What is the point of cultural theory? Do we even know what it is? This
book is at once an introduction to, and, broadly, a defence of modern
cultural theory understood as a particular constellation of inquiry, one
that may be all the more important in our postmodern times the more
seemingly irrelevant it is to current fashions. Focusing on the work of
Theodor Adorno, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault the book argues that
in spite of their differences these authors shared particularly 'modern'
understandings of culture, creativity and human agency; understandings
centred on the ideas of critical autonomy and creativity of thought.
Even though all three were committed to scholarly empirical research,
for them the function of cultural theory was not just to describe the
world positivistically 'as it is' (or was) but to cultivate the
conditions for ethical autonomy in their readerships by opening up ways
for thinking differently and exposing the fetishisms and blockages that
hinder that task.