On Wed, 24 May 2000, Louis Proyect wrote:
> of Hegel's philosophy. But in the Frankfurt School the task of revolution
> is dumped overboard and the problematic of alienation remains, only to be
> solved within the context of what ultimately will prove to be the modern
> liberal state, as evidenced by Adorno's friendliness to the post-WWII
> German republic.
Ye Gods. Adorno worked for the Institute of Social Research; no German
university would have hired him in the Fifties (the Ulbrecht regime, on
the other hand, would've had him shot). Marcuse mixed it up with the New
Left activists and students, Adorno and Horkheimer created the world's
first coherent theory of mass culture, and Adorno's conceptual
masterpieces are magnificent expositions of multinational Marxism, which
predicted the total system (global capitalism) decades before the thing
became a stark reality. You can't find a thinker more antagonistic to the
rigidly hierarchical, patriarchal, xenophobic Central Europe of the
mid-20th century than Teddy. The 1966 "Negative Dialectics" is a veritable
casebook of the human rights, labor rights, and ecological struggles of
our own era. I even wrote an itty bitty little dissertation on the
subject:
http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dredmond/slrgdenk.html
-- Dennis
