Adorno’s death ended Institute-centered Critical Theory, scattering its younger members.

Evidence

Adorno’s death was thus the end of a form of Critical Theory, no matter how disunified it had been, which had uniquely centred on the Institute of Social Research, as its outward form, and on an urge for discovery that had its roots in anti-bourgeois sentiment and in a sense of having a mission to criticize society. The fact that the younger members of the Institute all left Frankfurt within two or three years only underlined the significance of the break that Adorno’s death represented. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 689

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier chapter material on Adorno’s 1969 death ending the Institute-centered form of Critical Theory.
• DEEPTHINKING: Frames a whole intellectual school’s terminus as an institutional event, not just a biographical one — worth sitting with as a model of how schools die.