In 1942, the exiled members of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research held a seminar series in Los Angeles devoted to the development of a theory of human needs. Responding to the Third Reich and to the New Deal—as well as to Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel, Brave New World, published a decade earlier—Adorno’s contribution was arguably the most dialectical and thus most radical of them all. This lecture will analyze Adorno’s “Theses on Need” and situate it in relation to the foregoing context, to his Marxist commitments, and to Adorno’s central concept of “natural history.” In 1942, the exiled members of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research held a seminar series in Los Angeles devoted to the development of a theory of human needs. Responding to the Third Reich and to the New Deal—as well as to Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel, Brave New World, published a decade earlier—Adorno’s contribution was arguably the most dialectical and thus most radical of them all. This lecture will analyze Adorno’s “Theses on Need” and situate it in relation to the foregoing context, to his Marxist commitments, and to Adorno’s central concept of “natural history.” In 1942, the exiled members of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research held a seminar series in Los Angeles devoted to the development of a theory of human needs. Responding to the Third Reich and to the New Deal—as well as to Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel, Brave New World, published a decade earlier—Adorno’s contribution was arguably the most dialectical and thus most radical of them all. This lecture will analyze Adorno’s “Theses on Need” and situate it in relation to the foregoing context, to his Marxist commitments, and to Adorno’s central concept of “natural history.”