The Frankfurt School's own legacy is best preserved by exercising an
immanent critique of its premises and the conclusions to which they
often led. By distinguishing between what is still and what is no longer
alive in Critical Theory, these essays seek to demonstrate its
continuing relevance in the 21st century.
Fifty years after the appearance of The Dialectical Imagination, his
pioneering history of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay reflects on what
may be living and dead in its legacy. Rather than treating it with
filial piety as a fortress to be defended, he takes seriously its
anti-systematic impulse and sensitivity to changing historical
circumstances. Honouring the Frankfurt School's practice of immanent
critique, he puts critical pressure on a number of its own ideas by
probing their contradictory impulses.
Among them are the pathologization of political deviance through
stigmatizing "authoritarian personalities," the undefended theological
premises of Walter Benjamin's work, and the ambivalence of its members'
analyses of anti-Semitism and Zionism. Additional questions are asked
about other time-honored Marxist themes: the meaning of alienation, the
alleged damages of abstraction, and the advocacy of a politics based on
a singular notion of the truth.
Rather, however, than allowing these questions to snowball into an
unwarranted repudiation of the Frankfurt School legacy as a whole, the
essays also acknowledge a number of its still potent arguments. They
explore its neglected, but now timely analysis of "racket society,"
Adorno's dialectical reading of aesthetic sublimation, and the
unexpected implications of Benjamin's focus on the corpse for political
theory. Jay shows that it is a still evolving theoretical tradition
which offers resources for the understanding of-and perhaps even
practical betterment-of our increasingly troubled world.
