New book: Critical theory and the political

Critical theory and the political

Ed. by Anastasia Marinopoulou 

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2026)

257 pages

Description

The book addresses what is political in critical theory and which aspects, arguments or notions of critical theory maintain political significance for the 20th and the 21st centuries. The collection of essays comprises itself of a series of clear and critical perspectives that analyze the extent to which critical theory relates political argument to modern societies and, thereby, exerts a critique of the multiple social and political phenomena of late modernity. The contributors focus on a multiplicity of universal phenomena such as globalization, multiple crises, late capitalism and the social role of the sciences, and posit some novel criticism of the contemporary social sphere, as it is situated within the wider system of global capitalism. They also present a plurivalent critique that links arguments in Marxism and Freud to all three generations of critical theory.

Contents

Preface by Darrow Schecter [Preview]

Introduction - Anastasia Marinopoulou [Preview]

Part I: Essential political notions of critical theory

1. Critique, negation, politics - Stephen Eric Bronner [Preview]

2. Between ideals and realism: On the "political" in Max Horkheimer's early thought [Abstract] - Malte Frøslee Ibsen

Part II: Democracy

3. Critical theory and democracy: From Kant to Habermas and then back to the "Dialectic of Enlightenment" - Anastasia Marinopoulou

4. On the ambivalent effects of politicising justice - Esther Neuhann

Part III: Political power, civil society and globalisation

5. From the critique of power to critical institutionalism - Hubertus Buchstein

6. Guardians of legitimacy: Habermas on civil disobedience as radical democratic practice - Jeffrey Flynn

7. Can housing be unfair? Towards a critical theory of injustice - Regina Kreide

Part IV: Epistemology and the political

8. Critical theory and the realist critique of normative political theory - Kenneth Baynes

9. Power, reasons, and ideology: On the epistemology and metaphysics of noumenal power - Matteo Bianchin

Part V: Praxis, public sphere and political communication

10. The limits of critical democratic theory regarding structural transformations in twenty-first century left politics - David Ingram

11. New challenges for critical theory: Deliberative public sphere and political communication in the new hybrid media system [PDF] - Luca Corchia

Postscript by Joshua Clover

Excerpts from the book’s chapters are available here.