenomenon as pseudo - individualization and the always - the - same.

Adorno's analysis allowed for a critique of mass culture from the left which balanced the critique of popular culture from the right. From both perspectives – left and right – the nature of cultural production was felt to be at the root of social and moral problems resulting from the consumption of culture. However, while the critique from the right emphasized moral degeneracy ascribed to sexual and racial influences within popular culture, Adorno located the problem not with the content, but with the objective realities of the production of mass culture and its effects, e.g. as a form of reverse psychology. Thinkers influenced by Adorno believe that today's society has evolved in a direction foreseen by him, especially in regard to the past (Auschwitz), morals or the Culture Industry. The latter has become a particularly productive, yet highly contested term in cultural studies. Many of Adorno's reflections on aesthetics and 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, has only recently been collected and published as Essays on Music.

Adorno's work in the years before his death was shaped by the idea of "negative dialectics", set out especially in his book of that title. A key notion in the work of the Frankfurt School since Dialectic of Enlightenment had been the idea of thought becoming an instrument of domination that subsumes all objects under the control of the (dominant) subject, especially through the notion of identity, i.e., of identifying as real in nature and society only that which harmonized or fit with dominant concepts, and regarding as unreal or non - existent everything that did not. Adorno's "negative dialectics" was an attempt to articulate a non - dominating thought that would recognize its limitations and accept the non - identity and reality of that which could not be subsumed under the subject's concepts. Indeed, Adorno sought to ground the critical bite of his sociological work in his critique of identity, which he took to be a reification in thought of the commodity form or exchange relation which always presumes a false identity between different things. The potential to criticize arises from the gap between the concept and the object, which can never go into the former without remainder. This gap, this non - identity in identity, was the secret to a critique of both material life and conceptual reflection.

According to Horst Müller's Kritik der kritischen Theorie ("Critique of Critical Theory"), Adorno posits totality as an automatic system. This is consistent with Adorno's idea of society as a self - regulating system, from which one must escape (but from which nobody can escape). For him it was existent, but inhuman. Müller argues against the existence of such a system and claims that Critical Theory provides no practical solution for societal change. He concludes that Jürgen Habermas, in particular, and the Frankfurt School in general, misconstrue Marx.

As a pioneer of a self - reflexive sociology who prefigured Bourdieu's ability to factor in the effect of reflection on the societal object, Adorno realized that some criticism (including deliberate disruption of his classes in the 1960s) could never be answered in a dialogue between equals if, as he seems to have believed, what the naive ethnographer or sociologist thinks of a human essence is always changing over time.

Because Adorno believed that sociology needs to be self - reflective and self - critical, he believed that the language the sociologist uses, like the language of the ordinary person, is a political construct in large measure that uses, often unreflectingly, concepts installed by dominant classes and social structures (such as our notion of "deviance" which includes both genuinely deviant individual and "hustlers" operating below social norms because they lack the capital to operate above. He felt that those at the top of the Institute needed to be the source primarily of theories for evaluation and empirical testing, as well as people who would process the "facts" discovered... including revising theories that were found to be false. For example, in essays published in Germany on Adorno's return from the USA, and reprinted in the Critical Models essays collection, Adorno praised the egalitarianism and openness of US society based on his sojourn in New York and the Los Angeles area between 1935 and 1955.

One example of the clash of intellectual culture and Adorno's methods can be found in Paul Lazarsfeld, the American sociologist for whom Adorno worked in the middle 1930s after fleeing Hitler. As Rolf Wiggershaus recounts in The Frankfurt School, Its History, Theories and Political Significance (1995), Lazarsfeld was the director of a project, funded and inspired by David Sarnoff (the head of RCA), to discover both the sort of music that listeners of radio liked and ways to improve their "taste", so that RCA could profitably air more classical music. Lazarsfeld, however, had trouble both with the prose style of the work Adorno handed in and what Lazarsfeld thought was Adorno's "lack of discipline in ... presentation".

While even German readers can find Adorno's work difficult to understand, an additional problem for English readers is that his German idiom is particularly difficult to translate into English. A similar difficulty of translation is true of Hegel, Heidegger, and a number of other German philosophers and poets. As a result, some early translators tended toward over - literalness. In recent years, Edmund Jephcott and Stanford University Press have published new translations of some of Adorno's lectures and books, including Introduction to Sociology, Problems of Moral Philosophy and his transcribed lectures on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Aristotle's "Metaphysics", and a new translation of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Professor Henry Pickford, of the University of Colorado at Boulder, has translated many of Adorno's works such as The meaning of Working Through the Past. A new translation has also appeared of Aesthetic Theory and the Philosophy of New Music by Robert Hullot - Kentor, from University of Minnesota Press. Adorno's correspondence with Alban Berg, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction, and the letters to Adorno's parents, have been translated by Wieland Hoban and published by Polity Press. These fresh translations are less literal in their rendering of German sentences and words, and are more accessible to English readers. The Group Experiment, which had been unavailable to English readers, is now available in an accessible translation by Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin on Harvard University Press, along with introductory material explaining its relation to the rest of Adorno's work and 20th century public opinion research.

Herbert Marcuse was born in Berlin to Carl Marcuse and Gertrud Kreslawsky and raised in a Jewish family. In 1916 he was drafted into the German Army, but only worked in horse stables in Berlin during World War I. He then became a member of a Soldiers' Council that participated in the aborted socialist Spartacist uprising. He completed his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Freiburg in 1922 on the German Künstlerroman after which he moved back to Berlin, where he worked in publishing. In 1924 he married Sophie Wertheim, a mathematician. He returned to Freiburg in 1928 to study with Edmund Husserl and write a Habilitation with Martin Heidegger, which was published in 1932 as Hegel's Ontology and Theory of Historicity. This study was written in the context of the Hegel renaissance that was taking place in Europe with an emphasis on Hegel's ontology of life and history, idealist theory of spirit and dialectic. With his academic career blocked by the rise of the Third Reich, in 1933 Marcuse joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research.

In 1933, Marcuse published his first major review, of Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. In this review, Marcuse revised the interpretation of Marxism, from the standpoint of the works of the early Marx. This review helped the world see that Marcuse was becoming one of the most promising theorists of his generation.

While a member of the Institute of Social Research, Marcuse developed a model for critical social theory, created a theory of the new stage of state and monopoly capitalism, described the relationships between philosophy, social theory, and cultural criticism, and provided an analysis and critique of German fascism. Marcuse worked closely with critical theorists while at the Institute.

After emigrating from Germany in 1933, in 1934, Marcuse immigrated to the United States, where he became a citizen in 1940. Although he never returned to Germany to live, he remained one of the major theorists associated with the Frankfurt School, along with Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (among others). In 1940 he published Reason and Revolution, a dialectical work studying G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx.

During World War II Marcuse first worked for the U.S. Office of War Information (OWI) on anti - Nazi propaganda projects. In 1943 he transferred to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. His work for the OSS involved research on Nazi Germany and denazification. After the dissolution of the OSS in 1945, Marcuse was employed by the US Department of State as head of the Central European section, retiring after the death of his first wife in 1951.

In 1952 he began a teaching career as a political theorist, first at Columbia University, then at Harvard University, then at Brandeis University from 1958 to 1965, where he taught philosophy and politics, and finally (by then he was past the usual retirement age), at the University of California, San Diego. He was a friend and collaborator of the political sociologist Barrington Moore, Jr. and of the political philosopher Robert Paul Wolff, and also a friend of the Columbia University sociology professor C. Wright Mills, one of the founders of the New Left movement.

In the post war period, Marcuse was the most explicitly political and left wing member of the Frankfurt School, continuing to identify himself as a Marxist, a socialist, and a Hegelian.

Marcuse's critiques of capitalist society (especially his 1955 synthesis of Marx and Freud, Eros and Civilization, and his 1964 book One - Dimensional Man) resonated with the concerns of the student movement in the 1960s. Because of his willingness to speak at student protests, Marcuse soon became known as "the father of the New Left in the United States", a term he strongly disliked and disavowed. His work heavily influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies. He had many speaking engagements in the US and Europe in the late 1960s and 1970s. He became a close friend and inspirer of the French philosopher André Gorz.

Marcuse defended the arrested East German dissident Rudolf Bahro (author of Die Alternative: Zur Kritik des real existierenden Sozialismus [trans., The Alternative in Eastern Europe]), discussing in a 1979 essay Bahro's theories of "change from within".

Jesuit Fr. James Chevedden made a written complaint to the Superior General of the Jesuit Order, Peter - Hans Kolvenbach, regarding the promotion of the ideology of the Marxist philosopher, Herbert Marcuse at the 1998 California Jesuit Province Social Pastoral Conference.

Many radical scholars and activists were influenced by Marcuse, such as Angela Davis, Abbie Hoffman, Rudi Dutschke, and Robert M. Young.
Among those who critiqued him from the left were Marxist - humanist Raya Dunayevskaya, and fellow German emigre Paul Mattick, both of whom subjected One - Dimensional Man to a Marxist critique. Marcuse's 1965 essay "Repressive Tolerance", in which he claimed capitalist democracies can have totalitarian aspects, has been criticized by conservatives. Marcuse argues that genuine tolerance does not tolerate support for "repression", since doing so ensures that marginalized voices will remain unheard. He characterizes tolerance of repressive speech as "inauthentic." Instead, he advocates a form of tolerance that is intolerant of right wing political movements:

"Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left."

"Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people (i.e. in the majority of the people). This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc"

Marcuse later expressed his radical ideas through three pieces of writing. He wrote An Essay on Liberation in 1969 celebrating liberation movements such as those in Vietnam, which inspired many radicals. In 1972 he wrote Counterrevolution and Revolt, which argues that the hopes of the 1960s were facing a counterrevolution from the right.

After Brandeis denied the renewal of his teaching contract in 1965, Marcuse devoted the rest of his life to teaching, writing and giving lectures around the world. His efforts brought him attention from the media, which claimed that he openly advocated violence, although he often clarified that only "violence of defense" could be appropriate, not "violence of aggression." He continued to promote Marxian theory, with some of his students helping to spread his ideas. He published his final work The Aesthetic Dimension in 1979 on the role of high art in the process of what he termed "emancipation" from bourgeois society.

Marcuse married three times. His first wife was mathematician Sophie Wertman (1901 – 1951), with whom he had a son, Peter (born 1928). Herbert's second marriage was to Inge Neumann (1910 – 1972), the widow of his close friend Franz Neumann (1900 – 1954). His third wife was Erica Sherover (1938 – 1988), a former graduate student and forty years his junior, whom he married in 1976. His son Peter Marcuse is currently professor emeritus of Urban Planning at Columbia University. His granddaughter is the novelist Irene Marcuse and his grandson, Harold Marcuse, is currently a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

On July 29, 1979, ten days after his eighty - first birthday, Marcuse died after having suffered a stroke during a visit to Germany. He had spoken at the Frankfurt Römerberggespräche, and was on his way to the Max - Planck - Institute for the Study of the Scientific - Technical World in Starnberg, on invitation from second - generation Frankfurt School theorist Jürgen Habermas. In 2003, after his ashes were rediscovered in the USA, he was buried in the Dorotheenstädtischer cemetery, Berlin.

Marcuse’s analysis of capitalism derives partially from one of Karl Marx’s main concepts: Objectification, which under capitalism becomes Alienation. Marx believed that capitalism was exploiting humans; that the objects produced by laborers became alienated and thus ultimately dehumanized them to functional objects. Marcuse took this belief and expanded it. He argued that capitalism and industrialization pushed laborers so hard that they began to see themselves as extensions of the objects they were producing. At the beginning of One - Dimensional Man Marcuse writes, “The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split - level home, kitchen equipment,” meaning that under capitalism (in consumer society) humans become extensions of the commodities that they create, thus making commodities extensions of people's minds and bodies and calling into question the notion of alienation.

During his years in Freiburg, Marcuse wrote a series of essays that explored the possibility of synthesizing Marxism and Heidegger's fundamental ontology, as begun in the latter's work "Being and Time" (1927). Though he eventually came to distance himself from Heidegger's thought, it has been suggested by thinkers such as Juergen Habermas that an understanding of Marcuse's later thinking demands an appreciation of his early Heideggerian influence.

• Reason and Revolution (1941) Presents the Hegelian Perspective along with a critique of Marxism and positivist philosophy.
• Eros and Civilization (1955) The use of Freud's ideas on life and death to critique how modern culture changes and isolates desire.
• One - Dimensional Man (1964) Marcuse's concerns about modern capitalism restricting the possibility of opposition. He believed that the industrialization was creating a one - dimensional way of thought and behavior which decreased opposition towards capitalism.

Born in Düsseldorf, Rhine Province, in 1929, to a middle class and rather traditional family, Habermas came of age in postwar Germany. In his early teens, during World War II, Habermas was profoundly affected by the war. The Nuremberg Trials were a key formative moment that brought home to him the depth of Germany's moral and political failure under National Socialism.

Until his graduation from gymnasium, Habermas lived in Gummersbach, near Cologne. His father, Ernst Habermas, was executive director of the Cologne Chamber of Industry and Commerce, and was described by Habermas as a Nazi sympathizer. He was brought up in a staunchly Protestant milieu, his grandfather being the director of the seminary in Gummersbach. He studied at the universities of Göttingen (1949 / 50), Zürich (1950 / 51), and Bonn (1951 – 54) and earned a doctorate in philosophy from Bonn in 1954 with a dissertation written on the conflict between the absolute and history in Schelling's thought, entitled, Das Absolute und die Geschichte. Von der Zweispältigkeit in Schellings Denken ("The absolute and history: on the schism in Schelling's thought"). His dissertation committee included Erich Rothacker and Oskar Becker.

From 1956 on, he studied philosophy and sociology under the critical theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main Institute for Social Research, but because of a rift between the two over his dissertation — Horkheimer had made unacceptable demands for revision — as well as his own belief that the Frankfurt School had become paralyzed with political skepticism and disdain for modern culture — he finished his habilitation in political science at the University of Marburg under the Marxist Wolfgang Abendroth. His habilitation work was entitled, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit; Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der Bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (published in English translation in 1989 as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society). It is a detailed social history of the development of the bourgeois public sphere from its origins in the 18th century salons up to its transformation through the influence of capital driven mass media. In 1961, he became a privatdozent in Marburg, and — in a move that was highly unusual for the German academic scene of that time — he was offered the position of "extraordinary professor" (professor without chair) of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg (at the instigation of Hans - Georg Gadamer and Karl Löwith) in 1962, which he accepted. In this same year he gained his first serious public attention, in Germany, with the publication of his habilitation. In 1964, strongly supported by Adorno, Habermas returned to Frankfurt to take over Horkheimer's chair in philosophy and sociology. The philosopher Albrecht Wellmer was his assistant in Frankfurt from 1966 to 1970.

He accepted the position of Director of the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg (near Munich) in 1971, and worked there until 1983, two years after the publication of his magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984.

Habermas then returned to his chair at Frankfurt and the directorship of the Institute for Social Research. Since retiring from Frankfurt in 1993, Habermas has continued to publish extensively. In 1986, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honor awarded in German research. He also holds the uncharacteristically postmodern position of "Permanent Visiting" Professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and "Theodor Heuss Professor" at The New School, New York.

Habermas was awarded The Prince of Asturias Award in Social Sciences of 2003. Habermas was also the 2004 Kyoto Laureate in the Arts and Philosophy section. He traveled to San Diego and on March 5, 2005, as part of the University of San Diego's Kyoto Symposium, gave a speech entitled The Public Role of Religion in Secular Context, regarding the evolution of separation of Church and State from neutrality to intense secularism. He received the 2005 Holberg International Memorial Prize (about € 520,000). In 2007, Habermas was listed as the 7th most cited author in the humanities (including the social sciences) by The Times Higher Education Guide, ahead of Max Weber and behind Erving Goffman.

Habermas is a famed teacher and mentor. Among his most prominent students were the pragmatic philosopher Herbert Schnädelbach (theorist of discourse distinction and rationality), the political sociologist Claus Offe (professor at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin), the social philosopher Johann Arnason (professor at La Trobe University and chief editor of the journal Thesis Eleven), the social philosopher Hans - Herbert Kögler (Chair of Philosophy at University of North Florida), the sociological theorist Hans Joas (professor at the University of Erfurt and at the University of Chicago), the theorist of societal evolution Klaus Eder, the social philosopher Axel Honneth (the current director of the Institute for Social Research), the anarcho - capitalist philosopher Hans - Hermann Hoppe, the American philosopher Thomas McCarthy, the co-creator of mindful inquiry in social research Jeremy J. Shapiro, and the assassinated Serbian prime minister Zoran Đinđić.

Habermas has constructed a comprehensive framework of social theory and philosophy drawing on a number of intellectual traditions:

• the German philosophical thought of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schelling, G.W.F. Hegel, Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl and Hans - Georg Gadamer
• the Marxian tradition — both the theory of Karl Marx himself as well as the critical neo - Marxian theory of the Frankfurt School, i.e., Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse
• the sociological theories of Max Weber, Émile Durkheim and George Herbert Mead
• the linguistic philosophy and speech act theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, P.F. Strawson, Stephen Toulmin and John Searle
• the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg
• the American pragmatist tradition of Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey
• the sociological social systems theory of Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann
• Neo - Kantian thought

Jürgen Habermas considers his major contribution to be the development of the concept and theory of communicative reason or communicative rationality, which distinguishes itself from the rationalist tradition, by locating rationality in structures of interpersonal linguistic communication rather than in the structure of the cosmos. This social theory advances the goals of human emancipation, while maintaining an inclusive universalist moral framework. This framework rests on the argument called universal pragmatics - that all speech acts have an inherent telos (the Greek word for "end") — the goal of mutual understanding, and that human beings possess the communicative competence to bring about such understanding. Habermas built the framework out of the speech - act philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin and John Searle, the sociological theory of the interactional constitution of mind and self of George Herbert Mead, the theories of moral development of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, and the discourse ethics of his Heidelberg colleague Karl - Otto Apel.

Habermas's works resonate within the traditions of Kant and the Enlightenment and of democratic socialism through his emphasis on the potential for transforming the world and arriving at a more humane, just, and egalitarian society through the realization of the human potential for reason, in part through discourse ethics. While Habermas has stated that the Enlightenment is an "unfinished project," he argues it should be corrected and complemented, not discarded. In this he distances himself from the Frankfurt School, criticizing it, as well as much of postmodernist thought, for excessive pessimism, radicalism, and exaggerations.

Within sociology, Habermas's major contribution was the development of a comprehensive theory of societal evolution and modernization focusing on the difference between communicative rationality and rationalization on one hand and strategic / instrumental rationality and rationalization on the other. This includes a critique from a communicative standpoint of the differentiation based theory of social systems developed by Niklas Luhmann, a student of Talcott Parsons.

His defence of modernity and civil society has been a source of inspiration to others, and is considered a major philosophical alternative to the varieties of poststructuralism. He has also offered an influential analysis of late capitalism.

Habermas perceives the rationalization, humanization and democratization of society in terms of the institutionalization of the potential for rationality that is inherent in the communicative competence that is unique to the human species. Habermas contends that communicative competence has developed through the course of evolution, but in contemporary society it is often suppressed or weakened by the way in which major domains of social life, such as the market, the state, and organizations, have been given over to or taken over by strategic / instrumental rationality, so that the logic of the system supplants that of the lifeworld.

Habermas introduces the concept of “reconstructive science” with a double purpose: to place the “general theory of society” between philosophy and social science and re-establish the rift between the “great theorization” and the “empirical research”. The model of “rational reconstructions” represents the main thread of the surveys about the “structures” of the world of life (“culture”, “society” and “personality”) and their respective “functions” (cultural reproductions, social integrations and socialization). For this purpose, the dialectics between “symbolic representation” of “the structures subordinated to all worlds of life” (“internal relationships”) and the “material reproduction” of the social systems in their complex (“external relationships” between social systems and environment) has to be considered. This model finds an application, above all, in the “theory of the social evolution”, starting from the reconstruction of the necessary conditions for a phylogeny of the socio - cultural life forms (the “hominization”) until an analysis of the development of “social formations”, which Habermas subdivides into primitive, traditional, modern and contemporary formations. "This paper is an attempt, primarily, to formalize the model of “reconstruction of the logic of development” of “social formations” summed up by Habermas through the differentiation between vital world and social systems (and, within them, through the “rationalization of the world of life” and the “growth in complexity of the social systems”). Secondly, it tries to offer some methodological clarifications about the “explanation of the dynamics” of “historical processes” and, in particular, about the “theoretical meaning” of the evolutional theory’s propositions. Even if the German sociologist considers that the “ex-post rational reconstructions” and “the models system / environment” cannot have a complete “historiographical application”, these certainly act as a general premise in the argumentative structure of the “historical explanation”".

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Habermas argues that prior to the 18th century, European culture had been dominated by a "representational" culture, where one party sought to "represent" itself on its audience by overwhelming its subjects. As an example of "representational" culture, Habermas argued that Louis XIV's Palace of Versailles was meant to show the greatness of the French state and its King by overpowering the senses of visitors to the Palace. Habermas identifies "representational" culture as corresponding to the feudal stage of development according to Marxist theory, arguing that the coming of the capitalist stage of development marked the appearance of Öffentlichkeit (the public sphere). In the culture characterized by Öffentlichkeit, there occurred a public space outside of the control by the state, where individuals exchanged views and knowledge. In Habermas's view, the growth in newspapers, journals, reading clubs, Masonic lodges, and coffeehouses in 18th century Europe, all in different ways, marked the gradual replacement of "representational" culture with Öffentlichkeit culture. Habermas argued that the essential characteristic of the Öffentlichkeit culture was its "critical" nature. Unlike "representational" culture where only one party was active and the other passive, the Öffentlichkeit culture was characterized by a dialogue as individuals either met in conversation, or exchanged views via the print media. Habermas maintains that as Britain was the most liberal country in Europe, the culture of the public sphere emerged there first around 1700, and the growth of Öffentlichkeit culture took place over most of the 18th century in Continental Europe. In his view, the French Revolution was in large part caused by the collapse of "representational" culture, and its replacement by Öffentlichkeit culture. Though Habermas' main concern in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was to expose what he regarded as the deceptive nature of free institutions in the West, his book had a major effect on the historiography of the French Revolution.

According to Habermas, a variety of factors resulted in the eventual decay of the public sphere, including the growth of a commercial mass media, which turned the critical public into a passive consumer public; and the welfare state, which merged the state with society so thoroughly that the public sphere was squeezed out. It also turned the "public sphere" into a site of self - interested contestation for the resources of the state rather than a space for the development of a public minded rational consensus.

His most known work to date, the Theory of Communicative Action (1981), is based on an adaptation of Talcott Parsons AGIL Paradigm. In this work, Habermas voiced criticism of the process of modernization, which he saw as inflexible direction forced through by economic and administrative rationalization. Habermas outlined how our everyday lives are penetrated by formal systems as parallel to development of the welfare state, corporate capitalism and mass consumption. These reinforcing trends rationalize public life. Disenfranchisement of citizens occurs as political parties and interest groups become rationalized and representative democracy replaces participatory one. In consequence, boundaries between public and private, the individual and society, the system and the lifeworld are deteriorating. Democratic public life cannot develop where matters of public importance are not discussed by citizens. An "ideal speech situation", requires participants to have the same capacities of discourse, social equality and their words are not confused by ideology or other errors. In this version of the consensus theory of truth Habermas maintains that truth is what would be agreed upon in an ideal speech situation.

Habermas has expressed optimism about the possibility of the revival of the public sphere. He discerns a hope for the future where the representative democracy - reliant nation - state is replaced by a deliberative democracy - reliant political organism based on the equal rights and obligations of citizens. In such direct democracy - driven system, the activist public sphere is needed for debates on matters of public importance and as well as the mechanism for that discussion to affect the decision making process.

Several noted academics have provided various criticisms of Habermas's notions regarding the public sphere. John B. Thompson, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Jesus College, has pointed out that Habermas's notion of the public sphere is antiquated due to the proliferation of mass media communications. Michael Schudson from the University of California, San Diego, argues more generally that a public sphere as a place of purely rational independent debate never existed.

Habermas offered some early criticisms in an essay, "Modernity versus Postmodernity" (1981), which has achieved wide recognition. In that essay, Habermas raises the issue of whether, in light of the failures of the twentieth century, we "should try to hold on to the intentions of the Enlightenment, feeble as they may be, or should we declare the entire project of modernity a lost cause?" Habermas refuses to give up on the possibility of a rational, "scientific" understanding of the life - world.

Habermas has several main criticisms of postmodernism.

• First, the postmodernists are equivocal about whether they are producing serious theory or literature.
• Second, Habermas feels that the postmodernists are animated by normative sentiments but the nature of those sentiments is concealed from the reader.
• Third, Habermas accuses postmodernism of being a totalizing perspective that fails "to differentiate phenomena and practices that occur within modern society".
• Lastly, Habermas asserts that postmodernists ignore that which Habermas finds absolutely central - namely, everyday life and its practices.

In the period between Knowledge and Human Interest and The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas began to develop a distinctive method for elaborating the relationship between a theoretical social science of modern societies, on the one hand, and the normative and philosophical basis for critique, on the other. Following Horkheimer's definition of critical theory, Habermas pursued three aims in his attempt to combine social science and philosophical analysis: it must be explanatory, practical, and normative. This meant that philosophy could not become the sole basis for normative reflection. Rather, Habermas argued, adequate critique requires a thoroughgoing cooperation between philosophy and social science.

In this transitional phase from Knowledge and Human Interest to The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas's basic philosophical endeavor was to develop a more modest, fallibilist, empirical account of the philosophical claim to universality and rationality.

Habermas is famous as a public intellectual as well as a scholar; most notably, in the 1980s he used the popular press to attack the German historians Ernst Nolte, Michael Stürmer, Klaus Hildebrand and Andreas Hillgruber. Habermas first expressed his views on the above mentioned historians in the Die Zeit on July 11, 1986 in a feuilleton (opinion piece) entitled “A Kind of Settlement of Damages”. Habermas criticized Nolte, Hildebrand, Stürmer and Hillgruber for “apologistic” history writing in regard to the Nazi era, and for seeking to “close Germany’s opening to the West” that in Habermas’s view had existed since 1945. He argued that they had tried to detach Nazi rule and the Holocaust from the mainstream of German history, explain away Nazism as a reaction to Bolshevism, and partially rehabilitate the reputation of the Wehrmacht (German Army) during World War II. Habermas wrote that Stürmer was trying to create a "vicarious religion" in German history which, together with the work of Hillgruber, glorifying the last days of the German Army on the Eastern Front, was intended to serve as a "kind of NATO philosophy colored with German nationalism". The so-called Historikerstreit ("Historians' Quarrel") was not at all one - sided, because Habermas was himself attacked by scholars like Joachim Fest, Hagen Schulze, Horst Möller, Imanuel Geiss and Klaus Hildebrand. In turn, Habermas was supported by historians such as Martin Broszat, Eberhard Jäckel, Hans Mommsen and Hans - Ulrich Wehler.

Habermas and Jacques Derrida engaged in a series of disputes beginning in the 1980s and culminating in a mutual understanding and friendship in the late 1990s that lasted until Derrida died in 2004. They originally came in contact when Habermas invited Derrida to speak at The University of Frankfurt in 1984. The next year Habermas published "Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Derrida" in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity in which he described Derrida’s method as being unable to provide a foundation for social critique. Derrida, citing Habermas as an example, remarked that, "those who have accused me of reducing philosophy to literature or logic to rhetoric ... have visibly and carefully avoided reading me". After Derrida’s final rebuttal in 1989 the two philosophers didn’t continue, but, as Derrida described it, groups in the academy “conducted a kind of ‘war’, in which we ourselves never took part, either personally or directly”. Then at the end of the 1990s Habermas approached Derrida at a party held at a university in the United States where they were both lecturing. They then met at Paris over dinner, and afterwards have participated in many joint projects. In 2000 they held a joint seminar on problems of philosophy, right, ethics, and politics at the University of Frankfurt. In December 2000, in Paris, Habermas gave a lecture entitled "How to answer the ethical question?" at the Judeities. Questions for Jacques Derrida conference organized by Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury - Orly. Following the lecture by Habermas, both thinkers engaged in a very heated debate on Heidegger and the possibility of Ethics. The conference volume was published at the Editions Galilée (Paris) in 2002, and subsequently in English at Fordham University Press (2007). In the aftermath of 9/11, Derrida and Habermas laid out their individual opinions on 9/11 and the War on Terror in Giovanna Borradori's Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. In early 2003, both Habermas and Derrida were very active in opposing the coming Iraq War, and called for in a manifesto that later became the book Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe for a tighter union of the states of the European Union in order to provide a power capable of opposing American foreign policy. Derrida wrote a foreword expressing his unqualified subscription to Habermas's declaration of February 2003, "February 15, or, What Binds Europeans Together: Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in Core Europe,” in Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe which was a reaction to the Bush administration demands upon European nations for support for the coming Iraq War.

In early 2007, Ignatius Press published a dialogue between Habermas and Roman Catholic Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI), entitled The Dialectics of Secularization. It addresses such important contemporary questions as these:

• Is a public culture of reason and ordered liberty possible in our post - metaphysical age?
• Is philosophy permanently cut adrift from its grounding in being and anthropology?
• Does this decline of rationality signal an opportunity or a deep crisis for religion itself?

In this debate a recent shift of Habermas became evident — in particular, his rethinking of the public role of religion. Habermas writes as a “methodological atheist,” which means that when doing philosophy or social science, he presumes nothing about particular religious beliefs. Yet while writing from this perspective his evolving position towards the role of religion in society has led him to some challenging questions, and as a result conceding some ground in his dialogue with the Pope, that would seem to have consequences which further complicate the positions he holds about a communicative rational solution to the problems of modernity.

In an interview in 1999 Habermas stated that,

"For the normative self - understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of a continual critical reappropriation and reinterpretation. Up to this very day there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post - national constellation, we must draw sustenance now, as in the past, from this substance. Everything else is idle postmodern talk."

The statement was later misquoted in a number of American newspapers and magazines as: "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization," which Habermas did not say.

Habermas now talks about the emergence of "post - secular societies" and argues that tolerance is a two - way street: secular people need to tolerate the role of religious people in the public square and vice versa.

Habermas currently ranks as one of the most influential philosophers in the world. Bridging European and Anglo - American traditions of thought, he has engaged in debate with thinkers as diverse as Gadamer and Hilary Putnam, Foucault and Rawls, Derrida and Brandom. His extensive written work addresses topics stretching from social - political theory to aesthetics, epistemology and language to philosophy of religion, and his ideas have significantly influenced not only philosophy but also political - legal thought, sociology, communication studies, argumentation theory and rhetoric, developmental psychology and theology. Moreover, he has figured prominently in Germany as public intellectual, commenting on controversial issues of the day in German newspapers such as Die Zeit.

Two broad lines of enduring interest are found in Habermas's work, one having to do with the political domain, the other with issues of rationality, communication, and knowledge.