The Early Frankfurt School and Religion (eBook)

Are religions tissues of superstition and repression, or repositories of the highest hopes and aspirations of humanity, or perhaps both at the same time? For many of those thinkers who lived through the horrors and upheavals of the first half of the twentieth-century, this old question acquired a new urgency. This volume examines the ways in which the authors of the early Frankfurt School criticized, adopted and modified traditional forms of religious thought and practice. Focusing on the works of Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Otto Kirchheimer and Franz Neumann, it analyzes the relevance of religious traditions and of the Enlightenment critique of religion for modern conceptions of emancipatory thought, art, law, and politics.

RUDIGER BITTNER Professor of Philosophy, University of Bielefeld, Germany HOWARD CAYGILL Professor of Cultural History, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK PASCAL EITLER Historian, University of Bielefeld, Germany PIERFRANCESCO FIORATO Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Sassari, Italy DAVID GROISER Lecturer in German, University of Oxford, UK BARNABA MAJ Professor of Philosophy of History, University of Bologna, Italy GERARD RAULET Professor of German Intellectual History, University of Paris-Sorbonne, France CHRIS THORNHILL Reader in German, King's College, London, UK

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Are religions tissues of superstition and repression, or repositories of the highest hopes and aspirations of humanity, or perhaps both at the same time? For many of those thinkers who lived through the horrors and upheavals of the first half of the twentieth-century, this old question acquired a new urgency. This volume examines the ways in which the authors of the early Frankfurt School criticized, adopted and modified traditional forms of religious thought and practice. Focusing on the works of Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Otto Kirchheimer and Franz Neumann, it analyzes the relevance of religious traditions and of the Enlightenment critique of religion for modern conceptions of emancipatory thought, art, law, and politics.