Abstract

Even defenders of the enlightenment have suggested that the project of modernity is in crisis. This dissertation explores the crisis as understood in the Western Marxist tradition and offers a defense of the modern project. I begin with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's important work Dialectic of Enlightenment. They submit that while the Enlightenment claims to be a liberating force, in reality it erects a fetishized social world of capitalism that escapes from human control or comprehension. Thus they are skeptical of the modern project itself. ;I use the work of Jurgen Habermas to answer their skepticism. I defend Habermas's call for critical theory to make a paradigm shift from "the philosophy of consciousness" to one based on communication. Emphasized with this move are intersubjectivity, language and concepts such as validity and consensus. Yet Habermas's analytic distinction between system and lifeworld restricts major areas of human social experience from formation through communicative processes. I claim that we can both retain some of the more radical claims of critical theory and incorporate Habermas's advances by turning to the work of Georg Lukacs. In his early aesthetic work Lukacs develops original insights for overcoming alienation, making sense of our lives, and achieving the sort of reconciliation between ourselves and others, ourselves and the world and aspects of ourselves that motivated Hegel and Marx. Lukacs sustains these insights in History and Class Consciousness in a way that corrects for Habermas's misappropriation of labor. In the final chapter I draw on Marx's 1844 Manuscripts since this work stress the realness and the interaction of the laboring process. Marx offers concrete insights for developing a communicative theory of work and for showing that labor is communicative and how it is intertwined with our ability to make sense of our lives