Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Difficulties of Adorno's work -- Approaches to Adorno -- Overview of the argument -- 1 Permanent Exile: Adorno's Political Experiences -- From liberalism to Marxism -- Political experiences in the United States -- The student movement -- 2 Adorno's Marxism -- The imprint of Lukács -- Benjamin and natural history -- The eternal recurrence of the same -- 3 Approaches to Fascism -- The paradoxes of resistance -- Interpreting fascism -- Reappropriating psychoanalysis -- The authoritarian personality -- Anti-Semitism -- Extreme evil and remembrance -- 4 The Politics of Culture -- The self-perpetuating character of late capitalism -- A theory of culture or of an industry? -- Needs and need-interpretations -- Ideology -- The crisis of experience -- The paradoxes of cultural criticism -- Adorno in the postmodern -- 5 The Persistence of Philosophy -- Negative dialectics -- The critique of ontology -- Freedom -- 6 The Politics of Aesthetic Negativity -- The Adorno-Benjamin dispute -- Art and praxis -- Autonomy and truth content -- The politics of the sublime -- Natural beauty -- 7 The Transformation of Critical Theory -- Habermas' account of Adorno -- Intersubjectivity and mimesis -- Deliberative democracy and its limits -- 8 Adorno in Contemporary Political Theory -- Adorno and liberal political theory -- Feminist interventions -- The ecological challenge -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

Interest in Theodor W. Adorno continues to grow in the English-speaking world as the significance of his contribution to philosophy, social and cultural theory, as well as aesthetics is increasingly recognized. Espen Hammer's lucid book is the first to properly analyze the political implications of his work, paying careful attention to Adorno's work on key thinkers such as Kant, Hegel and Benjamin. Examining Adorno's political experiences and assessing his engagement with Marxist as well as liberal theory, Hammer looks at the development of Adorno's thought as he confronts Fascism and modern mass culture. He then analyzes the political dimension of his philosophical and aesthetic theorizing. By addressing Jürgen Habermas's influential criticisms, he defends Adorno as a theorist of autonomy, responsibility and democratic plurality. He also discusses Adorno's relevance to feminist and ecological thinking. As opposed to those who see Adorno as someone who relinquished the political, Hammer's account shows his reflections to be, on the most fundamental level, politically motivated and deeply engaged. This invigorating exploration of a major political thinker is a useful introduction to his thought as a whole, and will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of philosophy, sociology, politics and aesthetics.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2018. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.