Amongst the translations of Theodor Adorno’s work to have appeared in English in recent years, most have been from his so-called ‘opus postumum’, posthumously gathered from the many notes he left unpublished in his lifetime. These works consist for the most part in transcripts of Adorno’s university lecture courses from the 1960s. The books that have already appeared in this series include lectures on Kant’s first two Critiques, on Metaphysics (mostly on Ar istotle), and on Sociology. The present, arguably most intriguing volume gathers together lectures from 1964–5, which in their original German propose to expound ‘A theory of history and freedom’. The lectures are significant not just for their content, which includes a critical engagement with Hegelian and Marxist ideas of history and progress, and a sympathetic exposition of Walter Benjamin’s theses ‘On the concept of history’, but also because of their own historical context: the lectures were given against the backdrop of an increasing ‘state of emergency’ in West Germany in response to growing left-wing and student activism. These lectures (along with the those on Kant and on metaphysics) would themselves feed into the magnum opus of Adorno’s final years, Negative Dialectic; but here we see the ideas being developed in a much more accessible (though no less rigorous) form. Adorno was famed for being able to speak in a way that could be transcr ibed verbatim (Marcuse would later praise Adorno’s Theodor Adorno History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965

History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965

Honneth, Axel.Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life.New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Pp. 412. $35.00 (cloth).

The paper examines the role of shame as a motivator to engage in social struggles. The author first introduces a distinction between social and moral shame arguing that, while the former can lead t...

Gianluca Cavallo

Papers

Injustice, Shame, and the Moral Grammar of Social Struggles