Adorno's work has been variously described as Nietzschean, Weberian, Hegelian, idealist, Marxist and materialist. With equal frequency, commentators have excluded Adorno from one or the other of these camps. So, for example, Stephen Bronner argues that Adorno's work has nothing to do with materialism “unless that concept is configured in the most abstract terms” (1996: 186–7). Some Italian Marxists were even more critical than Bronner, excoriating Adorno as a romantic idealist. This is certainly true of Lucio Colletti, who, as Perry Anderson observes, soundly denounced Adorno (and others as well) for his allegedly Hegelian rejection of materialism (1976: 70). This charge reappears in a different form in Sebastiano Timpanaro's influential On Materialism (1975). Among other things, Timpanaro objects that the Frankfurt School as a whole has an “antimaterialist, anti-Enlightenment, anti-jacobin orientation”. All the school's theorists are pessimistic thinkers who “end up in, or at least tend towards, more or less explicitly religious positions” (ibid.: 19).

These barbed criticisms contradict Adorno's own description of his work as materialist in orientation. Although he would reject Timpanaro's claim that a materialist would never reduce experience to a “reciprocal implication of subject and object”, Adorno advances a version of materialism that agrees in part with Timpanaro's view that materialism involves “above all acknowledgement of the priority of nature over ‘mind’” (ibid.: 34). Furthermore, both Timpanaro and Adorno acknowledge their debts to Marx.