Of critical theory and its theorists; cultural studies and beyond: Fragments of empire; fantasy and reality in history; and history and the idea of progress
✍ Scribed by Peter Burke
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1997
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 19 KB
- Volume
- 33
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-5061
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
None of the four books under review is centrally concerned with the history of the behavioral sciences, but all of them make contributions to that history. The four studies are concerned with a number of different disciplines -philosophy, history, psychology, sociology, literary and cultural criticism -but there are many connections between them.
Stephen Bronner's book on Karl Korsch, Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, and others is more accurately described as a collection of essays. Essays on essays, since the author rightly notes that "Every major figure in the tradition of critical theory . . . employed the essay as a stylistic vehicle." The aims of the book are three: to reconstruct the original intentions of the critical theorists, to point out their inadequacies, and finally to evaluate their cultural legacy to the future. The book has considerable merits. Bronner writes from a position of sympathy with the project of critical theory and with the individuals who took part in it (especially Marcuse), a sympathy greater than some of them felt for one another. He moves with apparent ease from philosophy to theology, to literature, to art, to politics, and to history. His criticisms of the critical theorists are moderate and well-supported. As an account of a movement, however, Bronner's book is less successful. He leaves out some interesting figures altogether, notably Siegfried Kracauer and Leo Lowenthal. His thirty pages on Lukács deal only with a single essay, on reification. Although the introduction notes that critical theory "emerges from a distinct historical context," that context is generally alluded to rather than described or analyzed. The exception to this rule is the chapter on Erich Fromm, to my mind the most interesting in the book as well as the one most relevant to the history of the social sciences. It focusses not on the German but on the American phase of Fromm's career, describing his reception in different decades by different groups within the American Left, some viewing him as a psychologist, others as a sociologist, others as a popular writer. Bronner's own memories and experiences allow him to place Fromm in a richer historical context than his other protagonists. The book is not an appropriate introduction to the work of the Frankfurt School, but those who already knew something about the movement will profit from its ideas and insights.
Similar points can and should be made about the account of cultural studies offered by Ioan Davies. It is and it is not a history of the cultural studies movement. It is a history in the sense that it is concerned with the origins of cultural studies in Britain and the subsequent spread of the movement elsewhere, as well as the gradual penetration of ideas from the continent (those of Gramsci and Althusser rather than the thinkers discussed in Bronner's book). It is not a history in the sense that it is a collection of essays, for the most part previously published, rather than a systematic attempt to present the movement as a whole. The story it