The present article aims at providing some clarification on the Horkheimer-Neurath 1937 debate, so as to make three main claims: (a) around 1937 (even though perhaps neither in the early 1930s, at the time of his review of Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, nor after the Second World War, at the time of Adorno’s disenchanted statement, “the whole is the false”), Horkheimer belonged to the Hegelian-Marxist tradition stemming from Lukács’s History and Class Conscioussness (1923); (b) notwithstanding Neurath’s semantic and epistemological holism, (...) his fallibilism, his rejection of Wertfreiheit in the social sciences, his commitment to socialism, there is still a gulf between his position and Horkheimer’s, for Neurath did not accept the main methodological claim made by the latter, namely, the Lukács-inspired view that what “constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought” is the Hegelian “point of view of totality”; (c) highlighting the main differences between Neurath’s and Lukács’s versions of Marxism – one concerning the very idea of dialectic, and the other concerning the epistemic privilege of the proletariat – can throw some light on and help understand better the distinctive features of Lukács’s Hegelianization of Marxism. (shrink)

Este artigo investiga a “Tese” do primado do objeto na obra de Theodor W. Adorno, central ao seu materialismo não dogmático e relativamente pouco estudada. O primado do objeto será apresentado em seus elementos constitutivos, como crítica ao modo essencialmente idealista da dialética que perpassa o conjunto da obra de Adorno, em especial nos textos e discussões que precederam a publicação da Dialektik der Aufklãrung, para se explicitar no período de elaboração da Negative Dialektik. A “Tese” desenvolve momentos apresentados por (...) Lukács, Benjamin e Horkheimer, particularmente quanto ao nexo entre razão e experiência e se fundamenta especialmente no trajeto Kant – Hegel, como crítica ao idealismo, incorporando de modo estruturante as perspectivas de Marx e de Nietzsche. Ao romper a pretensa “simetria” entre sujeito e objeto, a “Tese” do primado do objeto revela como é insustentável a alegação habermasiana do Discurso filosófico da modernidade segundo a qual Adorno e Horkheimer incidiriam num ceticismo total frente à razão e à sua totalização ideológica. Ao contrário: estes autores, ao articularem de um modo original substância material histórica e argumentação teórica, contribuíram de modo fundamental para examinar o problema da reificação mediante sua relação à objetividade – como o não-idêntico – no âmbito da razão. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 2, Page 184-208, February 2022. Being critical does not come easy, not even within Critical Theory. In this article I respond to criticism of my book from 2019, Capitalism, Alienation and Critique, arguing that contemporary Critical Theory has something to learn from the founding fathers. Firstly, for Adorno immanent critique has metaphysical implications beyond Honneth’s critique of bourgeois society as inconsistent in terms of its professed ideals. Secondly, immanent critique is not the same (...) as ideology critique, and when it comes to Horkheimer and Habermas, they conducted the latter rather than the former. Thirdly, even though today nature must be our concern, answers are to be found in politics and metaphysics rather than science. Finally, critique of neoliberalism should be conducted as critique of political economy, that is, ideology critique, rather than sociological descriptions of the empirical details of globalized capitalism. Denaturalizing economics is a condition for economic democracy. (shrink)