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Title: The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950 (Weimar and Now ; 10) by Martin Jay ISBN: 0520204239 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5
Rating: 5
Summary: Locating thought in the right context
Comment: Frankfurt school is now a part of history. Not much of its arguments are reproduced now a day. For example, their critical cultural theory opened up the vast terrain of cultural study in capitalism. But their characterizing cultural consumer as dumb passive receiver is too much extreme to be real. Now nobody hold up such a position. Its perspective seems locked in the interwar period. Indeed, the power of the school comes from the distinctive problematic derived from such a peculiar era. But the strength is the source of weakness. But even we don¡¯t follow their lines, we should know what they said at least in cursory manner, for their theories are now classic in each field.
This book must be still the most authoritative history of Frankfurt school from its inception to 1950. but it deals with not only chronological events but also what the first generation of the school, such as Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and Fromm, worked. This book is the intellectual history of the school. The author illustrates the school against the time of school. As Hegel said, thought is the child of its time. So the thought should be located in the right context to understand. The society of Western intellectuals faced a crisis in the interwar period. The impact was severe especially to German intellectuals. The thought of Frankfurt school is one of the reactions to the crisis. Marin Jay succeeds in reconstruct their time in front of us. This book is the ¡®must¡¯, if you want to be oriented to Frankfurt school.
Rating: 5
Summary: Indispensable Introduction to the Frankfurt School
Comment: 28 years after its initial publication, Martin Jay's "The Dialectical Imagination" is still the best introduction and most indispensable guide to the Frankfurt School's history and thinkers. Jay can easily be forgiven his occasional historiographer's dryness and insistent reminders of the boundaries of his project (I would be a rich man if I had a nickel for every time he writes that "such considerations fall outside of the area of the current inquiry" or something to that effect). Moreover, even if subsequent publications of the translated correspondence and unpublished papers of figures like Benjamin and Adorno have robbed Jay's book of some of its potential for novelty and scoop, Jay still provides the best and most pithy assessments of the major points, and he does so without sacrificing the scholarly rigor that organizes "The Dialectical Imagination."
The book could certainly better fulfill its role as research tool if the publishers would sponsor an updating of the notes and citations; now that everything has been published and republished by presses like Fischer and Suhrkamp in Germany and by the likes of Continuum, Columbia, Harvard, etc., in the English-speaking world, Jay's opus might be more helpful were it not to insist on citing the original issues of the institute's journals, to which most of us simply don't have easy access.
That's a small bone to pick, though, with such a thorough book. Jay's chapter on the philosophical roots of critical theory moves quickly but surely (despite the occasional dependence on disciplinary argot that may slow down readers not steeped in the vocabulary of "isms"), providing a crucial backdrop to his reading of the Frankfurt School's entire intellectual contribution. This chapter grounds Jay's book safely, and the subsequent chapters make good on this very promising start.
"The Dialectical Imagination" is sure to remain the best available introduction to the thought of the Frankfurt School on the whole. I cannot recommend it highly enough for those interested in the history of philosophy in the 20th century, in radical politics, or in developments in literary theory.
Rating: 5
Summary: Evenhanded Intellectual History
Comment: A wonderful introduction to and overview of the works of one of the only coherent intellectual "schools" of the 20th century. Jay describes the penetrating insights (and weaknesses) of the thought of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse et al., with mercifully little of the psychologizing that one often finds in intellectual history. Ideas and their relation to historical context are the focus, rather than personalities and psyches. The book is readable enough to be attractive for non-academics and academics alike. It would have been nice to have more on the post-1950 period, but the as the subtitle makes clear, this is beyond Jay's purview for this book.
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Title: Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer, John Cumming, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno ISBN: 0826400930 Publisher: Continuum Pub Group Pub. Date: 1976 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas by David Held ISBN: 0520041755 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 1981 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life by Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, E. F. Jephcott ISBN: 0860917045 Publisher: Verso Books Pub. Date: 1996 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought) by Rolf Wiggershaus, Michael Robertson ISBN: 0262731134 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 23 February, 1995 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
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Title: Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Post-Contemporary Interventions Series) by Fredric Jameson ISBN: 0822310902 Publisher: Duke Univ Pr (Trd) Pub. Date: 1992 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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