Across the Euro-Atlantic world, political leaders have been mobilizing their bases with nativism, racism, xenophobia, and paeans to “traditional values,” in brazen bids for electoral support. How are we to understand this move to the mainstream of political policies and platforms that lurked only on the far fringes through most of the postwar era? Does it herald a new wave of authoritarianism? Is liberal democracy itself in crisis? In this volume, three distinguished scholars draw on critical theory to address our (...) current predicament. Wendy Brown, Peter E. Gordon, and Max Pensky share a conviction that critical theory retains the power to illuminate the forces producing the current political constellation as well as possible paths away from it. Brown explains how “freedom” has become a rallying cry for manifestly un-emancipatory movements; Gordon dismantles the idea that fascism is rooted in the susceptible psychology of individual citizens and reflects instead on the broader cultural and historical circumstances that lend it force; and Pensky brings together the unlikely pair of Tocqueville and Adorno to explore how democracies can buckle under internal pressure. These incisive essays do not seek to smooth over the irrationality of the contemporary world, and they do not offer the false comforts of an easy return to liberal democratic values. Rather, the three authors draw on their deep engagements with nineteenth–and twentieth–century thought to investigate the historical and political contradictions that have brought about this moment, offering fiery and urgent responses to the demands of the day. (shrink)

When he was 26, the great psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm abandoned Judaism, though he himself was descended from a long line of rabbis and the product of a devout Jewish upbringing. The title essay of this collection was first published in 1930, just four years after he made that first, decisive split. It was to point towards the future Fromm's work, presenting the view that an understanding of basic human needs is essential to the understanding of society and mankind (...) itself. The following essays too, show a man who would eventually establish himself as a major thinker, producing some of that era's most influential and astute political works. (shrink)

These essays, written in the 1930s and 1940s, represent a first selection in English from the major work of the founder of the famous institute for Social ...

By examining the private correspondence of a circle of German psychoanalyst emigrés that included Otto Fenichel, Annie Reich, and Edith Jacobson, Russell Jacoby recaptures the radical zeal of classical analysis and the efforts of the Fenichel group to preserve psychoanalysis as a social and political theory, open to a broad range of intellectuals regardless of their medical background. In tracing this effort, he illuminates the repression by psychoanalysis of its own radical past and its transformation into a narrow medical technique. (...) This book is of critical interest to the general reader as well as to psychoanalytic historians, theorists, and therapists. (shrink)

The book is based on documentary and biographical materials that have only recently become available.

A comprehensive biography which covers Adorno's life, work and times: from childhood, through to his student years, his years in emigration, his return to post-war Germany, his time in Frankfurt, his role as a public intellectual, and his ...