Towards a New ManifestoTheodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote the central text of “critical theory”, Dialectic of Enlightenment, a measured critique of the Enlightenment reason that, they argued, had resulted in fascism and totalitarianism. Towards a New Manifesto shows the two philosophers in a uniquely spirited and free-flowing exchange of ideas. This book is a record of their discussions over three weeks in the spring of 1956, recorded with a view to the production of a contemporary version of The Communist Manifesto. A philosophical jam-session in which the two thinkers improvise freely, often wildly, on central themes of their work—theory and practice, labor and leisure, domination and freedom—in a political register found nowhere else in their writing. Amid a careening flux of arguments, aphorisms and asides, in which the trenchant alternates with the reckless, the playful with the ingenuous, positions are swapped and contradictions unheeded, without any compulsion for consistency. A thrilling example of philosophy in action and a compelling map of a possible passage to a new world. This new edition contains two texts on needs by Adorno and Horkheimer that have been translated for the first time or have been difficult to access. |
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User Review - reganrule - LibraryThingA transcription of a series of conversations between Horkheimer and Adorno in 1956, riffing on the dialectical relationship between theory and practice in the wake of the failure of communism and the rise of fascism. Read full review
Contents
Introduction to Adorno Horkheimer | |
The Role of Theory | |
Work Spare Time and FreedomI | |
The Idea of Mankind | |
The False Abolition of Work | |
Political Concreteness | |
Critique of Argument | |
The Concept of Practice | |
No Utopianism | |
The Antinomy of the Political | |
Individualism | |
The Historical Change in the Relationship Between Statics and Dynamics | |
Theses on Need by Theodor Adorno On the Problem of Needs by Max Horkheimer Notes | |