Word: adorno
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...anti-abortion position by a fundamentalist fringe. Their wellintentioned arguments--couched in terms of Jesus and the Bible--do more harm than good when it comes to persuading Americans why abortion is the unjust policy, which it really is. As the prominent social theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno argued, even the best-intentioned reformer who uses anachronistic arguments--and the fundamentalist language is surely anachronistic and non-persuasive for most Americans--"strengthens the very power of the established order he is trying to break...
Toscanini's viscerally exciting performances, wrought with supreme tension and instrumental clarity, though sometimes sacrificing musical depth, also account for his popularity, according to Horowitz. Here Horowitz invokes the theories of Theodor Adorno, a Marxist of the Frankfurt school. Adorno, Horowitz writes, understood culture of the "bourgeois epoch"--"affirmative" and "official"--as neglecting the contradictions inherent in great art. Although proponents claimed classical would lead to universal enlightenment, "aspects of the concert hall experience were standardized, atomized, `fetishized,'" by alienated members of a "commodity society...
...sought to broaden Harvard, we might have succeeded at most in institutionalizing a trivial and pedantic approach to the fields of knowledge that mattered most to us. There were few experts in those fields at the time and I doubt whether Harvard would have recognized a Benjamin or an Adorno had one applied. In the end, there was no way for us to have followed our vision at Harvard or for Harvard to have followed us in our quest...