This interdisciplinary volume provides the most comprehensive evaluation, to date, of the merits and problems of Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. Outstanding repersentatives of several academic disciplines assess from opposite intellectual and political positions the achievements and shortcomings of the social theory that emerged from this school of thought. The volume also includes several newly translated but previously inaccessible essays by leading critical theorists such as Georg Lukács and Jürgen Habermas.

Judith Marcus is visiting assistant professor of sociology, Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science, the New School for Social Research. She is the author of Thomas Mann und Georg Lukács., Zoltán Tar was visiting Fulbright Scholar to Budapest, Hungary, and has taught sociology at the City College of CUNY, New School for Social Research, and University of Illinois. He is author of The Frankfurt School: The Critical Theories of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.

Preface, Acknowledgments, Introduction, Part One History and History of Ideas, 1. Contribution to a Critique of Critical Theory, 2. The Frankfurt School in New York, 3. The Idea of Critical Theory, 4. The Dialectical Imagination by Martin Jay, Part Two Philosophy, 5. The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory, 6. Critique of Reason from Max Weber to Jlirgen Habermas, 7. Irrationalism of the Left, 8. Reason or Revolution?, 9. The Frankfurt School: An Autobiographical Note, Part Three Aesthetics, 10. On Walter Benjamin, 11. Lukács and Horkheimer: The Place of Aesthetics in Horkheimer's Thought, 12. Negative Philosophy of Music: Positive Results, 13. Autonomy of Art: Looking Back at Adorno's Ästhetische Theorie, Part Four Sociology and Social Psychology, 14. Critical Theory and Dialectics, 15. The Struggle of Reason against Total Bureaucratization, 16. The Positivist Dispute in Retrospect, 17. The Uses of Psychoanalysis in Critical Theory and Structuralism, 18. Partisan Truth: Knowledge and Social Classes in Critical Theory, Part Five Political Science and Political Economy, 19. The Political Contradictions in Adorno's Critical Theory, 20. The Anti-Semitism Studies of the Frankfurt School: The Failure of Critical Theory, 21. Political Economy and Critical Theory, Part Six Marxism, 22. The Frankfurt School, 23. From Hegel to Marcuse, 24. Understanding Marcuse, 25. The Limits of Praxis in Critical Theory, About the Contributors, Index