Jeremy J. Shapiro · CC BY-SA 3.0

A leading figure of the Frankfurt School whose work fused Marx and Freud into a critique of mass culture — his term "the culture industry," coined with Max Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, described how entertainment manufactures conformity while appearing to offer choice. Trained as a composer under Alban Berg, he brought the same close attention to modernist music into his philosophy. He fled Nazi Germany for exile in the United States, where he collaborated with Thomas Mann on Doctor Faustus, before returning to Frankfurt to rebuild the Institute for Social Research and write Negative Dialectics.