The Tragedy of Enlightenment
An Essay on the Frankfurt School

This book conveys an overall sense of the continuities and discontinuities in the concerns of the Frankfurt School's core members over two generations.

Paul Connerton (Author)

9780521296755, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 28 February 1980

180 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.42 kg

First published in 1980, this essay on the Frankfurt School deals with one of the most important threads in the story of cultural migration from Europe which began in the 1930s. For long best known in the English-speaking world through the influence of Herbert Marcuse, the school played a unique role in the history of the intellectual emigration, since its core members, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, returned to Germany after the Second World War to reconstitute the Institute for Social Research, while the tradition has subsequently been renewed by a post-war generation centred around the social theorist Jurgen Habermas. The purpose of this book is to convey an overall sense of the continuities and discontinuities in the concerns of these representative figures over two generations. It seeks to do this by showing the way in which the experience of fascism shaped their interpretation of modern society as a whole, and by setting their work within the context of certain cultural conventions of German intellectual history.

Preface
List of abbreviations
1. Introduction
2. Horkheimer's critical theory
3. The critique of ideology
4. The dialectic of enlightenment
5. Technological rationality
6. Language and politics
7. Critique of critical theory
8. Conclusion
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Social theory [JHBA]