This book defends Hegel's concept of "reconciliation" as the best understanding of human beings' emancipatory interest and presents "reification" as a systematic blockage to its realization. Drawing upon psychoanalysis and legal theory, it explores the extent to which recent theories (Rawls, Honneth, Habermas) succeed in spelling out how society could be organized in such a way that reconciliation between individual and society could be realized on something approaching a universal basis.

Of all the concepts which have emerged to describe the effects of capitalism on the human world, none is more graphic or easily grasped than "reification"-the process by which men and women are turned into objects, things. Arising out of Marx's account of commodity fetishism, the concept of reification offers an unrivalled tool with which to explain the real consequences of the power of capital on consciousness itself. Symptoms of reification are proliferating around us-from the branding of goods and services to racial and sexual stereotypes, all forms of religious faith, the growth of nationalism, and recent concepts like "spin" and "globalization." At such a time, the term ought to enjoy greater critical currency than ever. Recent thinkers, however, have expressed deep reservations about the concept, and the term has become marginalized in the humanities and social societies. Eschewing this trend, Timothy Bewes opens up a new formulation of the concept, claiming that, in the highly reflective age of "late capitalism," reification is best understood as a form of social and cultural anxiety: further, that such an understanding returns the concept to its origins in the work of Georg Lukcs. Drawing upon writers including Kierkegaard, Herman Melville, Proust and Flannery O'Connor, he outlines a theory of reification which promises to unite politics with truth, art with experience, and philosophy with real life.

The early Marx called for the “realization of philosophy” through revolution. Revolution thus became a critical concept for Marxism, a view elaborated in the later praxis perspectives of Lukács and the Frankfurt School. These thinkers argue that fundamental philosophical problems are, in reality, social problems abstractly conceived. Originally published as Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory, The Philosophy of Praxis traces the evolution of this argument in the writings of Marx, Lukács, Adorno and Marcuse. This reinterpretation of the philosophy of praxis shows its continuing relevance to contemporary discussions in Marxist political theory, continental philosophy and science and technology studies.

This innovative study re-evaluates the philosophical significance of aesthetics in the context of contemporary debates on the nature of philosophy. Lewis's main argument is that contemporary conceptions of meaning and truth have been reified, and that aesthetics is able to articulate why this is the case, with important consequences for understanding the horizons and nature of philosophical inquiry. Reification and the Aesthetics of Music challenges the most emphatic and problematic conceptions of meaning and truth in both analytic philosophy and postmodern thought by acknowledging the ontological and logical primacy of our concrete, practice-based experiences with aesthetic phenomena. By engaging with a variety of aesthetic practices, including Beethoven's symphonies and string quartets, Wagner's music dramas, Richard Strauss's Elektra, the twentieth-century avant-garde, Jamaican soundsystem culture, and punk and contemporary noise, this book demonstrates the aesthetic relevance of reification as well as the concept's applicability to contemporary debates within philosophy.

Daniel Andrés López offers an immanent critique of Lukács's philosophy of praxis, drawing fundamental political, methodological and philosophical questions for Marxism.

How to Critique Authoritarian Populism: Methodologies of the Frankfurt School offers a comprehensive introduction to the techniques used by the early Frankfurt School to study and combat authoritarianism and authoritarian populism. In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the writings of the early Frankfurt School, at the same time as authoritarian populist movements are resurging in Europe and the Americas. This volume shows why and how Frankfurt School methodologies can and should be used to address the rise of authoritarianism today. Critical theory scholars are assembled from a variety of disciplines to discuss Frankfurt School approaches to dialectical philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, human subjects research, discourse analysis and media studies. Contributors include: Robert J. Antonio, Stefanie Baumann, Christopher Craig Brittain, Dustin J. Byrd, Mariana Caldas Pinto Ferreira, Panayota Gounari, Peter-Erwin Jansen, Imaculada Kangussu, Douglas Kellner, Dan Krier, Lauren Langman, Claudia Leeb, Gregory Joseph Menillo, Jeremiah Morelock, Felipe Ziotti Narita, Michael R. Ott, Charles Reitz, Avery Schatz, Rudolf J. Siebert, William M. Sipling, David Norman Smith, Daniel Sullivan, and AK Thompson.

This book offers a comprehensive evaluation of the two preeminent post-WWII political philosophers, John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. Both men question how we can be free and autonomous under coercive law and how we might collectively use our reason to justify exercises of political power. In pluralistic modern democracies, citizens cannot be expected to agree about social norms on the basis of common allegiance to comprehensive metaphysical or religious doctrines concerning persons or society, and both philosophers thus engage fundamental questions about how a normatively binding framework for the public use of reason might be possible and justifiable. Hedrick explores the notion of reasonableness underwriting Rawls's political liberalism and the theory of communicative rationality that sustains Habermas's procedural conception of the democratic constitutional state. His book challenges the Rawlsianism prevalent in the Anglo-American world today while defending Habermas's often poorly understood theory as a superior alternative.