The Frankfurt School and the New Right

Introduction Donald J. Trump’s unexpected victory in the November 2016 American presidential election was met by a wave of shock. After first trying to come to grips with why Trump had won[1], commentators across an array of media outlets then composed “hot takes”[2] as to what Trump’s election signified; did it mark the end of…

Understanding the critique of political economy as a critical social theory includes the critique of so-called neo-liberalism as the theoretical expression of capitalist social relations. In contrast to normative critics of neoliberalism, which reject it abstractly as a doctrine of narrow-minded economic interests, especially the interests of financial capital, neoliberalism did not corrupt capitalism.[1] It…

If one wants to address the question of what Frankfurt School Critical Theory can still teach us about the resurgence of right-wing populism in Europe and the United States in recent times, one must call the very concept of the “Frankfurt School” into question and look more closely at how Jürgen Habermas’s efforts to “reconstruct”…

Today, Habermas’s action-theoretic reformulation of Critical Theory seems neither capable of understanding the objective crisis of Europe, in particular, nor the rise of authoritarianism, more generally, from Ukraine, Hungary and Poland to Turkey and India and Egypt. The account of the “colonization of the life-world” by the social subsystems of money and power engendering defensive…

Introduction Since the election, much writing and discussion has been dedicated to making sense of the political rise of Trump and Trumpism. It’s not easy to make sense of his journey from a marginal, garish, Know Nothing, hate-spewing reality TV personality to, well, those things, except he’s no longer marginal and, as of January 20,…