Critical Marxist Theory : Political Autonomy and the Radicalising Project of Modernity

This book argues why Critical Theory - as first developed in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung - must be updated to help us tackling today’s capitalist polycrisis, from economic via political to ecological crises.Yet, following the dissolution of the Institute for Social Research in New York, and the latest with the death of Adorno in 1969 and the death of Marcuse almost exactly ten years later, there has been a ‘domestication’ of the main strands of the Frankfurt School.To understand and overcome this domestication, the book traces, with the means of philosophy and sociology, its two affirmative steps in a liberal and in a postmodern turn.As an alternative to both, it defends Habermas’ project of modernity, yet only by disentangling it - in Marxian fashion - from the capitalist process of modernisation.This disentanglement is at the same time a political radicalisation.It is necessary because the cultural-political ideal(s) of the project of modernity - from human autonomy via ratio