New Books In Critical Theory

Can computers think? That was the question which provoked English mathematician Alan Turing to come up with what we call the Turing Test, in which a computer engages a human in conversation while a judge, unaware of who is who, looks on and tries to ascertain which participant is made of flesh and blood, and which of bits and bytes. Such a test is held every year in Brighton, England, where the most convincing human confederate is awarded a prize: The Most Human Human. There is also a prize for The Most Human Computer but to date no computer has ever been judged to be more convincingly human than a real person. Enter Brian Christian who, in 2009, took part in this test (known officially as the Loebner Prize) with the aim of being awarded the prize for Most Human Human. He was successful, and in his new book The Most Human Human: A Defense of Humanity in the Age of the Computer (Penguin, 2011) he charts the methodology of his approach, his conclusions on the conceptual value of the Turing Test and the linguist

I have a friend who, as a young child, happened to meet Herbert Marcuse, by that time a rock-star intellectual and darling of the American student movement. Upon seeing the man, he exclaimed “Marcuse! Marcuse! You have such a beautiful head!” I don’t know how beautiful Herbert Marcuse’s head was, but I do know a lot of other interesting things about him and his Frankfurt School buddies now that I’ve read Thomas Wheatland’s wonderful The Frankfurt School in Exile (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). The story Tom tells casts the Frankfurt School in a new (and more correct) light. For one thing, Horkheimer, Adorno, and the rest really were hard-core empirical social scientists in the beginning, not “Critical Theorists” as we understand the term. They counted, measured, conducted surveys and did everything a positivist sociologist or economist would do. But, of course, that was not how they became idols of the New Left and the founders of “Critical Theory.&

The vast majority of historians write history. Perhaps that’s good, as one should stick to what one knows. But there are historians who braves the waters of social and political criticism. One thinks of Arthur Schelsinger Jr., Richard Hofstadter, Christopher Lasch, Robert Conquest, Richard Pipes, Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, and more recently Tony Judt, Sean Wilentz and Victor Davis Hanson. Today I had the good fortune to speak with a historian who is virtually sure to enter the top rank of historian-public intellectuals, John H. Summers. Indeed, he already has. He’s published numerous probing essays on academic life, anarchism, the Left, sex scandals, anti-Americanism, the fate of newspapers, and, of course, many of the great American public intellectuals (he’s at work on a biography of C. Wright Mills). Summers does what all critics worth their salt do: comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Just read his remarkably insightful “All the Priviledged Must Have Prizes”