While Adorno has tended to be read as a critic of the administered world and the consumer industry rather than a Marxist, Adorno and Marx establishes Adorno's negative dialectics as fundamental for understanding Marx's critique of political economy. This conception of the critique of political economy as a critical theory marks both a radical departure from traditional Marxist scholarship and from traditional readings of Adorno's work and warns against identifying Adorno with Marx or Marx with Adorno. Rather, it highlights the intersection between Adorno's critical theory and Marx's critique of political economy that produces a critical theory of economic objectivity that moves beyond Marxian economics and Adornonian social theory. Adorno and Marx offers an ingenious account of critical social theory. Its subversion of the economic categories of political economy contributes to the cutting-edge of contemporary social theory and its critique of social practice.

This book sheds new light on those who inherit Spinoza's thought and its consequences materially rather than metaphysically.

A definitive contribution to scholarship on Adorno, bringing together the foremost experts in the field As one of the leading continental philosophers of the last century, and one of the pioneering members of the Frankfurt School, Theodor W. Adorno is the author of numerous influential—and at times quite radical—works on diverse topics in aesthetics, social theory, moral philosophy, and the history of modern philosophy, all of which concern the contradictions of modern society and its relation to human suffering and the human condition. Having authored substantial contributions to critical theory which contain searching critiques of the ‘culture industry’ and the ‘identity thinking’ of modern Western society, Adorno helped establish an interdisciplinary but philosophically rigorous study of culture and provided some of the most startling and revolutionary critiques of Western society to date. The Blackwell Companion to Adorno is the largest collection of essays by Adorno specialists ever gathered in a single volume. Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series, this important contribution to the field explores Adorno’s lasting impact on many sub-fields of philosophy. Seven sections, encompassing a diverse range of topics and perspectives, explore Adorno’s intellectual foundations, his critiques of culture, his views on ethics and politics, and his analyses of history and domination. Provides new research and fresh perspectives on Adorno’s views and writings Offers an authoritative, single-volume resource for Adorno scholarship Addresses renewed interest in Adorno’s significance to contemporary questions in philosophy Presents over 40 essays written by international-recognized experts in the field A singular advancement in Adorno scholarship, the Companion to Adorno is an indispensable resource for Adorno specialists and anyone working in modern European philosophy, contemporary cultural criticism, social theory, German history, and aesthetics.

Decades before the environmental movement emerged in the 1960s, Adorno condemned our destructive and self-destructive relationship to the natural world, warning of the catastrophe that may result if we continue to treat nature as an object that exists exclusively for our own benefit. "Adorno on Nature" presents the first detailed examination of the pivotal role of the idea of natural history in Adorno's work. A comparison of Adorno's concerns with those of key ecological theorists - social ecologist Murray Bookchin, ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant, and deep ecologist Arne Naess - reveals how Adorno speaks directly to many of today's most pressing environmental issues. Ending with a discussion of the philosophical conundrum of unity in diversity, "Adorno on Nature" also explores how social solidarity can be promoted as a necessary means of confronting environmental problems.

A unique exploration of Adorno's ethics, defending his challenging views about how to live in an evil world.

A major study of modern culture, Dialectic of Enlightenment for many years led an underground existence among the homeless Left of the German Federal Republic until its definitive publication in West Germany in 1969. Originally composed by its two distinguished authors during their Californian exile in 1944, the book can stand as a monument of classic German progressive social theory in the twentieth century.>

This book is a critical analysis of a selection of Adorno’s work framed by four essential concerns: 1) Adorno’s method of analysis; 2) the absence of a theory of social change; 3) the relationship of his approach to the dialectics of Hegel and Marx, particularly, to others in and around the Frankfurt School (Benjamin, Kracauer, Marcuse), and in contrast to scholars such as Lukács and Bloch; and 4) Adorno’s use of his approach with respect to jazz, popular music, radio and pro-fascist propaganda of the 1930s and 40s as an instrument to disparage the working class. The argument is not an affirmation of Adorno’s work, but argues against the significance of aspects of his theoretical perspective.

This book contributes to the foundations of a critical theory of communication as shaped by the forces of digital capitalism. One of the world's leading theorists of digital media Professor Christian Fuchs explores how the thought of some of the Frankfurt School's key thinkers can be deployed for critically understanding media in the age of the Internet. Five essays that form the heart of this book review aspects of the works of Georg LukAcs, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Axel Honneth and Ju rgen Habermas and apply them as elements of a critical theory of communication's foundations. The approach taken starts from Georg LukAcs Ontology of Social Being, draws on the work of the Frankfurt School thinkers, and sets them into dialogue with the Cultural Materialism of Raymond Williams. Critical Theory of Communication offers a vital set of new insights on how communication operates in the age of information, digital media and social media, arguing that we need to transcend the communication theory of Habermas by establishing a dialectical and cultural-materialist critical theory of communication. "

This book upends some of the myths that have come to surround the work of the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno – not least amongst them, his supposed fatalism. Sebastian Truskolaski argues that Adorno's writings allow us to address what is arguably the central challenge of modern philosophy: how to picture a world beyond suffering and injustice without, at the same time, betraying its vital impulse. By re-appraising Adorno's writings on politics, philosophy, and art, this book reconstructs this notoriously difficult author's overall project from a radically new perspective (Adorno's famous 'standpoint of redemption'), and brings his central concerns to bear on the problems of today. On the one hand, this means reading Adorno alongside his principal interlocutors (including Kant, Marx and Benjamin). On the other hand, it means asking how his secular brand of social criticism can serve to safeguard the image of a better world – above all, when the invocation of this image occurs alongside Adorno's recurrent reference to the Old Testament ban on making images of God. By reading Adorno in this iconoclastic way, Adorno and the Ban on Images contributes to current debates about Utopia that have come to define political visions across the political spectrum.

Identity has become a central feature of national conversations: identity politics and identity crises are the order of the day. We celebrate identity when it comes to personal freedom and group membership, and we fear the power of identity when it comes to discrimination, bias, and hate crimes. Drawing on Isaiah Berlin's famous distinction between positive and negative liberty, Theodor Adorno and the Century of Negative Identity argues for the necessity of acknowledging a dialectic within the identity concept. Exploring the intellectual history of identity as a social idea, Eric Oberle shows the philosophical importance of identity's origins in American exile from Hitler's fascism. Positive identity was first proposed by Frankfurt School member Erich Fromm, while negative identity was almost immediately put forth as a counter-concept by Fromm's colleague, Theodor Adorno. Oberle explains why, in the context of the racism, authoritarianism, and the hard-right agitation of the 1940s, the invention of a positive concept of identity required a theory of negative identity. This history in turn reveals how autonomy and objectivity can be recovered within a modern identity structured by domination, alterity, ontologized conflict, and victim blaming.