New Books In Critical Theory

The work of Theodore Adorno is well established as a crucial resource for understanding the complexities of contemporary capitalism, playing a foundational role in Critical Theory. Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno’s most well known text written with Max Horkheimer, is reassessed in a new book of philosophy by Martin Shuster. Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism and Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 2014) considers how autonomy might exist under the conditions of contemporary capitalism, following the disastrous inhumanity of events in the twentieth century. Shuster explores the nature of autonomy in four ways. The book opens with a re-reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment, as a means to engage and critique Kant’s notion of autonomy. The text then turns to consider a potential ‘response’ from Kant, in the form of Kant’s conception of a rational theology. It is here where Shuster considers the importance of God to Kantian ethics, most notably the role of God as