By Douglas Kellner
During this paintings, Douglas Kellner brings new gentle to undergo upon the advance and modern implications of severe conception. The origins of severe concept, he argues, have been hooked up to the transition from classical to state-organized capitalism. whereas the various views of severe conception are important to social research this day, in different uncomplicated respects the technique of severe idea has to be up-to-date so as to confront the alterations that have intervened in Western society over the last region of a century. The dialectical revision of Marxian concept performed through the Frankfurt authors needs to now be utilized to their very own works to generate a serious interpretation of today's social global. This, Kellner argues, calls for a reassessment of the former severe conception research of latest capitalism via new views which take account of advancements in customer, media, technological, cultural and different spheres of what Kellner calls "techno-capitalism".
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Extra resources for Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity
Sample text
After the publication of Henryk Grossmann's The Law of Accumulation and Collapse of the Capitalist System and Friedrich Pollock's The Attempts at a Planned Economy in the Soviet Union, 1917-1927, both in 1929, the Institute published Karl Wittfogel's study of Economy and Society in China in 1931 and Franz Borkenau's The Transition from the Feudal to the Bourgeois World View in 1934. 32 During this time too, the Institute was preparing for publication a study of the German working classes' socio-political attitudes.
He argued that an illusory idealism that derives everything from the Idea is 'an abstract and therefore badly understood Hegel'; just as the attempt to derive everything from an economy which is understood merely as material being is 'an abstract and therefore badly understood Marx' (p. 43). Such theses posit an 'uncritical, obsolete and highly problematic cleavage of spirit and reality into naive absolutes', and must be dialectically overcome (p. 43). Critical social philosophy, by contrast, describes the complex set of mediations which interconnect consciousness and society, culture and economy, state and citizens.
Groups toward fascism. Lacking a theory of the subject, orthodox Marxism could not really confront the failure of revolutionary consciousness to develop, and could not point to ways in which revolutionary consciousness and struggle could be produced. To overcome this dual crisis of Marxism and bourgeois science, the Institute attempted to develop a materialist social theory that would be characterized by an integration of philosophy and the sciences. Accordingly, during the 1930s the Institute developed critiques of both the abstract, speculative and metaphysical philosophy dominant in Germany at the time and the methodological and substantive poverty of the various specialized sciences.
