Confronting Mass Democracy and Industrial Technology

by McCormick, John P.; Strong, Tracy B. (CON); Feenberg, Andrew (CON); Wolin, Richard (CON)

• ISBN13: 9780822327882
• ISBN10: 0822327880
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-06-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

With a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary approach to German political and social theory, Confronting Mass Democracy and Industrial Technology provides fresh insight into the thought of many of the most influential intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Its essays detail the manner in which a wide range of German intellectuals grappled with the ramifications and implications of democracy, technology, knowledge, and control from the late Kaisserreich to the Weimar Republic, from the Third Reich and the Federal Republic through recently unified Germany.Scholars representing the fields of political science, philosophy, history, law, literature, and cultural studies devote essays to the work of Nietzsche, Weber, Heidegger, Lukács, Schmitt, Marcuse, Adorno, and Habermas. They also discuss the writings of such figures as Brecht and Freud, who are not primarily thought of as political theorists, and explore the thought of Helmut Plessner and reformist theorists from East Germany who have been little studied in the English language. In the process of debating the nature and responsibilities of the modern state in an era of mass politics, unparalleled military technology, capacity for surveillance, and global media presence, the contributors question whether technology is best understood as an instrument of human design and collective control or as an autonomous entity that not only has a will and life of its own but one that forms the very fabric of modern humanity.Contributors. Seyla Benhabib, Richard J. Bernstein, Peter C. Caldwell, Richard Dienst, David Dyzenhaus, Andrew Feenberg, Nancy S. Love, John P. McCormick, Jan-Werner Müller, Gia Pascarelli, William E. Scheuerman, Steven B. Smith, Tracy B. Strong, Richard Wolin

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	v
Introduction: Democracy and Technology in the Intellectual Life of the Ill-Fated ``German Century,''	1	(14)
John P. Mccormick
Rationality and Politics at the Outset of the Century
Love, Passion, and Maturity: Nietzsche and Weber on Science, Morality, and Politics	15	(30)
Tracy B. Strong
Strategies of Progressive Political Action in an Age of Technological Transformation
Post-Utopian Marxism: Lukacs and the Dilemmas of Organization	45	(26)
Andrew Feenberg
Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Retrospective from Berlin to Berkeley	71	(18)
Richard Wolin
Socio-Literary Theory: Unlikely Sources for a Critique of Capitalism?
History Lesson on the S-Bahn: Brecht's Cartography of Capital	89	(22)
Richard Dienst
The Geist in the Machine: Freud, the Uncanny, and Technology	111	(28)
Gia Pascarelli
Society and State as Machine in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich
The Soul in the Age of Society and Technology: Helmuth Plessner's Defensive Liberalism	139	(24)
Jan-Werner Muller
Leviathan in the 1930s: The Reception of Hobbes in the Third Reich	163	(32)
David Dyzenhaus
Theories of Technocracy in Two Postwar Germanies
Revisionism and Orthodoxy: Stalinism and Political Thought in the German Democratic Republic's Founding Decade	195	(26)
Peter C. Caldwell
Unsolved Paradoxes: Conservative Political Thought in Adenauer's Germany	221	(24)
William E. Scheuerman
Throwing Off the Yoke of ``the German Master''
Destruktion or Recovery?: Leo Strauss's Critique of Heidegger	245	(22)
Steven B. Smith
A Critical Versus Genealogical ``Questioning'' of Technology: Notes on How Not to Read Adorno and Horkheimer	267	(28)
John P. Mccormick
Provocation and Appropriation: Hannah Arendt's Response to Martin Heidegger	295	(26)
Richard J. Bernstein
Critical Democratic Theory at Century's End: Language, Gender, Ethinicity
Disembodying Democracy: Gendered Discourse in Habermas's Legalistic Turn	321	(22)
Nancy S. Love
Reversing the Dialectic of Enlightenment: The Reenchantment of the World	343	(18)
Seyla Benhabib
Contributors	361	(2)
Index	363