Jeremy J. Shapiro · CC BY-SA 3.0

A German philosopher who, as director of the Institute for Social Research, built the Frankfurt School into one of the twentieth century's most influential intellectual projects, developing critical theory as a way of examining how modern capitalist societies produce conformity and authoritarianism rather than the freedom they promise. His Dialectic of Enlightenment, written with Theodor Adorno while both were in American exile, became one of the defining texts of twentieth-century social philosophy.