Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory

Axel Honneth

April, 2009
Cloth, 236 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-14626-5
$29.50 / £20.50

Preface

1. The Irreducibility of Progress: Kant’s Account of the Relationship Between Morality and History

2. A Social Pathology of Reason: On the Intellectual Legacy of Critical Theory

3. Reconstructive Social Criticism with a Genealogical Proviso: On the Idea of “Critique” in the Frankfurt School

4. A Physiognomy of the Capitalist Form of Life: A Sketch of Adorno’s Social Theory

5. Performing Justice: Adorno’s Introduction to Negative Dialectics

6. Saving the Sacred with a Philosophy of History: On Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence”

7. Appropriating Freedom: Freud’s Conception of Individual Self-Relation

8. “Anxiety and Politics”: The Strengths and Weaknesses of Franz Neumann’s Diagnosis of a Social Pathology

9. Democracy and Inner Freedom: Alexander Mitscherlich’s Contribution to Critical Social Theory

10. Dissonances of Communicative Reason: Albrecht Wellmer and Critical Theory

Appendix: Idiosyncrasy as a Tool of Knowledge: Social Criticism in the Age of the Normalized Intellectual

Notes

Bibliography

Related Subjects

• Continental/Feminist Philosophy
• Political Philosophy
• Political Theory

Series

• New Directions in Critical Theory

About the Author

Axel Honneth is professor of philosophy at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt and director of the Institute for Social Research. He is the author of The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment, The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, and Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas's "The Theory of Communicative Action." James Ingram is an assistant professor of political science at McMaster University. He has translated works by Reinhart Koselleck, Christoph Menke, Hauke Brunkhorst, Jacques Derrida, and Étienne Balibar, among others.

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