New Essays on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory offers fifteen essays covering a variety of authors and topics related to the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (Institut für Sozialforschung) that flourished from the 1920s in connection with the University of Frankfurt in Germany and then abroad. The volume offers reflections on the Frankfurt School’s critical dialogue with philosophical predecessors such as Marx and Nietzsche, elucidates key debates between Frankfurt School authors and contemporaries, and addresses the continuing significance of the Frankfurt School in the postmodern age, with reference to major thinkers such as Fredric Jameson, Antonio Negri, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan. Readers will find a lively but respectful debate on the strengths and limitations of Frankfurt notions about technology, “negative dialectics,” the Shoah, and the utopian dimension of political thought, among other concerns. The aim of contributors throughout has been to broaden readers’ understanding of the sophistication and integrity of Frankfurt School thought rather than reducing it to the level of the formulaic or polemical. Music theory, the representation of urban spaces in prose and image, and the theorization of childhood find a place in this appropriately diverse collection, with essays on Lewis Mumford and Siegfried Kracauer broadening its scope.
