Dustin Garlitz

The Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School, is an interdisciplinary research center associated with the University of Frankfurt in Germany and responsible for the founding and various trajectories of Critical Theory in the contemporary humanities and social sciences. Three generations of critical theorists have emerged from the Institute. The first generation was most prominently represented in the twentieth century by Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Leo Löwenthal, and also for some time Erich Fromm. The so-called ‘second generation’ of the Institute is centrally represented by Jürgen Habermas, whose work has functioned as the focal point of a wide range of critical theorists. The third generation of the Frankfurt School is represented by Axel Honneth who emerged as a new center, with different strands or readings of who else belongs to the third generation, some in Germany, some internationally, and some more in sociology and social and political theory than philosophy.

The article focuses on the scholarly career of German sociologist, philosopher, and musicologist Theodor W. Adorno. Examined are his leading publications, his notable teachers and collaborators, and his time in exile in the United States, among other places. Special emphasis is placed on his negative dialectics, including how this perspective formed a method of communication in itself. Adorno's contributions to the Frankfurt School, and to 20th-century Continental philosophy, sociology, and musicology, are also covered.

Surplus labor and crime have complemented one another since the nineteenth century, when social philosopher Karl Marx propounded a now classical theory of surplus labor, exploitation, and crime in the material sense. As illustrated in Volume 1 of Capital (Marx, 1867/1976), Marx's concept of “surplus labor”—a type of unpaid labor—represented a moral injustice, a sort of crime against humanity. In the twentieth century a distinct form of surplus labor was linked to crime in a wider range of studies, which redefined this concept as labor surplus or surplus in labor. As an expression of the twentieth-century neo-Marxism of the Frankfurt School, Rusche and Kirchheimer's Punishment and Social Structure, first published in 1933, was among the first studies to link surplus labor and crime where the former was meeting the criteria both for a classical theory concept of “surplus labor” and for a revised concept of “surplus in labor” or “labor surplus.” Most studies along a sociological–criminological spectrum were now dedicated to this revised concept.