Description
The United States has some claim to have risen to a position of intellectual dominance in the social sciences in the post-war years. American social scientists are key players in international conferences and their premier publications have some claim to set international trends. Yet the relationship between American thought and global traditions has been peculiarly under-theorized.
This unparalleled four-volume collection is divided into eight parts that focus on American post-war critical theory with special reference to social theory, sociology and politics. It provides a comprehensive survey of the outstanding contributions in the field.
Peter Beilharz, through a considered selection of articles, argues that American critical theory can be read not only as European, but also as profoundly American and North American. That is, it is hybrid, at the same time global and local in significance and inflection. In this way, the American experience can be read as a case study for doing critical theory today. This comprehensive collection amounts to a definitive guide to the currents and cross currents of American critical theory in the Postwar years.
Peter Beilharz is Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University, Director of the Thesis Eleven Centre for Critical Theory and Associate Fellow, Yale University in 2004 -.
Table of Contents
PART ONE: SOURCES - THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL
Introduction - Peter Beilharz
Urban Flights - Martin Jay
The Institute of Social Research between Frankfurt and New York
Adorno in America - Martin Jay
The Frankfurt School in Exile - Martin Jay
Critical Theory and Political Economy - Moishe Postone and Barbara Brick
Walter Benjamin Today - Richard Wolin
Introduction to Habermas on Society and Politics - Steven Seidman
Habermas and Critical Theory - Jeffrey Alexander
Beyond the Marxian Dilemma?
Complexity and Democracy, or The Seducements of Systems Theory - Thomas McCarthy
PART TWO: SOURCES - FROM THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL TO FOUCAULT
From the Problem of Judgement to the Public Sphere - Seyla Benhabib
Rethinking Hannah Arendt's Political Theory
Ontology and the Political Project - Dick Howard
Cornelius Castoriadis
Institutionalization as a Creative Process - Hans Joas
The Sociological Importance of Cornelius Castoriadis's Political Philosophy
Habitus, Field and Capital - Craig Calhoun
The Question of Historical Specificity
The Reality of Reduction - The Failed Synthesis of Pierre Bourdieu - Jeffrey Alexander
Why We Might All Be Able to Live Together - Jeffrey Alexander
An Immanent Critique of Alain Touraine's Pourrons-Nous Vivre Ensemble?
Women in Dark Times - Martin Jay
Agnes Arendt and Hannah Heller
Foucault, Post-Structuralism and the Mode of Information - Mark Poster
Conflicting Conceptions of Critique - David Couzens Hoy
Foucault versus Habermas
PART THREE: AMERICAN INFLEXIONS AND RESPONSES
Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism - Daniel Bell
The Actor Deprived of His Art - Richard Sennett
The Narcissistic Personality of Our Time - Christopher Lasch
Nostalgia - Christopher Lasch
The Abdication of Memory
Afterword - Richard Rorty
Pragmatism, Pluralism and Postmodernism
An Underestimated Alternative - Hans Joas
America and the Limits of 'Critical Theory'
Between Science and Politics - Steven Seidman
For Gouldner - Martin Jay
Reflections on an Outlaw Marxist
City Life and Difference - Iris Murdoch Young
Culture, Political Economy and Difference - Nancy Fraser
On Iris Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference
Calhoun's Critical Theory - Peter Beilharz
Bourdieu in America - Lo[um]ic Wacquant
Notes on the Transatlantic Importation of Social Theory
Prophetic Pragmatism - Cornel West
Cultural Criticism and Political Engagement
The McDonaldization of Sociological Research - George Ritzer
PART FOUR: SOCIOLOGY - CRITIQUE AND INNOVATION
Modern, Anti, Post and Neo - Jeffrey Alexander
How Intellectuals Have Coded, Narrated and Explained the 'New World of Our Time'
Rethinking Critical Theory - Craig Calhoun
Civic Bodies Multi-Cultural New York - Richard Sennett
The Search for Tradition - Andreas Huyssen
Avant Garde and Postmodernism in the 1970s
The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism - Fredric Jameson
The End of the Utopias of Labor - Anson Rabinbach
Metaphors of the Machine in the Post-Fordist Era
Critical Theory, the Informational Revolution and an Ecological Path to Modernity - Timothy W Luke and Stephen K White
Where Are We at Home? - Agnes Heller
On Irony - Gil Eyal, Iv[ac]an Sz[ac]el[ac]enyi and Eleanor Townsley
An Invitation to Neo-Classical Sociology
PART FIVE: POLITICS
Introduction - Craig Calhoun
Habermas and the Public Sphere
Why More Political Theory? - Jean Cohen
Civil Society and Social Theory - Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato
Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics - Nancy Fraser
Redistribution, Recognition and Participation
Recognition and Social Justice - Axel Honneth
Honneth's New Critical Theory of Recognition - Jeffrey Alexander and Mari Pia Lara
The Politics of Recognition - Charles Taylor
PART SIX: ENGAGING AMERICA
The Resistance That Modernity Constantly Provokes - Peter Wagner
Europe, America and Social Theory
The Evergreen Tocqueville (On the Occasion of the Hungarian Publication of Democracy in America) - Ferenc Feher
Why Return to the American Revolution? - Dick Howard
False Premises - Jean Cohen
Jean Baudrillard - Robert Hughes
America
The Signs in the Street - Marshall Berman
It All Comes Together in Los Angeles - Edward W Soja
PART SEVEN: ENDGAMES/EXITS
The Significance of the Frankfurt School Today - Albrecht Wellmer
Five Theses (1986)
Exit - N[ac]estor Garc[ac]ia Canclini
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