Theodor Adorno

1903-1969 Adorno, Theodor W.

German philosopher and social commentator, who along with Henry Marcuse and Max Horkheimer developed Critical Theory, a broad-based Marxist-oriented approach to the study of society.  In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Horkheimer and Adorno argued that the celebration of reason by thinkers of the 18th-century Enlightenment had led to the development of technologically sophisticated but oppressive and inhumane modes of governance, exemplified in the 20th century by fascism and totalitarianism.  This thinking emerged in Critical Legal Studies in the 1960’s and 1970’s, then to Critical Race Theory from the 1990’s.