Adorno - Softcover

Jay, Martin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674005155 ISBN 13: 9780674005150

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1984

Synopsis

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) was a leading figure in the Frankfurt School and one of this century's most demanding intellectuals. His works, always informed by his variant of Critical Theory that he called Negative Dialectics, is notoriously difficult to understand bu has had an enormous impact on philosophy, sociology, musicology, literary criticism, psychology, and the study of culture.

In an introductory section, Martin Jay gives a brief, lucid account of Adorno's notion of force-field, and of Adorno's extension of Walter Benjamin's concept of constellation. He distinguishes five impulses in Adorno's thinking: his Marxism, his aesthetic modernism, his mandarin cultural conservatism, his anticipation of deconstructionism, and the self-conscious Jewishness that led him to look for redemption and at the same time to refuse any definition of paradise.

Professor Jay devotes the central sections of his book to the major aspects of Adorno's thought--his philosophy, his social theory, and his view of modern culture and aesthetic theory. He has succeeded brilliantly in the task of presenting Adorno's theories in understandable form while remaining true to their unresolved tensions.

About this title

About the Author:

Martin Jay is Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley, and author of The Dialectical Imagination, his classic account of the Frankfurt School, and Marxism and Totality, his history of western Marxism from Lukács to Habermas.

Review:

An admirable introduction to the thought of an inordinately complex writer. It presents that thought in lucid outline, while avoiding the sort of facile simplification that Adorno himself would have detested. (H. Stuart Hughes)

Martin Jay's Adorno makes this powerful thinker intelligible and even sympathetic, while still respecting his essential complexity and asperity. (Paul Robinson)

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1984
• ISBN 10: 0674005155
• ISBN 13: 9780674005150
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200