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Social and Cultural Diversity
The Frankfurt School and the Critique of Modernity
A common definition of modernity, usually associated with Max Weber, emphasizes the increasing rationality – and rationalization – of social, economic, political, intellectual and other spheres of human life, and a concomitant “disenchantment” of the world: the inevitable and progressive banishment of the irrationalities of religion, superstition, emotion, aesthetics, political extremism, and so forth. Yet other great theorists of modernity, including Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, and many others, exposed and explored a pervasive irrational core to modern existence.
In this course we will examine one such critique of modernity -- that of the Frankfurt School, tracing its development from the early 1920s and 30s in Germany to one more recent exponent, Jürgen Habermas. A key focus, however, will be on the attempt of Frankfurt School theorists (more sustained in some than in others), to retrieve and rebuild an emancipatory project out of the ruins of modernity itself. This attempt distinguishes the Frankfurt School from approaches that seek a return to the pre-modern period for philosophical guidance, and those for whom the abandonment of the universalizing pretensions of modernity marks an achievement.
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