Adorno - by Stefan Müller-Doohm (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

'Even the biographical individual is a social category', wrote Adorno. 'It can only be defined in a living context together with others.' In this major new biography, Stefan Muller-Doohm turns this maxim back on Adorno himself and provides a rich and comprehensive account of the life and work of one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century.

This authoritative biography ranges across the whole of Adorno's life and career, from his childhood and student years to his years in emigration in the United States and his return to postwar Germany. At the same time, Muller-Doohm examines the full range of Adorno's writings on philosophy, sociology, literary theory, music theory and cultural criticism. Drawing on an array of sources from Adorno's personal correspondence with Horkheimer, Benjamin, Berg, Marcuse, Kracauer and Mann to interviews, notes and both published and unpublished writings, Muller-Doohm situates Adorno's contributions in the context of his times and provides a rich and balanced appraisal of his significance in the 20th Century as a whole.

Muller-Doohm's clear prose succeeds in making accessible some of the most complex areas of Adorno's thought. This outstanding biography will be the standard work on Adorno for years to come.

From the Back Cover

'Even the biographical individual is a social category', wrote Adorno. 'It can only be defined in a living context together with others.' In this major new biography, Stefan Müller-Doohm turns this maxim back on Adorno himself and provides a rich and comprehensive account of the life and work of one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century.

This authoritative biography ranges across the whole of Adorno's life and career, from his childhood and student years to his years in emigration in the United States and his return to postwar Germany. At the same time, Muller-Doohm examines the full range of Adorno's writings on philosophy, sociology, literary theory, music theory and cultural criticism. Drawing on an array of sources from Adorno's personal correspondence with Horkheimer, Benjamin, Berg, Marcuse, Kracauer and Mann to interviews, notes and both published and unpublished writings, Muller-Doohm situates Adorno's contributions in the context of his times and provides a rich and balanced appraisal of his significance in the 20th Century as a whole.

Müller-Doohm's clear prose succeeds in making accessible some of the most complex areas of Adorno's thought. This outstanding biography will be the standard work on Adorno for years to come.

Review Quotes

"Although Adorno died in 1969, we have had to wait more than thirty years for a biography ... Stefan Müller-Doohm's is the most detailed and probably the best. (It has been exceptionally well translated, too.)"
Times Literary Supplement

"Stands as a very informative account of Adorno's life, which has much to offer casual readers of Adorno and those with a thorough interest in his work [and] ties a narrative description of Adorno's life to a sensitive understanding of his thought, and of the consistency of his reflection across the different disciplinary boundaries that it traversed ... This book does all the things a biography should."
Times Higher Education Supplement

"Exhaustively researched and presented with exemplary balance, Müller-Doohm's re-creation of Adorno's 'damaged life' is fully worthy of its demanding subject. No future student of one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers will be able to ignore this remarkable achievement in intellectual biography."
Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley

About the Author

Stefan Müller-Doohm isProfessor of Sociology at Oldenburg University, Germany.