Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School by Stuart Jeffries

  • Year2018
  • LanguageRussian
  • Edition2500
  • Pages448
  • BindingPaperback
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Garage publishing program in collaboration with Ad Marginem Press

In his laboriously researched study, Stuart Jeffries presents a panoramic history of one of the most influential schools of philosophy in the twentieth century.

Founded between the First and the Second World Wars, the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt has not only influenced development of social sciences and humanities, but also shaped the structure of contemporary Western universities, social movements and political discourses. The concepts of alienation, one-dimensional man, and critical theory, along with the names of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse have long been inscribed not only into the history of thought, but also into popular culture. Spanning a period that starts with horsecars and zeppelins and ends with Occupy Wall Street and social media, Stuart Jeffries writes an engaging introduction into the history of one of the greatest intellectual phenomena of the twentieth century. 

This was where the Frankfurt School felt most comfortable – instead of getting caught up in delusive revolutionary euphoria, they preferred to retreat into a non-repressive intellectual space where they could think freely. That kind of freedom is, to be sure, a melancholy one since it is borne of a loss of hope in real change. But to explore the history of the Frankfurt School and critical theory is to discover how increasingly impotent these thinkers, Marcuse notwithstanding, thought themselves to be against forces they detested but felt powerless to change.

— Stuart Jeffries

Author

Stuart Jeffries (b. 1962) is a British journalist and author, a feature writer for the Guardian.

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