|
Showing 1 - 25 of
52 matches in All Departments
Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) was one of the twentieth century's
most influential thinkers in the areas of social theory,
philosophy, aesthetics, and music. This volume reveals another
aspect of the work of this remarkable polymath, a pioneering
analysis of the psychological underpinnings of what we now call the
Radical Right and its use of the media to propagate its political
and religious agenda.
The now-forgotten Martin Luther Thomas was an American
fascist-style demagogue of the Christian right on the radio in the
1930s. During these years, Adorno was living in the United States
and working with Paul Lazarsfeld on the social significance of
radio. This book, Adorno's penetrating analysis of Thomas's
rhetorical appeal and manipulative techniques, was written in
English and is one of Adorno's most accessible works. It is in four
parts: "The Personal Element: Self-Characterization of the
Agitator," "Thomas' Methods," "The Religious Medium,"and
"Ideological Bait." The importance of the study is manifold: it
includes a theory of fascism and anti-semitism, it provides a
methodology for the cultural study of popular culture, and it
offers broad reflections on comparative political life in America
and Europe.
Implicit in the book is an innovative idea about the relation
between psychological and sociological reality. Moreover, the study
is germane to the contemporary reality of political and religious
radio in the United States because it provides an analysis of
rhetorical techniques that exploit potentials of psychological
regression for authoritarian aims.
The creation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory in the
1920s saw the birth of some of the most exciting and challenging
writings of the twentieth century. It is out of this background
that the great critic Theodor Adorno emerged. His finest essays are
collected here, offering the reader unparalleled insights into
Adorno's thoughts on culture. He argued that the culture industry
commodified and standardized all art. In turn this suffocated
individuality and destroyed critical thinking. At the time, Adorno
was accused of everything from overreaction to deranged hysteria by
his many detractors. In today's world, where even the least cynical
of consumers is aware of the influence of the media, Adorno's work
takes on a more immediate significance. The Culture Industry is an
unrivalled indictment of the banality of mass culture.
Although Theodor W. Adorno is best known for his association with
the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, he began his career as a
composer and successful music critic. Night Music presents the
first complete English translations of two collections of texts
compiled by German philosopher and musicologist Adorno—Moments
musicaux, containing essays written between 1928 and 1962, and
Theory of New Music, a group of texts written between 1929 and
1955. In Moments musicaux, Adorno echoes Schubert’s eponymous
cycle, with its emphasis on aphorism, and offers lyrical
reflections on music of the past and his own time. The essays
include extended aesthetic analyses that demonstrate Adorno’s aim
to apply high philosophical standards to the study of music. Theory
of New Music, as its title indicates, presents Adorno’s thoughts
and theories on the composition, reception, and analysis of the
music that was being written around him. His extensive
philosophical writing ultimately prevented him from pursuing the
compositional career he had once envisaged, but his view of the
modern music of the time is not simply that of a theorist, but
clearly also that of a composer. Though his advocacy of the Second
Viennese School, comprising composer Arnold Schoenberg and his
pupils, is well known, many of his writings in this field have
remained obscure. Collected in their entirety for the first time in
English, the insightful texts in Night Music show the breadth of
Adorno’s musical understanding and reveal an overlooked side to
this significant thinker.
This volume makes available in English for the first time Adorno's
lectures on metaphysics. It provides a unique introduction not only
to metaphysics but also to Adorno's own intellectual standpoint, as
developed in his major work" Negative Dialectics,"
Metaphysics for Adorno is defined by a central tension between
concepts and immediate facts. Adorno traces this dualism back to
Aristotle, whom he sees as the founder of metaphysics. In Aristotle
it appears as an unresolved tension between form and matter. This
basic split, in Adorno's interpretation, runs right through the
history of metaphysics. Perhaps not surprisingly, Adorno finds this
tension resolved in the Hegelian dialectic.
Underlying this dualism is a further dichotomy, which Adorno
sees as essential to metaphysics: while it dissolves belief in
transcendental worlds by thought, at the same time it seeks to
rescue belief in a reality beyond the empirical, again by thought.
It is to this profound ambiguity, for Adorno, that the metaphysical
tradition owes its greatness.
The major part of these lectures, given by Adorno late in his
life, is devoted to a critical exposition of Aristotle's thought,
focusing on its central ambiguities. In the last lectures, Adorno's
attention switches to the question of the relevance of metaphysics
today, particularly after the Holocaust. He finds in 'metaphysical
experiences', which transcend rational discourse without lapsing
into irrationalism, a last precarious refuge of the humane truth to
which his own thought always aspired.
This volume will be essential reading for anyone interested in
Adorno's work and will be a valuable text for students and scholars
of philosophy and social theory.
|
Dialectic of Enlightenment (Paperback)
Max Horkheimer, Theodor W Adorno; Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noeri; Translated by Edmund Jephcott
|
R797
R744
Discovery Miles 7 440
Save R53 (7%)
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
"Dialectic of Enlightenment" is undoubtedly the most influential
publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written
during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared
in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "What we had set out to
do," the authors write in the Preface, "was nothing less than to
explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is
sinking into a new kind of barbarism."
Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of contemporary
events. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of
Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle
against natural forces, as represented in myths, are connected in a
wide arch to the most threatening experiences of the present.
The book consists in five chapters, at first glance unconnected,
together with a number of shorter notes. The various analyses
concern such phenomena as the detachment of science from practical
life, formalized morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment
culture, and a paranoid behavioral structure, expressed in
aggressive anti-Semitism, that marks the limits of enlightenment.
The authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the
tendency toward self-destruction of the guiding criteria inherent
in enlightenment thought from the beginning. Using historical
analyses to elucidate the present, they show, against the
background of a prehistory of subjectivity, why the National
Socialist terror was not an aberration of modern history but was
rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western
civilization.
Adorno and Horkheimer see the self-destruction of Western reason as
grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the
domination of external nature and society. They trace
enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its
mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not
irreconcilable opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of
both real and intellectual life. "Myth is already enlightenment,
and enlightenment reverts to mythology." This paradox is the
fundamental thesis of the book.
This new translation, based on the text in the complete edition of
the works of Max Horkheimer, contains textual variants, commentary
upon them, and an editorial discussion of the position of this work
in the development of Critical Theory.
Notes to Literature is a collection of the great social theorist
Theodor W. Adorno's essays on such writers as Mann, Bloch,
Hoelderlin, Siegfried Kracauer, Goethe, Benjamin, and Stefan
George. It also includes his reflections on a variety of subjects,
such as literary titles, the physical qualities of books, political
commitment in literature, the light-hearted and the serious in art,
and the use of foreign words in writing. This edition presents this
classic work in full in a single volume, with a new introduction by
Paul Kottman.
Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), one of the leading social thinkers
of the twentieth century, long concerned himself with the problems
of moral philosophy, or "whether the good life is a genuine
possibility in the present." This book consists of a course of
seventeen lectures given in May-July 1963. Captured by tape
recorder (which Adorno called "the fingerprint of the living
mind"), these lectures present a somewhat different, and more
accessible, Adorno from the one who composed the faultlessly
articulated and almost forbiddingly perfect prose of the works
published in his lifetime. Here we can follow Adorno's thought in
the process of formation (he spoke from brief notes), endowed with
the spontaneity and energy of the spoken word. The lectures focus
largely on Kant, "a thinker in whose work the question of morality
is most sharply contrasted with other spheres of existence." After
discussing a number of the Kantian categories of moral philosophy,
Adorno considers other, seemingly more immediate general problems,
such as the nature of moral norms, the good life, and the relation
of relativism and nihilism. In the course of the lectures, Adorno
addresses a wide range of topics, including: theory and practice,
ethics as bad conscience, the repressive character, the problem of
freedom, dialectics in Kant and Hegel, the nature of reason, the
moral law as a given, psychoanalysis, the element of the Absurd,
freedom and law, the Protestant tradition of morality, Hamlet,
self-determination, phenomenology, the concept of the will, the
idea of humanity, The Wild Duck, and Nietzsche's critique of
morality.
Introduction to Sociology distills decades of distinguished work in
sociology by one of this century's most influential thinkers in the
areas of social theory, philosophy, aesthetics, and music. It
consists of a course of seventeen lectures given by Theodor W.
Adorno in May-July 1968, the last lecture series before his death
in 1969. Captured by tape recorder (which Adorno called "the
fingerprint of the living mind"), these lectures present a somewhat
different, and more accessible, Adorno from the one who composed
the faultlessly articulated and almost forbiddingly perfect prose
of the works published in his lifetime. Here we can follow Adorno's
thought in the process of formation (he spoke from brief notes),
endowed with the spontaneity and energy of the spoken word. The
lectures form an ideal introduction to Adorno's work, acclimatizing
the reader to the greater density of thought and language of his
classic texts. Delivered at the time of the "positivist dispute" in
sociology, Adorno defends the position of the "Frankfurt School"
against criticism from mainstream positivist sociologists. He sets
out a conception of sociology as a discipline going beyond the
compilation and interpretation of empirical facts, its truth being
inseparable from the essential structure of society itself. Adorno
sees sociology not as one academic discipline among others, but as
an over-arching discipline that impinges on all aspects of social
life. Tracing the history of the discipline and insisting that the
historical context is constitutive of sociology itself, Adorno
addresses a wide range of topics, including: the purpose of
studying sociology; the relation of sociology and politics; the
influence of Saint-Simon, Comte, Durkheim, Weber, Marx, and Freud;
the contributions of ethnology and anthropology; the relationship
of method to subject matter; the problems of quantitative analysis;
the fetishization of science; and the separation of sociology and
social philosophy.
Kant is a pivotal thinker in Adorno's intellectual world. Although
he wrote monographs on Hegel, Husserl, and Kierkegaard, the closest
Adorno came to an extended discussion of Kant are two lecture
courses, one concentrating on the "Critique of Pure Reason" and the
other on the "Critique of Practical Reason." This new volume by
Adorno comprises his lectures on the former.
Adorno attempts to make Kant's thought comprehensible to students
by focusing on what he regards as problematic aspects of Kant's
philosophy. Adorno examines Kant's dualism and what he calls the
Kantian "block": the contradictions arising from Kant's resistance
to the idealism that his successors--Fichte, Schelling, and
Hegel--saw as the inevitable outcome of his ideas. These lectures
also provide an accessible introduction to and rationale for
Adorno's own philosophy as expounded in "Negative Dialectics" and
his other major writings. Adorno's view of Kant forms an integral
part of his own philosophy, since he argues that the way out of the
Kantian contradictions is to show the necessity of the dialectical
thinking that Kant himself spurned. This in turn enables Adorno to
criticize Anglo-Saxon scientistic or positivist thought, as well as
the philosophy of existentialism.
This book will be of great interest to those working in philosophy
and in social and political thought, and it will be essential
reading for anyone interested in the foundations of Adorno's own
work.
Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) was one of the twentieth century's
most influential thinkers in the areas of social theory,
philosophy, aesthetics, and music. This volume reveals another
aspect of the work of this remarkable polymath, a pioneering
analysis of the psychological underpinnings of what we now call the
Radical Right and its use of the media to propagate its political
and religious agenda.
The now-forgotten Martin Luther Thomas was an American
fascist-style demagogue of the Christian right on the radio in the
1930s. During these years, Adorno was living in the United States
and working with Paul Lazarsfeld on the social significance of
radio. This book, Adorno's penetrating analysis of Thomas's
rhetorical appeal and manipulative techniques, was written in
English and is one of Adorno's most accessible works. It is in four
parts: "The Personal Element: Self-Characterization of the
Agitator," "Thomas' Methods," "The Religious Medium,"and
"Ideological Bait." The importance of the study is manifold: it
includes a theory of fascism and anti-semitism, it provides a
methodology for the cultural study of popular culture, and it
offers broad reflections on comparative political life in America
and Europe.
Implicit in the book is an innovative idea about the relation
between psychological and sociological reality. Moreover, the study
is germane to the contemporary reality of political and religious
radio in the United States because it provides an analysis of
rhetorical techniques that exploit potentials of psychological
regression for authoritarian aims.
"Introduction to Sociology" distills decades of distinguished work
in sociology by one of this century's most influential thinkers in
the areas of social theory, philosophy, aesthetics, and music.
It consists of a course of seventeen lectures given by Theodor W.
Adorno in May-July 1968, the last lecture series before his death
in 1969. Captured by tape recorder (which Adorno called "the
fingerprint of the living mind"), these lectures present a somewhat
different, and more accessible, Adorno from the one who composed
the faultlessly articulated and almost forbiddingly perfect prose
of the works published in his lifetime. Here we can follow Adorno's
thought in the process of formation (he spoke from brief notes),
endowed with the spontaneity and energy of the spoken word. The
lectures form an ideal introduction to Adorno's work, acclimatizing
the reader to the greater density of thought and language of his
classic texts.
Delivered at the time of the "positivist dispute" in sociology,
Adorno defends the position of the "Frankfurt School" against
criticism from mainstream positivist sociologists. He sets out a
conception of sociology as a discipline going beyond the
compilation and interpretation of empirical facts, its truth being
inseparable from the essential structure of society itself. Adorno
sees sociology not as one academic discipline among others, but as
an over-arching discipline that impinges on all aspects of social
life.
Tracing the history of the discipline and insisting that the
historical context is constitutive of sociology itself, Adorno
addresses a wide range of topics, including: the purpose of
studying sociology; the relation of sociology and politics; the
influence of Saint-Simon, Comte, Durkheim, Weber, Marx, and Freud;
the contributions of ethnology and anthropology; the relationship
of method to subject matter; the problems of quantitative analysis;
the fetishization of science; and the separation of sociology and
social philosophy.
"Critical Models" combines into a single volume two of Adorno's
most important postwar works -- "Interventions: Nine Critical
Models" (1963) and "Catchwords: Critical Models II" (1969). Written
after his return to Germany in 1949, the articles, essays, and
radio talks included in this volume speak to the pressing
political, cultural, and philosophical concerns of the postwar era.
The pieces in "Critical Models" reflect the intellectually
provocative as well as the practical Adorno as he addresses such
issues as the dangers of ideological conformity, the fragility of
democracy, educational reform, the influence of television and
radio, and the aftermath of fascism.
This new edition includes an introduction by Lydia Goehr, a
renowned scholar in philosophy, aesthetic theory, and musicology.
Goehr illuminates Adorno's ideas as well as the intellectual,
historical, and critical contexts that shaped his postwar
thinking.
Theodor Adorno (1903-69) was undoubtedly the foremost thinker of
the Frankfurt School, the influential group of German thinkers that
fled to the US in the 1930s, including such thinkers as Herbert
Marcuse and Max Horkheimer. His work has proved enormously
influential in sociology, philosophy and cultural theory. Aesthetic
Theory is Adorno's posthumous magnum opus and the culmination of a
lifetime's investigation. Analysing the sublime, the ugly and the
beautiful, Adorno shows how such concepts frame and distil human
experience and that it is human experience that ultimately
underlies aesthetics. In Adorno's formulation 'art is the
sedimented history of human misery'.
During the occupation of West Germany after the Second World War,
the American authorities commissioned polls to assess the values
and opinions of ordinary Germans. They concluded that the fascist
attitudes of the Nazi era had weakened to a large degree. Theodor
W. Adorno and his Frankfurt School colleagues, who returned in 1949
from the United States, were skeptical. They held that standardized
polling was an inadequate and superficial method for exploring such
questions. In their view, public opinion is not simply an aggregate
of individually held opinions, but is fundamentally a public
concept, formed through interaction in conversations and with
prevailing attitudes and ideas "in the air." In Group Experiment,
edited by Friedrich Pollock, they published their findings on their
group discussion experiments that delved deeper into the process of
opinion formation. Andrew J. Perrin and Jeffrey K. Olick make a
case that these experiments are an important missing link in the
ontology and methodology of current social-science survey research.
The creation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory in the 1920s saw the birth of some of the most exciting and challenging writings of the twentieth century. It is out of this background that the great critic Theodor Adorno emerged. His finest essays are collected here, offering the reader unparalleled insights into Adorno's thoughts on culture. He argued that the culture industry commodified and standardized all art. In turn this suffocated individuality and destroyed critical thinking. At the time, Adorno was accused of everything from overreaction to deranged hysteria by his many detractors. In today's world, where even the least cynical of consumers is aware of the influence of the media, Adorno's work takes on a more immediate significance. The Culture Industry is an unrivalled indictment of the banality of mass culture.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
|