The writings of Theodor W. Adorno have significantly influenced the disciplines of philosophy, aesthetics, musicology, and politics. His Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Writings, 1970-1986) comprises twenty-three volumes; previously uncollected writings continue to be published in book form. Together with other members of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research), known in academic circles as the Frankfurt School, Adorno helped to integrate the sometimes contradictory social theories of Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Georg Lukács, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Max Weber into the Frankfurt School Critical Theory, a particularly sophisticated type of ideology critique that interrogates both the revolutionary and reactionary elements of culture. His negative dialectics, a version of philosophical thinking that rejects the notion of synthesis found in classical dialectics, continues to make provocative contributions to many of the ongoing discussions concerning aesthetic modernism, cultural criticism, and Western Marxism...