The Frankfurt School Revisited

Frankfurt School thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Jurgen Habermas, and Herbert Marcuse have been enormously influential in a wide range of contemporary public debates. Their writings have remained an invaluable touchstone for controversies in the fields of law, politics, the arts, and cultural studies. Discussions of "postmodernism" regularly mine the theories of Benjamin and Adorno for ideas and inspiration. And the burgeoning field of democratic theory would be inconceivable apart from Habermas's towering influence. "The Frankfurt School Revisited," Richard Wolin, the eminent political theorist and intellectual historian, reassesses the school's relevance in light of a variety of pressing, contemporary issues and concerns including the collapse of communism, the global war on terror, the resurgence - both at home and abroad - of religious fundamentalism, the dislocations of globalization, and the prospect of global democracy. In doing so, Wolin seeks to redeem and reinvigorate the Frankfurt School's rich intellectual legacy.