The Dialectical Imagination. Martin Jay
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Название: The Dialectical Imagination

Автор: Martin Jay

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Социология

Серия: Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism

isbn: 9780520917514

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ

      But The Dialectical Imagination was certainly written with the hope of conveying the palpable sense of excitement and promise I felt in unearthing and trying to sort out so radically unfamiliar and challenging a corpus of work. Although the precise historical moment of the School’s central figures was indeed past (insofar as their major work was clearly behind them and many were no longer alive), it seemed to me that the reception and appropriation of that work still lay very much in the future. The book was written, at least in part, in the hope of facilitating that process, but without inviting the uncritical dogmatism that characterized so many other embraces of Marxist theory.

      Significantly for The Dialectical Imagination’s later fate, the reception of Critical Theory outlived the moment of the recovery and absorption of Western Marxism in the 1970s. The end of this moment betokened a precipitous decline in interest in other figures in its history, such as Karl Korsch, Louis Althusser or Lucien Goldmann, but the Frankfurt School managed to become an enduring fixture in the theoretical landscape of the late 20th century. Although its coherence as a monolithic school may now seem less evident than it did when I first sought to write its history, the general impulses of Critical Theory are still identifiable a quarter century later, even as its work has been hybridized and amalgamated with other theoretical tendencies.

      There is, however, still another explanation for the dogged survival of interest in Critical Theory, which allowed it to remain potent even after the larger paradigm of Western Marxism lost its momentum: its unexpected fit with the concerns and anxieties of an era whose beginnings were only dimly perceptible, if at all, when The Dialectical Imagination first appeared. It turns out that 1973 was more than the highwater mark in the American New Left’s discovery of European Western Marxist theory in its efforts to challenge bourgeois society; indeed, it can be said to have had a very different significance in initiating another narrative whose end is not yet in sight.