The Dark Side of Enlightenment - A Century of the Institut fur Sozialforschung

As Irish society trumpets its modernity, progressivism and liberalism ever more loudly, a 'ruthless criticism of everything now existing' remains an intellectual and scholarly imperative.    Irish take-up of the ideas of the famous Frankfurt School, at any of its various stages and manifestations, from Horkheimer to Honneth, has been patchy or sporadic.   But the work of this school of critical theory is a huge resource for anyone wishing to cut beneath the Irish Times platitudes that represent serious social and political thinking in Ireland today.  

Here is an article, at the excellent Boston Review, by a leading American inheritor of the Frankfurt School legacy, Seyla Benhabib, to mark the centenary:

Below the Asphalt Lies the Beach

And here is an excerpt from Martin Jay's classic history of the Frankfurt School, The Dialectical Imagination:

Creation of the Institut für Sozialforschung

Conor