General Editor's Preface.- Introduction.- PART 1 EARLY MODERN VIEWPOINTS: CRITICAL BACKGROUND TO CONTEMPORARY DEBATES.- PART 2 THE MAJOR ISSUES IN CONTEMPORARY DEBATES.- Is Theory Necessary ? (Empiricism vs Theoreticism).- What Does the Literary Work Represent'.- Is Literature Language? (The Claims of Stylistics).- What is Deconstruction'.- What is the Reader's Place'.- PART 3 THE NEW THEORIES IN PRACTICE.- Fiction Poetry Drama.- Select Bibliography.- Notes on Contributors.- Acknowledgements.- Index.
These essays, written in the 1930s and 1940s, represent a first selection in English from the major work of the founder of the famous Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Horkheimer's writings are essential to an understanding of the intellectual background of the New Left and the to much current social-philosophical thought, including the work of Herbert Marcuse. Apart from their historical significance and even from their scholarly eminence, these essays contain an immediate relevance only now becoming fully recognized.
We live in critical times. We face a global crisis in economics and finance, a global ecological crisis, and a constant barrage of international disputes. Perhaps most dishearteningly, there seems to be little faith in our ability to address such difficult problems. However, there is also a more positive sense in which these are critical times. The world's current state of flux gives us a unique window of opportunity for shaping a new international order that will allow us to cope with current and future global crises. In Critical Theory in Critical Times, eleven of the most distinguished critical theorists offer new perspectives on recent crises and transformations of the global political and economic order. Essays from Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, Cristina Lafont, Rainer Forst, Wendy Brown, Christoph Menke, Nancy Fraser, Rahel Jaeggi, Amy Allen, Penelope Deutscher, and Charles Mills address pressing issues including international human rights and democratic sovereignty, global neoliberalism, novel approaches to the critique of capitalism, critical theory's Eurocentric heritage, and new directions offered by critical race theory and postcolonial studies. Sharpening the conceptual tools of critical theory, the contributors to Critical Theory in Critical Times reveal new ways of expanding the diverse traditions of the Frankfurt School in response to some of the most urgent and important challenges of our times.
Critical theory emerged in the 1920s from the work of the Frankfurt School, the circle of German-Jewish academics who sought to diagnose -- and, if at all possible, cure -- the ills of society, particularly fascism and capitalism. In this book, Stephen Eric Bronner provides sketches of leading representatives of the critical tradition (such as George Lukács and Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas) as well as many of its seminal texts and empirical investigations. This Very Short Introduction sheds light on the cluster of concepts and themes that set critical theory apart from its more traditional philosophical competitors. Bronner explains and discusses concepts such as method and agency, alienation and reification, the culture industry and repressive tolerance, non-identity and utopia. He argues for the introduction of new categories and perspectives for illuminating the obstacles to progressive change and focusing upon hidden transformative possibilities. In this newly updated second edition, Bronner targets new academic interests, broadens his argument, and adapts it to a global society amid the resurgence of right-wing politics and neo-fascist movements.
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.
Axel Honneth has been instrumental in advancing the work of the Frankfurt School of critical theorists, rebuilding their effort to combine radical social and political analysis with rigorous philosophical inquiry. These eleven essays reclaim the relevant themes of the Frankfurt School, which counted Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, Franz Neumann, and Albrecht Wellmer as members. They also engage with Kant, Freud, Alexander Mitscherlich, and Michael Walzer, whose work on morality, history, democracy, and individuality intersects with the Frankfurt School's core concerns. Collected here for the first time in English, Honneth's essays pursue the unifying themes and theses that support the methodologies and thematics of critical social theory, and they address the possibilities of continuing this tradition through radically changed theoretical and social conditions. According to Honneth, there is a unity that underlies critical theory's multiple approaches: the way in which reason is both distorted and furthered in contemporary capitalist society. And while much is dead in the social and psychological doctrines of critical social theory, its central inquiries remain vitally relevant. Is social progress still possible after the horrors of the twentieth century? Does capitalism deform reason and, if so, in what respects? Can we justify the relationship between law and violence in secular terms, or is it inextricably bound to divine justice? How can we be free when we're subject to socialization in a highly complex and in many respects unfree society? For Honneth, suffering and moral struggle are departure points for a new "reconstructive" form of social criticism, one that is based solidly in the empirically grounded, interdisciplinary approach of the Frankfurt School.
This edited volume brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the traces of the idea of “Real Abstraction” in Marx’s thought from the early to late writings, as well as the theoretical and practical consequences of this notion in the capitalist social system. Divided into two main parts, Part One reconstructs Marx’s notion of “Real Abstraction” and the influences of earlier thinkers (Berkley, Petty, Franklin, Feuerbach, Hegel) on his thoughts, as well as the further elaborations of this concept in later Marxist thinkers (Sohn-Rethel, Lukács, Lefebvre, Adorno and Postone). Part Two then considers the reverberations of the notion in the field of critical theory from a more abstract critique of capitalist social relations, to a more concrete understanding of historical movements. Taken together, the chapters in this volume offer a focused look at the concept of “Real Abstraction” in Marx.
The Critical Theory of Axel Honneth provides a comprehensive study of the work of Axel Honneth, tracing the theoretical trajectory from his earliest writings on philosophical anthropology to the development of a theory of recognition. The book argues that Honneth’s early work provides important insights for the reconstruction of the normative project of critical theory and the articulation of a conceptual framework for analyzing social relations of power and domination. Danielle Petherbridge contends, however, that these aims are not fully realized in Honneth’s more mature project and that central insights recede as his project develops. Petherbridge seeks to demonstrate that the basis for an alternative theory of intersubjectivity that can account for both an adequate theory of power and normative forms of subject-formation can be immanently reconstructed from within Honneth’s own work. By contextualizing Honneth’s project in relation to its theoretical influences, The Critical Theory of Axel Honneth provides a critical study and excellent entry point that will be essential reading for both students and scholars who work in the areas of European philosophy, critical theory, social and political philosophy, or social and political theory.
Critical theory and dystopia offers a uniquely rich study of dystopian fiction, drawing on the insights of critical theory. Asking what ideological work these dark imaginings perform, the book reconstructs the historical emergence, consolidation and transformation of the genre across the twentieth century and into our own, ranging from Yevgeny Zamayatin’s We (1924) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) to Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1963) and Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games series (2000s and 2010s). In doing so, it reveals the political logics opened up or neutered by the successive moments of this dystopian history.
Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller! Times, Sunday Times, and Financial Times Book-of-the-Year Selection! Have you heard that language is violence and that science is sexist? Have you read that certain people shouldn't practice yoga or cook Chinese food? Or been told that being obese is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only white people can be racist? Are you confused by these ideas, and do you wonder how they have managed so quickly to challenge the very logic of Western society? In this probing and intrepid volume, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay document the evolution of the dogma that informs these ideas, from its coarse origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields. Today this dogma is recognizable as much by its effects, such as cancel culture and social-media dogpiles, as by its tenets, which are all too often embraced as axiomatic in mainstream media: knowledge is a social construct; science and reason are tools of oppression; all human interactions are sites of oppressive power play; and language is dangerous. As Pluckrose and Lindsay warn, the unchecked proliferation of these anti-Enlightenment beliefs present a threat not only to liberal democracy but also to modernity itself. While acknowledging the need to challenge the complacency of those who think a just society has been fully achieved, Pluckrose and Lindsay break down how this often-radical activist scholarship does far more harm than good, not least to those marginalized communities it claims to champion. They also detail its alarmingly inconsistent and illiberal ethics. Only through a proper understanding of the evolution of these ideas, they conclude, can those who value science, reason, and consistently liberal ethics successfully challenge this harmful and authoritarian orthodoxy—in the academy, in culture, and beyond.
