By Douglas Kellner
During this paintings, Douglas Kellner brings new mild to endure upon the advance and modern implications of severe idea. The origins of severe thought, he argues, have been hooked up to the transition from classical to state-organized capitalism. whereas many of the views of serious thought are very important to social research this day, in different uncomplicated respects the procedure of serious thought has to be up to date in order to confront the adjustments that have intervened in Western society over the last region of a century. The dialectical revision of Marxian thought performed by means of the Frankfurt authors needs to now be utilized to their very own works to generate a serious interpretation of today's social international. This, Kellner argues, calls for a reassessment of the former severe thought research of up to date capitalism via new views which take account of advancements in buyer, media, technological, cultural and different spheres of what Kellner calls "techno-capitalism".
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Extra resources for Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity
Sample text
In Fromm's reading, Bachofen points out the relativity of existing societal relationships and institutions such as marriage, monogamy, private property and so forth. Fromm suggests that such views on the social constructedness of social arrangements should 'be welcomed by a theory and 40 THE 1930s PROGRAM political activity that advocated a fundamental change of the existing social structure' (CoP, p. 123). There were other political reasons as well why such a theory could appealto progressives: Aside from the fact that the theory of matriarchy underlined the relativity of the bourgeois social structure, its very special content could not but win the sympathy of Marxists.
The materialism of the Institute was closer in spirit to the early Marx and the position set forth in his Theses on Feuerbach than to the positivistic materialism of Engels, as set forth in texts like The Dialectics of Nature, which posited matter in motion as the primary metaphysical reality. Marxian materialism, of the sort taken over by Critical Theory, by contrast, assumed as its primary presuppositions the reality of human needs, class interests, and the constitutive role of the system of production in shaping social reality and experience.
108-9). Justice for Horkheimer is thus bound up with freedom, equality and morality. In a class society, however, inequality is linked not only with disparities in goods and services but with unequal divisions of pain, suffering, opportunities and possibilities. For Horkheimer, no form of inequality is to be seen as 'natural' or 'inevitable', but rather as 'something that should be overcome' (p. 111). In other words, political conceptions of justice, freedom and equality should be seen in relation to the present unequal distribution of wealth, goods, opportunities and power and to the sorts of suffering and deprivations that these forms of inequality produce.