As a result of a new understanding of the relation between theory and practice, the "New Frankfurt School," with Jürgen Habermas as its major representative, highly values the philosophical tradition of American pragmatism, in contrast to the first generation Critical Theorists represented by Max Horkheimer. In Habermas, the idea of"critique" is, both substantially and methodologically, closely connected with the idea of "praxis" in the following senses: communicative action, rational argumentation, public discussion and political culture. "Critique" is thus found (...) to be immanent in "praxis"; or, a la Horkheimer, pragmatism turns out to be a "critical philosophical analysis" without "falling back upon objective reason and mythology.". (shrink)

In "The Frankfurt School on Religion," Eduardo Mendieta has brought together a collection of readings and essays revealing both the deep connections that the Frankfurt School has always maintained with religion as well as the significant contribution that its work has to offer. Rather than being unanimously antagonistic towards religion as has been the received wisdom, this collection shows the great diversity of responses that individual thinkers of the school developed and the seriousness and sophistication (...) with which they engaged the core religious issues and major religious traditions. Through a careful selection of writings from eleven prominent theorists, including several new and previously untranslated pieces from Leo Lowenthal, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Jurgen Habermas, this volume provides much needed sources for religious leaders, philosophers, and social theorists as they grapple with the nature and functions of religion in the contemporary social, political, and economic landscape. "The Frankfurt School on Religion" recovers the religious dimensions of the Frankfurt School, for too long sidelined or ignored, and offers new perspectives and insights necessary to the development of a fuller and more nuanced critical theory of society. Selections and essays from: Ernst Bloch, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Johann Baptist Metz, Jurgen Habermas, Helmut Peukert, Edmund Arens. (shrink)

Since 1980s, the Frankfurt School's critique of Culture Industry has provided powerful ammunitions for Chinese intellectuals to reject rising consumer popular culture. In recent years, Chinese academics began to study the Frankfurt School's critique of capitalist modernity from more theoretical perspectives, attempting to set Chinese problems of modernity and its legitimacy against the Frankfurt School's theorization. However, Chinese intellectuals’ diverse responses to the Frankfurt School have largely remained at the level of academic (...) inquiries rather than seriously engaging in practically seeking alternatives. This study will consider issues of critique of and alternatives to capitalist modernity that modern Marxists or post-Marxists, be they Frankfurt School philosophers, the Chinese Marxists or the latter-day Chinese “new left,” all wish to seek out. (shrink)

Wheatland intends in this work to demythologize the "Frankfurt school" and answer a lacuna by providing a detailed social history of its American exile and reception. He undertakes the first task by distinguishing the "Horkheimer circle" from later portrayals of the continuity and homogeneity of their thought, the mystique of theorizing in the "splendid isolation" of alienated exile, and their significance for the radical politics of the 1960s. Although it is doubtful that many philosophers and theorists believe these (...) myths, and the book can be unsatisfying due to its overly generalizing and partial treatment of philosophical positions and arguments, it is helpful to understanding the Frankfurt exiles' social contexts and the impact of their connections with colleagues, critics, and interpreters in American academic, Jewish, and leftist circles.Part 1 portrays the complicated efforts to re-establish the Institute for Social Research in New York and Columbia University's interest in Horkheimer and his associates. Since they offered expertise in and a model for interdisciplinary empirical research integrating sociology, psychology, and theory, they were a solution to the decline of Columbia's sociology program, which was interested in expanding empirical social research in a situation of intense competition for funding. While fears of their Marxist connections persisted, the exiles' ever. (shrink)

For some decades now, British cultural studies has tended to either disregard or caricature in a hostile manner the critique of mass culture developed by the Frankfurt school. [1] The Frankfurt school has been repeatedly stigmatized as elitist and reductionist, or simply ignored in discussion of the methods and enterprise of cultural studies. This is an unfortunate oversight as I will argue that despite some significant differences in method and approach, there are also many shared positions (...) that make dialogue between the traditions productive. Likewise, articulation of the differences and divergences of the two traditions could be fruitful since, as I will argue, both traditions to some extent overcome the weaknesses and limitations of the other. Consequently, articulation of their positions could produce new perspectives that might contribute to developing a more robust cultural studies. Thus, I will argue that rather than being antithetical, the Frankfurt school and British cultural studies approaches complement each other and can be articulated in new configurations. (shrink)

The Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School, is an interdisciplinary research center associated with the University of Frankfurt in Germany and responsible for the founding and various trajectories of Critical Theory in the contemporary humanities and social sciences. Three generations of critical theorists have emerged from the Institute. The first generation was most prominently represented in the twentieth century by Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Leo Löwenthal, and also for some time Erich (...) Fromm. The so-called ‘second generation’ of the Institute is centrally represented by Jürgen Habermas, whose work has functioned as the focal point of a wide range of critical theorists. The third generation of the Frankfurt School is represented by Axel Honneth who emerged as a new center, with different strands or readings of who else belongs to the third generation, some in Germany, some internationally, and some more in sociology and social and political theory than philosophy. (shrink)

The Institute of Social Research, from which the Frankfurt School developed, was founded in the early years of the Weimar Republic. It survived the Nazi era in exile, to become an important centre of social theory in the postwar era. Early members of the school, such as Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, developed a form of Marxist theory known as Critical Theory, which became influential in the study of class, politics, culture and ideology. The work of more recent (...) members, and in particular Habermas, has received wide attention throughout Europe and North America. Tom Bottomore's study takes a new and controversial look at the contributions of the Frankfurt School to modern sociology, examining several issues not previously discussed elsewhere. He discusses the neglect of history and political economy by the critical theorists, and considers the relationship of the later Frankfurt School to the radical movements of the 1960s and the present time. His critical analysis makes the school's writers accessible, through an assessment of their work and an exploration of the relationship of Critical Theory to other forms of sociological thought, especially positivism and structuralism. (shrink)

This is the definitive study of the history and accomplishments of the Frankfurt School. It offers elegantly written portraits of the major figures in the school's history as well as overviews of the various positions and directions they developed from the founding years just after World War I until the death of Theodor Adorno in 1969.The book is based on documentary and biographical materials that have only recently become available. As the narrative follows the Institute for Social (...) Research from Frankfurt am Main to Geneva, New York, and Los Angeles, and then back to Frankfurt, Wiggershaus continually ties the evolution of the school to the changing intellectual and political contexts in which it operated. He also interweaves these accounts with incisive summaries of substantive works by Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Fromm, Kirchheimer, Lowenthal, Marcuse, Neumann, Pollock, and Habermas.The book is self-contained and can serve as a general introduction to critical theory, but it also has a wealth of new material to offer those who are familiar with this tradition but would like to learn more about its history and context.Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. (shrink)

Introduction to the new edition -- The philosophy of praxis -- The demands of reason -- Metacritique of the concept of nature -- Reification and rationality -- The realization of philosophy -- The controversy over subject-object identity -- From Lukács to the Frankfurt School -- The last philosophy of praxis -- Philosophy of praxis: summary and significance -- Appendix: the unity of theory and practice.

The Institute of Social Research, from which the Frankfurt School developed, was founded in the early years of the Weimar Republic. It survived the Nazi era in exile, to become an important centre of social theory in the postwar era. Early members of the school, such as Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, developed a form of Marxist theory known as Critical Theory, which became influential in the study of class, politics, culture and ideology. The work of more recent (...) members, and in particular Habermas, has received wide attention throughout Europe and North America. Tom Bottomore's study takes a new and controversial look at the contributions of the Frankfurt School to modern sociology, examining several issues not previously discussed elsewhere. He discusses the neglect of history and political economy by the critical theorists, and considers the relationship of the later Frankfurt School to the radical movements of the 1960s and the present time. His critical analysis makes the school's writers accessible, through an assessment of their work and an exploration of the relationship of Critical Theory to other forms of sociological thought, especially positivism and structuralism. (shrink)

This is above all a documentary book, written in monumental proportions. Not only the "history," but also the "theories" and the "political significance" of the Frankfurt School are discussed here in a narrative style and in constant reference to the biographical and, more generally, the social, political, and ideological-intellectual contexts. The author's sources are not only theoretical publications but also interviews with members of the Institute for Social Research, archive material, and published and unpublished correspondence. The work thus (...) touches upon such disparate topics as the Weimar Republic, the German Jewish emigres, the Third Reich, the student movement of the 1960's, the "positivist dispute", as well as "Western marxism" and psychoanalysis, to name some of the most important themes. In this sense, Wiggershaus's work expands the scope and deepens the contents of Martin Jay's The Dialectical Imagination. A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950. Among other things, Wiggershaus follows the history of the "school" up to Adorno's death in 1969, and thus includes Habermas in his historiographical narrative; in other words, he relates the career of both the Old and the New Generations of the Frankfurt School. (shrink)

The Discourse of Domination tackles nothing less than the challenge of giving critical theory a new grip on current problems, and restoring the left's faith in the possibility of enlightened social change.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 37.1 (2004) 92-95 [Access article in PDF] Rethinking the Frankfurt School: Alternative Legacies of Cultural Critique. Ed. Jeffrey T. Nealon and Caren Irr. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002. Pp. 227. $23.95, paperback. Not long ago at a gathering of arts and humanities scholars, I found myself introduced to a group of people as someone interested in the work of Theodor Adorno, whose name led one (...) member of the group to groan, "Not that old chestnut!" Such has been an ambient attitude in cultural studies toward not just the work of Adorno but many of the scholars who came to be known collectively in the 1960s as the Frankfurt School, thanks to their affiliation with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt. Rethinking the Frankfurt School, a deceptively slim volume that manages to cover a lot of ground in a dozen densely packed essays edited by Jeffrey T. Nealon and Caren Irr, counters the conventional cultural studies wisdom regarding the Frankfurt School, debunking along the way not just the facile dismissal of some of the school's members for their "mandarin elitism," but also the notion that the scholars who arguably pioneered the critical study of mass culture have lost their relevance for cultural studies.The association of the Frankfurt School with a cranky and outdated variant of bourgeois proto-Marxism—what Lukacs once dismissed as self-indulgent despair cultivated in the comfort of "the Grand Hotel Abyss"—was at least in part a legacy of the rediscovered cultural and political optimism of the late 1960s. This optimism came to characterize those strands of cultural studies that countered the gloomy assessments of the Frankfurt School with the potential of what the collection's editors disparagingly describe as "subversive consumption." From the perspective of the new millennium it's no longer the Frankfurt scholars who look misguided. In a turning of the tables, the outdated figure of this volume is not Adorno, the pointy-headed pessimist, but rather those who helped dismiss him as such. In particular, Simon During, who edited the 1993 version of the cultural studies canon, The Cultural Studies Reader, comes in for a double dose of implicit criticism (thanks in part to what seems to be an editing oversight) for his critique of Horkheimer and Adorno's failure to take into account [End Page 92] the "opportunities for all kinds of individual collective creativity and decoding" provided by the culture industries (3, 62). If, as During suggested, the 1960s represented a time in which the mass media had become more variegated and presumably more flexible and porous than in the period treated by Horkheimer and Adorno, this collection suggests the renewed relevance of the Frankfurt School might in part be explained by the "unprecedented consolidation within the multinational 'infotainment' industry" during the 1990s (5). The triumphal resuscitation and consolidation of monopoly capitalism triggers, on this account, the rehabilitation of its most scathing critics.The more compelling argument advanced in this volume, however, is that the ostensibly outdated character of much of the work of the Frankfurt School was as much a result of superficial and dismissive readings as of changing historical conditions. As contributor Evan Watkins suggests in his discussion of Adorno, the dominant tendency in culture studies has been to contradict disparaging claims about mass culture (claims which earned Adorno and Horkheimer the sticky moniker of elitists) rather than to take seriously an approach that explored the intricate connections between mass culture and the social relations of production and consumption. Only in the abstract can the consumption of ostensibly counter-hegemonic texts be figured as subversive politics, especially during a time when "The Times They Are A-Changin' " can become a jingle for a bank commercial.Against the theoretical backdrop of the Frankfurt School, the very attempt to isolate culture as a sphere of resistance unto itself becomes a symptom of reification. As Imre Szeman puts it, perhaps the most important lesson of the Frankfurt School for cultural studies "can be summarized by a negative maxim: don't fetishize culture" (74... (shrink)

Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Franz Neumann, Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal—the impact of the Frankfurt School on the sociological, political, and cultural thought of the twentieth century has been profound. _The Dialectical Imagination_ is a major history of this monumental cultural and intellectual enterprise during its early years in Germany and in the United States. Martin Jay has provided a substantial new preface for this edition, in which he reflects on the continuing relevance of the work of (...) the Frankfurt School. (shrink)

An innovative, ambitious, tradition-crossing study drawing on the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas to propose a new and transformative concept of truth. The idea of truth is a guiding theme for German continental philosophers from Husserl through Habermas. In this book, Lambert Zuidervaart examines debates surrounding the idea of truth in twentieth-century German continental philosophy. He argues that the Heideggerian and critical theory traditions have much in common—despite the miscommunication, opposition, and even outright hostility that have prevailed (...) between them—including significant roots in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Zuidervaart sees the tensions between Heideggerian thought and critical theory as potentially generative sources for a new approach to the idea of truth. He argues further that the “critical retrieval” of insights from German continental philosophy can shed light on current debates in analytic truth theory. Zuidervaart structures his account around three issues: the distinction between propositional truth and truth that is more than propositional (which he calls existential truth); the relationship between propositional truth and the discursive justification of propositional truth claims, framed in analytic philosophy by debates between epistemic and nonepistemic conceptions of truth; and the relationship between propositional truth and the objectivity of knowledge, often presented in analytic philosophy as a conflict between realists and antirealists over the relation between “truth bearers” and “truth makers.” In an innovative and ambitious argument, drawing on the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas, Zuidervaart proposes a new and transformative conception of truth. (shrink)

John Abromeit, nacido en 1970 en Estados Unidos de América, obtuvo el grado de doctor en la Universidad de California en Berkeley, sus principales temas de investigación consisten en la historia intelectual europea moderna, historia alemana y la teoría social crítica. Actualmente se desempeña como profesor de Historia y Estudios Sociales, en el Buffalo State College de la State University of New York. Entre sus publicaciones más importantes se encuentran Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas: History and Recent (...) Tendencies (en coedición con Bridget Chesterton, York Norman y Gary Marotta, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016); Herbert Marcuse: Heideggerian Marxism (en coedición con Richard Wolin, USA, University of Nebraska, 2005); Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader (en coedición con W. Mark Cobb, Routledge, 2004), y Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School. (shrink)

Marxism as an intellectual movement has been one of the most important and fertile contributions to twentieth-century thought. No social theory or political philosophy today can be taken seriously unless it enters a dialogue, not just with the legacy of Marx, but also with the innovations and questions that spring from the movement that his work sparked, Marxism. Marx provided a revolutionary set of ideas about freedom, politics and society. As social and political conditions changed and new intellectual challenges to (...) Marx's social philosophy arose, the Marxist theorists sought to update his social theory, rectify the sociological positions of historical materialism and respond to philosophical challenges with a Marxist reply. This book provides an accessible introduction to Marxism by explaining each of the key concepts of Marxist politics and social theory. The book is organized into three parts, which explore the successive waves of change within Marxist theory and places these in historical context, while the whole provides a clear and comprehensive account of Marxism as an intellectual system. (shrink)

Are the arguments of the Frankfurt School still relevant? Modern Culture and Critical Theory investigates this question in the context of important issues in contemporary cultural politics: neoconservatism and new social movements, discontents with modernity and debates on postmodernism, the political hegemony of Ronald Reagan, and the cultural hegemony of structuralism and poststructuralism. Russell Berman thoughtfully explores the theories of Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Lyotard, and Foucault and their relevance to both historical and contemporary issues in literature, politics, and (...) the arts. (shrink)

In Unthinking Modernity, Judith Stamps reinterprets the communications theory of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan as a Canadian variant of the critical theory associated with the early Frankfurt school. Stamps argues that Innis and McLuhan used their studies of media to develop a critique of the thoughts and habits that characterize the West. Like their European contemporaries, Innis and McLuhan worked toward a theory of how westerners have developed classifications through which they perceive the world. Moreover, Stamps shows (...) that they used insights derived from their North American experience to add a new, media-based perspective to such a theory. Unthinking Modernity offers unique perspectives on the ways in which economics, politics, and media intertwine to create personal and social consciousness. (shrink)

Theodor Adorno has been quoted as responding to the Humanist Union stating ‘I might possibly be willing to join if your club had been called an inhuman union, but I could not join one that calls itself “humanist”’. Adorno’s opposition to forms of humanism (both liberal and Marxist) which posit the existence of our humanity is reflected in readings of The Frankfurt Institute’s history such as that produced by Martin Jay. While this is the case, one of Adorno’s highly (...) admired students, Alfred Schmidt, commemorated his teacher by proclaiming him a ‘philosopher of Real Humanism’. In categorising Adorno’s work as embodying a ‘Real Humanism’, Schmidt points towards an understanding and orientation towards the human (and our understanding of it) which cannot be accurately characterised through the philosophies of Humanism and Anti-Humanism as oppositional viewpoints. Rather, the Real Humanism of Adorno (as well as some of his fellow travellers) understands the human as the negative image of our currently existing society’s inhumanity, and urges us to take an ethical orientation towards the constitution of the human through the abolition of our inhumanity. If we, like Adorno, are to believe in the new categorical imperative that we must make sure ‘that Auschwitz never repeats itself, so that nothing similar ever happen[s] again’, then we must fundamentally orient ourselves towards the goal of ‘real humanism’ – a society free from the domination of ourselves and the other. (shrink)

In his new book, Lambert Zuidervaart argues that the concept of propositional truth remains one-dimensional and needs to be extended by and embedded in several versions of what the author calls “existential truth,” which he discusses in relation to phenomenology and critical theory. Zuidervaart focuses on key figures of twentieth-century German philosophy, such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, and Max Horkheimer. According to the author, his book “does not intend to be a historical narrative” ; nor (...) does it intend to present “a few nuggets of insights from continental writings”. Instead, Zuidervaart tries to reconstruct the primary material and immanently criticizes the... (shrink)

Using theories by Pierre Bourdieu and the Frankfurt School that causally link art to class interests, this article examines the differential development of modern architecture in the United States and central Europe during the early 20th century. Modern architecture was the aesthetic expression of technocracy, a movement of the new class of professionals, managers and engineers to place itself at the center of rationalized capitalism. The aesthetic of modernism, which glorified technology and instrumental reason, was weak and undeveloped (...) in the US, because this class defined by its cultural capital was quickly integrated into modernizing corporations, where it was compelled to cater to the emerging mass market and drop its distinctive aesthetic. Modern architecture emerged mainly in interwar central Europe, because here industrial modernization was blocked, forcing the new class to pursue an alliance with state managers pushing modernization. Thus unencumbered by the demands of the mass market, modern architects were free to express their machine aesthetic in state-financed housing projects. (shrink)

The rapprochement between critical social theory and liberal political theory raises the question of whether Critical Theory remains adequately equipped to respond to contemporary global crises such as nationalism and ecological devastation. Recent Critical Theory---represented by the 2nd generation Frankfurt School writings of Jurgen Habermas and his U.S. reception---has neglected the original program of critical theory as an oppositional methodology oriented to liberation. This liberatory spirit has been replaced by an internal debate whose boundaries are set by current (...) discourses within the philosophy of language and moral/political philosophy, and by the one-sided response of Critical Theorists to the influx of postmodernism to the academy. ;Habermas's procedural framework for democratic legitimation, in which meeting formal conditions legitimates the outcome of discursively-based decisions, implies minimal background conditions which, when met by existing institutions and mechanisms of consent-generation, lead Habermas to tacitly legitimate both anti-democratic practices and geo-political calamities. This brings Habermas's theory quite close to the uncritical Enlightenment discourse of John Rawls. While Habermas argues he is the bearer of a "counter-discourse of modernity," his theory, like Rawls's excludes the margins of opposition in which hope for liberation from existing institutions is most clearly found. ;I thus recommend a return to first-generation critical theory, reread as a philosophy of praxis. I argue against recent post-Marxist social theory that the mere proliferation of discourses is inadequate to respond to the demands of liberation articulated by the disenfranchised and oppressed. I also argue against neo0Heideggerian "politics of thought." These discourses are replaced by a New Critical Theory which refuses abstract polarization between modern and postmodern thought, and seeks to displace both current discourses of legitimation and the regimes they support. New Critical Theory is exemplified by recent developments in feminist theory and postmodern social theory . ;Though ongoing pathologies of modernity resist global attempts at either remediation of radical change-and thus ope for liberation continues to appear impossible-I conclude that oppositional theory and oppositional movements have not yet exhausted all possibilities for mutual reinforcement. (shrink)

This article suggests that the philosophical contributions of the French democratic theorist Miguel Abensour offer a unique model for the practice of the history of political thought. Under the influence of the first generation of Frankfurt School critical theory, Abensour can be seen as applying a method of thinking in constellations to the study of historical texts, the critical rearrangement of conceptual elements drawn from the latter generating new dialectical images that reveal something previously obscured about the object (...) of investigation. The history of political thought on this model is less about the recuperation of a definite textual intelligibility than the revelation of social and political alterity. (shrink)

From the beginning to the end of his career, the critical theorist and Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor W. Adorno sustained an uneasy but enduring bond with existentialism. His attitude overall was that of unsparing criticism, often verging on polemic. In Kierkegaard he saw an early paragon for the late flowering of bourgeois solipsism; in Heidegger an impresario for a "jargon of authenticity" that cloaked its idealism in an aura of pseudo-concreteness and neo-romantic kitsch; even in the more rationalist (...) tradition of Husserl's phenomenology he detected a vain attempt of the bourgeois spirit to break free from the prison-house of immanent consciousness. Yet his enduring fascination with the philosophical canons of existentialism and phenomenology suggests a connection far more complicated and productive than mere antipathy. From his first published book on Kierkegaard's aesthetic to the mature studies in negative dialectics, Adorno was forever returning to the philosophies of bourgeois interiority, seeking the paradoxical relation between their manifest failure and their hidden promise. Scholars of critical theory often regard these philosophical adventures as unfortunate lapses into reductive sociology or as marginal to Adorno's path of intellectual development. In Adorno and Existence, Peter E. Gordon challenges this assumption, showing how the confrontation with existentialism helps us toward a deeper understanding of Adorno's own intellectual commitments. In lucid prose and with a dialectical sensitivity for the links between philosophy and life, Adorno and Existence casts new and unfamiliar light on this neglected chapter in the history of Continental philosophy.--. (shrink)

While the postmodern critique of universals provides important insights, it also leaves us in an unacceptable position---lacking solid justification for moral judgments and political action, and unable to generalize about human experience. I argue that the best response to relativism lies in a new humanism. Any new humanism must be "post-humanist"---taking into account valid critiques of past humanisms, incorporating multicultural voices, and building upon an understanding of the common human condition that does not erase or ignore difference. My project is (...) to present a re-conceptualized notion of the "human condition" that meets these conditions, to serve as a basis for a new humanism. ;As a starting point, I take up the framework found in Jean-Paul Sartre's later Marxist-Existentialist works. These are helpful in two respects. First, as he attempts to reconcile Marxism and Existentialism, Sartre re-examines central categories of human experience and ultimately arrives at an understanding of the human that transcends both essentialism and anti-essentialism. Second, I argue that the methods Sartre develops anticipate crucial postmodern insights without losing moral and political ground, and that a reworking of these methods enables us to theorize beyond postmodernism today. My project also draws upon Feminism, Critical Race Theory, Postcolonialism, African Philosophy, and the Frankfurt School. ;The central elements of my articulation of the human condition include: a rethinking of the relationship of the individual and the social; an account of the social constitution of the individual; a new approach to understanding freedom and necessity in human experience; and a reconsideration of social identities such as race, class, and gender. I ask, given this understanding of the human condition, what problems remain inherent to human relationships, and what are the possibilities? Are we doomed to alienating and objectifying interactions with others, or are authentic love and cooperation also possible? Finally, I explore the ways in which we might achieve equality and reciprocity in a democracy necessarily built upon differences in identity and social power. (shrink)

This book directs discussions of critical theory to the Caribbean as a key source in the theory and practice of freedom, liberation, and justice. In dialogue with Frankfurt School Critical Theory, while highlighting contributions of Caribbean theorists, the volume offers a wider archive of Marxism as well as of social critique and construction.

An edited collection of all new work in the area of "new critical theory," intended to serve as a signature volume for the New Critical Theory Series. The volume, like the series as a whole, is designed to capture the present moment in postdisciplinary theory, as the older tradition of critical theory in the Frankfurt School sense comes together with postmodernism and the new critical theory. It represents the dialogue that is taking place among the various strands of (...) theory and can serve as a survey of contemporary leftist philosophy. (shrink)

The developing countries are currently undergoing a perhaps unprecedented technological revolution that has given new credence and life to the concept of alienation after a period of relative decline in which M arxian, existentialist, and other modern discourses were replaced with postmodern perspectives skeptical or critical of the concept of alienation. In this paper, I want to suggest that emergent information and communication technologies and the restructuring of global capitalism require us to rethink the problematics of technology and alienation. If (...) it is true that we are undergoing a Great Transformation, one of the epochal shifts within the history of capitalism, that the new technologies are taking us into a novel field of cultural experience and that the very nature of human identity and social relations are changing, then obviously we need to develop fresh theories to analyze these changes and politics to respond to them.2 For many, the changes underway on a global scale are as thorough-going and dramatic as the shift from the stage of market and competitive and laissez-faire capitalism theorized by M arx to the stage of state monopoly capitalism critically analyzed by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s.3 Theorizing this ongoing and epic transformation requires critical social theory to engage anew the relations between the economy, state, culture industry, science and technology, social institutions and everyday life as radically as the Frankfurt School revised classical M arxism in the 1930s. In this context, talking about technology and alienation is not just an academic affair, the latest twist in the discourse of alienation or of technology, but rather concerns the fate of the human being in the contemporary world and thus requires serious reflection and discussion whether the changes in society, culture, and human existence are or are not beneficial, and what we can do to promote a positive outcome and prevent a harmful one.. (shrink)

A World Without Why collects essays, of which some are new, others already published, on topics that interest Raymond Geuss, including architecture, theology, Marxism, tragedy, ethics and the unity of academic philosophy as a discipline. A theme running through the essays is a critical, or at least skeptical, stance towards the ‘Enlightenment project’ of explanation and rationalisation, familiar from the Frankfurt School. In Geuss, that stance may in the end express, despite everything, a thwarted Kantian hope: that reason, (...) and it alone, can make things make sense. (shrink)

In the early 20th century, Marxist theory was enriched and rejuvenated by adopting the concept of reification, introduced by the Hungarian theorist Georg Lukács to identify and denounce the transformation of historical processes into ahistorical entities, human actions into things that seemed part of an immutable "second nature." For a variety of reasons, both theoretical and practical, the hopes placed in de-reification as a tool of revolutionary emancipation proved vain. In these original and imaginative essays, delivered as the Tanner Lectures (...) at the University of California, Berkeley in 2005, the distinguished third-generation Frankfurt School philosopher Axel Honneth attempts to rescue the concept of reification by recasting it in terms of the philosophy of recognition he has been developing over the past two decades. Three distinguished political and social theorists: Judith Butler, Raymond Geuss, and Jonathan Lear, respond with hard questions about the central anthropological premise of his argument, the assumption that prior to cognition there is a fundamental experience of intersubjective recognition that can provide a normative standard by which current social relations can be judged wanted. Honneth listens carefully to their criticism and provides a powerful defense of his position. (shrink)

The Manifesto develops further the Critical Theory of Religion intrinsic to the Critical Theory of Society of the Frankfurt School into a new paradigm of the Psychology, Sociology, Philosophy and Theology of Religion.

In 1947 Theodor Adorno, one of the seminal European philosophers of the postwar years, announced his return after exile in the United States to a devastated Europe by writing Philosophy of New Music. Intensely polemical from its first publication, every aspect of this work was met with extreme reactions, from stark dismissal to outrage. Even Schoenberg reviled it. Despite the controversy, Philosophy of New Music became highly regarded and widely read among musicians, scholars, and social philosophers. Marking a major turning (...) point in his musicological philosophy, Adorno located a critique of musical reproduction as internal to composition itself, rather than as a matter of the reproduction of musical performance. Consisting of two distinct essays, “Schoenberg and Progress” and “Stravinsky and Reaction,” this work poses the musical extremes in which Adorno perceived the struggle for the cultural future of Europe: between human emancipation and barbarism, between the compositional techniques and achievements of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. In this completely new translation—presented along with an extensive introduction by distinguished translator Robert Hullot-Kentor—Philosophy of New Music emerges as an indispensable key to the whole of Adorno's illustrious and influential oeuvre. Theodor W. Adorno was the leading figure of the Frankfurt school of critical theory. He authored more than twenty volumes, including Negative Dialectics, Philosophy of Modern Music, Kierkegaard, Dialectic of Enlightenment with Max Horkheimer, and Aesthetic Theory.Robert Hullot-Kentor has taught at Harvard and Stanford universities and written widely on Adorno. He has translated various works of Adorno, including Aesthetic Theory. (shrink)

A timely addition to Henry Giroux's Critical Interventions series, Ecology and Revolution is grounded in the Frankfurt School critical theory of Herbert Marcuse. Its task is to understand the economic architecture of wealth extraction that undergirds today's intensifying inequalities of class, race, and gender, within a revolutionary ecological frame. Relying on newly discovered texts from the Frankfurt Marcuse Archive, this book builds theory and practice for an alternate world system. Ecology and radical political economy, as critical forms (...) of systems analysis, show that an alternative world system is essential - both possible and feasible - despite political forces against it. Our rights to a commonwealth economy, politics, and culture reside in our commonworks as we express ourselves as artisans of the common good. It is in this context, that Charles Reitz develops a GreenCommonWealth Counter-Offensive, a strategy for revolutionary ecological liberation with core features of racial equality, women's equality, liberation of labor, restoration of nature, leisure, abundance, and peace. (shrink)

Andrew Feenberg's Questioning Technology (1999) is his third book in a series of studies which undertake to provide critical theoretical and democratic political perspectives to engage technology in the contemporary era. In Critical Theory of Technology (1991), Feenberg draws on neo-Marxian and other critical theories of technology, especially the Frankfurt School, to criticize determinist and essentialist theories. In this ground-breaking work (which will go into its second edition in 2001), he discusses both how the labor process, science, and (...) technology are constituted as forms of domination of nature and human beings, and how they could be democratically transformed as part of a program of radical social transformation. In Alternative Modernity (1995), Feenberg turns to focus on constructivist theories and the ways in which individuals and groups can reconstruct technology to make it serve more humane and democratic goals. His most recent book draws on his earlier work while polemically developing his own positions within contemporary debates over technology. (shrink)

This book consists of ten chapters, an Introduction, and an Appendix. Of these twelve sections, eight have appeared previously. Although in the Acknowledgments he writes that "the essays have been revised for publication in this volume," the Introduction is more honest when it admits the failure of his "original plan... to rewrite essays in order to relate a coherent narrative". The disdain for coherence and narrative unity is of course part of what Bernstein calls the "'modern/postmodern' Stimmung", and the title's (...) use of composite terms, as well as the guiding concepts of "constellation" and "force-field" borrowed from the Frankfurt School via Martin Jay demonstrate the author's attempts at a sympathetic engagement with a direction of thought that is obviously at odds with his deepest philosophical impulses. Viewed as a whole, the book bears a strong resemblance to the The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity of Habermas, a philosopher with whose work Bernstein has long been identified and who is prominently mentioned in the Acknowledgments. Three introductory chapters precede a chapter on Heidegger in which a lengthy and sympathetic textual discussion is followed by a shorter, harsh judgment of Heidegger's silence concerning the criminality of the National Socialist regime, and of the connection of this ethical failure with his philosophy. Bernstein follows, as does Habermas, with chapters on Foucault and Derrida, in addition to one on the Derrida-Habermas controversy itself which arose from the publication of Habermas's book. Rather than treating Bataille, Bernstein devotes two chapters to the political implications of Richard Rorty's recent writings, and Bernstein also concludes with two chapters on his own position, the first proposing a rehabilitation of determinate negation, and the second outlining his pragmatic "engaged fallibilistic pluralism" based on a "model of dialogical encounter". Nietzsche, for Habermas the "turning point" of modernity, is thematically absent from Bernstein's book. This is emblematic of the collection as a whole, robbing postmodernism of its philosophical point and encouraging treatment of it as a "pervasive, amorphous mood". The thrust of Bernstein's analysis is less theoretical than Habermas's though often dependent on Habermas's conclusions. Replacing his previous focus on praxis with one on ethos, Bernstein is especially concerned with ethical and political implications of the positions he examines. The level of Bernstein's ethical-political "analysis," however, is concrete in what often seems to be an arbitrary way. He is indulgent of Foucault and Derrida, but Rorty is warned about his similarity to "neo-conservatives" and "[Daniel] Bell and his fellow travelers". Nothing is said about Derrida's ambiguous apologias for Heidegger and Paul de Man as exercises in the ethics of deconstruction. Bernstein notes similarities between Rorty's irony and Mussolini's cynicism, but is silent about Foucault's advocacy of Khomeini's Islamic revolution. Perhaps most bizarrely, Bernstein notes at the beginning of chapter 4 that "throughout his writings, Heidegger typically uses masculine forms of speech. To avoid artificiality, I have followed his usage". Needless to say, this "usage" is not "typical" only of Heidegger. The question of the ethical and political implications of postmodernism is certainly a deeply significant one. But this is philosophy that is "political" in a way that many will find repugnant as well as unedifying. Despite all talk of a "new constellation" and "openness to the Other," many--not only those who are familiar with Bernstein's previous publications--who sit down with this book will find themselves faced with the same old thing.--Robert Rethy, Xavier University. (shrink)

This review explores a recent trend in commentary on Hegel’s philosophy of history which owes much of its interpretive substance to the aesthetic modernism of the Frankfurt School. This modernist trend emphasizes the interplay of form and content, material conditions of rationality, and the temporal disjunction between experiencing and cognizing history. In so doing, it produces a deeply political, psychoanalytic, and musical reading of Hegel.

The imperative to theorize emerges in the practical question of how to live in the world with others. In the contemporary historical moment, one shot through with two hundred fifty years of capitalist political economic practices, such an imperative requires theorists to both use and go beyond a Marxist critique. This need to fold Marxist theory back into itself in an effort to emerge differently inspired, among others, Frankfurt School theorists who wove psychoanalysis into historical materialism, Birmingham (...) class='Hi'>School thinkers who stressed difference and the power of ordinary culture, anti-colonial thinkers who theorized the global marketplace, settler colonialism, and racial difference, and Italian Autonomists who... (shrink)

The role of metaphysics in critique stands as a defining issue for the Frankfurt School theorists. Max Horkheimer himself claims that metaphysics serves as an instrument of domination, leading him to develop an interdisciplinary mate- rialism as a postmetaphysical alternative. Critics such as Georg Lohmann con- tend, however, that Horkheimer’s critique of instrumental reason is aporetic insofar as it undermines all metaphysical claims while implicitly making them. Since Horkheimer narrowly equates metaphysics with identity thinking, this article argues that (...) his appeal to nonidentity thinking as the foundation for critique is better understood as a form of antimetaphysics. This, however, leaves Horkheimer no better situated, since antimetaphysics remains a variant of metaphysics. While Horkheimer reproduces the techniques of domination he sought to avoid, this lapse into metaphysics warns of the difficult path that postmetaphysical thinking must navigate between the antipodes of metaphys- ical and antimetaphysical positions. (shrink)

In, Love and Politics Jeffery L. Nicholas argues that Eros is the final rejection of an alienated life, in which humans are prevented from developing their human powers; Eros, in contrast, is an overflowing of acting into new realities and new beauties, a world in which human beings extend their powers and senses. Nicholas uniquely interprets Alasdair MacIntyre's Revolutionary Aristotelianism as a response to alienation defined as the divorce of fact from value. However, this account cannot address alienation in the (...) form of the oppression of women or people of color. Importantly, it fails to acknowledge the domination of nature that blackens the heart of alienated life. Alienation must be seen as a separation of the human from nature. Nicholas turns to Aristotle, first, to uncover the way his philosophy embodies a divorce of human from nature, then to reconstruct the essential elements of Aristotle's metaphysics to defend a philosophical anthropology based on Eros. Love and Politics: Persistent Human Desires as a Foundation for Liberation presents a critical theory that synthesizes MacIntyre's Revolutionary Aristotelianism, Frankfurt School Critical Theory, and Social Reproduction Theory. It will be of great interest to political theorists and philosophers. (shrink)