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English

THE END OF PROGRESS

Amy Allen

Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory

While post- and decolonial theorists have thoroughly debunked the idea of historical progress as a Eurocentric, imperialist, and neocolonialist fallacy, many of the most prominent contemporary thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School?Juergen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rainer Forst?have defended ideas of progress, development, and modernity and have even made such ideas central to their normative claims. Can the Frankfurt School's goal of radical social change survive this critique? And what would a decolonized critical theory look like?

Amy Allen fractures critical theory from within by dispensing with its progressive reading of history while retaining its notion of progress as a political imperative, so eloquently defended by Adorno. Critical theory, according to Allen, is the best resource we have for achieving emancipatory social goals. In reimagining a decolonized critical theory after the end of progress, she rescues it from oblivion and gives it a future.

Amy Allen is Liberal Arts Research Professor of Philosophy and head of the Philosophy Department at Pennsylvania State University.

DAS ENDE DES FORTSCHRITTS
Zur Dekolonisierung der normativen Grundlagen der kritischen Theorie
Deutsch von Frank Lachmann
[ PB Campus 11/19]

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Book Published 2016-01-01 by Columbia University Press

Comments

Amy Allen has performed the long-overdue task of pulling contemporary Frankfurt School theory into the light that postcolonial theory sheds upon its quietude about imperialism and colonialism, its insufficient appreciation of global inequality and differences, and its fetishism and purification of European modernity. While honoring the power of the School's theoretical foundations and insights, she stages a steady and profound encounter with its worldly Others?an encounter that cannot be dismissed. -- Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley

In her perspicacious and penetrating discussion of major figures of the Frankfurt School, Allen shows how deeply the tradition of critique is entangled with the grand narrative of enlightenment, the myth of the progressive unfolding of reason. Drawing on Adorno and Foucault, she shows the path contemporary critique has to take: the path to radical self-critique. -- Christoph Menke, Goethe-Universitaet Frankfurt