This contribution traces the singular significance of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy for Sebald’s literary as well as literary critical writings. It offers a discussion of Sebald’s adaptation of Benjaminian theorems and reflections, focussing in particular on the philosophy of history, conceptions of natural history, the epistemological functionalization of melancholia, and a materialist understanding of memory.

The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School was a child of total war. In the aftermath of World War I, its founding members sought to understand the new phenomenon of total mobilization, the integration of all aspects of state, society, and economy into a war effort that effectively erased traditional distinctions between war and peace. Their conception of Marxism, and the development of their critiques of mass culture and fascism, were shaped by the outcome of this effort at understanding total warfare. This chapter reconstructs the trajectory of the critical responses to total warfare in the Weimar period by the founders of Critical Theory and their counterparts on the German Right. It reviews core texts by Horkheimer and Adorno to see how their critique of mass culture in the United States and fascist mobilization in Germany are informed by their encounter with total mobilization. In its concluding section, the chapter argues that the power of this critical project came at a steep price: convinced of totalizing nature of modern warfare, critical theorists had few resources to respond to new, lower-intensity armed conflicts characteristic of decolonization struggles.

Looking for orientation, it is worthwhile to reconstruct the intellectual trajectory of Rudolf Wiethölter, a radical legal scholar from the Frankfurt school of critical theory. Wiethölter reacts to the disaster of both current liberal and Marxist legal theories. He has the courage to lay out the blueprint for a constitutional utopia. Two distinct phases are discernible. In the first phase, he develops the program of a material constitution – the economic constitution as the constitution of society. In the second phase, after his long march through the three most advanced social theories of modernity, he develops a ’critical systems theory of law’, which, however, he sharply positions against Niklas Luhmann’s functionalist systems theory. Selbstgerechtes Rechtsverfassungsrecht (self-justifying law of constitutional law) – in this condensed formula Wiethölter enigmatises his vision of a future material constitution. No less enigmatic are its two main elements of a novel ’reciprocity’ and an ’impartial partiality’. How can these enigmatic concepts be deciphered? And what prospects do they open up to an ambitious constitutional program?

This chapter engages various philosophical attempts to define and delimit the essay, and to use the form to do a kind of philosophy that became increasingly urgent in the shadow of twentieth-century atrocities. The author considers theories of the essay by Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Walter Pater, and others.

Alexis de Tocqueville is often described as a critic of American culture and modern democracy. Yet, as Alan Levine argues, there is an important difference between Tocqueville’s friendly criticisms of parts of American culture he finds wanting and other ideological critiques by “anti-American” thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and the Frankfurt School. Several factors separate Tocqueville from this European tradition of “Anti-Americanism.” Tocqueville’s criticisms are balanced by an appreciation of the virtues of American democracy and a recognition that these defects are hardly unique to America. His criticisms also take their root in empirical considerations of the complexities of American culture. Although the Frankfurt School and other influential critics often claim Tocqueville as inspiration for their complaints about mass society, they are ideologically motivated, ignore America’s redeeming virtues, and fault America uniquely for widely shared flaws of modernity.

This chapter takes up the ways Marxist cultural theory has explored the intensified mechanization or automation of labor. It suggests that the relationship between labor-saving industrial technology and cultural transformation has been central to twentieth-century Marxist thought, from Frankfurt School theorists Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno; to mid-century forebearers of cultural studies like Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse; to activist thinkers C. L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and James Boggs; to the Italian autonomists. Despite and often alongside their persistent interest in consumption and the commodity, these thinkers have also explored the ways transformations in the “instruments of labor” affect productive workers themselves. The chapter concludes by drawing attention to the genre of the workers' inquiry, which yokes structural analysis of capital accumulation to a careful rendering of workers’ own experiences, and by calling for future workers inquiries exploring technology and the exploitation of university labor.

Within the Frankfurt School tradition of critical social theory Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth propose intersubjectivist conceptions of freedom, in which the freedom of individual human subjects develops adequately only in relationship with other human subjects. Their conceptions incorporate intuitions central to conceptions of negative as well as positive liberty, while moving beyond either of these traditions of thinking about freedom.In Part One of my contribution to this volume I argue that Habermas’ and Honneth’s conceptions of freedom should be viewed as a “paradigm shift” in the Western modern tradition of thinking about freedom. Their decisive move is to conceive of individual freedom as constitutively intersubjective – as a mode of human being in the world that comes into existence and develops only in certain kinds of relationship with other humans. With this, they destabilize once and for all the polarity between negative and positive freedom. I see this as an important and valuable move. However, in Part Two I argue that the constitutively intersubjective accounts of freedom offered respectively by Habermas and Honneth are, in different ways, unsatisfactory. In Part Three I propose an alternative constitutively intersubjective account of freedom.

Theodor Adorno was the most erudite and most challenging of Mahler’s critical apologists. A deeply cultured thinker whose family background represented a coming together of the twin poles of German rationalism and Italian lyricism, he acquired in his youth a vast knowledge of European classical musical repertoire (mostly by playing piano duets), which he deployed in profound critical readings of a wide range of music. His principal statements on Mahler are surveyed here, from early attempts such as “Mahler Today” (1930) – a concise but wide-ranging essay challenging the prevailing view that Mahler was a late Romantic who had been superseded by the modernist trends of the 1920s – to the monograph Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy (1960) and the centenary address that served as its distillation. A distillation of Adorno’s broader project vis-à-vis late capitalism serves as introduction.