Confronting Reification
Confronting Reification

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-07-27

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 9004430083

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Georg Lukács (1885-1971) was one of the most original Marxist philosophers and literary critics of the twentieth century. His work was a major influence on what we now know as critical theory. Almost fifty years after his death, Lukács’s legacy has come under attack by right-wing extremists in his native Hungary. Despite efforts to erase his memory, Lukács remains a philosophical gadfly. In Confronting Reification, an international team of fourteen scholars explicate, reassess, and apply one of Lukács’s most significant philosophical contributions, his theory of reification. Based on papers presented at the 2017 Legacy of Georg Lukács conference held in Budapest, the essays in this volume demonstrate the vitality of Lukács’s thought and its relevance. Contributors include: Rüdiger Dannemann, Frank Engster, Andrew Feenberg, Joseph Grim Feinberg, Andraž Jež, Christian Lotz, Csaba Olay, Tom Rockmore, Gregory R. Smulewicz-Zucker, Mariana Teixeira, Michael J. Thompson, Tivadar Vervoort, Richard Westerman, and Sean Winkler.

Critical Theory: The Basics
Critical Theory: The Basics

Author: Martin Shuster

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-05-27

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1003861725

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Critical Theory: The Basics brings clarity to a topic that is confusingly bandied about with various meanings today in popular and academic culture. First defined by Max Horkheimer in the 1930s, “critical theory” now extends far beyond its original German context around the Frankfurt School and the emergence of Nazism. We now often speak of critical theories of race, gender, anti-colonialism, and so forth. This book introduces especially the core program of the first-generation of the Frankfurt School (including Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse), and shows how this program remains crucial to understanding the problems, ideologies, and systems of the modern world, including capitalism, racism, sexism, and the enduring problems of colonialism. It explores basic questions like: What is critical theory? What can critical theory be? What should it be? Why and how does critical theory remain vital to understanding the contemporary world, including notions of self, society, politics, art, religion, culture, race, gender, and class? With suggestions for further reading, this book is an ideal starting point for anyone seeking an accessible but robust introduction to the richness and complexity of this tradition and to its continuing importance today.

Descent of the Dialectic
Descent of the Dialectic

Author: Michael J. Thompson

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-08-01

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1040099785

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This book reconstructs the concept and practice of dialectics as a means of grounding a critical theory of society. At the center of this project is the thesis of phronetic criticism or a form of reason that is able to synthesize human value with objective rationality. This book argues that defects in modern forms of social reason are the result of the powers of social structure and the norms and purposes they embody. Increasingly, modern societies are driven not by substantive values concerning human good but by the technical imperatives of economic management, leading to a cultural condition of nihilism that has eroded dialectical consciousness. The first half of the book demonstrates the various ways that social power erodes and undermines critical-rational forms of consciousness. The second part of the book constructs an alternative basis for critical reason by showing how it requires seeing human value as essentially ontological: that is, constituted by objective forms of sociality that either promote human freedom or pervert our capacities and drive toward pathological forms of life. The philosophical claim is that a critical theory of ethics must be rooted in these concrete forms of life and that this will serve as a critical vantage point for critical political judgment and transformational praxis. Descent of the Dialectic will be of interest to researchers working in philosophy, political theory, social theory, and critical theory.

Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists
Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists

Author: Stephen Eric Bronner

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-11

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 1135326045

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Of Critical Theory and its Theorists is an intelligent , accessible overview of the entire Critical Theory Tradition, written by one of the leading experts on the subject. Filled with original insights and valuable historical narratives, Of Critical Theory and ItsTheorists covers the work of major philosphical thinkers such as Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and Habermas and revisits the contributions of lesser-known figures such as Karl Korsch and Ernst Bloch. Bronner measures the writing of these theorists against each other, postmodernist philosophers and the critical tradition reaching back to Hegel. Of Critical Theory andIts Thoerists presents new insights useful to experienced scholars and offers clear summaries for students making this book an ideal introduction to the debates surrounding one of the most important intellectual traditions of the 20th Century.

Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci
Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci

Author: Dario Gentili

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-09-16

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1040129935

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This book marks a missed encounter between two of the most influential Marxist thinkers of our age, Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci, studied here for the first time side by side. Benjamin and Gramsci were contemporaries, whose births and deaths took place within a few years of each other in Western Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Two Marxists sui generis, they radically changed Marxism’s themes and vocabulary, profoundly influencing the most significant analyses and debates. At a time in which Marxism was considered to be outdated and in crisis, both Gramsci’s and Benjamin’s thoughts provided resources for its renewal: particularly in postcolonial studies for Gramsci and in new media studies for Benjamin. Both were victims of fascism, on the threshold of the catastrophe of the Second World War. These two philosophers’ posthumous fortune depended on the transmission of their thought, which was first entrusted to friends and comrades, and then to entire generations of scholars from a wide range of disciplines. Editors, Dario Gentili, Elettra Stimilli, and Gabriele Guerra explore with leading voices on Benjamin and Gramsci the most relevant and topical issues today. The book gives an indispensable new perspective in Marxism for students and researchers alike.

Marx and We
Marx and We

Author: Sun Zhengyu

Publisher: American Academic Press

Published: 2024-08-01

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 163181494X

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Marxist ideology is the only fully scientific ideology, the only one able to guide mankind toward the settlement of fundamental social problems and to point out the royal road for the proletariat to take in its march toward socialism and communism. Without Marxism, modern people cannot establish true social ideals, nor can they engage in the rational pursuit of values. Without Marxism, modern people cannot choose the correct path of development, nor can they build up new forms of civilizations. Without Marxism, modern people would never base their commitments to schedule the consensus-building effort and support the consensus-building process on any irrefutably and sufficiently sound theoretical foundations.

De-Centering Global Sociology
De-Centering Global Sociology

Author: Arthur Bueno

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-09-01

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 1000684032

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This volume explores the challenges posed to sociological theory and social science research by a growing need to foreground perspectives stemming from, and accounting for, subaltern groups, marginal categories, the Global South, and other politically peripheral regions. De-Centering Global Sociology radically questions some of the most enduring assumptions within sociological thought and social science research and illustrates the impacts of de-centering critical concepts in public policy and education. It proposes new places to build social theory, beyond Europe and the United States, offering debates on the present and future of the social sciences. This peripheral turn also has impacts on the development of pedagogical practices, curricula, and educational research that are more inclusive, and in a position to promote global citizenship. This book will be a valuable resource for researchers and academics with an interest in global social theory, decolonial and postcolonial studies, political theory, feminism, critical race theory, economic sociology, inequality studies, urban sociology, and the sociology of work, religion, and education. It will be of particular interest to those with a focus on citizenship, social policy, conviviality, social integration and solidarity, and new perspectives on multicultural education.

In Defense of Animals
In Defense of Animals

Author: Peter Singer

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-05-20

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1118712358

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Bringing together new essays by philosophers and activists, InDefense of Animals: The Second Wave highlights the newchallenges facing the animal rights movement. Exciting new collection edited by controversial philosopherPeter Singer, who made animal rights into an international concernwhen he first published In Defence of Animals and AnimalLiberation over thirty years ago Essays explore new ways of measuring animal suffering, reassessthe question of personhood, and draw highlight tales of effectiveadvocacy Lays out “Ten Tips for Activists”, taking thereader beyond ethical theory and into the day-to-day campaigns foranimal rights

History and Class Consciousness
History and Class Consciousness

Author: Georg Lukacs

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1972-11-15

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 9780262620208

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This is the first time one of the most important of Lukács' early theoretical writings, published in Germany in 1923, has been made available in English. The book consists of a series of essays treating, among other topics, the definition of orthodox Marxism, the question of legality and illegality, Rosa Luxemburg as a Marxist, the changing function of Historic Marxism, class consciousness, and the substantiation and consciousness of the Proletariat. Writing in 1968, on the occasion of the appearance of his collected works, Lukács evaluated the influence of this book as follows: "For the historical effect of History and Class Consciousness and also for the actuality of the present time one problem is of decisive importance: alienation, which is here treated for the first time since Marx as the central question of a revolutionary critique of capitalism, and whose historical as well as methodological origins are deeply rooted in Hegelian dialectic. It goes without saying that the problem was omnipresent. A few years after History and Class Consciousness was published, it was moved into the focus of philosophical discussion by Heidegger in his Being and Time, a place which it maintains to this day largely as a result of the position occupied by Sartre and his followers. The philologic question raised by L. Goldmann, who considered Heidegger's work partly as a polemic reply to my (admittedly unnamed) work, need not be discussed here. It suffices today to say that the problem was in the air, particularly if we analyze its background in detail in order to clarify its effect, the mixture of Marxist and Existentialist thought processes, which prevailed especially in France immediately after the Second World War. In this connection priorities, influences, and so on are not particularly significant. What is important is that the alienation of man was recognized and appreciated as the central problem of the time in which we live, by bourgeois as well as proletarian, by politically rightist and leftist thinkers. Thus, History and Class Consciousness exerted a profound effect in the circles of the youthful intelligentsia."

Explorations in Social Theory
Explorations in Social Theory

Author: George Ritzer

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2001-04-10

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 1412933285

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George Ritzer is one of the leading social and cultural commentators of the present day. In this essential new book he considers some of the main tendencies in contemporary social theory. Included here are Ritzer′s latest reflections on the uses and misuses of metatheory. According to Ritzer, sociology is a multiparadigm science. The differences and intensities of rivalries between paradigms are often very confusing for students and even for professional sociologists. This book seeks to find a way out of the confusion by sketching out the lineaments of a new integrated sociological paradigm and demonstrates how this paradigm can be applied. It shows the various ways in which Ritzer has developed rationalization theory to shed light on professional integration, the shape of consumer culture, hyperrationality and the state of sociology today.