Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) was a leading figure in the Frankfurt School and one of this century's most demanding intellectuals. His works, always informed by his variant of Critical Theory that he called Negative Dialectics, is notoriously difficult to understand bu has had an enormous impact on philosophy, sociology, musicology, literary criticism, psychology, and the study of culture.

In an introductory section, Martin Jay gives a brief, lucid account of Adorno's notion of force-field, and of Adorno's extension of Walter Benjamin's concept of constellation. He distinguishes five impulses in Adorno's thinking: his Marxism, his aesthetic modernism, his mandarin cultural conservatism, his anticipation of deconstructionism, and the self-conscious Jewishness that led him to look for redemption and at the same time to refuse any definition of paradise.

Professor Jay devotes the central sections of his book to the major aspects of Adorno's thought--his philosophy, his social theory, and his view of modern culture and aesthetic theory. He has succeeded brilliantly in the task of presenting Adorno's theories in understandable form while remaining true to their unresolved tensions.

From the beginning to the end of his career, the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno sustained an uneasy but enduring bond with existentialism. His attitude overall was that of unsparing criticism, verging on polemic. In Kierkegaard he saw an early paragon for the late flowering of bourgeois solipsism; in Heidegger, an impresario for a “jargon of authenticity” cloaking its idealism in an aura of pseudo-concreteness and neo-romantic kitsch. Even in the straitened rationalism of Husserl’s phenomenology Adorno saw a vain attempt to break free from the prison-house of consciousness.

“Gordon, in a detailed, sensitive, fair-minded way, leads the reader through Adorno’s various, usually quite vigorous, rhetorically pointed attacks on both transcendental and existential phenomenology from 1930 on…[A] singularly illuminating study.”
—Robert Pippin, Critical Inquiry

“Gordon’s book offers a significant contribution to our understanding of Adorno’s thought. He writes with expertise, authority, and compendious scholarship, moving with confidence across the thinkers he examines…After this book, it will not be possible to explain Adorno’s philosophical development without serious consideration of [Gordon’s] reactions to them.”
—Richard Westerman, Symposium

We live in a world of technical systems designed in accordance with technical disciplines and operated by personnel trained in those disciplines. This is a unique form of social organization that largely determines our way of life, but the actions of individuals and social protest still play a role in developing and purposing these rational systems. In Technosystem, Andrew Feenberg builds a theory of both the threats of technocratic modernity and the potential for democratic change.

Feenberg draws on the tradition of radical social criticism represented by Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, which recognized the social effects of instrumental rationality but did not advance a convincing alternative to the new forms of domination imposed by rational systems. That is where the fine-grained analyses of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) studies can contribute. Feenberg uses these approaches to reconcile the claims of rationality with the agency of a public increasingly mobilized to intervene in technically based decisions. The resulting social theory recognizes emerging forms of resistance, such as protests and hacking, as essential expressions of public life in the “rational society.”

Combining the most salient insights from critical theory with the empirical findings of STS, Technosystem advances the philosophical debate over the nature and practice of reason in modern society.