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Theodor Adorno: A Leading Figure of the Frankfurt School

Complete your Adorno bookshelf with this list of his most essential works.

2 September 2025

Theodor Adorno: A Leading Figure of the Frankfurt School

Theodor Adorno is one of the twentieth century’s most prominent social theorists. As a leading member of the Frankfurt School—alongside Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse—his work is is essential to any critique of modern society, fascism, and European left thought.

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Related Reading

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Aesthetics and Politics

by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukács

Afterword by Fredric Jameson

No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics...
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Minima Moralia

by Theodor Adorno

Translated by Edmund F.N. Jephcott

Written between 1944 and 1947, Minima Moralia is a collection of rich, lucid aphorisms and essays about life in modern capitalist society. Adorno casts his penetrating eye across society in mid-cen...
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The Authoritarian Personality

by Theodor Adorno

What makes a fascist? Are there character traits that make someone more likely to vote for the far right? The Authoritarian Personality, written in the shadow of Fascism and the Holocaust, looked t...
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Towards a New Manifesto

by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

Translated by Rodney Livingstone

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote the central text of “critical theory”, Dialectic of Enlightenment, a measured critique of the Enlightenment reason that, they argued, had resulted in fascism...
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Dialectic of Enlightenment

by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

Contributions by John Cumming

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer are the leading figures of the Frankfurt School and this book is their magnum opus. Dialectic of Enlightenment is one of the most celebrated works of modern social...
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Quasi Una Fantasia

by Theodor Adorno

This collection covers a wide range of topics, from a moving study of Bizet’s Carmen to an entertainingly caustic exploration of the hierarchies of the auditorium. Especially significant is Adorno’...
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In Search of Wagner

by Theodor Adorno

Foreword by Slavoj Žižek

Translated by Rodney Livingstone

Written in exile from Germany, this potent study of Europe’s most controversial composer explodes the frontiers of musical and cultural analysis. Measuring key elements of Wagner’s oeuvre with pate...
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Grand Hotel Abyss

by Stuart Jeffries

In 1923, a group of young radical German thinkers and intellectuals came together to at Victoria Alle 7, Frankfurt, determined to explain the workings of the modern world. Among the most prominen...
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Adorno, Foucault and the Critique of the West

by Deborah Cook

Adorno, Foucault, and the Critique of the West argues that critical theory continues to offer valuable resources for critique and contestation during this turbulent period in our history. To assess...
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Late Marxism

by Fredric Jameson

In the name of an assault on “totalization” and “identity,” a number of contemporary theorists have been busily washing Marxism’s dialectical and utopian projects down the plug-hole of postmodernis...
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The Melancholy Science

by Gillian Rose

The Melancholy Science is Gillian Rose’s investigation into Theodor Adorno’s work and legacy. Rose uncovers the unity discernable among the many fragments of Adorno’s oeuvre, and argues that his...
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The Philosophy of Praxis

by Andrew Feenberg

The early Marx called for the “realization of philosophy” through revolution. Revolution thus becomes a critical philosophical concept for Marxism, a view elaborated in the later praxis philosophie...
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Hollywood Flatlands

by Esther Leslie

With ruminations on drawing, colour and caricature, on the political meaning of fairy-tales, talking animals and human beings as machines, Hollywood Flatlands brings to light the links between anim...
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