Major sociological work related to the culture industry thesis was undertaken by Adorno during his period as a ‘refugee scholar’ in the USA. It has been charged with a ‘sociological deficit’ by leading figures within critical theory, typically without reference to that US context. A dialogue with Márkus’s work on Adorno and the Marxian production paradigm can redress failings in those critiques. However, such a task is complicated by the limitations of Márkus’s own major essay on this topic. This paper (...) thus conducts an immanent critique of Márkus: ‘Márkus against Márkus’. Márkus’s proposals for the application of the Marxian production paradigm to aesthetic culture and his prospective vision for critical theory are so found to be very compatible with Adorno’s related work. (shrink)

Recent events have only reinforced the fact that the value of freedom occupies a pre-eminent, but also paradoxical, role in modern societies. Nowhere have the ambiguities and ambivalences of this leading concept been more fully explored than in recent analyses by György Márkus and Axel Honneth. The following paper brings these two theorists together, examining Márkus’s claims for the perplexity that overtakes an investigation of modern freedom against the background of Honneth’s most recent magnum opus. This contrast will provide mutual (...) illumination, allowing us to appreciate both the commonalities and differences in approach and conclusion, but also allowing us to critically contest some of Márkus’s most startling conclusions. (shrink)

As Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney for over 20 years, György Márkus exerted a profound influence on a generation of philosophers and students from many disciplinary backgrounds. His legendary lecture courses, spanning the history of modern philosophy from the Enlightenment through to the late 20th century, were memorable for their breadth, erudition, and philosophical drama. Always modest despite his mastery of the tradition, Márkus’s approach to this history of philosophy never failed to emphasize its continuing role in (...) shaping our inherited understanding of philosophy as ‘its own time comprehended in thoughts’. This is especially true of his contribution to the philosophical discourse of modernity, which we could summarize as comprising an original philosophy of cultural modernity. In what follows, I briefly reconstruct Márkus’s account of the adventures of the concept of culture, focusing on his definitive essay ‘The Path of Culture: From the Refined to the High, From the Popular to Mass Culture’ but also referring to other relevant Márkus texts, offering some critical remarks on his account of culture and its relationship with modern aesthetics, both classical and contemporary. (shrink)