Volume 27

Die Kritische Theorie in Amerika

Besides Germany, Critical Theory has nowhere been as vividly studied and discussed as in the United States. Two journals Telos and New German Critique, founded in the wake of the 1960s Student movement and a renaissance of Marxism, were instrumental in promoting the translation, dissemination and discussion of the writings of Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and others – a group of scholars known as the »Frankfurt School.« In the first ever comprehensive study on the so called »second generation« of Critical Theory in the US, Robert Zwarg shows how the Frankfurt tradition became of interest across the Atlantic in the first place, which hopes were put in Critical Theory, and how it changed between the late 1960s and the early 1990s. The afterlife of the Frankfurt Tradition in America, he argues, can be recounted as a story of both scholary success and political as well as philosophical doubts, revealing valuable insights into the differences between the Old and the New World. To reach these insights, the author confronts Critical Theory with its own history.

All titles in the series »Studies of the Dubnow Institute«