The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950

by Martin Jay

Overview

Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Franz Neumann, Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal—the impact of the Frankfurt School on the sociological, political, and cultural thought of the twentieth century has been profound. The Dialectical Imagination is a major history of this monumental cultural and intellectual enterprise during its early years in Germany and in the United States. Martin Jay has provided a substantial new preface for this edition, in which he reflects on the continuing relevance of the work of the Frankfurt School.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520204232
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	03/05/1996
Series:	Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism , #10
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	382
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Among his books are Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought and, as co-editor, The Weimar Sourcebook, both published by the University of California Press.

Table of Contents

Preface to the 1996 Edition 
Foreword by Max Horkheimer 
Introduction 
Acknowledgments 
I. The Creation of the Institut fUr Sozialforschung and
Its First Frankfurt Years 
2. The Genesis of Critical Theory 
3· The Integration of Psychoanalysis 
4. The Institut's First Studies of Authority 
5. The Institut's Analysis of Nazism 
6. Aesthetic Theory and the Critique of Mass Culture 
7· The Empirical Work of the Institut in the 1940's 
8. Toward a Philosophy of History: The Critique of the
Enlightenment 
Epilogue 
Chapter References 
Bibliography 
Index 

Editorial Reviews

Berkeley Professor Jay's intellectual history covers the influential Frankfurt School, a group of German philosophers whose radical cultural criticism laid much of the groundwork for contemporary critical theory. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Though finding some flaws in the text, LJ's reviewer nonetheless dubbed this history of the Frankfort School and the Institute for Social Research a "coherent, judicious discussion of this controversial band of German Theorists." Libraries lacking such a volume should purchase this "lucid study" (LJ 1/1/73).

Library Journal