Product Description: From the beginning to the end of his career, the critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno sustained an uneasy but enduring bond with existentialism. His attitude overall was that of unsparing criticism, 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” cloaking its idealism in an aura of pseudo-concreteness and neo-romantic kitsch...read more

Product Description: Culture, Class, and Critical Theory develops a theory of culture that explains how ideas create and legitimate class inequalities in modern society. This theory is developed through a critique and comparison of the powerful ideas on culture offered by Pierre Bourdieu and the Frankfurt School thinkers, especially Theodor Adorno...read more

Product Description: Public space, both literally and figuratively, is foundationally important to political life. From Socratic lectures in the public forum, to Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, public spaces have long played host to political discussion and protest...read more

Product Description: This unique work analyzes the crisis in modern society, building on the ideas of the Frankfurt School thinkers. Emphasizing social evolution and learning processes, it argues that crisis is mediated by social class conflicts and collective learning, the results of which are embodied in constitutional and public law...read more

Product Description: Subversive thought is none other than the cunning of reason when confronted with a social reality in which the poor and miserable are required to sustain the illusion of fictitious wealth. Yet, this subsidy is absolutely necessary in existing society, to prevent its implosion...read more

Subject & Object is a thematic collection of classic works by Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, designed to foreground the authors' philosophical concerns, especially in the areas of epistemology, ontology, and method. The volume, which includes lucid introductions to all of the selections, illustrates Frankfurt School approaches to questions such as the nature of reason; the limits of empiricism, pragmatism and Kantian transcendental idealism; the case for materialism; the difficulty of thinking counterfactually; and the ideological character of mainstream social science. Many of the pieces in the volume are otherwise out of print. Subject & Object will be a resource for social, political, and cultural theorists who may be less familiar with the philosophical aspects of the Frankfurt School, for analytic philosophers who may not have had previous exposure to their work at all, and for anyone wanting access to these seminal texts.

"The Melancholy Science" is Gillian Rose s investigation into TheodorAdorno s work and legacy. Rose uncovers the unity discernableamong the many fragments of Adorno s oeuvre, and argues that hisinfluence has been to turn Marxism into a search for style. The attempts of Adorno, Lukacs and Benjamin to develop a Marxisttheory of culture centred on the concept of reification are contrasted, and the ways in which the concept of reification has come to bemisused are exposed. Adorno s continuation for his own time ofthe Marxist critique of philosophy is traced through his writings onHegel, Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger. His opposition to theseparation of philosophy and sociology is shown by examination ofhis critique of Durkheim and Weber, and of his contributions to thedispute over positivism, his critique of empirical social research andhis own empirical sociology. Gillian Rose shows Adorno s most important contribution to be hisfounding of a Marxist aesthetic that offers a sociology of culture, asdemonstrated in his essays on Kafka, Mann, Beckett, Brecht andSchonberg. Finally, Adorno s Melancholy Science is revealed tooffer a sociology of illusion that rivals both structural Marxism andphenomenological sociology as well as the subsequent work of theFrankfurt School."

Product Description: This book is the first comprehensive intellectual biography of Max Horkheimer during the early and middle phases of his life (1895-1941). Drawing on unexamined new sources, John Abromeit describes the critical details of Horkheimer's intellectual development...read more

Product Description: What has become known as the Frankfurt School is often reduced to a small number of theorists in media communication and cultural studies. Challenging this limitation, Revisiting The Frankfurt School introduces a wider theoretical perspective by introducing critical assessments on a number of writers associated with the school that have been mostly marginalized from debate...read more

Product Description: This book introduces educational practitioners, students, and scholars to the people, concepts, questions, and concerns that make up the field of critical social theory. It guides readers into a lively conversation about how education can and does contribute to reinforcing or challenging relations of domination in the modern era...read more

Product Description: The Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory particular established at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, Germany in 1923. Tarr’s investigation focuses on three key issues...read more