The Sociology of Theodor Adorno reads like an anachronistic title for a book. This is not because the ink of Adorno's last written word dried four decades ago. Many disciplines, notably philosophy and aesthetics, still cite his oeuvre as a timely source. It is Adorno's sociology that seems so far out of touch with basic trends in contemporary social science as to no longer warrant attention. Adorno conceived sociology as a demarcated discipline insofar as ‘there are specifically sociological methods and … questions’ (IS 99) and insisted that this discipline required a concept of society. These convictions appear to clash head-on with present-day ideas for sociology's cross- or post-disciplinarity (Urry 2000a: 199–200; 2003: 124), its reunification with other disciplines as twenty-first-century historical science (Wallerstein 2000: 33–4) and its abandonment of the concept of society. At first glance, Adorno's sociology promises little more than reactionary obstacles for the discipline's advance into the new millennium.

But the issue is not so straightforward. Adorno's sociology resonates consonantly with some of these developments. He never considered sociology as a conventional academic subject. Notwithstanding the specificity of sociological questions and methods, he assigned no defined, defining substantive field to them (IS 102).