The concept of »power of judgment« develops both before Kant and in Kant in conjunction with that of »taste«. Throughout this history it is understood as bearing on objects with a direct connection to the humanity of human beings: truth, value, and beauty. More precisely, the focus is the relation between the One and the Many with respect to these objects. The understanding of this power vacillates historically between these two extremes, so that it is sometimes placed in the neighborhood (...) of the faculty of taste and sometimes in that of the understanding as the faculty of strict objectivity or universality. In the Kant of the third Critique this power comes to be conceived as an independent faculty whose function is to mediate between universality and particularity, i.e., between objectivity and subjectivity. (shrink)

This is above all a documentary book, written in monumental proportions. Not only the "history," but also the "theories" and the "political significance" of the Frankfurt School are discussed here in a narrative style and in constant reference to the biographical and, more generally, the social, political, and ideological-intellectual contexts. The author's sources are not only theoretical publications but also interviews with members of the Institute for Social Research, archive material, and published and unpublished correspondence. The work thus touches upon (...) such disparate topics as the Weimar Republic, the German Jewish emigres, the Third Reich, the student movement of the 1960's, the "positivist dispute", as well as "Western marxism" and psychoanalysis, to name some of the most important themes. In this sense, Wiggershaus's work expands the scope and deepens the contents of Martin Jay's The Dialectical Imagination. A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950. Among other things, Wiggershaus follows the history of the "school" up to Adorno's death in 1969, and thus includes Habermas in his historiographical narrative; in other words, he relates the career of both the Old and the New Generations of the Frankfurt School. (shrink)