Description
Book SynopsisThis is an analysis of how Heidegger, Brecht, Habermas, Adorno, and other German thinkers came to terms with the proliferation of technologies - technologies of bureaucratic democracy, of surveillance and military conquest, and those that affect the human psyche and soul.
Trade Review“The contributors to
Confronting Mass Democracy and Indusrial Technology are a highly diverse yet uniformly first-rate lot. This rich volume is sure to attract scholarly attention in a variety of fields. There is nothing else like it in print.”—Stephen Holmes, New York University School of Law
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
I. Rationality and Politics at the Outset of the Century
Love, Passion, and Maturity: Nietzsche and Weber on Science, Morality, and Politics / Tracy B. Strong
II. Strategies of Progressive Political Action in an Age of Technological Transformation
Post-Utopian Marxism: Lukacs and the Dilemmas of Organization / Andrew Feenberg
Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Retrospective from Berlin to Berkeley / Richard Wolin
III. Socio-Literary Theory: Unlikely Sources for a Critique of Capitalism?
History Lesson on the S-Bahn: Brecht’s Cartography of Capital / Richard Dienst
The
Geist in the Machine: Freud, the Uncanny, and Technology / Gia Pascarelli
IV. Society and State as Machine in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich
The Soul in the Age of Society and Technology: Helmuth Plessner’s Defensive Liberalism / Jan-Werner Muller
Leviathan in the 1930s: The Reception of Hobbes in the Third Reich / David Dyzenhaus
V. Theories of Technocracy in Two Postwar Germanies
Revisionism and Orthodoxy: Stalinism and Political Thought in the German Democratic Republic’s Founding Decade / Peter C. Caldwell
Unsolved Paradoxes: Conservative Political Thought in Adenauer’s Germany / William E. Scheuerman
VI. Throwing Off the Yoke of “the German Master”
Destruktion or Recovery?: Leo Strauss’s Critique of Heidegger
A Critical versus Genealogical “Questioning” of Technology: Notes on How
Not to Read Adorno and Horkheimer / John P. McCormick
Provocation and Appropriation: Hannah Arendt’s Response to Martin Heidegger
VII. Critical Democratic Theory at Century’s End: Language, Gender, Ethnicity
Disembodying Democracy: Gendered Discourse in Habermas’s Legalistic Turn / Nancy S. Love
Reversing the Dialectic of Enlightenment: The Reenchantment of the World / Seyla Benhabib
Contributors
Index
