The Early Frankfurt School and Religion

by M. Kohlenbach (Editor), R. Geuss (Editor)

Overview

Are religions tissues of superstition and repression, or repositories of the highest hopes and aspirations of humanity, or perhaps both at the same time? For many of those thinkers who lived through the horrors and upheavals of the first half of the twentieth-century, this old question acquired a new urgency. This volume examines the ways in which the authors of the early Frankfurt School criticized, adopted and modified traditional forms of religious thought and practice. Focusing on the works of Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Otto Kirchheimer and Franz Neumann, it analyzes the relevance of religious traditions and of the Enlightenment critique of religion for modern conceptions of emancipatory thought, art, law, and politics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349517985
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	12/10/2004
Edition description:	1st ed. 2005
Pages:	263
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.99(h) x 0.02(d)

About the Author

RUDIGER BITTNER Professor of Philosophy, University of Bielefeld, Germany HOWARD CAYGILL Professor of Cultural History, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK PASCAL EITLER Historian, University of Bielefeld, Germany PIERFRANCESCO FIORATO Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Sassari, Italy DAVID GROISER Lecturer in German, University of Oxford, UK BARNABA MAJ Professor of Philosophy of History, University of Bologna, Italy GERARD RAULET Professor of German Intellectual History, University of Paris-Sorbonne, France CHRIS THORNHILL Reader in German, King's College, London, UK

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations and Translations Notes on the Contributors Introduction: The Frankfurt School and the Problem of Religion; M.Kohlenbach & R.Geuss PART I: STUDENTS, THEOLOGIANS, CRITICAL THEORISTS Max Horkheimer's 'Religious Conversion'? A Semantic Analysis; P.Eitler On the Usefulness and Uselessness of Religious Illusions; R.Geuss PART II: CONSTRUCTIONS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE Emerging 'Orders': The Contemporary Relevance of Religion and Teaching in Walter Benjamin's Early Thought; P.Fiorato Religion, Experience, Politics: On Erich Unger and Walter Benjamin; M.Kohlenbach Allegory, Metonymy and Creatureliness: Walter Benjamin and the Religious Roots of Modern Art; B.Maj PART III: LEGAL PHILOSOPHY AND JEWISH TRADITION Law and Religion in Early Critical Theory; C.Thornhill Jewish Law and Tradition in the Early Work of Erich Fromm; D.Groiser Critical Theory and the New Thinking: A Preliminary Approach; H.Caygill PART IV: DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT - RECONSIDERED Does Dialectic of Enlightenment Rest on Religious Foundations?; R.Bittner Secularisation, Myth, Anti-Semitism: Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment and Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms; G.Raulet Bibliography Index