Download or read book The Return of Work in Critical Theory written by Christophe Dejours and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-19 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From John Maynard Keynes’s prediction of a fifteen-hour workweek to present-day speculation about automation, we have not stopped forecasting the end of work. Critical theory and political philosophy have turned their attention away from the workplace to focus on other realms of domination and emancipation. But far from coming to an end, work continues to occupy a central place in our lives. This is not only because of the amount of time people spend on the job. Many of our deepest hopes and fears are bound up in our labor—what jobs we perform, how we relate to others, how we might flourish. The Return of Work in Critical Theory presents a bold new account of the human significance of work and the human costs of contemporary forms of work organization. A collaboration among experts in philosophy, social theory, and clinical psychology, it brings together empirical research with incisive analysis of the political stakes of contemporary work. The Return of Work in Critical Theory begins by looking in detail at the ways in which work today fails to meet our expectations. It then sketches a phenomenological description of work and examines the normative premises that underlie the experience of work. Finally, it puts forward a novel conception of work that can renew critical theory’s engagement with work and point toward possibilities for transformation. Inspired by Max Horkheimer’s vision of critical theory as empirically informed reflection on the sources of social suffering with emancipatory intent, The Return of Work in Critical Theory is a lucid diagnosis of the malaise and pathologies of contemporary work that proposes powerful remedies.
Download or read book Critical Theory in Critical Times written by Penelope Deutscher and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Critical Theory Politics and Society written by Peter Stirk and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2005-10-26 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the launch of the Journal of Social Research in 1932 to the recent work of Jurgen Habermas on law and democracy, the Frankfurt School has produced some of the most ambitious and influential theories of the past century. This new introduction to the critical theory of the School provides a thorough, concise and up-to-date assessment of thinkers including Pollock, Marcuse, Horkheimer, Adorno, Neumann, Lowenthal, Fromm, Kirchheimer and Habermas. Peter Stirk's lively account places the formative work of the School within the context of the Weimar Republic and of Nazi Germany. He contrasts this environment with the very different background of 1950s Germany in which Habermas embarked on his academic career. Stirk goes on to discuss the enduring relevance of political theory to the contemporary political agenda. In particular, he illustrates the continuing validity of the Frankfurt School's criticism of positivist, metaphysical and more recently postmodernist views, and its members' attempts to incorporate psychological perspectives into broader theories of social dynamics. He assesses their contribution to key areas of contemporary debate, including morality, interest, individual and collective identity and the analysis of authoritarian and democratic states. Specifically focused on the interests and needs of social scientists, philosophers and historians of ideas, Critical Theory, Politics and Society is an essential book both for students and for all those who wish to grasp the contours of critical theory and to understand its enduring relevance.
Download or read book The Idea of a Critical Theory written by Raymond Geuss and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1981-10-30 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this series is to help make contemporary European philosophy intelligible to a wider audience in the English-speaking world, and to suggest its interest and importance in particular to those trained in analytical philosophy.
Download or read book Critical Theory and Society written by Stephen Eric Bronner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-24 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of seminal essays, many appearing in English for the first time, which provides an excellent overview of the critical theory developed by the Frankfurt School.
Download or read book Critical Theory written by Max Horkheimer and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 1972-01-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy written by Werner Bonefeld and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-05-08 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. The critique of political economy is a thoroughly subversive business. It rejects the appearance of economic reality as a natural thing, argues that economy has not independent existence, expounds economy as political economy, and rejects as conformist rebellion those anti-capitalist perspectives that derive their rationality from the existing conceptuality of society. Subversion focuses on human conditions. Its critical subject is society unaware of itself. This book develops Marx's critique of political economy as negative theory of society. It does not conform to the patterns of the world and demands that society rids itself of all the muck of ages and founds itself anew.
Download or read book Cynical Theories written by Helen Pluckrose and published by Pitchstone Publishing (US&CA). This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller! 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.
Download or read book Justification and Critique written by Rainer Forst and published by Polity. This book was released on 2014 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rainer Forst develops a critical theory capable of deciphering the deficits and potentials inherent in contemporary political reality. This calls for a perspective which is immanent to social and political practices and at the same time transcends them. Forst regards society as a whole as an ‘order of justification’ comprising complexes of different norms referring to institutions and corresponding practices of justification. The task of a ‘critique of relations of justification’, therefore, is to analyse such legitimations with regard to their validity and genesis and to explore the social and political asymmetries leading to inequalities in the ‘justification power’ which enables persons or groups to contest given justifications and to create new ones. Starting from the concept of justification as a basic social practice, Forst develops a theory of political and social justice, human rights and democracy, as well as of power and of critique itself. In so doing, he engages in a critique of a number of contemporary approaches in political philosophy and critical theory. Finally, he also addresses the question of the utopian horizon of social criticism.
Download or read book Critical Social Theory written by Tim Dant and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2003 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical theory has left an indelible mark on postwar social thought. But what are the relations between critical theory and 'the cultural turn'? This text demonstrates the origins of critical theory in the Marxian analysis of the capitalist mode of production and Freudian psychoanalysis.
Download or read book Critical theory and epistemology written by Anastasia Marinopoulou and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-26 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume in the Critical Theory and Contemporary Society series explores the arguments between critical theory and epistemology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Focusing on the first and second generations of critical theorists and Luhmann’s systems theory, the book examines how each approaches epistemology. It opens by looking at twentieth-century epistemology, particularly the concept of lifeworld (Lebenswelt). It then moves on to discuss structuralism, poststructuralism, critical realism, the epistemological problematics of Foucault’s writings and the dialectics of systems theory. The aim is to explore whether the focal point for epistemology and the sciences remain that social and political interests actually form a concrete point of concern for the sciences as well.
Download or read book Critical Theory and Democracy written by Enrique Peruzzotti and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andrew Arato has become a prominentpolitical theoristin the fields of democratic theory, constitutional law, and comparative politics. He has had a profound and global influenceon the thinking ofseveral generations of scholars. The Critical Theory and Democracy of Andrew Arato brings together original essays honouring Arato's intellectual contribution to the field, based round the themes in Arato's work of Critical Theory and Civil Society, Democracy and Dictatorship, and Constitution Making. It includes contributions from leading ...
Download or read book Beyond Friend and Foe written by Volker Heins and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-01-19 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book provides a thematic account of the changing political thought of critical theorists from Adorno to Habermas and Honneth. Its purpose is to establish the relevance of this tradition for contemporary political theory and philosophy.
Download or read book The Vitality of Critical Theory written by Harry F. Dahms and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2011-05-19 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: States that the critical theory of the Frankfurt School is as important today, if not more so, as it was at its inception during the 1930s. This title looks at the distinguishing features of this tradition and how it is critical, yet also complementary, of other approaches in the social sciences, especially in sociology.
Download or read book Critical Theory Marxism and Modernity written by Douglas Kellner and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 1989-09-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kellner writes, "As we move into the 1990s critical theory might help produce theoretical and political perspectives which could be part of a Left Turn that could reanimate the political hopes of the 1960s, while helping overcome and reverse the losses and regression of the 1980s."
Download or read book Theory and Politics written by Helmut Dubiel and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important study of the relationship between historical developments and the work of the scholars associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research yields fascinating insights into the actual workings of the Institute and the relationships among its members. The book has already had a major impact in Germany, where it has opened up the subject for argument and analysis by a new generation of scholars.Theory and Politics first explores the effect of political experience on the process of theory construction from 1930 to 1945. The central figure in this examination is Max Horkheimer, whose work is seen as the key to the shift in the Frankfurt School's focus from materialism to Critical Theory to a "critique of instrumental reason." Within each of the three periods defined by these foci the author examines external historical-political events (including the School's emigration to America) and their reflection in the group's changing conception of the relation of theory to practice as well as in its detailed theoretical position. Along the way he helps to clarify such questions as the Schools's evolving attitudes toward the Soviet Union, fascism, science, and the desired utopia.The book then examines what may have been the strongest stage of Critical Theory - the program for interdisciplinary research that emerged in the early 1930s. The author acutely portrays Horkheimer's conception of a synthesis between philosophy and empirical social science that would result in a form of social research relevant to the central problems of the day.As Martin Jay notes in his foreword, Helmut Dubiel has become not only an analyst of Critical Theory but a gifted contributor to its ongoing reception and development. He is currently a research fellow at the University of Frankfurt. Theory and Politics is included in the series, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.
Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory written by Michael J. Thompson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-01-20 with total page 732 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook is the only major survey of critical theory from philosophical, political, sociological, psychological and historical vantage points. It emphasizes not only on the historical and philosophical roots of critical theory, but also its current themes and trends as well as future applications and directions. It addresses specific areas of interest that have forged the critical theory tradition, such as critical social psychology, aesthetics and the critique of culture, communicative action, and the critique of instrumental reason. It is intended for those interested in exploring the influential paradigm of critical theory from multiple, interdisciplinary perspectives and understanding its contribution to the humanities and the social sciences.
