By Stephen Eric Bronner
Severe concept emerged within the Twenties from the paintings of the Frankfurt tuition, the circle of German-Jewish teachers who sought to diagnose-and, if in any respect attainable, cure-the ills of society, really fascism and capitalism. during this booklet, Stephen Eric Bronner presents sketches of top representatives of the severe culture (such as George Lukács and Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas) in addition to a lot of its seminal texts and empirical investigations. This Very brief advent sheds mild at the cluster of techniques and issues that set severe conception except its extra conventional philosophical opponents. Bronner explains and discusses strategies equivalent to strategy and company, alienation and reification, the tradition and repressive tolerance, non-identity and utopia. He argues for the creation of latest different types and views for illuminating the stumbling blocks to innovative switch and focusing upon hidden transformative probabilities. just a critique of severe thought can render it salient for a brand new age. that's accurately what this very brief advent provides.
Reviews:
"This is the one ebook of its style: it's a readable, but expertly crafted, journey during the Frankfurt institution, besides a forceful account of why the Frankfurt college of severe conception nonetheless concerns a decade into the hot millennium. I can't suggest it hugely enough." --Jeffrey T. Nealon, professor of English, Penn nation college; co-editor of Rethinking the Frankfurt college
"The book's forthright critique and get in touch with to transformation are a breath of
fresh air."-- Joan Braune, Philosophy in Review
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Additional resources for Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
Sample text
If revolution can no longer be identified with liberation, then resistance must change its character. This would ultimately involve confronting civilization, progress, and enlightenment. Looking backward Critical theorists saw in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts a new emphasis upon ending the repression associated with the “pre-history” of humanity. Socialism would now be identified with how people were treated rather than a fixed set of institutions and policies. The young Marx seemed to exhibit utopian inclinations along with the vision of a new man freed from egotism, cruelty, and alienation.
The story of paradise lost precedes the loss of objects to the world of commodity exchange. ” It also shows why trust between individuals has been lost, nature appears as an enemy, and—interestingly enough—redemption becomes possible. Unity and harmony are forfeited. Adam and Eve exhibited free will. They brought about their expulsion from Eden—by succumbing to evil. Perhaps different choices might bring about the re-creation of paradise. Prometheus may have sought to make good on that hope: there is a reason why he was Marx’s favorite mythical character.
The Frankfurt School was sympathetic to communism during the 1930s. Its members did not yet offer an outright critique of technological rationality. They were content to argue that the dominance of instrumental reason was merely an expression of capitalist social relations. As communism turned totalitarian, however, the Frankfurt School became disillusioned, and its critique of the reification process intensified. The Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 that unleashed World War II was the last straw. Practice had betrayed theory.