The Critical Theory of Society as Reflexive Sociology

In the course of developing his critical theory of society - a project whose philosophical foundations were first explicitly outlined by Max Horkheimer in a programmatic 1937 essay in the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung - Theodor W. Adorno came to formulate his unique concept of sociology. The formulation is the result of a process of learning and reflection whose point of departure is the attempt to make sense of the mutually conditioning relations between music and society. The importance of music theory in Adorno's sociology is also to be explained from the biographical fact that, though Adorno studied philosophy in Frankfurt am Main at the beginning of the 1920s, his heart had been bent on music from childhood. (Adorno studied composition with Alban Berg in Vienna in 1925.) Adorno's abilities as a composer influenced not only his numerous published opera and concert reviews but also his music-aesthetic analyses of individual works. These two areas of interest have in common that both were engaged in discerning the transformation of musical material amid changes in society.