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Bronner (poiltical science, Rutgers U.) ranges across many fields, from philosophy and aesthetics to politics and anthropology, to reconstruct the radical aims of critical theory and evaluate its successes, its failings, and its legacy. He also provides interpretations of critical theory's most important representatives, including Lukacs, Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm, and Habermas. Paper edition (unseen), $22.95. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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CHOICE Review

Bronner's lucid, detailed, and informative treatment of the influential radical Frankfurt school and the development of critical theory out of its origins in the "Western Marxism" propounded by Karl Korsch is a timely and useful contribution to intellectual history. Although openly sympathetic to the social ideals and innovative writings of the leading figures in critical theory, Bronner is not uncritical of some of the internal paradoxes and tensions in the thought of Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, and the instrumentalism of "analytic and rational choice Marxism." There are fine treatments of Adorno's negative dialectics, Luk'acs's critique of reification, Horkheimer's seminal Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972), and the link between critical theory and artistic expressionism. The often neglected utopian thinker Ernst Block is discussed in terms of what amounts to a synthesis of existential thought, aesthetic, and the longing for utopia. The book also includes an atypically positive discussion of the contributions of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse; a polemical chapter on Heidegger, which attacks the man (with justice) and the themes in Being and Time without noticing their similarity to those in the works of key critical theorists; and a concise summary of the liberal democratic ideas of J"urgen Habermas. Despite its domestication over time, critical theory, as Bronner shows so effectively, wrestled with Marxism and raised questions about vital issues. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduate; graduate; faculty. G. J. Stack; SUNY College at Brockport