The crisis~ of the "project of modernity" (Habermas) is, at the same time, a crisis of critical theories of society and culture that have radically questioned bourgeois culture and capitalist society and economy from the perspective of a utopia of enlightened rationality. A number of parallel recent social and political problems, developments, and

GUNTER H. LENZ (1940 2012) was one of the leading scholars of American Studies in Europe and one of the founders of Transnational American Studies. Trained in the famed Frankfurt School he was professor of American literary and cultural studies at Humboldt University in Berlin.