Critical theory

Abstract: Powers of Freedom, first published in 1999, offers a compelling approach to the analysis of political power which extends Foucault's hypotheses on governmentality in challenging ways. Nikolas Rose sets out the key characteristics of this approach to political power and analyses the government of conduct. He analyses the role of expertise, the politics of numbers, technologies of economic management and the political uses of space. He illuminates the relation of this approach to contemporary theories of 'risk society' and 'the sociology of governance'. He argues that freedom is not the opposite of government but one of its key inventions and most significant resources. He also seeks some rapprochement between analyses of government and the concerns of critical sociology, cultural studies and Marxism, to establish a basis for the critique of power and its exercise. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in political theory, sociology, social policy and cultural studies.

Abstract: Dialectic of Enlightenment is, quite justifiably, one of the most celebrated and often cited works of modern social philosophy. It has been identified as the keystone of the 'Frankfurt School', of which Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were the leading members, and does not cease to impress in its wide-ranging ambition and panache. Adorno and Horkheimer addressees themselves to a question which went to the very heart of the modern age, namely 'why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism'. Modernity, far from redeeming the promises and hopes of the Enlightenment, had resulted in a stultification of mankind and an administered society, characterised by simulation and candy-floss entertainment. To seek an answer to the question of how such a condition could arise, Adorno and Horkheier subjected the whole history of Western catagories of reason and nature, from Homer to Nietzsche, to a searching philosophical and psychological critique. Drawing on psychoanalytical insights, their own work on the 'culture industry', deep knowledge of the key Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment thinkers, as well as fascinating considerations on the relationship between reason and myth - the rational and the irrational - the authors exposed the domination and violence towards both nature and humanity that underpin the Enlightenment project.

Abstract: Academic conventions divide up the seamless web of the real social world into separate spheres, each with its own theorising; this is a necessary and practical way of gaining understanding. Subdivisions of social knowledge thus may roughly correspond to the ways in which human affairs are organised in particular times and places. E. H. Carr and Eric Hobsbawm have both been sensitive to the continuities between social forces, the changing nature of the state and global relationships. Critical theory is directed to the social and political complex as a whole rather than to the separate parts. Critical theory allows for a normative choice in favour of a social and political order different from the prevailing order, but it limits the range of choice to alternative orders which are feasible transformations of the existing world. The "common rationality" of neo-realism arises from its polemic with liberal internationalism.

Abstract: Interpreting the ideas of Jurgen Habermas, the nature of three generic domains of adult learning is posited, each with its own interpretive categories, ways of determining which knowledge claims ar...

Abstract: Acknowledgements. Introduction. Part I: Powers, Norms, and Vocabularies of Contestation:. 1. Foucault on Modern Power:. Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions. 2. Michael Foucault: A a Young Conservativea ?. 3. Foucaulta s Body Language: A Posthumanist Political Rhetoric?. Part II: On the Political and the Symbolic:. 4. The French Derrideans:. Politicizing Deconstruction or Deconstructing the Political?. 5. Solidarity or Singularity?:. Richard Rorty between Romanticism and Technocracy. Part III: Gender and the Politics of Need Interpretation:. 6. Whata s Critical about Critical Theory?. The Case of Habermas and Gender. 7. Women, Welfare, and the Politics of Need Interpretation. 8. Struggle over Needs: Outline of a Socialist--Feminist Critical. Theory of Late Capitalist Political Culture. Index.