Search Results

Advanced Search

16 to 30 of 37 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

From Soixante-Huit to Soixante-Neuf

Glen Newey: Slack-Sphinctered Pachyderm, 29 April 1999

Collected Papers: Technology, War and Fascism 
by Herbert Marcuse, edited by Douglas Kellner.
Routledge, 278 pp., £25, March 1998, 0 415 13780 2
Show More
The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy after the Holocaust 
by Norman Geras.
Verso, 181 pp., £15, June 1998, 1 85984 868 0
Show More
Show More
... history.’ The ‘authoritarian personality’ dogma of such Frankfurt School existentialists as Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, is derived from the same axiomatic assumptions as Marcuse’s and Hofstadter’s ban on ‘conspiracy theories’. Since the name of Marcuse connotes the cases of Karl Korsch, the Communist Party’s Angela Davis, and the ...

Look over your shoulder

Christopher Hitchens, 25 May 1995

... and provisional wings.) As Richard Hofstadter, in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Theodor Adorno, in The Authoritarian Personality, have both taught us, this kind of American ‘populism’ has always been tainted by its kinship with racism and superstition, and by its servility to the very power it ostensibly rails against. It leads to ...

Vermin Correspondence

Iain Sinclair, 20 October 1994

Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play 
by Ben Watson.
Quartet, 597 pp., £25, May 1994, 0 7043 7066 2
Show More
Her Weasels Wild Returning 
by J.H. Prynne.
Equipage, 12 pp., £2, May 1994
Show More
Show More
... course the best poetry of the Forties was written by Marxists, hence the resurgence of Adorno.’ Out to Lunch. His notebooks.) There is a Cantab tradition (morphic resonance?) of double lives, whispers, betrayal, running back from the Gang of Four (Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt) to the Apostles; a tradition that is impossible to honour now that ...

From the Other Side

David Drew, 1 August 1985

... attended the International Hegel Society’s congress in Frankfurt. The principal speaker was Theodor Adorno, whom Bloch had probably not seen, and had certainly not talked with, since they had parted company in the USA. Adorno had already arranged that he would not sit with Bloch at the opening banquet for ...

He is cubic!

Tom Stammers: Wagnerism, 4 August 2022

Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music 
by Alex Ross.
Fourth Estate, 769 pp., £14.99, September 2021, 978 0 00 842294 3
Show More
Show More
... Sullivan), choreographers (Isadora Duncan), scenographers (Adolphe Appia), philosophers (Theodor Adorno) and filmmakers. Our Jedi, hobbits and hammer-wielding superheroes are his distant progeny.Among composers, only Wagner can be said to have secured an ‘ism’ (following her trip to Weimar in 1855, George Eliot referred to the ‘propaganda ...

Brooksie and Faust

Angela Carter, 8 March 1990

Louise Brooks 
by Barry Paris.
Hamish Hamilton, 640 pp., £20, February 1990, 0 241 12541 3
Show More
Show More
... nor felt complicitous with her. ‘Women of exceptional beauty are doomed to unhappiness,’ says Theodor Adorno. Beautiful is as beautiful does: Brooks’s features in repose can look doll-like, chocolate-boxy. The spirit that animated them was the exceptional thing. On the evidence of this book and her own book of essays, Lulu in Hollywood, I don’t ...

Let’s eat badly

William Davies: Irrationality and its Other, 5 December 2019

Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason 
by Justin E.H. Smith.
Princeton, 344 pp., £25, April 2019, 978 0 691 17867 7
Show More
Show More
... without simply turning into a curmudgeonly conservative? How, as he puts it, to avoid becoming Theodor Adorno, who died of a heart attack in 1969 shortly after a brush with the ‘trolls’ of his day, when his lecture was disrupted by bare-breasted student protesters scattering flower petals on his head? This is partly just the circle of intellectual ...

Unreasoning Vigour

Stefan Collini: Ian Watt, 9 May 2019

Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic 
by Marina MacKay.
Oxford, 228 pp., £25, November 2018, 978 0 19 882499 2
Show More
Show More
... by Weber, Troeltsch, Mannheim, Merton, Parsons, Radcliffe-Brown and more. In his preface he thanks Adorno, Henry Nash Smith, I.A. Richards, Talcott Parsons and Peter Laslett, among others. The standard caricature of the Cambridge-influenced criticism of the postwar years represents it as blunderingly empirical and cosily parochial: these stereotypes wilt and ...

Hubbub

Nicholas Spice, 6 July 1995

Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music 
by Michael Chanan.
Verso, 204 pp., £39.95, May 1995, 1 85984 012 4
Show More
Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak Easy Listening and other Moodsong 
by Joseph Lanza.
Quartet, 280 pp., £10, January 1995, 0 7043 0226 8
Show More
Show More
... background music of any kind. The grandfather of their cause, its most formidable prosecutor, was Theodor Adorno. Adorno’s life (1903-69) was co-extensive with the rise and flourishing of the mass market in music. He watched its phenomenal growth with horror. At the heart of his concerns was an ideal of ...

First Impressions

Fredric Jameson: Slavoj Žižek’s Paradoxes, 7 September 2006

The Parallax View 
by Slavoj Žižek.
MIT, 434 pp., £16.95, March 2006, 0 262 24051 3
Show More
Show More
... appearance (one of the deeper subjects of The Parallax View). The other great modern dialectician, Theodor Adorno (whose generic tone compares with Žižek’s, perhaps, as tragedy to comedy), was fond of observing that nowhere was Hegel closer to his heroic contemporary Beethoven than in the great thunderchord of the Logic, the assertion that ‘Essence ...

Rabbits Addressed by a Stoat

Stefan Collini: Émigré Dons, 13 July 2017

Ark of Civilisation: Refugee Scholars and Oxford University, 1930-45 
edited by Sally Crawford, Katharina Ulmschneider and Jaś Elsner.
Oxford, 396 pp., £75, March 2017, 978 0 19 968755 8
Show More
Show More
... in London, though it would have been interesting to have some discussion of the experience of Theodor Adorno, who spent almost four years attached to Merton between 1934 and 1938. In 1939 the composer and musicologist Egon Wellesz, one of the few to eventually obtain a full-time position in the university, told a correspondent that he regarded Oxford ...

Misrepresentations

Dmitri Levitin: The Islamic Enlightenment, 22 November 2018

The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment 
by Alexander Bevilacqua.
Harvard, 340 pp., £25.95, February 2018, 978 0 674 97592 7
Show More
The Islamic Enlightenment: The Modern Struggle between Faith and Reason 
by Christopher de Bellaigue.
Vintage, 404 pp., £10.99, February 2018, 978 0 09 957870 3
Show More
Show More
... opponents of secularisation (Alasdair MacIntyre), or Marxist critics of liberal modernity (Theodor Adorno) – are more condemnatory. The second conception is typically held by historians, who have largely abandoned grand narratives of the Enlightenment. As they see it, the evidence is too complicated, and the totalising approach conflates ...

Weimar in Partibus

Norman Stone, 1 July 1982

Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World 
by Elizabeth Young-Bruehl.
Yale, 563 pp., £12.95, May 1982, 0 300 02660 9
Show More
Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy 
by Bhikhu Parekh.
Macmillan, 198 pp., £20, October 1981, 0 333 30474 8
Show More
Show More
... performer on the violin. He aimed to combine the two, and worked on the philosophy of music. Theodor Adorno, to whom the result was submitted, was jealously down-putting. Stern relapsed into sub-polymathic journalism, writing now on mystery novels, now on the latest conference on Hegel. Marriage to Hannah Arendt went off the tracks, and she ...

Human Spanner

Stuart Jeffries: Kant Come Alive, 17 June 2021

Correspondence 1923-66: Theodor W. Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer 
edited by Wolfgang Schopf, translated by Susan Reynolds and Michael Winkler.
Polity, 537 pp., £35, November 2020, 978 0 7456 4923 8
Show More
Kracauer: A Biography 
by Jörg Später, translated by Daniel Steuer.
Polity, 584 pp., £35, September 2020, 978 1 5095 3301 5
Show More
Show More
... of love from Siegfried Kracauer, the Weimar Republic’s celebrated cultural critic, to Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno, precocious teenager and future philosopher. ‘These past two days,’ Friedel wrote, ‘I have again been feeling such a tormenting love for you that it now seems to me as if I could quite simply ...

Into the Big Tent

Benjamin Kunkel: Fredric Jameson, 22 April 2010

Valences of the Dialectic 
by Fredric Jameson.
Verso, 625 pp., £29.99, October 2009, 978 1 85984 877 7
Show More
Show More
... Party more frequently than since McCarthy’s heyday. In Late Marxism (1990), his book on Adorno, Jameson wrote of Dialectic of Enlightenment that ‘the question about poetry after Auschwitz has been replaced with that of whether you could bear to read Adorno and Horkheimer next to the pool.’ With Jameson the ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences