In its essence, Critical Theory is Western Marxist
thought with the emphasis moved from the liberation of
the working class to broader issues of individual
agency. Critical Theory emerged in the 1920s from the
work of the Frankfurt School, the circle of
German-Jewish academics who sought to diagnose--and, if
at all possible, cure--the ills of society, particularly
fascism and capitalism. In this book, Stephen Eric
Bronner provides sketches of famous and less famous
representatives of the critical tradition (such as
George Lukacs and Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno and Walter
Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas) as well
as many of its seminal texts and empirical
investigations. Though they shared a Marxist bent, the
Frankfurt School's scholars came from a variety of
fields--philosophy, economics, psychoanalysis, and even
music--and they initially sought not only to do
interdisciplinary work but also to combine theory with
practice, criticism with empirical data.Forced by the
rise of Hitler to flee to the United States, by the late
1930s the Frankfurt School left behind the emphasis on
empiricism, beginning instead to specialize in
philosophical inquiry into the nature of social control,
which combined the work of Hegel, Marx, Freud, and
Nietzsche. This VSI is ultimately organized around the
cluster of concepts and themes that set critical theory
apart from its more traditional philosophical
competitors. Bronner explains and discusses concepts
such as method and agency, alienation and reification,
the culture industry and repressive tolerance,
non-identity and utopia. He argues for the introduction
of new categories and perspectives for illuminating the
obstacles to progressive change and focusing upon hidden
transformative possibilities. Only a critique of
critical theory can render it salient for a new age.
That is precisely what this very short introduction
seeks to provide. |
|