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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Critical Theory and Political Possibilities: Conceptions of Emancipatory Politics in the Works of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas

Critical Theory and Political Possibilities: Conceptions of Emancipatory Politics in the Works of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas

Alway, Joan

Hardcover

Series: Controversies in Science

General Political ScienceGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 0313293171
ISBN13: 9780313293177
Publisher: Praeger
Published: Feb 14 1995
Pages: 184
Weight: 0.97
Height: 0.76 Width: 6.38 Depth: 9.54
Language: English

Alway identifies and assesses new models of emancipatory politics in the Frankfurt Schools Critical Theory. She outlines the complexities of Critical Theory, and clarifies the logical connections between assumptions that inform the critical theorists' analyses of social conditions and their views on the possibilities for radical political practice.

Alway examines the works of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Jurgen Habermas to argue the relevance of Critical Theory to contemporary efforts to reconceptualize radical politics. Indeed Alway argues that these theorists anticipate and point to new models of emancipatory politics. Unpacking the complexities of the critical theorists' writings and outlining them in a straightforward manner, Alway identifies the assumptions about human actors and history that inform their analyses of contemporary conditions. The explication of how these background assumptions inform their analyses then allows the author to clarify and assess the critical theorists' positions concerning the possibilities for radical social change, as well as their views on the issues and agents of such change.

The author concludes that to the extent that the critical theorists abandon the notion of a revolutionary subject, their work leads us toward a new conceptualization of radical politics. The first generation of critical theorists, however, never fully extricate themselves from a subject-object framework that ultimately limits their efforts. Habermas's transposition of Critical Theory onto new foundations extricates it from the subject-object framework of the philosophy of consciousness, but also fundamentally alters accepted notions of radical politics. The first generation's reconceptualization of radical politics becomes with Habermas a radical reconceptualization of politics itself.

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