Contemporary Critical Theory

• Authors: Grumley John
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This paper employs the work of Ágnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér as a characterization of a contemporary critical theory. Critical theory is not “an argument across the ages” nor another attempt at traditional metaphysics. Like modern thinkers G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx, influenced by the French Revolution, the critical theory tradition endeavours to practically engage with the present and inches towards an undetermined future. Ágnes Heller and György Márkus fuse knowledge of the modern sciences with a historical anthropology that becomes an agent of practical transformation. These émigrés from Budapest took the opportunities of the capitalist West against modern societies’ fault lines to theorize a potential better future. They marshal modern knowledge against existing social reality towards a present, still typically irrational society. Contemporary critical theory has this intent and occupies this space.

Keywords

EN

critical theory; Ágnes Heller; Ferenc Fehér; Budapest School in Australia

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Warszawski. Wydział Filozofii
• Journal: Edukacja Filozoficzna
• Year: 2022
• Issue: 74
• Pages: 239-249

Contributors

author

Grumley John

References

• Agamben G., Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1998.
• Fehér F., Heller Á., Biopolitics, Avebury, Aldershot 1994.
• Fehér F., Redemptive and Democratic Paradigms in Radical Politics, “Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary” 1985, No. 63, pp. 147–156.
• Heller Á., Puntscher Riekmann S., Fehér F., eds., Biopolitics: The Politics of the Body, Race and Nature, Averbury, Aldershot 1996.
• Heller Á., Can Modernity Survive?, Polity, Cambridge 1990.
• Heller Á., Michel Foucault: The Personal Thinker, “Thesis Eleven,” forthcoming.
• Jay M., Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950, Little Brown, Boston, MA, 1973.