Against Orthodoxy Social Theory and its Discontents

by Aronowitz, Stanley

• ISBN13: 9781137388292
• ISBN10: 1137388293
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-05-06
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

In Against Orthodoxy, the author engages some of the most provocative thinkers of the twentieth century, including Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, Karl Marx, Harry Braverman and Paulo Freire. All of these social and political theorists were dedicated to fundamental social change, but many were forced to recognize the difficulty of achieving change in the modern world. This book demonstrates that all of them reject conventional interpretations of how radical change might be possible. What marks their unity is an effort to address capitalism's ability to incorporate widespread popular alienation. Consequently they urge serious attention to issues of culture, subjectivity, and education.

Author Biography

Stanley Aronowitz is distinguished Professor of Sociology and Urban Education at City University of New York Graduate Center, USA. His classic study of the US working class, False Promises (1973 1992) is still in print forty-two years after it was first published. He is author or editor of twenty-five books including: Against Schooling: For an Education that Matters (2008), Left Turn: Forging a New Political Future (2006), Just Around Corner (2005), How Class Works (2003), The Last Good Job in America (2001), The Knowledge Factory (2000) and The Jobless Future (1994). He is founding editor of the journal Social Text and is currently a member of its advisory board. Most recently, he co-founded Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination and serves as co-editor in the journal's editorial collective. He also serves on the advisory board of WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society, and has sat on the editorial boards of Cultural Critique and Ethnography. He has published more than two hundred articles and reviews in publications such as Harvard Educational Review, Social Policy, The Nation, and The American Journal of Sociology.

Table of Contents

1. The Unknown Herbert Marcuse
2. Between Criticism and Ethnography: Raymond Williams and the Invention of Cultural Studies
3. A Critique of Methodological Reason
4. George Lukacs's Destruction of Reason
5. Henri Lefebvre: The ignored Philosopher and Social Theorist
6. Gramsci's Theory of Political Organization
7. Max Horkheimer's Critical Theory
8. Paulo Freire's Radical Democratic Humanism
9. Herbert Marcuse's Concept of Eros
10. Marx, Braverman and the Logic of Capital