Friedrich Pollock


Book Description

The son of an industrialist who wanted to abolish private property. A Jew who didn’t want anything to do with Judaism. A professor who published little. An economist who squandered his wealth on the stock market. A communist who thought Marxism was anachronistic. And finally: a critical intellectual. When dealing with the political culture of the Weimar Republic, the development of Critical Theory and German-Jewish emigration to the USA, there is no way around Friedrich Pollock. Max Horkheimer’s companion and the founder of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt plays an important part in German-Jewish intellectual history as one of the most prominent representatives of Critical Theory. The present volume presents the first biography of a major but overlooked figure.




Group Experiment and Other Writings


Book Description

During the occupation of West Germany after the Second World War, the American authorities commissioned polls to assess the values and opinions of ordinary Germans. They concluded that the fascist attitudes of the Nazi era had weakened to a large degree. The author and his colleagues, who returned in 1949 from the United States, were skeptical. In their view, public opinion is not simply an aggregate of individually held opinions, but is fundamentally a public concept, formed through interaction in conversations and with prevailing attitudes and ideas "in the air." In this book, they published their findings on their group discussion experiments that delved deeper into the process of opinion formation.




For Nonconformism: Max Horkheimer and Friedrich Pollock


Book Description

This book reconstructs the crucial moments in the friendship between Max Horkheimer and Friedrich Pollock and sheds a new light on the origins of the Frankfurt School.




Guilt and Defense


Book Description

In this series of interlocking essays, which had their start as lectures inspired by the presidency of Barack Obama, Robert Burns Stepto sets canonical works of African American literature in conversation with Obama's Dreams from My Father. The elegant readings that result shed surprising light on unexamined angles of works ranging from Frederick Douglass's Narrative to W.E.B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk to Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.




The Frankfurt School in Exile


Book Description

Thomas Wheatland examines the influence of the Frankfurt School, or Horkheimer Circle, and how they influenced American social thought and postwar German sociology. He argues that, contrary to accepted belief, the members of the group, who fled oppression in Nazi Germany in 1934, had a major influence on postwar intellectual life.




Reason After Its Eclipse


Book Description

Tackles a question as old as Plato and still pressing today: What is reason, and what roles does and should it have in human endeavor? The eminent intellectual historian Martin Jay surveys Western ideas of reason, particularly in German philosophy from Kant to Habermas.




Frankfurt School


Book Description

The Frankfurt School' refers to the members associated with the "Institut fur Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) " which was founded in Frankfurt in 1923. The work of this group is generally agreed to have been a landmark in twentieth century social science. It is of seminal importance in our understanding of culture, progress, politics, production, consumption and method. This set of six volumes provides a full picture of the School by examining the important developments that have occured since the deaths of the original core of Frankfurt scholars. All the major figures--Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Benjamin--are represented. In particular, the important post-war work of Jurgen Habermas is fully assessed. The collection also covers the work of many of the minor figures associated with the School who have been unfairly neglected in the past, resulting in the most complete survey and guide to the "oeuvre" of the Frankfurt School.




The Frankfurt School


Book Description

The book is based on documentary and biographical materials that have only recently become available. As the narrative follows the Institute for Social Research from Frankfurt am Main to Geneva, New York, and Los Angeles, and then back to Frankfurt, Wiggershaus continually ties the evolution of the school to the changing intellectual and political contexts in which it operated.




Marxism and Totality


Book Description

Totality has been an abiding concern from the first generation of Western Marxists, most notably Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci, and Bloch, through the second, exemplified by the Frankfurt School, Lefebvre, Goldmann, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Della Volpe, up to the most recent, typified by Althusser, Colletti, and Habermas. Yet no consensus has been reached concerning the term's multiple meanings—expressive, decentered, longitudinal, latitudinal, normative—or its implications for other theoretical and practical matters. By closely following the adventures of this troublesome but central concept, Marxism & Totality offers an unconventional account of the history of Western Marxism.




The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism


Book Description

This book explores the ways in which the Jewish backgrounds of leading Frankfurt School Critical Theorists shaped their lives, work, and ideas.