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This book offers a unique and timely reading of the early Frankfurt School in response to the recent 'affective turn' within the arts and humanities. It revisits some of the founding tenets of critical theory in the context of the establishment of the Institute for Social Research in the early twentieth century. The book focuses on the work of Walter Benjamin, whose varied engagements with the subject of melancholia prove to be far more mobile and complex than traditional accounts. It also looks at how an affective politics underpins critical theory's engagement with the world of objects, exploring the affective politics of hope. Situating the affective turn and the new materialisms within a wider context of the 'post-critical', it explains how critical theory, in its originary form, is primarily associated with the work of the Frankfurt School. The book presents an analysis of Theodor Adorno's form of social critique and 'conscious unhappiness', that is, a wilful rejection of any privatized or individualized notion of happiness in favour of a militant and political discontent. A note on the timely reconstruction of early critical theory's own engagements with the object world via aesthetics and mimesis follows. The post-Cold War triumphalism of many on the right, accompanied by claims of the 'end of history', created a sense of fearlessness, righteousness, and unfettered optimism. The book notes how political realism has become the dominant paradigm, banishing utopian impulses and diminishing political hopes to the most myopic of visions.
the number of great powers in the international system during any period. He distinguishes between bipolar systems (two great powers) and multipolar systems (more than two great powers). Waltz argues that bipolar systems are more stable than multipolar systems. Waltz's view is that bipolar systems will be more stable because in a bipolar system ‘who is a danger to whom is never in doubt’ (Waltz, 1979 : 171). During the Cold War of the latter half of the twentieth century, it was clear to both the United States and the Soviet Union who the enemy was – and as both
with existential concerns. One measure of the current concatenation of crises that we confront is the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists ’ ‘Doomsday Clock’, currently set at 100 seconds to midnight – the closest to Armageddon that it has been since it was initially set up in 1947. The global situation, by this account, is more precarious or fragile than at any time during the Cold War. However, International Relations has a problem in that it is often perceived as ‘Western’, or more specifically an ‘American’ social science (Hoffmann, 1977 ; Smith, 2000 ) – one
reflects a more optimistic period in the immediate post-Cold War period. It is hard, for example, to imagine an ideal speech situation involving either former US president Donald Trump, or Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Habermas’ discourse ethics has been developed in the recent work of Rainer Forst. Forst has been centrally concerned with issues of justice and human rights and has speculated on these issues at a national and international level. 23 His central concern has been to develop a theory of
contradictions would be constantly worked out until the ‘end of history’ was reached. That the contradictions had been worked out and that the most perfect form of society was the Western liberal one was central to Fukuyama's ( 1989 ) resurrection of the notion of ‘the end of history’ at the end of the Cold War. Western thought is littered with ideas of stages of history, whether they be Marxist, moving through various modes of production until classless communism is achieved or Rostow's modernisation theory whereby countries move through various phases of economic development
coincides with the emergence of, in the wake of the Cold War, a global neoliberal project so that the international realm becomes one dominated by the central tenets of the neoliberal perspective. While Foucault's analysis was at a state level, with the appearance of a common political culture more or less worldwide, it became possible to apply his ideas to analyse these processes at a global level. 12 International Relations theorists who have drawn on these ideas have worked on the assumption that there is a global, or
2012 , p. 260); or indeed it is a Cold War ‘anti-utopianism’ arising from her opposition to ‘ideological extremism’ (Thaler 2017 , p. 6). It is an example of ‘negative morality’, in that it does ‘not add up to a moral system or decision procedure’, and instead tells us merely ‘what to think about’ rather than ‘what to think’ (Misra 2016 , p. 86), and, in this light, it inspires Williams's ‘realist’ political theory (Sagar 2016 , p. 381). Although not a perfect consensus, there does seem to be broad agreement that her scepticism stands opposed
until 2003 by bifurcating Europe’s previously shared (western) framework of collective memory. By questioning the status of 1945 and the Holocaust as the focal points of European memory politics, the accession of postcommunist Europe has forced continental institutions and existing members of the EU to ‘negotiate the past’ in new and disruptive ways. 6 The post-Cold War ‘revenge of memory’ – as Tony Judt refers to this phenomenon in the epigraph to this chapter – also sparked memory-based conflicts between neighbours, further threatening the surprisingly thin
whose expertise was needed for reconstruction. Since these postwar governments had to recreate functioning democracies while simultaneously dealing with the geopolitical problems engendered by the emerging Cold War, working through the past was not their top priority: ‘Economic recovery and political legitimacy, not additional purges, were the proper medicine. Democratic renewal went hand in hand with silence.’ 2 A mere twenty years after the end of the Second World War, all of this had changed. The silence of the late 1940s and 1950s was followed by an explosive
of fascism, retreat is not an option. The globalisation of economic interests, which have successfully moved beyond the nation-state and generated protectionist responses across Europe, have not been matched by an expansion of politics to a similar level. On the contrary, developments since the end of the Cold War show that the power of the state to control events within its borders, which is crucial to the traditional doctrine of sovereignty, is in decline. According to Matti Koskenneimi, ‘The pattern of influence and decision-making that rules the world has an