Adorno/Horkheimer

Enclosed is the syllabus and course notes from the upper division course I teach in PostModernism and Post-Marxist Critical Theory. It occurs to me that some of these essays--ranging from Horkheimer and Adorno, Baudrillard, Foucault, and the feminist post-modern theorist Donna Haraway may offer some insight and some tools for comprehending the dark times in which we live. While these essays may not be directly aimed at understanding the rise of phenomena like the Alt-Right, toxic masculinity, and particularly violent forms of patriarchy, I think they can show us something about the ideological trends that set us on out current morally troubling path.

Puts 'Dialectic of Enlightenment' in an historical context and shows hows the concept of 'mimesis' prefigures more recent cognitive interest in the emotional foundations of human knowledge and human interaction. The paper builds bridges between the critical legacy of the Frankfurt School and recent more empirically-oriented work on cognition, using Nietzsche and Winnicott as a bridge. It suggests we shouldn't be too attached to Adorno and Horkheimer's dialectical form of argument, and should focus instead on their early interdisicplinary analyses of embodied forms of knowledge.

Wayne Vucinic Book Prize 2007, "for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences." 

Endorsement by Slavoj Zizek:

"Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More immediately seduced me by its very title with a profound philosophical implication that eternity is a historical category--things can be eternal for some time. The same spirit of paradox runs through the entire book--it renders in wonderful details the gradual disintegration of the Soviet system from within its ideological and cultural space, making visible all the hypocrisy and misery of this process. I consider Yurchak's book by far the best work about the late epoch of the Soviet Union--it is not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art." (Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defense of Lost Causes)

Abstract:

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

Die sechs Jahre der sowjetischen Perestroika zwischen 1985 und 1991 stellen eine krisenhafte Umbruchszeit dar, in der der Wandel von Bevölkerung und politischer Elite bewusst erlebt und aktiv gestaltet wurde. In dieser speziellen Periode ermöglichte die Lockerung medialer und gesellschaftlicher Zensur die Entstehung informeller Organisationen, die sich in Form einer lautstarken Demokratiebewegung für diverse Systemalternativen einsetzten. Die Kritik am repressiven Staatssozialismus sowie am ungerechten Kapitalismus eröffnete den Blick auf viele Dritte Wege, die in einer Zeit rasanter öffentlicher Politisierung intensiv diskutiert wurden. Die Massendemonstrationen und propagierten Alternativen der russischen Informellenbewegung werden jedoch von Geschichtsschreibung und Sozialwissenschaften weitgehend ignoriert und sind so in Vergessenheit geraten. Der vorliegende Beitrag versucht diesem Vergessen entgegenzuwirken und die damaligen Ideen in aktuelle Diskussionen um eine Redemokratisierung der Demokratie bzw. um sozialistische Systemalternativen einfließen zu lassen. So soll eine neue Perspektive auf das Verhältnis von Demokratie und Sozialismus eingenommen werden. Nach einer historischen Einbettung des
Forschungsgegenstandes werden die diversen Reformvorschläge und Alternativkonzeptionen dargestellt. Da es zu den Inhalten der russischen Informellenbewegung fast keine Literatur gibt, wurden sechzehn qualitative ExpertInneninterviews mit AktivistInnen verschiedenster ideologischer Richtungen in Moskau durchgeführt. Abschließend werden die besprochenen Ideen in den Kontext aktueller Krisen- und Alternativdiskussionen gestellt.

Schlagwörter: Alternative Demokratiekonzepte, Sozialistische Ideengeschichte, Russland, Perestroika, Systemtransformation, Zivilgesellschaft, Demokratiebewegung

Many Third Ways: Alternative Conceptions of Democracy in Russia during the Perestroika

The six years of Soviet perestroika represent a time of radical change, consciously experienced and actively promoted by society and the political elite. In this special period the loosening of social and media censorship enabled the emergence of informal organisations, promoting their various ideas of system alternatives in a loud democracy movement. The criticism of repressive state socialism and unjust capitalism opened a perspective on many Third
Ways, which were vividly discussed in a time of rapid public politicisation. The mass demonstrations and promoted
alternatives of the Russian informal movement are, however, ignored by historic and social sciences and are thus almost forgotten. This paper tries to counteract this oblivion and to incorporate those ideas into current discussions about a re-democratisation of democracy or socialist alternatives respectively. Thus a new perspective on the relationship of democracy and socialism is taken into account. After a historic overview of the Russian informal movement, the various reform suggestions and system alternatives are illustrated. Since almost no literature on this
topic exists, sixteen qualitative interviews with activists of various ideological backgrounds were taken in Moscow. Finally, the illustrated ideas will be put into the context of current alternative discussions of democracy.

Keywords: Alternative models of democracy, history of socialist ideas, Russia, perestroika, system transformation,
civil society, democracy movement

Abstract: This article addresses shortcomings in the way that philosophers and cultural critics have considered propaganda by offering a new genealogical account. Looking at figures such as Marx, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas, Bourdieu, and Stanley, this article finds that their consideration of propaganda has not necessarily been wrong but has missed some of the most significant and important functions of propaganda. This text draws on archival and published materials from propagandists, most notably Edward Bernays, to elaborate a new governmentality of propaganda and public relations. Through focusing on the concept of public opinion, I argue that propaganda is best thought of as an apparatus whose function it is to construct, modify, counter, and destroy relations of force within public opinion in order to produce the subjectivities and conduct that its disseminators and their clients desire.

Die meisten von Theodor W. Adornos zentralen Thesen zu Faschismus und Antisemitismus finden sich in der mit Max Horkheimer verfassten Dialektik der Aufklärung (1944). Dort sind sie meist sehr theoretisch und in aphoristischen Höhenflügen formuliert. In der nur ein paar Jahre später veröffentlichten empirischen Untersuchung The Authoritarian Personality (1950) erhalten diese Thesen ‚Hand und Fuß', weil sie durch die konkreten Aussagen der Befragten und die alltagsnahen Analysen von Adorno und seinem Team anschaulich nachvollziehbar werden. Wenn in dieser Reihe über "KulturKlassiker" also eine quantitative Erhebung erscheint, dann zum einen, weil die Studie Adornos Faschismus-und Autoritarismustheorie präzisiert und zugänglicher macht, und zum anderen, weil Adorno über all den empirischen Daten dennoch das Qualitative nicht aus den Augen verliert und letztlich den größeren kulturellen Kontext wieder in den Vordergrund rückt. Die Grundlage für die Dialektik der Aufklärung waren Philosophie und Kulturtheorie. Mit der empirischen Studie zum autoritären Charakter untersuchte Adorno das Alltagsdenken. Schlussendlich kehrte er aber wieder zu Theorie und Kultur zurück und betrachtete die quantitativen Antworten von Neuem mit einem Geist, der vor der Tiefe des Unquantifizierbaren nicht zurückschreckt. Mit anderen Worten: Die Authoritarian Personality betrachtet den Menschen so, wie er im Alltag erscheint und fragt, wie er alltagsbestimmende politische Entwicklungen und Möglichkeiten einschätzt. Sie liefert messbare Eigenschaften und Fakten, welche in statistischen Meinungs umfragen gewonnen werden und sucht nach den Erscheinungsweisen des autoritären Charakters, wie er sich in Umfragen präsentiert und gesehen werden möchten. Die kulturtheoretische Ebene blickt dagegen tiefer und kann auch die unbewussten Motive der Meinungsäußerungen erfassen. Der Schwerpunkt in der Beschreibung dieses "KulturKlassikers" liegt auf den Teilen, die Adorno zum Projekt der Erforschung der Authoritarian Personality beigetragen hat, da sie deutlich die Durchdringung der quantitativen mit der qualitativen Ebene zeigen. Von den vier Skalen der Studie, die jeweils den Antisemitismus, den Ethnozentrismus, den Konservatismus und den Faschismus messen sollten, hatte nur die letzte zum Ziel, auf beiden Ebenen gleichzeitig zu operieren und quantitativ das Unbewusste auszuloten. Zur Kombination dieser beiden Ebenen hat Adorno selbst einen Fragebogen ausgearbeitet. Er soll die Anfälligkeit für Faschismus und Antisemitismus messen, für deren unterschiedlichen Grade er eine "Faschismus-Skala" entwarf. Mit der Abkürzung als "F-Skala" wurde dieser Fragebogen zum berühmtesten Teil der Untersuchung. An der Dialektik der Aufklärung sowie an der Authoritarian Personality arbeitete Adorno im amerikanischen Exil. Auf der Flucht vor den Nazis befand sich der 1903 in Frankfurt geborene Philosoph und Musiktheoretiker seit 1934. Die Dialektik der Aufklärung beendete er zehn Jahre später zusammen mit Max Horkheimer; die Autoritäts

Il movimento della cosiddetta riabilitazione della filosofia pratica, nato in Germania agli inizi degli anni Sessanta con la formula di Rehabilitierung der praktischen Philosophie, si connota come un movimento di rinascita dell’interesse filosofico per le tematiche della morale, del diritto e della politica, affrontate da una prospettiva alternativa rispetto sia a quella tecnico-scientifica che a quella metafisico-trascendentale(2). Per superare il relativismo ed il pluralismo etico della moderna società, globalizzata e policentrica, il movimento della Rehabilitierung rifiuta sia il modello della razionalità tecnico-scientifica (avvalendosi in ciò delle argomentazioni della prima Scuola di Francoforte) con il suo “divisionismo etico”(3), sia quello metafisico con la sua lontananza dagli ambiti della vita pratica (a partire dalla sua pretesa fondazione trascendentale), volgendosi invece alla ricerca di un modello di razionalità che, conciliando l’ethos con il logos (quindi né tramite una ratio calcolante e strumentale, né tramite la fede in ciò che risiederebbe prima e/o oltre la vita pratica), possa fungere da guida per l’azione.

Mitos y referencias culturales en el film El viaje de Chihiro, de Hayao Miyazaki (2001)
Autora: Lic. en Artes Camila Sabeckis

El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo desarrollar el concepto de mito desde el punto de vista de diferentes autores: George Gusdorf, Roland Barthes, Theodor Adorno y Max Horkheimer, y ejemplificar estas concepciones mediante el análisis del film El viaje de Chihiro (2001) de Hayao Miyazaki.
La pérdida del mito en tanto que fuente de explicación cosmológico y su reemplazo a manos del saber científico ha conllevado a lo largo de la historia numerosas crisis de valores hasta llegar a nuestros días en los cuales lo espiritual a perdido importancia frente a los ideales de la sociedad capitalista. Miyazaki se ha propuesto a lo largo de su extensa filmografia mostrar a sus seguidores aquellos elementos del folclore y la cultura japonesa que se han ido perdiendo a lo largo de los siglos y concientizar a los jóvenes respecto de la necesidad de no olvidar los orígenes. Mitos, dioses y seres sobrenaturales son una presencia constante en las historias que el director nipón narra en sus películas con la finalidad de preservar y dar a conocer a los más jóvenes las historias originarias de Japón, en un contexto en el cual se están perdiendo las raíces culturales debido a la globalización y el furor generado por las nuevas tecnologías. Miyazaki siente una gran preocupación por lo que está sucediendo en la cultura japonesa en la actualidad, la cual se encuentra muy influenciada por elementos de la cultura occidental y más precisamente norteamericana, lo que según el director  ha llevado a la juventud a olvidar sus raíces culturales. 

Palabras clave: mito, conciencia mítica, mana,  tradición, cultura, sintoísmo, raíces, naturaleza, religión japonesa

A research project on the importance and validity of Adorno's/Horkheimer's "Kulturindustrie" for today's fashion industry. The manipulative forces of media, described by Adorno and Horkheimer in the 1940s, have switched to consumer goods. Media (Kulturindustrie) + consumer goods (Warenästhetik) establish a narrow grid in order to manipulate consumer behavior, transporting consciously created variable cultural meaning bordering fascist methods (according to Eco's Urfascism). Key words: Kulturindustrie, Warenästhetik, Culture, Consumption, Advertising, Fashion, Urfascism, Illusionsindustrie (Haug), sustainable fashion, aesthetics. References: Georg Simmel: Fashion (Philosophy of fashion), Roland Barthes: The language of fashion, Grant McCracken: Culture and consumption, Wolfgang Fritz Haug: Kritik der Warenästhetik, Umberto Eco: Urfascism, Roger Behrens: Krise und Illusion.

"The mausolea of communist leaders, a major component of Stalinist symbolic politics, are still shrouded in mystery. Some are destroyed, like Dimitrov’s in Sofia, Gottwald’s in Prague and Neto’s in Luanda. The Lenin mausoleum in Moscow is basically defunct. Yet the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum in Hanoi, Mao’s in Beijing and the Kumsusan mausoleum complex of the Kim dynasty in Pyongyang keep fulfilling their task of a powerful symbol of a different political, social and economic order, with the embalmed cadavers of the founding fathers embodying the supposed eternal duration of that order and thereby perpetuating its legitimacy.
While the destroyed and defunct mausolea continue to be a subject of rumours and fables widely circulating among citizens of the respective countries, and globally among journalists and some scholars, very little is currently known about what actually transpired in a communist mausoleum.
This talk will offer first an overview of the cultural background and ideological reasons for the origin of communist mausolea in general. Second, it will demonstrate the details of the Soviet embalming method and the symbolic meaning of displaying the leader’s body, based on archival documents relating to the mausoleum of Bulgarian leader Georgi Dimitrov (on display 1949–1990) and Czechoslovak president Klement Gottwald (on display 1953–1962). The recently declassified archives of these mausolea currently represent the only freely accessible documentation of its kind. The formerly top secret material to be presented in this talk was never seen before by anybody else than the embalmers.
The talk will conclude with a discussion of the relationship of the embalmers to the practice of preserving dead bodies in the past. It will be shown that the Soviet, and to a lesser extent also the Bulgarian, specialists were fully aware that their preservation work in a monumental tomb constituted a continuation of a tradition inherited from antiquity, and they did not hesitate to publicly acknowledge that, at the same time highlighting the fundamental differences between the context and method of ancient and modern body preservation. They were (and still are) proud of their work while the attitude of particularly the Soviet population to the mausoleum project certainly was not negative. The attitude of the Czech specialists, however, was marked by indifference or even shame while the mausoleum project met with condemnation among the majority of Czechoslovaks."

At first, the Russian Formalists overlapped with Frankfurt School theoreticians, such as Horkheimer and Adorno, in criticizing the mechanization of life, clichéd art being one of its manifestations. Soon, however, the Formalists got interested in mass literature instead of rejecting it point blank. Rather than accuse it of all mortal sins, they recognized the necessary role it played in literary evolution. This made the Opoyaz Formalists (Shklovsky, Tynianov, and Eikhenbaum) one of the first scholars of the literary market, and the fact their theory thereof was not a Marxian one makes it doubly original. Furthermore, the Formalists remained faithful to their principle of studying something not only in abstraction but also in practice, as writers, which is the case with a novel Shklovsky co-authored, the devices of adventure fiction emulated and parodied in it. This shows that Formalists did take an interest in the sociology of literature despite their critics’ mistaken claims otherwise. However, Formalism still tried to approach sociological problems from the standpoint of literary theory proper, without conceding the autonomy of literature as a self-sufficient system. I rely on the Formalists’ texts to show how the idea of literature’s systemic independence can be elaborated and preserved when the largely sociological problem of the literary market is addressed.

Dieser Aufsatz stellt eine Analyse der nationalsozialistischen Subjektivität vor und stützt sich dafür auf eine Interpretation der »Freiheit zum Tode« aus Martin Heideggers
Sein und Zeit.
Meine These ist, dass in dieser philosophischen Denkfigur die nationalsozialistische Subjektivität zum Ausdruck kommt. Als Kern dieser Subjektivität werde ich eine radikale Selbstaufgabe herausarbeiten, die in einer vollständigen Unterwerfung und einem kompromisslosen Vollstrecken des »Notwendigen« zur »Freiheit« gelangt. Dieses Phänomen ist von Hannah Arendt und von Max Horkheimer und Theodor W. Adorno als absolute Indifferenz dargestellt worden. Ich teile diese Beobachtung,  unterscheide mich aber in der begrifflichen Analyse.

This book reassesses Primo Levi’s Holocaust texts in light of the posthumanist theories of Adorno, Levinas, Lyotard, and Foucault which together critique humanist notions of subjectivity, ethics, culture, and science. I argue that Levi positions himself as an exemplary subject of Western modernity who experiences and interprets Auschwitz through the lens of Enlightenment humanism. Even as Levi speaks for the victims, his texts suggest that Holocaust writing framed by humanist assumptions risks complicity with the murderous master narratives of Nazism that it seeks to overturn. My book explores the consequences of this potential complicity for the future of the humanist subject.
Reviewed in The Journal of the Association for the Study of Modern Italy. See https://doi.org/10.1080/13532944.2012.756706

Séminaire Généalogies de la modernité : textes clés et approches critiques
Raffaele Carbone
De la Dialectique de la raison à la Terminologie philosophique :  Horkheimer et Adorno interprètes de Spinoza
16 mars 2022, 18h30
USIC, 18 rue de Varenne – 75007 Paris
Salle 19. Code d'accès:  05637

The literature on populism used to depict the phenomenon as an alternative to the standard path from traditional to modern society, as a way to enfranchise the underclass, or as an anomaly vis-à-vis class politics and liberal institutions. More recently, the debate has shifted into something of a terra incognita due to the growing interest in the connection between populism and democratic politics. One of the more intriguing contributions to this debate is an article by Margaret Canovan, if only because it makes this unknown territory less confusing. Her argument draws from Michael Oakeshott’s claim that political modernity is characterised by the interplay of two distinct styles, the politics of faith and of scepticism. She renames them the redemptive and pragmatic faces of democracy, and suggests that populism arises in the gap between them. This establishes a relation of interiority between populism and democracy. The former will follow democracy like a shadow. At times, however, the theoretical status of the gap is somewhat uncertain, as it seems more appropriate for thinking politics— particularly radical politics— in general. One could also specify the political valence of the shadow further to show the undecidability between the democratic aspect of the phenomenon and its possible ominous tones. I will look into this in some detail to engage in a friendly interrogation of her claims.

The book makes a critical comparison of fundamental trends in modern epistemology with the epistemological concerns of critical theory of the Frankfurt School. It comprises five chapters, which refer to phenomenology, structuralism and poststructuralism, modernism and postmodernism, systems’ theory and critical realism.
It follows the course of development of modern epistemology, considering basic conceptions such as dialectics, theory and practice in science, and the potential for a political epistemology based on the arguments of critical theory. It can certainly be used as a textbook because each chapter tallies with a major trend in modern epistemology, and provides a concrete analysis of the comparison it draws with the work of leading figures of the Frankfurt School such as Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas.
The present volume addresses the reader of political theory, epistemology, social theory and it also raises key questions on methodology in science and research. Therefore, it can prove beneficial for students, researchers and academics that deal with issues of theory, practice, and method in science. The contents of the volume were meticulously constructed in order to be of practical use both for undergraduate and postgraduate students, and each chapter includes basic graphs  that condense the basic argument for each thematic circle on modern epistemology and methodology.
The book contains unpublished critique and information provided to the writer in recent interviews she conducted with Jürgen Habermas (providing analysis on systems theory), William Outhwaite and Stefan Müller-Doohm (both the latter clarified issues and contributed valuable information on critical realism and the Frankfurt School, respectively).

The Majority of the papers in the present volume are the result of a series of seminars which took place between autumn 2007 and spring 2009 at the Department of the History of Eastern Europe at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, headed by Dr. Tamás Krausz, under the auspices of the doctoral programme entitled ‘The History of Eastern Europe first in a wider historical context and then concentrating on the processes of the past twenty years.

"The project helps young researchers to join in with the international debate on their subject matter and to foster the emergence of a common discourse. We believe it is important that the young generation of historians born around or after the transition who did not live through the pre-1989 period as children or young contemporaries should come to play an increasing role in this discourse. A certain distance in time is an important condition for a deeper understanding of the events and processes of the time. Not only do we gain access to the sources for this exciting sequence of historical phenomena – a distance in time also allows the subject matter to shift from the boundary zone between political sciences and history clearly into the sphere of the latter, thus becoming free of daily political interests. We trust that the authors of the present volume will become active participants in shaping this process."

Update: If you'd like to watch an accurate, funny, and brief take on Eco-Nihilism, please go to #wisecrack on Youtube: Did South Park Turn Anti-Capitalist, where the central argument from Eco-Nihilism is quoted at several junctures:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_MglOKUFRg.

I may not have made South Park directly--but Wisecrack--close enough!!

Wendy Lynne Lee

This is the preface for Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse.

Lexington Books (Rowman and Littlefield), February 2017.

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780739176887/Eco-Nihilism-The-Philosophical-Geopolitics-of-the-Climate-Change-Apocalypse.

Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel, The Road,  tells the story of a dying father’s heroic effort to protect his child from starvation, violence, and disease as they struggle to cross the devastated landscape of a post-apocalyptic America. We don’t know what’s happened to bring about so tragic and terrorizing a circumstance, but we’re nonetheless drawn to the stark images McCarthy evokes and, though we work feverishly to deny that such a tragedy could befall us, we can imagine it.

Indeed, for Syrian refugees, Niger Delta villagers, Northwest Kenyan pastoralists, Chukchi Sea coastal fishermen, Ecuadorian rainforest dwellers, Mexican fishermen, Pennsylvania farmers, indigenous Sengwer, the citizens of Kiribati Island’s thirty-two atolls, and many more, fables like The Road reek of a reality already poisoned nearly beyond repair and foreshadow future crises—environmental, economic, geopolitical, social, and moral—for which the prospect of recovery seems little more than fiction.

Such crises are as predictable as are the implications of an economic system, namely, neoliberal or conquest capitalism, whose objectives and governing logic are, I’ll argue, inherently incompatible not only with the just, the good, or the beautiful—but with life itself. Conquest capital devours and digests values, ethical, civic, and aesthetic, reducing each to that single value without which it can neither replicate itself nor grow: exchange. In so doing it generates a state of affairs that can only rightly be described as pathologically nihilistic: capitalism destroys its own existential conditions through the wholesale commodification of the finite ecosystems upon which it depends. It cannot do otherwise and be capitalism. Hence, to continue down this road guarantees a future disfigured by the violence consequent on abject desperation and subjugation not only to domination by multinational corporations, but ultimately to more prosaic though terrorizing prospects—like thirst.

However much we appreciate the enormous scientific contribution by Professor Ronald Inglehart, who initiated the international data collection of the World Values Survey, our re-analysis of the very World Values Survey data [“roll-outs” of the World Values Survey data wvs1981_2008_v20090914.sav] brought us to question Inglehart’s theories, with which he and his associates interpret the mass of the World Values Survey data. Their theoretical approach does not use a sufficiently number of hard-core indicators how global publics view central issues of economic policy, and their theories overemphasize a secularistic view of the religious phenomenon in modern society. Their theories predict the gradual waning of the religious phenomena in parallel with the increase of human security, and even cherish at times the tendencies brought about by such a waning of the religious element in advanced democracies. Inglehart spells them out: higher levels of tolerance for abortion, divorce, homosexuality; the erosion of parental authority, the decrease of the importance of family life et cetera. Is that really something to cherish?

Today, societal and economic development is discontinuous; regional centers of the world economy shift at an enormous speed; and above all, religion and family values can be an important assett in the stability of capitalist development. Economic growth inexorably shifts away from the North Atlantic arena towards new centers of gravitation of the world economy. Alberto Alesina’s and Paola Giuliano’s new maps of global values (Alesina and Giuliano, 2013) present a real break with the hitherto existing secularistic consensus of global value research. Their maps of family ties, respect for parents et cetera coincide with the global map of economic growth today.

Leading representatives of the global economics profession now start to take up the challenge to interpret the mass of the data from the World Values Survey project on their own. The essay by Barro and McCleary (2003) was an important beginning and a good example of how today economic research uses data from the World Values Survey project to study the relationship between religion, denominations and economic growth.

Alesina (2013); Alesina and Angeletos (2005); Alesina and Fuchs-Schündeln (2007); Alesina and Guiliano (2010, 2011, 2013); Alesina, Cozzi and Mantovan (2012); and Alesina, di Tella, and MacCulloch (2004) all show how the economic discipline can gain hard-core, quantitative and valuable insights from comparative knowledge about such phenomena as generalized trust and social capital, individualism, family ties, morality, attitudes toward work and perception of poverty, and religious practice for economic processes.

In our re-analysis, we use the advanced statistical multivariate analysis technique of the Promax factor analysis, which allows for correlations between factors. It is available to the global public via the IBM-SPSS statistical package XXI. We eliminated missing values by listwise delition.

In our first re-analysis, there were 92289 interview partners from around the globe with complete data for all the 30 variables of our research design. Our main model explains 47.89% of the total variance of all the 30 variables. We highlight the relationships between the original 30 variables and the newly derived factor analytical dimensions:

a) economic permissiveness
b) traditional religion
c) racism
d) higher education for the younger generation (education gap between the generations)
e) distrust of the army and the press
f) authoritarian character
g) tolerance and respect
h) the 'ego' company (i. e. the rejection of obedience and unselfishness as values in education)
i) [predominantly] female rejection of the market economy and democracy

We also look at the trajectory of global society by analyzing the factor scores along the path of the Human Development Indicator of the UNDP (“human security indicator”, also used by Inglehart and his associates).

 Economic permissiveness clearly captures the dimension of lawlessness, moral-ethical decay and the shadow economy, so prominent in contemporary economic theory of growth. In statistical terms, it is the most important of all the resulting factors.

 Traditional religion is linked in a very complex way to the absence of economic permissiveness. We also look at the exceptional performers (“residuals”) which best avoided economic permissiveness on each stage of secularization.

We also present Chropleth maps of human values across the globe, and show the regional implications of our analysis.



JEL Classification: A13; Z12; P48; O017; N3


Keywords: Relation of Economics to Social Values; religion; other Economic Systems: Political Economy; Legal Institutions; Property Rights, Formal and Informal Sectors, Shadow Economy, Institutional Arrangements; Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy

Joseph Stalin (1879–1953), originally Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, until he adopted "Stalin" ("man of steel") as a nom de guerre while editing Pravda. As the leader of the USSR from 1924 to 1953, he outmaneuvered and liquidated all rivals for power. Stalin's policies of forced collectivization of agriculture and intensive industrialization created great misery; a frightened nation of suppressed speech and action, and, in the 1930s, one that feared imprisonment or execution due to extensive purges. During WWII,  he negotiated skilfully with the Allied leaders at Yalta and Potsdam and forced puppet communist governments on the states of Eastern Europe. His repressive policies were emulated by many communist governments in the 20th century.

El presente artículo se confronta con la cuestión de cómo cabe valorar la aportación de la Escuela de Fráncfort desde nuestros días. Para ello, en primer lugar, distingue conceptualmente entre Escuela de Fráncfort y teoría crítica, mostrando las virtualidades de cada una de estas expresiones. A continuación, expone sintéticamente qué ha dado de sí el trabajo teórico de los seguidores más visibles de esta Escuela en las últimas décadas. Y apunta finalmente una serie de temáticas en las que las aportaciones de la Escuela de Fráncfort continúan siendo fuente de inspiración para numerosos investigadores actuales.

This article examines how to evaluate the contribution of the Frankfurt School from today's perspective. In the first place, I distinguish conceptually between Frankfurt School and Critical Theory, and focus the potentialities of each of these terms. Then, my article synthetically resumes the findings of the theoretical work of the most visible representatives of this School in the last decades. Finally, it hints at several topics for which the contributions of the Frankfurt School are still a source of inspiration for a large number of current researchers.

This paper explains how Horkheimer and Adorno came to understand Enlightenment as totalitarian, illustrated by five examples of possible totalitarianism. It concludes by drawing a line between the totalitarianism of Enlightenment and Western European societies' attitudes just prior to the Second World War. It can be argued that totalitarian Enlightenment 'primed' people, as it were, for the horrors that were to come.

El propósito de este curso es desarrollar las problemáticas fundamentales de la Filosofía de la técnica, partiendo de las teorías propuestas por Carl Mitcham y Andrew Feenberg. Ambos autores serán los disparadores para repensar y poner en cuestión las reflexiones y/o planteamientos de autores tan dispares como heterogéneos, como lo son: M. Heidegger, J. Ellul, M. Bunge, M. Á. Quintanilla, la primera generación de la Escuela de Frankfurt (T. Adorno, M. Horkheimer y H. Marcuse), como también J. Habermas, P. Sloterdijk, G. Simondon y D. Haraway.

The paper presents a brief description of the situation of sport in
Poland. The first part focuses on the legacy from state socialism. It
concerns both the impact of Stalinism on sport in Poland (1949-
1956), and the rest of the socialist era in Poland (1956-1989). Many
topics concerning the political, social, and economic functions of
sport during these periods are discussed. The second part focuses
on the nature of the transition of sport following the 1989-1990
political and economic changes in Poland. The third part focuses on
the functioning of sport in contemporary Polish society. The Sports
Act as a legal background of sport and its consequences are
analysed. Some challenges (e.g. organization of European Football
Championship 2012 in Poland and Ukraine; Zakopane – candidate
city for future Winter Olympic Games) and problems (pseudo-fans
and football hooliganism) are discussed as well.

In this chapter I offer a critical re-reading of the Frankfurt School’s concept of culture industry by arguing that this concept can only be understood in connection with the goals of critical theory [1] as a theory of society, [2] as an extension of Marx’s critique of political economy, as well as [3] as a materialistic theory of subjectivity. These three dimensions of the concept of culture industry are tied together by Kant’s concept of schematism that Adorno and Horkheimer turn into a social-material concept in order to analyze capitalist social relations.