Download or read book Critique of Instrumental Reason written by Max Horkheimer and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2014-09-24 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays, written between 1949 and 1967, focus on a single theme: the triumph in the twentieth century of the state-bureaucratic apparatus and ‘instrumental reason’ and the concomitant liquidation of the individual and the basic social institutions and relationships associated with the individual.
Download or read book Dialectic of Enlightenment written by Max Horkheimer and published by Burns & Oates. This book was released on 1993 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major study of modern culture, Dialectic of Enlightenment for many years led an underground existence among the homeless Left of the German Federal Republic until its definitive publication in West Germany in 1969. Originally composed by its two distinguished authors during their Californian exile in 1944, the book can stand as a monument of classic German progressive social theory in the twentieth century.>
Download or read book Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School written by John Abromeit and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-10 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. This study recovers and reconstructs the model of early Critical Theory that guided the work of the Institute for Social Research in the 1930s. Horkheimer is remembered primarily as the co-author of Dialectic of Enlightenment, which he wrote with Theodor W. Adorno in the early 1940s. But few people realize that Horkheimer and Adorno did not begin working together seriously until the late 1930s or that the model of Critical Theory developed by Horkheimer and Erich Fromm in the late 1920s and early 1930s differs in crucial ways from Dialectic of Enlightenment. Abromeit highlights the ways in which Horkheimer's early Critical Theory remains relevant to contemporary theoretical discussions in a wide variety of fields.
Download or read book On Max Horkheimer written by Seyla Benhabib and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays by German and American scholars will help familiarize English-speaking readers with the most important results of this recent work and, in conjunction with a companion volume of Horkheimer's essays, Between Philosophy and Social Science, should provide a much fuller and deeper picture of his role in the history of modern social theory. Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), one of the founders of critical theory and a sometime colleague of Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin, has become a subject of renewed attention and appreciation in Germany in the last decade. This collection of essays by German and American scholars will help familiarize English-speaking readers with the most important results of this recent work and, in conjunction with a companion volume of Horkheimer's essays, Between Philosophy and Social Science, should provide a much fuller and deeper picture of his role in the history of modern social theory.
Download or read book EPZ Eclipse of Reason written by Max Horkheimer and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2004-01-25 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Horkheimer surveys and demonstrates the gradual ascendancy of Reason in Western philosophy, its eventual total application to all spheres of life, and what he considers its present reified domination.
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 The Frankfurt School written by and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2011 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published: New York: Wiley, c1977.
Download or read book Towards a New Manifesto written by Theodor Adorno and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote the central text of “critical theory”, Dialectic of Enlightenment, a measured critique of the Enlightenment reason that, they argued, had resulted in fascism and totalitarianism. Towards a New Manifesto shows the two philosophers in a uniquely spirited and free-flowing exchange of ideas. This book is a record of their discussions over three weeks in the spring of 1956, recorded with a view to the production of a contemporary version of The Communist Manifesto. A philosophical jam-session in which the two thinkers improvise freely, often wildly, on central themes of their work—theory and practice, labor and leisure, domination and freedom—in a political register found nowhere else in their writing. Amid a careening flux of arguments, aphorisms and asides, in which the trenchant alternates with the reckless, the playful with the ingenuous, positions are swapped and contradictions unheeded, without any compulsion for consistency. A thrilling example of philosophy in action and a compelling map of a possible passage to a new world.
Download or read book Max Horkheimer written by Peter M. R. Stirk and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1992 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work offers an introduction to, and an interpretation of, the thought of Max Horkheimer, a leading figure of the Frankfurt School.
Download or read book Dawn Decline written by Max Horkheimer and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Frankfurt School in Exile written by Thomas Wheatland and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Wheatland examines the influence of the Frankfurt School, or Horkheimer Circle, and how they influenced American social thought and postwar German sociology. He argues that, contrary to accepted belief, the members of the group, who fled oppression in Nazi Germany in 1934, had a major influence on postwar intellectual life.
Download or read book The Mathematical Imagination written by Matthew Handelman and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an archeology of the undeveloped potential of mathematics for critical theory. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno first conceived of the critical project in the 1930s, critical theory steadfastly opposed the mathematization of thought. Mathematics flattened thought into a dangerous positivism that led reason to the barbarism of World War II. The Mathematical Imagination challenges this narrative, showing how for other German-Jewish thinkers, such as Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Siegfried Kracauer, mathematics offered metaphors to negotiate the crises of modernity during the Weimar Republic. Influential theories of poetry, messianism, and cultural critique, Handelman shows, borrowed from the philosophy of mathematics, infinitesimal calculus, and geometry in order to refashion cultural and aesthetic discourse. Drawn to the austerity and muteness of mathematics, these friends and forerunners of the Frankfurt School found in mathematical approaches to negativity strategies to capture the marginalized experiences and perspectives of Jews in Germany. Their vocabulary, in which theory could be both mathematical and critical, is missing from the intellectual history of critical theory, whether in the work of second generation critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas or in contemporary critiques of technology. The Mathematical Imagination shows how Scholem, Rosenzweig, and Kracauer’s engagement with mathematics uncovers a more capacious vision of the critical project, one with tools that can help us intervene in our digital and increasingly mathematical present. The Mathematical Imagination is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.
Download or read book Kierkegaard s Writings VII Volume 7 written by Søren Kierkegaard and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-21 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains a new translation, with a historical introduction by the translators, of two works written under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus. Through Climacus, Kierkegaard contrasts the paradoxes of Christianity with Greek and modern philosophical thinking. In Philosophical Fragments he begins with Greek Platonic philosophy, exploring the implications of venturing beyond the Socratic understanding of truth acquired through recollection to the Christian experience of acquiring truth through grace. Published in 1844 and not originally planned to appear under the pseudonym Climacus, the book varies in tone and substance from the other works so attributed, but it is dialectically related to them, as well as to the other pseudonymous writings. The central issue of Johannes Climacus is doubt. Probably written between November 1842 and April 1843 but unfinished and published only posthumously, this book was described by Kierkegaard as an attack on modern speculative philosophy by "means of the melancholy irony, which did not consist in any single utterance on the part of Johannes Climacus but in his whole life. . . . Johannes does what we are told to do--he actually doubts everything--he suffers through all the pain of doing that, becomes cunning, almost acquires a bad conscience. When he has gone as far in that direction as he can go and wants to come back, he cannot do so. . . . Now he despairs, his life is wasted, his youth is spent in these deliberations. Life does not acquire any meaning for him, and all this is the fault of philosophy." A note by Kierkegaard suggests how he might have finished the work: "Doubt is conquered not by the system but by faith, just as it is faith that has brought doubt into the world!."
Download or read book Dialectic of Enlightenment in the Anglosphere written by Howard Prosser and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-02-29 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the reception of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. It examines a variety of perspectives on the text, supplied by e.g. American critical theorists, British New Leftists, Transatlantic Cultural Studies scholars, Postmodernists, and those working in the current after-theory moment from 1970 to 2010. It considers the works of the Frankfurt School, especially Horkheimer and Adorno, alongside the secondary literature on the subject. The main focus is on how various intellectual circles and trends have responded to the Dialectic, making scholarly discussions the primary sources. While the work is a history of the Dialectic of Enlightenment’s Anglophone reception, it also reflects the post-1968 left’s retreat to academia, which echoes the Frankfurt School’s own stance of political resignation.
Download or read book Toward a Concrete Philosophy written by Mikko Immanen and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-15 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toward a Concrete Philosophy explores the reactions of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse to Martin Heidegger prior to their dismissal of him once he turned to the Nazi party in 1933. Mikko Immanen provides a fascinating glimpse of the three future giants of twentieth-century social criticism when they were still looking for their philosophical voices. By reconstructing their overlooked debates with Heidegger and Heideggerians, Immanen argues that Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse saw Heidegger's 1927 magnum opus, Being and Time, as a serious effort to make philosophy relevant for life again and as the most provocative challenge to their nascent materialist diagnoses of the discontents of European modernity. Our knowledge of Adorno's "Frankfurt discussion" with "Frankfurt Heideggerians" remains anecdotal, even though it led to a proto-version of Dialectic of Enlightenment's idea of the entwinement of myth and reason. Similarly, Horkheimer's enthusiasm over Heidegger's legendary post–World War I lectures and criticism of Being and Time have escaped attention almost entirely. And Marcuse's intriguing debate with Heidegger over Hegel and the origin of the problematic of "being and time" has remained uncharted until now. Reading these debates as fruitful intellectual encounters rather than hostile confrontations, Toward a Concrete Philosophy offers scholars of critical theory a new, thought-provoking perspective on the emergence of the Frankfurt School as a rejoinder to Heidegger's philosophical revolution.
Download or read book Grand Hotel Abyss written by Stuart Jeffries and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Marvelously entertaining, exciting and informative.” —Guardian “An engaging and accessible history.” —New York Review of Books This group biography is “an exhilarating page-turner” and “outstanding critical introduction” to the work and legacy of the Frankfurt School, and the great 20th-century thinkers who created it (Washington Post). In 1923, a group of young radical German thinkers and intellectuals came together to at Victoria Alle 7, Frankfurt, determined to explain the workings of the modern world. Among the most prominent members of what became the Frankfurt School were the philosophers Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. Not only would they change the way we think, but also the subjects we deem worthy of intellectual investigation. Their lives, like their ideas, profoundly, sometimes tragically, reflected and shaped the shattering events of the twentieth century. Grand Hotel Abyss combines biography, philosophy, and storytelling to reveal how the Frankfurt thinkers gathered in hopes of understanding the politics of culture during the rise of fascism. Some of them, forced to escape the horrors of Nazi Germany, later found exile in the United States. Benjamin, with his last great work—the incomplete Arcades Project—in his suitcase, was arrested in Spain and committed suicide when threatened with deportation to Nazi-occupied France. On the other side of the Atlantic, Adorno failed in his bid to become a Hollywood screenwriter, denounced jazz, and even met Charlie Chaplin in Malibu. After the war, there was a resurgence of interest in the School. From the relative comfort of sun-drenched California, Herbert Marcuse wrote the classic One Dimensional Man, which influenced the 1960s counterculture and thinkers such as Angela Davis; while in a tragic coda, Adorno died from a heart attack following confrontations with student radicals in Berlin. By taking popular culture seriously as an object of study—whether it was film, music, ideas, or consumerism—the Frankfurt School elaborated upon the nature and crisis of our mass-produced, mechanized society. Grand Hotel Abyss shows how much these ideas still tell us about our age of social media and runaway consumption.
Download or read book Prophetic Interruptions written by Bryan Wagoner and published by Mercer Tillich. This book was released on 2017 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prophetic Interruptions initially draws numerous, yet previously unknown, connections between Paul Tillich, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer during their shared years in Frankfurt and New York, focusing particularly on the years 1929-1944. While Critical Theory was being formulated, Tillich, the teacher and colleague of Adorno and Horkheimer, respectively, was working on his own religious social(ist) theory. Moving beyond this historical background, Wagoner shows how these personal connections evolved and were mutually engaging. Instead of pursuing discernible mutual influence among Tillich, Adorno, and Horkheimer, the book instead demonstrates that their ideas were forged in the crucible of friendship and common purpose, toward the common end of emancipation. The collective 'prophetic interruptions' among the three thinkers have a common goal of naming and remediating injustices, and interrupting social forms that inhibit individual and collective agency. To that end, parallels are traced along four lines: critical rationality, theories of human nature (particularly vis-�-vis Nazism), metaphysics, and religion. These striking commonalities (coupled with potentially insurmountable differences, such as ontology) reveal historical connections between progressive religious thought and allegedly secular critical theory. The book suggests room for further conversation between progressive religion and critical theory rooted in Tillich's early 'religious socialism,' read here as a type of critical social theory, anticipating that of Adorno and Horkheimer. The appendix includes the first translation of an important letter from Adorno to Tillich, written in 1944.
