Sobre Marcuse

Entrevista sobre el libro de Thomas Wheatland,

The Frankfurt School in Exile

University of Minnesota Press, 2009, 2009. Sobre Marcuse, Horkheimer, etc. Resulta que estuvo en Brown cuando estuve yo, a finales de los ochenta, y habla del ambiente de allí.

Interview with Thomas Wheatland [ 1:13:05 ] Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download

De New Books in Critical Theory:

The story Tom tells casts the Frankfurt School in a new (and more correct) light. For one thing, Horkheimer, Adorno, and the rest really were hard-core empirical social scientists in the beginning, not “Critical Theorists” as we understand the term. They counted, measured, conducted surveys and did everything a positivist sociologist or economist would do. But, of course, that was not how they became idols of the New Left and the founders of “Critical Theory.” (Now that I think about it, almost no one ever achieves fame by doing empirical social science. See “Malcolm Gladwell” for more.) No, they–or rather Fromm, Marcuse and Habermas–got famous by telling young Americans that they were “repressed,” “alienated,” and “downtrodden” at exactly the moment they wanted to hear it, that is, the 1960s. You see, the “old” Marxism was dead; this was the “new and improved” version. In other words, they were in the right Critical-Theoretical place and at the right Critical-Theoretical time.

Unpacking Benjamin