Michael Rectenwald
Author and Former Professor · Independent Author
Michael Rectenwald is an author and former professor whose work examines intellectual history, culture, technology, political ideology, and threats to liberty.
View full profileExplain how Hegelian dialectics, Marxist materialism, Lukács’s reification, and later critiques of Marxism inform the course’s principal theoretical traditions.
Assess arguments about instrumental reason, mass-produced culture, technological rationality, manufactured needs, negative thinking, and political tolerance.
Distinguish the Frankfurt School’s cultural criticism from British cultural studies’ investigation of working-class life, media, institutions, ideology, and power.
Explain how discourse, power-knowledge, authorship, textuality, différance, metanarratives, and language games reshape accounts of knowledge, history, and the subject.
Evaluate how systemic and discourse-centered theories affect conceptions of individual agency, responsibility, voluntary relations, civil liberty, and self-determination.
This course examines critical theory, cultural studies, and postmodern theory as related but distinct responses to Marxism and modern social thought. It begins with Hegel, Marx, and Lukács, establishing the dialectical, materialist, and subjective concepts that shaped the Frankfurt School. Lectures on Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse explore instrumental reason, the culture industry, technological society, manufactured needs, tolerance, and the prospects for social change. The course then traces British cultural studies through the New Left and its analysis of working-class life, mass media, institutions, ideology, and power. Its treatment of postmodern theory moves from major philosophical and linguistic precursors to Foucault and Barthes on discourse, authorship, and the constructed subject; Derrida on writing, différance, and reference; and Lyotard on metanarratives, knowledge, and language games. A concluding civil-libertarian assessment considers how these traditions bear on agency, responsibility, voluntary relations, and individual self-determination.
Author and Former Professor · Independent Author
Michael Rectenwald is an author and former professor whose work examines intellectual history, culture, technology, political ideology, and threats to liberty.
View full profile