Only Utopias Are Realistic Now is the first comprehensive English-language reader of Oskar Negt (1934-2024), one of the most original voices to emerge from Frankfurt School's second generation. Forging his own path through sociology, political philosophy and pedagogy, Negt is not only best known for his landmark collaborations with Alexander Kluge, but was also a formidable independent thinker and public intellectual embedded in West German labor politics, workers' education and the New Left, and the deep well of Kant and Marx.

This volume offers English readers a path into Negt's extraordinary range, drawing on seminal writings from 1968 to his posthumously published university lectures. The selections move from autobiographical reflection through political theory and praxis, philosophical foundations, sociology and anthropology under neoliberalism, and Negt's mature trilogy on learning, labor, and democracy. Assembled with an extensive critical apparatus, Only Utopias Are Realistic Now closes a gap in the English reception of Critical Theory, restoring to view a thinker whose insistence that only utopian thinking is realistic remains urgent for anyone grappling with democracy's fragility today.

Oskar Negt (1934-2024) was a German philosopher, social theorist and a leading figure of the Frankfurt School's second generation. A student of Adorno and Habermas, he taught sociology at Leibniz University Hanover. Renowned for his collaborations with Alexander Kluge, Negt reshaped critical theory of the public sphere, labor and democracy.

Richard Langston is Professor of German Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Dark Matter and The Patriot and lead translator of History and Obstinacy.

N.D. Jones is a Career Development Fellow in German at St Hilda's College, University of Oxford. His research focuses on twentieth-century German literature and political aesthetics, drawing on Marxist thought and Critical Theory.