Books and Reviews on Frankfurt School
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The
Frankfurt School in Exile by Thomas Wheatland
Members of the Frankfurt School have had an enormous effect on Western thought, beginning
soon after Max Horkheimer became the director of the Institute for Social Research at the
University of Frankfurt am Main, in 1930. Also known as the Horkheimer Circle, the group
included such eminent intellectuals as Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Leo
Lowenthal, and Friedrich Pollock. Fleeing Nazi oppression, Horkheimer moved the Institute
and many of its affiliated scholars to Columbia University in 1934, where it remained
until 1950.
Until now, the conventional portrayal of the Institute has held that its members found
refuge by relocating to Columbia but that they had little contact with, or impact on,
American intellectual life. With insight and clarity, Thomas Wheatland demonstrates that
the standard account is wrong. Based on deep archival research in Germany and in the
United States, and on interviews conducted with luminaries such as Daniel Bell, Bernadine
Dohrn, Peter Gay, Todd Gitlin, Nathan Glazer, Tom Hayden, Robert Merton, and others,
Wheatland skillfully traces the profound connections between the Horkheimer Circle’s
members and the intellectual life of the era. Reassessing the group’s involvement
with the American New Left in the 1960s, he argues that Herbert Marcuse’s role was
misunderstood in shaping the radical student movement’s agenda. More broadly, he
illustrates how the Circle influenced American social thought and made an even more
dramatic impression on German postwar sociology.
Although much has been written about the Frankfurt School, this is the first book to
closely examine the relationship between its members and their American contemporaries.
The Frankfurt School in Exile uncovers an important but neglected dimension of the history
of the Frankfurt School and adds immeasurably to our understanding of the contributions
made by its émigré intellectuals to postwar intellectual life.
Dialectic
of Solidarity: Labor, Antisemitism, and the Frankfurt School (Studies in Critical Social
Sciences) by Mark P. Worrell
During World War II it appeared that American workers in uniform had all that was required
to defend democracy on the battlefields yet, on the domestic front, the working class, as
it turned out, was ideologically inconsistent when it came to democracy. Could battles
against tyranny be won abroad only to lose the war back home? This was the question the
Institute of Social Research (the famous “Frankfurt School”) asked in 1944 when
it embarked upon an important study of the American working class. Dialectic of Solidarity
draws upon unpublished research reports of the Frankfurt School and represents a unique
and multidimensional view of the political imagination of the wartime American worker and
the role of antisemitism as the 'spearhead of fascism.'
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Negativity
and Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism by John Holloway, Fernando Matamoros,
and Sergio Tischler
How can activists combat the political paralysis that characterises the anti-dialectical
Marxism of Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze, without reverting to a dogmatic orthodoxy? This
book explores solutions in the 'negative dialectics' of Theodor Adorno. The
poststructuralist shift from dialectics to 'difference' has been so popular that it
becomes difficult to create meaningful revolutionary responses to neoliberalism. The
contributors to this volume come from within the anti-capitalist movement, and close to
the concerns expressed in Negri and Hardt's Empire and Multitude. However, they argue
forcefully and persuasively for a return to dialectics so a real-world, radical challenge
to the current order can be constructed. This is a passionate call to arms for the
anti-capitalist movement. It should be read by all engaged activists and students of
political and critical theory.
Thought-Images:
Frankfurt School Writers? Reflections from Damaged Life (Cultural Memory in the Present)
by Gerhard Richter
"Richter's truly fresh look at the Frankfurt School writers through the genre of the
philosophical miniature of the Denkbild is a stroke of genius. Richter demonstrates how
the Denkbild was both a manifestation of a particular shared conception of aesthetics and
a genre with which to expand this conception. The book's major accomplishment is to
establish a significant connection between the work of the Frankfurt School and
contemporary French thinkers, in particular, Deleuze and Derrida."
--Rodolphe Gasché, SUNY Buffalo, author of The Honor of Thinking (Stanford, 2007)
"Masters of the philosophical miniature, Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, and Kracauer were
able to shine light through the smallest cracks in the facade of an increasingly opaque
world. Building on their legacy, Gerhard Richter reveals himself to be no less adept at
fashioning illuminating thought-images of his own. This collection of scintillating essays
is a welcome addition to the ongoing and still lively reception of Frankfurt School
ideas."
--Martin Jay, University of California at Berkeley
In this book, Gerhard Richter explores the aesthetic and political ramifications of the
literary genre of the Denkbild, or thought-image, as it was employed by four major
German-Jewish writers and philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century: Theodor
W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Siegfried Kracauer. The Denkbild is a poetic
mode of writing, a brief snapshot-in-prose that stages the interrelation of literary,
philosophical, political, and cultural insights. Richter's careful analysis of the
linguistic characteristics of this mode of writing sheds new light on pivotal concerns of
modernity, including the fractured cityscape, philosophical problems of modern music, the
experience of exiled homelessness, and the disaster of Auschwitz.
Denaturalizing
Ecological Politics: Alienation from Nature from Rousseau to the Frankfurt School and
Beyond.(Book review): An article from: Canadian Journal of History
Frankfurt
School Perspectives on Globalization, Democracy, and the Law (Routledge Studies in Social
and Political Thought)
This volume demonstrates that the Frankfurt School tradition speaks directly to some
pressing political and social concerns, including globalization, the reform of the welfare
state, and the environmental crisis. Despite widespread claims to the contrary, the legal
substructure of economic globalization tends to conflict with traditional models of the
rule of law. Neumann’s prediction that contemporary capitalism would decreasingly
depend on generality, clarity, publicity, and stability in the law is supported by a
surprising variety of empirical evidence. Habermas’s recent work is then interrogated
in order to pursue the question of how we might counteract the deleterious trends
accurately predicted by Neumann. How might democracy and the rule of law flourish in the
context of globalization?
Frankfurt School Perspectives on Globalization, Democracy, and the Law makes use of the
work of first-generation Frankfurt School theorist Franz L. Neumann, in conjunction with
his famous successor, Jürgen Habermas, to try to understand the momentous political and
legal transformations generated by globalization.
"Breaking the power of the past over the present": psychology, utopianism, and
the Frankfurt School.(Critical essay): An article from: Utopian Studies by Janet Stewart -
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The
Frankfurt School Revisited: And Other Essays on Politics and Society by Richard Wolin
Frankfurt School thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Jurgen Habermas, and
Herbert Marcuse have been enormously influential in a wide range of contemporary public
debates. Their writings have remained an invaluable touchstone for controversies in the
fields of law, politics, the arts, and cultural studies. Discussions of
"postmodernism" regularly mine the theories of Benjamin and Adorno for ideas and
inspiration. And the burgeoning field of democratic theory would be inconceivable apart
from Habermas's towering influence.
The Frankfurt School Revisited, Richard Wolin, the eminent political theorist and
intellectual historian, reassesses the school's relevance in light of a variety of
pressing, contemporary issues and concerns including the collapse of communism, the global
war on terror, the resurgence - both at home and abroad - of religious fundamentalism, the
dislocations of globalization, and the prospect of global democracy. In doing so, Wolin
seeks to redeem and reinvigorate the Frankfurt School's rich intellectual legacy.
Gramsci's
Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School (Cultural
Spaces) by Peter Ives
In Gramsci's Politics of Language, Peter Ives argues that a university education in
linguistics and a preoccupation with Italian language politics were integral to the
theorist's thought. Ives explores how the combination of Marxism and linguistics produced
a unique and intellectually powerful approach to social and political analysis. To
explicate Gramsci's writings on language, Ives compares them with other Marxist approaches
to language, including those of the Bakhtin Circle, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt
School, including Jrgen Habermas. From these comparisons, Ives elucidates the implications
of Gramsci's writings, which, he argues, retained the explanatory power of the semiotic
and dialogic insights of Bakhtin and the critical perspective of the Frankfurt School,
while at the same time foreshadowing the key problems with both approaches that
post-structuralist critiques would later reveal. Gramsci's Politics of Language fills a
crucial gap in scholarship, linking Gramsci's writings to current debates in social theory
and providing a framework for a thoroughly historical-materialist approach to language.
Feminist
Theory and the Frankfurt School (Differences, Volume 17, Number 1 (Spring 2006)) by
Rebecca Comay, Karyn Ball, Elisabeth Bronfen, and Robyn Marasco
This special issue of differences explores what light Frankfurt School critical theory can
shed on contemporary problematics in feminist theory. In contrast to the relatively
extensive employment of the work of Jürgen Habermas for this purpose, this special issue
focuses on other major thinkers of the Frankfurt School, especially Horkheimer, Adorno,
and Benjamin.
The
Early Frankfurt School and Religion by Raymond Geuss and Margarete Kohlenbach
This volume examines the ways in which the authors of the early Frankfurt School
criticized, adopted and modified traditional forms of religious thought and practice.
Focusing on the works of Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer,
Otto Kirchheimer and Franz Neumann, it analyzes the relevance of religious traditions and
of the Enlightenment critique of religion for modern conceptions of emancipatory thought,
art, law, and politics.
Denaturalizing
Ecological Politics: Alienation from Nature from Rousseau to the Frankfurt School and
Beyond by Andrew Biro
Biro traces the development of the concept of alienation from nature through four modern
political thinkers - Rousseau, Marx, Adorno, and Marcuse - each of whom are read as
arguing that human beings are not biologically separate from the rest of nature, but are
nevertheless historically differentiated from it through the self-conscious transformation
of the natural environment. In so doing, Biro provides the starting point for a
'denaturalized' rethinking of ecological politics.
The
Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Studies in
Contemporary German Social Thought)
"Rolf Wiggershaus's monumental study of the Frankfurt School provides the best
overall view of its entire trajectory.... The book is an absolute must for anyone
interested in contemporary social theory and politics." -- Douglas Kellner
"Compulsory reading for anyone wanting to study or write about the Frankfurt
School." -- Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
This is the definitive study of the history and accomplishments of the Frankfurt School.
It offers elegantly written portraits of the major figures in the school's history as well
as overviews of the various positions and directions they developed from the founding
years just after World War I until the death of Theodor Adorno in 1969. The book is based
on documentary and biographical materials that have only recently become available. As the
narrative follows the Institute for Social Research from Frankfurt am Main to Geneva, New
York, and Los Angeles, and then back to Frankfurt, Wiggershaus continually ties the
evolution of the school to the changing intellectual and political contexts in which it
operated. He also interweaves these accounts with incisive summaries of substantive works
by Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Fromm, Kirchheimer, Lowenthal, Marcuse, Neumann, Pollock,
and Habermas. The book is self-contained and can serve as a general introduction to
critical theory, but it also has a wealth of new material to offer those who are familiar
with this tradition but would like to learn more about its history and context. Studies in
Contemporary German Social Thought
The
Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers by Eduar Mendieta
In The Frankfurt School on Religion, Eduardo Mendieta has brought together a collection of
readings and essays revealing both the deep connections that the Frankfurt School has
always maintained with religion as well as the significant contribution that its work has
to offer. Rather than being unanimously antagonistic towards religion as has been the
received wisdom, this collection shows the great diversity of responses that individual
thinkers of the school developed and the seriousness and sophistication with which they
engaged the core religious issues and major religious traditions.
Through a careful selection of writings from eleven prominent theorists, including several
new and previously untranslated pieces from Leo Lowenthal, Max Horkheimer, Herbert
Marcuse, and Jurgen Habermas, this volume provides much needed sources for religious
leaders, philosophers, and social theorists as they grapple with the nature and functions
of religion in the contemporary social, political, and economic landscape.
The Frankfurt School on Religion recovers the religious dimensions of the Frankfurt
School, for too long sidelined or ignored, and offers new perspectives and insights
necessary to the development of a fuller and more nuanced critical theory of society.
Selections and essays from: Ernst Bloch, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowelthal, Herbert Marcuse,
Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Johann Baptist Metz, Jurgen Habermas,
Helmut Peukert, Edmund Arens.
Levinas,
the Frankfurt School and Psychoanalysis (Disseminations, Psychoanalysis in Contexts)
by C. Fred Alford
"Alford's broad conversation, with Winnicott, Murdoch Adorno, Greek tragedy and,
always, the reader -- focused on Levinas and thus on ethics, eros and infinity -- is
intense, complex and lucid. Best of all, compelling and expanding." (Martin
Gliserman, Associate Prof. of English, Editor Emeritus, American Imago, Rutgers University
)
Insightful and accessible critique of postmodern ethics.
Frankfurt
School (Key Sociologists)
Controversial look at the School's contribution to modern sociology, examining issues
previously not discussed, such as the neglect of history and political economy by the
critical theorists, and relationship of the School to radical movements.
Early
British Romanticism, the Frankfurt School and French Post-Structuralism: In the Wake of
Failed Revolution by David Beran
Rethinking
the Frankfurt School: Alternative Legacies of Cultural Critique by Jeffrey T. Nealon
and Caren Irr
By exploring the work of the Frankfurt school today, this book helps to define the very
field of cultural studies. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
A reexamination of key Frankfurt School thinkers—Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer,
Marcuse—in the light of contemporary theory and cultural studies across the
disciplines, Rethinking the Frankfurt School asks what consequences such a rethinking
might have for study of the Frankfurt School on its own terms. Ironically, contemporary
theorists find themselves turning back toward the Frankfurt School precisely for the
reasons it was once scorned: for a notion of subjects whose desires are less liberated and
multiplied than they are produced and regulated by a far-reaching, very-nearly totalizing
global culture industry. Indeed, as new questions concerning globalization and economic
redistribution emerge, while analyses of identity politics and subjective transgression
become less central to contemporary theory and cultural studies, the future of the
Frankfurt School looks as promising and productive as its past has proven to be.
The
Culture Industry (Routledge Classics) by Theodor Adorno
Adorno expounds what may be called a new philosophy of consciousness. His philosophy
lives, dangerously but also fruitfully, in proximity to an ascetic puritanical moral rage,
an attachment to some items in the structure and vocabulary of Marxism, and a feeling that
human suffering is the only important thing and makes nonsense of everything else ...
Adorno is a political thinker who wishes to bring about radical change. He is also a
philosopher, with a zest for metaphysics, who is at home in the western philosophical
tradition. –Iris Murdoch
This book is an unrivalled indictment of the banality of mass culture - Adorno's finest
essays are collected here, offering the reader unparalleled insights into Adorno's
thoughts on culture.
German
20th Century Philosophy: The Frankfurt School (German Library) by Wolfgang Schirmacher
The Frankfurt School remains a puzzle, its flickering importance hard to assess. In the
Sixties, Herbert Marcuse became the darling of antiwar protesters; central figure Theodor
Adorno fled in horror when his lectures were invaded by bare-breasted women protesting his
"patriarchate"; and with aesthetics and politics again linked, Walter Benjamin
has sparked much recent discussion. These very different thinkers were organized into a
functioning group by Max Horkheimer, an academic administrator with remarkable fundraising
skills. All were inspired by a Marx whom they related closely to Hegel, and all used some
ideas and jargon from the phenomenological movement. Their chief remaining spokesman, J
rgen Habermas, once Adorno's assistant, now preaches a kind of gentled capitalism that
could be applauded by Gerhard Schroeder or Tony Blair. Schirmacher (German Socialist
Philosophy) provides a brief but lucid introduction, and his selections raise the most
central topics. A useful work for almost all academic and larger general collections.
-Leslie Armour, Univ. of Ottawa, Ont. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
This work contains writings of members of the Frankfurt School including: "On the
Concept of Philosophy" by Max Horkheimer; "Reflections from Damaged Life"
and selections from "Aesthetic Theory" by Theodor W. Adorno; "Theses on the
Philosophy of History" by Walter Benjamin; and "On Hedonism",
"Solidarity", and "The Catastrophe of Liberation" by Herbert Marcuse;
and "Adorno: The Primal History of Subjectivity", "Benjamin:
Conciousness-Raising or Raising Technique", and "Marcuse: Psychic
Thermidor" by Jurgen Habermas.
The Essential Frankfurt School Reader by Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (Paperback - Oct
1982)
The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social
Research, 1923-1950 (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism) by Martin Jay (Paperback -
Mar 5, 1996)
The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Studies in
Contemporary German Social Thought) by Rolf Wiggershaus and Michael Robertson (Paperback -
Feb 23, 1995)
The Discourse of Domination: From the Frankfurt School to Postmodernism (SPEP) by Ben
Agger (Paperback - Jan 1, 1992)
The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Modern European
Philosophy) by Raymond Geuss (Paperback - Oct 30, 1981)
Critical Theory and Society: A Reader by S. Bronner (Paperback - Nov 15, 1989)
Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas by David Held (Paperback - Oct 13,
1980)
Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law (Studies in
Contemporary German Social Thought) by William E. Scheuerman (Paperback - Jan 22, 1997)
Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society) by
Douglas Kellner (Paperback - Sep 1, 1989)
Dialectic of Enlightenment (Cultural Memory in the Present) by Max Horkheimer, Theodor W.
Adorno, Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, and Edmund Jephcott (Paperback - Mar 28, 2002)
Praxis and Method: Sociological Dialogue with Lukacs, Gramsci and the Early Frankfurt
School (International Library of Society) by Richard Kilminster (Hardcover - Jul 1979)
Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and Institute of Social
Research by Martin Jay (Paperback - Jun 1973)
The Essential Frankfurt School Reader by Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (Hardcover - Jun
1978)
Frankfurt School by Zoltan Tar (Paperback - Feb 12, 1985)
The Frankfurt School: Critical Assessments by Jay Bernstein (Hardcover - Nov 15, 1994)
The Dialectical Imagination: history of the Frankfurt school & the Institute of social
research 1923-1950 (Hardcover - 1973)
Narcissism: Socrates, the Frankfurt School, and Psychoanalytic Theory by Professor C. Fred
Alford (Hardcover - Sep 10, 1988)
Critics and critical theory in Eastern Europe (The Frankfurt School: how relevant is it
today?) (Unknown Binding - 1990) - Import
Origin and Significance of the Frankfurt School: A Marxist Perspective (International
Library of Society) by Philip Slater (Paperback - Jan 1980)
Frankfurt School Reader: The Postwar Years by Andrew Arato (Hardcover - Dec 1982)
Praxis and Method A Sociological Dialogue with Lukacs, Gramsci and theEarly Frankfurt
School by Richard Kilminster (Hardcover - Jan 1, 1979)
THE CRITICAL THEORY OF RELIGION: THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL by Rudolf J. Siebert (Paperback -
Jan 1, 2001)
Conscience and Its Recovery: From the Frankfurt School to Feminism (Studies in Religion
and Culture) by Guyton B. Hammond (Hardcover - Oct 1993)
Origin and significance of the Frankfurt School A Marxist perspective (Unknown Binding -
Jan 1, 1977)
Foundations of the Frankfurt School of Social Research by Judith Marcus and Zoltan Tarr
(Paperback - Jan 1, 1984)
The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism.
by Richard. Wolin (Paperback - Jan 1, 1992)
