Detlev Claussen (b. 1948) is Professor Emeritus of Social Theory, Culture and Sociology at Leibniz Universität Hannover. In the mid-sixties he moved to Frankfurt to study with Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, where he was actively involved in the protest movements associated with the political upheavals of 1968. In the seventies, Claussen worked as […]
'Critical Theory' tag archive
Interview: Critical Theory’s contexts of cooperation
Johan F. Hartle: I want to discuss the possibilities of Critical Theory that you and Alexander Kluge develop in your collective project. To that end, I would like to ask you to reconstruct a few points from your biography. Let’s start off by having you describe your path to the Institute for Social Research in […]
73 Reviews
REVIEWS Marxism without Marxism Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf, New York and London, Routledge, 1994. xx + 198 pp., £11.99 pb., 0415910455. There is no doubt that Derridean deconstruction was a political project from the outset, or that […]
‘The world spirit on the fins of a rocket’
‘The world spirit on the fins of a rocket’ Adorno’s critique of progress Michael Lowy and Eleni Varikas The ideology of progress, born (in its modern guise) during the Enlightenment, finds its culminating philosophical expression in Hegel’s conception of history. Here, everything that happens marks a further step in mankind’s march towards freedom: watching Napoleon […]
Incomplete Modernity
Incomplete Modernity: Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society Michae/ Rustin There has been good reason to fear that ‘post-modem’ and ‘post-industrial’ currents of thought have been sweeping away the foundations of radical critiques without offering to put anything very substantial in their place. It is all very well criticising the limitations of social democracy, the welfare state, […]
Axel Honneth
Critical Theory in Germany Today 1 r An Interview with Axel Honneth if’ Axel Honneth is Professor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Political Science at the Free University, Berlin. He is the author of The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory (1985; English translation, MIT Press, 1991) and Struggle for […]
The Call of Nature
The Call of Nature A Reply to Ted Benton and Tim Hayward Michael Reid Does the critical practice of the ecology movement require a theoretical ground? Ted Benton,l for one, seems to think that it does. In the Autumn 1992 issue of Radical Philosophy Tim Hayward argued that one could accept Benton’ s theory without […]
The Spirit of Postmodernism (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 27 February); Rethinking Critical Theory (University of Essex, 27 February 1993); Maurice Blanchot (London, 6-8 January 1993)
For Godd’s Sake The Spirit of Postmodernism Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 27 February 1993 It seemed that Marx had forgotten to add that not only worldhistorical events but also academic conferences occur twice, the second time as farce. This conference was timed to coincide with the publication of the papers collected from an earlier […]
Does a Marxian Critical Theory of Society Need a Moral Theory?
Does a Marxian Critical Theory of Society Need a Moral Theory? Kai Nielsen To show Marx is not a moral philosopher is not to show that he is not a moralist, i.e., one having or propounding moral judgements and views . R. G. Peffer As the image of actually existing socialism becomes more and more […]
56 Reviews
Geoffrey Scarre, ed., Children, Parents and Politics Carolyn Steedman, Childhood, Culture and Class in Britain: Margaret McMillan, 1860-1931 David Archard Alison Assiter, Pornography, Feminism and the lndividual Jean Grimshaw Otto Pöggeler, Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking Jonathan Rée David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, Simon Schaffer, eds., The Uses of Experiment Jonathan Powers Morwenna Griffiths and Margaret […]
The Politics of Fulfilment and Transfiguration
The Politics of Fulfilment and Transfiguration J. M. Bernstein- SeylaBenhabib’ s Critique, Norm, and Utopia* is, without doubt, the most philosophically acute and learned history of the critical theory of society yet to be written. Because the intentions of Benhabib’s work are systematic rather than historical, her history is equally a major contribution to critical […]
The Frankfurt School and the Problem of Critique
The Frankfurt School and the Problem of Critique: A Reply to McCarney Peter Dews and Peter Osborne The question of the possibility, form, and validity of a ‘critical’ social science, of its relation to Marxism and to the ideas of dialectic and contradiction, received considerable attention on the pages of Radical Philosophy in the late […]
What Makes Critical Theory Critical?
What Makes Critical Theory IC riticaI’? Joseph McCarney The toplc of this paper is the project of a critlcal theory of society. It considers that project in the form it takes in the work of its best known exponents, the theorists of the socalled ‘Frankfurt School’. The main question to be answered is the question […]
Hegelian Phenomenology and the Critique of Reason and Society
Hegelian Phenomenology and the Critique of Reason and Society Peter Osborne Abhot Terrasson has rema~cked that if the size of a volume be measured not by the number of its pages but by the time required for mastering it, it can be said of many a book, that it would be much shorter if it […]
Why Habermas?
WBY BA.BERMAS ? LINDA J. NICHOLSON’ There exist two ways to deny an idea. One is to label it false. The other is to call it non-important, more effectively achieved by not discussing it all. Mainstream philosophy in both England and the United states has skilfully employed the art of nondiscussion to deny ideas antithetical […]
Philosophy in Germany
Philosophy in Germany Simon critchley and axel honneth SC: Simply as a way of initially organizing our discussion, we both agreed to read a short article by Dieter Henrich that appeared in Merkur in his philosophy column, ʻEine Generation im Abgangʼ (ʻA Passing Generationʼ). [1] Henrich rightly claims that a change of generations is coming […]
Left Rawlsianism and social philosophy
Left Rawlsianism and social philosophy A response to ‘Philosophy in Germany’ Alessandro ferrara Reading ʻPhilosophy in Germanyʼ, the exchange between Simon Critchley and Axel Honneth in Radical Philosophy 89, I found myself perplexed by a basic assumption the participants appear to share: namely, that so-called ʻLeft Rawlsianismʼ and ʻsocial philosophyʼ are alternative paths for the […]
Recognition and resistance
Recognition and resistance Axel Honneth’s critical social theory Roger foster beginning. Yet, as we shall see, the shortcomings of his own project are also largely due to a continued adherence to the critical framework opened by the ʻKantian turnʼ, of which Habermas remains the chief expositor. Culture and criticism In an early essay, entitled ʻCommunication […]
New German aesthetic theory
A central preoccupation of German aesthetic theorists over the last thirty years has been with the social and political truth-potential of works of art. Drawing on the distinctively Idealist and post-Idealist tradition of German philosophy since Hegel and the early romantics up to Heidegger, Gadamer and Adorno, several theorists have argued that works of art […]
Remembering Adorno
Remembering Adorno John abromeit In his sociology of religion, but also in his analyses of bureaucracy in modern societies, Max Weber analysed the process by which ideas that aim for qualitative change, for a transvaluation of values, are worn down in the historical process, codified and routinized by interpreters, gradually brought back into line with […]
The tragedy of listening
Music and philosophy follow the same principle of working, that of construction and deconstruction. They are both systems for arriving at a poetical structure. Massimo Cacciari1Luigi Nono (1924–1990) occupies a key place in the development of contemporary music. Conventional accounts identify him as the composer who in the 1950s most coherently confronted the implications of […]