Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Conceptual foundations of early Critical Theory
- 2 Benjamin, Adorno, and the decline of the aura
- 3 The dialectic of enlightenment
- 4 The marriage of Marx and Freud
- 5 Dialectics and the revolutionary impulse
- 6 “The dead speaking of stones and stars”
- 7 Critique, state, and economy
- 8 The transcendental turn
- 9 The politics of Critical Theory
- 10 Critical Theory and the analysis of contemporary mass society
- 11 Critical Theory and poststructuralism
- 12 The very idea of a critical social science
- 13 A social pathology of reason
- Select bibliography
- Index
10 - Critical Theory and the analysis of contemporary mass society
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Conceptual foundations of early Critical Theory
- 2 Benjamin, Adorno, and the decline of the aura
- 3 The dialectic of enlightenment
- 4 The marriage of Marx and Freud
- 5 Dialectics and the revolutionary impulse
- 6 “The dead speaking of stones and stars”
- 7 Critique, state, and economy
- 8 The transcendental turn
- 9 The politics of Critical Theory
- 10 Critical Theory and the analysis of contemporary mass society
- 11 Critical Theory and poststructuralism
- 12 The very idea of a critical social science
- 13 A social pathology of reason
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
REVOLUTION IN THE MEANS OF COMMUNICATION
In February 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's Manifesto of the Communist Party appeared in London's Red Republican. This treatise was the one and only celebration of the revolutionary power of the new, bourgeois age. Marx and Engels were expecting from the bourgeoisie and its epoch not only the freeing of all productive forces of humankind, but also the permanent revolution of all relations of production and, what is more, of all social relations:
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without continually revolutionizing the instruments of production, hence the relations of production, and therefore social relations as a whole . . . The continual transformation of production, the uninterrupted convulsion of all social conditions, a perpetual uncertainty and motion distinguish the epoch of the bourgeoisie from all earlier ones. All the settled, age-old relations with their train of time-honored preconceptions and viewpoints are dissolved; all newly formed ones become outmoded before they can ossify. Everything feudal and fixed goes up in smoke, everything sacred is profaned, and men are finally forced to take a down-to-earth view of their circumstances, their multifarious relations.
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- The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory , pp. 248 - 279Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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