CRITICAL THEORY AND
THE THOUGHT OF ANDREW FEENBERG
Darrell P. Arnold and Andreas Michel, eds.
London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017
 

This volume explores Andrew Feenberg's work in critical theory. Feenberg is considered one of the key "second generation" critical theorists, with a keen interest in philosophy of technology. He has made a vital contribution to critical theory in ways that remain of interest given the pressing technological issues of our time. The authors of the book's many chapters highlight not only the ways that Feenberg has begun to make good on what is often characterized as "the broken promise of critical theory" to address issues of technology, but also the continued importance of critical theory more generally, and of Feenberg's contributions to understanding this tradition.

 

Introduction
Darrell P. Arnold and Andreas Michel
 
PART I: REVERBERATIONS OF MARX AND LUKÁCS
What is the “Philosophy of Praxis”?
Steven Vogel
 
Philosophy of Praxis or Philosophical Anthropology? Andrew Feenberg and Axel Honneth on Lukács’s Theory of Reification
Konstantinos Kavoulakos
 
Gegenständlichkeit—From Marx to Lukács and Back Again
Christian Lotz
 
Feenberg, Rationality and Isolation
Clive Lawson
 
PART II: BETWEEN DEMOCRACY AND A POLITICS OF RESISTANCE

Transforming Dystopia with Democracy: The Technical Code and the Critical Theory of Technology
Graeme Kirkpatrick
 
Andrew Feenberg’s Ecological Modernism
Darrell P. Arnold
 
Between Instrumentalism and Determinism: Western Marxism and Feenberg’s Critical Theory of Technology
Matthew Greaves
 
PART THREE: FROM HEIDEGGER THROUGH POSTMODERNISM: THE ONGOING ROLE OF THE CRITICAL THEORY OF TECHNOLOGY
 
The Question Concerning a Vital Technology: Heideggerian Influences on the Philosophy of Andrew Feenberg
Dana S. Belu
 
Future Questions: Democracy and the New Converging Technologies
Andreas Michel
 
Revisiting Critical Theory in the Twenty-First Century
Raphael Sassower
 
Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory, and the Critique of Technology
Douglas Kellner
 
PART IV. A CRITICAL RESPONSE

Replies to Critics: Epistemology, Ontology, Methodology
Andrew Feenberg
 
Appendix: Interview with Bruna Della Torre de Carvalho Lima and Eduardo Altheman Camargo Santos
 
                                                

Andrew Feenberg holds the Canada Research Chair in the Philosophy of Technology in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. One of the world's leading contemporary critical theorists, he was a student of Herbert Marcuse, and he has been a longstanding member of the International Herbert Marcuse Society.
 

Section on Marxist Sociology

Marxist Sociology
Lifetime Achievement Award

2017

awarded to

Dr. Lauren Langman
Professor of Sociology
Loyola University Chicago

Dr. Langman has long served as a member of the Board of Directors
of the INTERNATIONAL HERBERT MARCUSE SOCIETY.

His most recent books are:


Piketty, Inequality and 21st Century Capitalism
Brill, 2017


God, Guns, Gold and Glory:
American Character and its Discontents
Brill, 2016



Alienation and the Carnivalization of Society 
Routledge, 2013
 

Five new lectures (1966-1976) by Herbert Marcuse have recently been discovered in the Marcuse Archive in Frankfurt, Germany. The lectures concern the growing emergence of a "new sensibility" and a "transvaluation of values" that since the Sixties have activated key sectors of society against alienation, economic oppression, racial and gender inequality, and for the radical--rather than minimal--goals of socialism. The booklet -- available here -- is priced at $20, and sales benefit the International Herbert Marcuse Society.