Description A series critical essays that connect the rise of Enlightenment thinking with the emergence of state bureaucratic apparatuses that oppress human societies through a distinctive form of ‘instrumental rationality’. Creator Horkheimer, Max Publisher New […]
Tag Archives: critical theory
Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments
Description Perhaps the most canonical work of Marxist critical theory in the twentieth century, Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment investigates how the project of the Enlightenment transforms into a logic of domination and instrumentalization […]
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Description Less a single coherent argument than a series of meditations, this book introduces many of the concepts that would become foundational to Marxist thought and critical theory, more generally, including alienation, exploitation, and dialectical […]
The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays
Description A collection of essays published during the Weimar Republic that reflect on the contemporary state of reason and society as expressed in the material products of modern mass capitalism, most notebly in dance revues, […]
Cinema and Experience: Kracauer, Benjamin, Adorno
Description Hansen explores the promise of cinema as it defined and changed the notion of experience in modernity and modernist thinkers. Here Hansen proposes a materialst theory of the cinema to help work understand the […]
Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments
Description A landmark text critiquing the universalizing project of the European enlightenment. It argues the so-called promises of the intellectual movement remain unfulfilled, as does the forward-moving, developmental picture of history as a progressive continuum […]
Critical Theory: Essays
Description Collection of Horkhiemer’s early essays that define the program of critical theory. Includes seminal essays such as “Traditional and Critical Theory” and “The Latests Attacks on Metaphysics,” providing background and context for many of […]