Dialectical Imagination News Today

Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno tried to find meaning in history while remaining committed to Marxism.

The Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik’s murderous...

This book outlines Ecocentric Socialism as a theory of humanity embedded in nature to understand and help solve social and ecological crises of the twenty-first century...

In the 1960s, especially in radical student circles, there were many fanciful ideas floating about. The most pernicious and erroneous of these was the view represented by Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, that “neo-capitalism” had evolved ways of avoiding capitalist crisis, and that the working class had been integrated into the system as passive consumers in the “affluent” society. As Daniel Morley explains, these were the pseudo-Marxist ideas of the so-called Frankfur...

As its name should make abundantly clear, Critical Race Theory (CRT) is the child of Critical Theory (CT), or, to be more precise, its grandchild. Critical Theory is the immediate forebearer of Critical Legal Theory (CLT), and CLT begat CRT. As we discuss in this Backgrounder, however, there are strong thematic components linking CT, CLT, and CRT. Among these are:

Toggle open close After the Trump Administration rightly banned Critical Race Theory (CRT) training in the federal workforce in late 2020, the Biden–Harris Administration swiftly undid the prohibition in its first day in office. The reversal sent the momentum for combatting CRT to the states, where legislatures and governors are currently considering the impact of CRT’s Marxist roots and intolerance of other ideas on K–12 school policies, such as student discipline and curricula. Can the ...

Ghost in the Machine In the last fragment of his 1951 book Minima Moralia , one of the foundational texts of critical theory, Theodor Adorno provocatively recasts his own philosophical project in seemingly religious terms. “The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair,” he writes in E.F.N. Jephcott’s translation, “is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.” Soon, the theological language gro...

Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17.1 (2003) 62-88 The Holocaust and American Public Memory, 1945-1960 San Diego State University Abstract: Until the 1960s, many scholars assert, most Americans awareness of the Holocaust was based upon vague, trivial, or inaccurate representations. Yet the extermination of the Jews was remembered in significant ways, this article posits, through World War II accounts, the Nuremberg trials, philosophical works, comparisons with Soviet totalitarianism, Christian an...