Books by Max HORKHEIMER
KULTURINDUSTRIE (French Edition)
by Theodor W. Adorno, Max HORKHEIMER
Product Description
La notion d'« industrie culturelle », dont l'origine est à trouver dans le présent texte, a permis de développer toute une pensée critique des médias : livre, musique, cinéma, télévision, une production industrielle confondue avec la culture elle-même.Dans ce texte, Adorno et Horkheimer démontrent que toute manifestation culturelle et tout moyen de diffusion – film, radio, magazine – forment un système et que, face à ce système, nulle voix ne peut se faire entendre. Obéissant aujourd’hui à une logique extensive, l’industrie culturelle devient, dans le capitalisme avancé, une industrie du divertissement. L’amusement n’est en outre que « le prolongement du travail ». Aussi, celui qui en jouit, s’il échappe alors au travail automatisé, ne crée que les conditions pour être en mesure de s’y confronter à nouveau. Texte extrait de La Dialectique de la raison, paru chez Gallimard, sous le titre La production industrielle des biens culturels.
From the Back Cover
"Tous se pressent dans la crainte de manquer quelque chose.”
About the Author
Professeur de philosophie et de sociologie à l’université de Francfort, Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) a fondé et dirigé l’Institut de recherche sociale à Francfort, institut qui reprendra ses travaux aux États-Unis, Horkheimer étant contraint à l’exil en 1933. Il est le principal penseur de la « théorie critique » des années 30.Philosophe et sociologue allemand, Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) suit des études de philosophie, et s’intéresse en particulier à George Lukacs et Karl Korsch.
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Towards a New Manifesto
by Theodor Adorno, Max HORKHEIMER
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote the central text of “critical theory”, Dialectic of Enlightenment, a measured critique of the Enlightenment reason that, they argued, had resulted in fascism and totalitarianism.
Towards a New Manifesto shows the two philosophers in a uniquely spirited and free-flowing exchange of ideas. This book is a record of their discussions over three weeks in the spring of 1956, recorded with a view to the production of a contemporary version of The Communist Manifesto. A philosophical jam-session in which the two thinkers improvise freely, often wildly, on central themes of their work—theory and practice, labor and leisure, domination and freedom—in a political register found nowhere else in their writing. Amid a careening flux of arguments, aphorisms and asides, in which the trenchant alternates with the reckless, the playful with the ingenuous, positions are swapped and contradictions unheeded, without any compulsion for consistency.
A thrilling example of philosophy in action and a compelling map of a possible passage to a new world.
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Towards a New Manifesto
by Theodor Adorno, Max HORKHEIMER
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote the central text of “critical theory”, Dialectic of Enlightenment, a measured critique of the Enlightenment reason that, they argued, had resulted in fascism and totalitarianism.
Towards a New Manifesto shows the two philosophers in a uniquely spirited and free-flowing exchange of ideas. This book is a record of their discussions over three weeks in the spring of 1956, recorded with a view to the production of a contemporary version of The Communist Manifesto. A philosophical jam-session in which the two thinkers improvise freely, often wildly, on central themes of their work—theory and practice, labor and leisure, domination and freedom—in a political register found nowhere else in their writing. Amid a careening flux of arguments, aphorisms and asides, in which the trenchant alternates with the reckless, the playful with the ingenuous, positions are swapped and contradictions unheeded, without any compulsion for consistency.
A thrilling example of philosophy in action and a compelling map of a possible passage to a new world.
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Eclipse of Reason
In his most important work, Max Horkheimer surveys and demonstrates the gradual ascendancy of Reason in Western philosophy, its eventual total application to all spheres of life, and what he considers its present reified domination. First published in 1947, Horkheimer here explores the ways in Nazism - that most irrational of political movements - had co-opted ideas of rationality for its own ends. Ultimately, the book is a warning of the ways this might happen again and, as such, this is a book that has never appeared more timely.
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Critical Theory Selected Essays
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 Research in Frankfurt. Horkheimer's writings are essential to an understanding of the intellectual background of the New Left and the to much current social-philosophical thought, including the work of Herbert Marcuse. Apart from their historical significance and even from their scholarly eminence, these essays contain an immediate relevance only now becoming fully recognized.
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A Life in Letters: Selected Correspondence (Texts and Contexts)
One of the central figures in modern thought, Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) was the director of the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt and guided the activities of the Frankfurt School from its origins in Germany through its exile in the United States during World War II. The Frankfurt School writers developed what came to be known as Critical Theory, and anyone familiar with poststructuralist theory in the humanities and social sciences will recognize its indebtedness to the Frankfurt School.
These letters show how Horkheimer’s thought was influenced by and engaged with the historical events of the twentieth century, particularly the Holocaust and the Vietnam War. The letters trace the trajectory of his thought from an early optimism about the possibility of revolutionary change to a critique of orthodox Marxism as his faith in revolution was replaced by a commitment to the transformative power of education.
These letters also convey the contours of Horkheimer’s personal relationships and illustrate the connection of Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School to the work and thought of some of the most important figures in the intellectual life of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Karl Marx, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse.
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Critique of Instrumental Reason (Radical Thinkers)
These essays, written between 1949 and 1967, focus on a single theme: the triumph in the twentieth century of the state-bureaucratic apparatus and ‘instrumental reason’ and the concomitant liquidation of the individual and the basic social institutions and relationships associated with the individual.
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Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)
These essays reveal another side of Horkheimer, focusing on his remarkable contributions to critical theory in the 1930s.
Max Horkheimer is well known as the director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and as a sometime collaborator with Theodor Adorno, especially on their classic Dialectic of Enlightenment. These essays reveal another side of Horkheimer, focusing on his remarkable contributions to critical theory in the 1930s. Included are Horkheimer's inaugural address as director of the Institute, in which he outlines the interdisciplinary research program that would dominate the initial phase of the Frankfurt School, his first full monograph, and a number of other pieces published in the 1930s. The essays, most of which have not appeared in English before, are surprisingly relevant to current post-philosophy debates, notably "On the Problem of Truth," with its focus on pragmatism, and "The Rationalism Debate in Current Philosophy," a sustained critique of the post-Cartesian philosophy of consciousness. Horkheimer's 1933 critique of Kantian ethics, "Materialism and Morality," is of particular interest given the current reaction to the neo-Kantian aspect of Habermas's work. There are also essays relevant to the current foundations debate within Continental philosophy, and the rationality/relativism question is sustained throughout the volume.
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Dialectic of Enlightenment (Cultural Memory in the Present)
by Theodor W. Adorno, Max HORKHEIMER
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.
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Dialectic of Enlightenment
by Theodor W. Adorno, Max HORKHEIMER
Analyzes the manner in which ideological symbol systems constitute an advance beyond such previous symbol systems as religion and myth
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