Critical Theorists
Conceptualizing Actualization, Actualizing Conceptions

Christopher Elliot Gray, 03-july-2004

Idealists

Johann Gottelieb Fichte (1762-1814)

• The North American Fichte Society
• Outlines of the Doctrine of Knowledge - by J.G. Fichte
  
• 
  

Immanuel Kant
F.W.J. Schelling
G.W.F. Hegel

• The Critical Philosophy (from The Shorter Logic) - by G.W.F. Hegel
   
  

Max Stirner

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804-1872)

• The Case of Ludwig Feuerbach - by Lyn Marcus
• International Society of Feuerbach Researchers
  
• The Feuerbach Internet Archive
• Philosophy Research Base: Ludwig Feuerbach
• The Essence of Religion - by Ludwig Feuerbach
  
• The Essence of Christianity - by Ludwig Feuerbach
  
• Thoughts on Death and Immortality - by Ludwig Feuerbach
  

Bruno Bauer
Edgar Bauer
Arnold Ruge
Karl Nauwerck
Fredrick Engels

Materialists

Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Mikhail Bakunin
Max Weber (1864-1920)
Jean-Pierre Proudhon

Georgs (aka Gyorgy) Lukacs (1885-1971)

• Modernity, and Lukacs, Marx, and the Sources of Critical Theory - by Professor Andrew Feenburg
• History and Class Consciousness (1923)
  
• The Destruction of Reason (1955)
• Social Ontology of Being
• see Georgs Lukacs on Marxists page
  

Existentialists

Jean-Paul Sartre

• Jean-Paul Sartre Archive
• The Dogmatic Dialectic and the Critical Dialectic - by Jean-Paul Sartre

Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991)

• Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space
• Everyday Life in the Modern World
• Critique of Everyday Life
• Lefebvre the Historian (from Internationale Situationiste #10)
• Lefebvre on the Situationist International - interview by Kristen Ross in 1983

Soren Kierkegaard
Albert Camus
Franz Kafka
Friedrich Nietzsche

Positivists (Analytical Hegelians)

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
George Edward Moore (1873-1958)
Sir James George Frazier (1854-1941)
Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900)
Moritz Schlick (1882-1936)
Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970)
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

Constructionists (anti-realist; anti-foundationalist)

Kenneth Gergen
John Shotter

Unspecified, General, and Referential

• Humanist Psychology and the Social Construction of Reality - by John Rowan (1997)

Constructivists

Ron Harre
James Averill
Donald Polkinghorne

Deconstructionists

Objectivists (individualist opposition to Kant)

Ayn Rand
David Kelly
Nathaniel Branden

Unspecified, General, and Referential

• Nihilism
• Freedom and Causality - by Russell Madden
  
• Essentials of Objectivism - by Ayn Rand
• Love and Selfishness - by Gary Hull, Ph.D.
  
• The Objectivist Center

Modernists

Ezra Pound
William Faulkner
Joseph Conrad
James Joyce
Marcel Proust
Virginia Woolf
T.S. Eliot
Jean-Luc Godard
Luis Bunuel
Federico Fellini
Werner Herzog
Vera Chytilova
Michelangelo Antoinini
Alain Resnais
Ingmar Bergman
Carl Theodor Dreyer

Unspecified, General, and Referential

• Modernism in European Film - by Laura Rascaroli
  
• The Culture of Modernism: Arts of Transgression, Transgressions of Art - by Goran Sonesson
• Modernism - by Christopher L.C.E. Witcombe
  

Phenomenologists (neo-Kantian)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)

• Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)
Martin Heidegger

• Postmodern Jihad: What Osama bin Laden learned from the Left - by S. Jackson
  

Alfred Schutz (1899-1959)
Gabriel Marcel
Karl Mannheim (1893-1947)
Karl Jaspars
Martin Buber
Leon Shestov
Nicholas Berdyaev
Vladimir Solovev
Max Scheler
Jose Orteg y Gassett
Paul Tillich
Paul Ricoeur
Herman Hesse
Simone de Beauvoir

Unspecified, General, and Referential

• Existential Phenomenology
• 
  

Post-Modernists

"Postmodernism ... indicate[s] a specific moment in history. It is a moment in which in-depth transformations of the system of economic production are also altering traditional social and symbolic structures. In the West, the shift away from manufacturing toward a service and information-based structures entails a global redistribution of labor, with the rest of the world and especially the developing countries providing most of the underpaid, offshore production. This shift entails the decline of traditional sociosymbolic systems ... [as] postmodernity corresponds to reorganization of capital accumulation in a transnational mobile manner. Given this new historical trend toward 'trans-national mobility, it is imperative for critical theorists and cultural critics to rethink their situation and their practices within this scheme." — Rosi Braidotti

"Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the 'real' country, all of the 'real' America which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety; in its banal omnipresence which is carceral)." — Jean Baudrillard

Friedrich Nietzsche
Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)

• lacan dor com is jacques lacan in the u.s.
• Lacan Online

Paul Virilio

• Crepuscular Dawn - by Paul Virilio, Sylvere Lotringer, Mike Taormina (Semiotexte, 2002)
• Speed Pollution - by James Der Derian (in Wired issue 4.05, 05-1996)
• Science Friction - a review of Paul Virilio's Open Sky  by Eric Johnson (MetroActive, issue 6-12.Nov.1997)
• Paul Virilio (French Urbanist and Philosopher)

Paolo Virno (1952-, Italy)

• A Grammar of the Multitude - by Paolo Virno (Semiotexte, 2004)
• Multitude and Working Class - Maurizio Lazzarato interviews Paolo Virno
• The Memory of the Present: Test Over Historical Time - by Paolo Virno (1999) - review by Michel Valensi

Pierre-Felix Bourdieu (1930-2002) also see web listings under "Pierre Bordieu"

• Pierre Bourdieu and Taste
• HyperBourdieu World Catalog
  

Slavoj Zizek

• Welcome to the Desert of the Real - by Slavoj Zizek (Verso, 2002)
• Bibliographies: Zizek
• Zizek in Lacanian Ink

Jean Francois Lyotard

• Phenomenology - by Jean-Francois Lyotard
• Jean Francois Lyotard

Gilles Deleuze

• Capitalism: A Very Special Delerium - interview with Deleuze and Guattari

Claude Lefort
Thomas Hylland Eriksen

• Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age - by T.H. Eriksen (Pluto Press, 2001) - review

Felix Guattari

• Deleuze and Guatarri Internet Resources
• Deleuze and Guattari Web Resources
  

Georges Bataille (1897-1962)

• The Biography Project: George Bataille
• George Bataille eLibrary

Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1944-)

• Faculty web page at University of California - Berkeley - Anthropology
• The End of the Body: The Global Traffic in Organs for Transplant Surgery - by Nancy Scheper-Hughes
• Commodifying Bodies - by Nancy Scheper-Hughes
• Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics - by Nancy Scheper-Hughes
• Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil  - by Nancy Scheper-Hughes
• Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics - by Nancy Scheper-Hughes
  

David Harvey

• What is Globalization? - by David Harvey
• Freeing Language from Capitalist Post-Modernism - by David Harvey

Gaston Bachelard

• Quotations
• Gaston Bachelard: Subversive Humanist - Texts and Readings - by Mary MacAllester Jones

Michel De Certeau
Jean Baudrillard

• Bordiga and Baudrillard
• Impossible Exchange  - by Jean Baudrillard
• Simulations - by Jean Baudrillard
• Baudrillard and the Millenium - by Christopher Horrocks (Icon Books, UK 1999; Totem Books USA 1999)
  
• On the Eradication of Reality - by Andrew Hussey (author of The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord - published by Pimlico)
• Baudrillard's Remainder - by Andrew Wernick
• The System of Objects - by Jean Baudrillard (Verso, 1996)
• The Baudrillard Project

Richard Rorty

• Richard Rorty's webpage

Jacques Derrida (1930-)

Unspecified, General, and Referential

• Postmodernism and the Death of the Subject - by James Heartfield
• Algeria and the Defeat of French Humanism - by James Heartfield
• Steven Wexler's Theory Page
  
• Why More is Less - by Sashi Kumar
• Postmodernism and Its Critics
• Modern and Post-Modern: Contrasting Tendencies
• What is Critical Postmodern Theory? - by David M. Boje
• The Great Effects of Small Things: Insignificance with Immanence in Critical Theory - by Douglas Collins

Structuralists

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)

Post-Structuralists
symbolic codes and discourses; draw upon German Irrationalists

Michael Bakhtin
Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

• Foucault, Marxism, and History: Mode of Production Versus Mode of Information - by Mark Poster
• Unpublished Interview with Noam Chomsky Critical of Foucault and Negri - by Antasofia
• The Calm Before the Storm: Virilio's Debt to Foucault and Some Notes on Contemporary Global Capital - by Ian R. Douglas
• Spurious
• 
  

Daniel du Prie

Jacques Derrida
reworks Heidegger's "destruction of traditional ontology" as a deconstruction of orthodox rationality

• Derrida and the End of History - by Stuart Sim (Icon Books, UK 1999; Totem Books USA 1999)
  

Unspecified, General, and Referential

• 7 Post-Structuralists and Post-Modernists - by James Heartfield
• Conspiracy of Commodities: Postmodern Encyclopedic
  Narrative and Crowdedness - by Alan Clinton (Univ. of Florida)
  

Institute of Social Research (at Frankfurt University; 1929)

Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University

Jurgen Habermas (1929-)

• The Jurgen Habermas Web Resource

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-1969)

Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)

Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979)

• One-Dimensional Man - by Herbert Marcuse
  
• Eros and Civilzation - by Herbert Marcuse
• Herbert Marcuse - by Douglas Kellner
• Herbert Marcuse Archive
• The Foundations of the Dialectics of Society (Part II, Reason & Revolution) - by Herbert Marcuse
• The Rise of Social Theory (Part II, Reason & Revolution) - by Herbert Marcuse
  

  Otto Kirchheimer (-)

• The Rule of Law Under Seige: Selected Essays - by Otto Kirchheimer and Franz L. Neumann

Franz L. Neumann (-)

• Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944 - by Franz Neumann
• The Rule of Law Under Siege: Selected Essays of Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer
• Diagnosis of Social Pathology - by Franz L. Newmann
  

Erich Fromm (1900-1980)

• The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (1970)
• Escape From Freedom ()
• Erich Fromm (1900 - 1980) - by Dr. C. George Boeree
• Erich Fromm

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)

• Walter Benjamin, Surrealism and Photography - by Rajeev S. Patke Reclaiming the Fragments: On the Messianic Materialism of Walter Benjamin - by Stephen Bronner

Unspecified, General, and Referential

• The Politics of Despair: The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School - by Liam O. Ruiarc
• Critical Sociology: Selected Readings of Adorno, Habermas, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Neumann - edited by Paul Connerton (Penguin, 1976)
  

Semioticians

Ludwig Wittgenstein

John Locke
Charles Sanders Peirce
Claude Levi-Straus
Roland Barthes
Umberto Eco
Thomas Sebeok
Ferdinando de Saussure
Jacques lacan
Michael Bakhtin
Jacob von Uexküll

Unspecified, General, and Referential

• Representations of Global Capital
• Landscapes of Capital
• Semiotics for Beginners - by Daniel Chandler
• The Post-Modern Generator
• Structure of Memes
• MemeSpace: Memes are Mind Viruses
• Memetics
• Memetics: Self-Replicants or Mysticism?
• How Can We Die if We're Not Alive?
• The Church of Virus
• Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology - by J.M. Balkin. Cultural Software explains ideology as a result of the cultural evolution of bits of cultural knowhow, or memes. It is the first book to apply theories of cultural evolution to the problem of ideology and justice.
  

• Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West - by Susan Buck-Morss
• Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations - by Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner
• Panic Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to the Postmodern Scene - by Arthur Kroker, Marilouise Kroker, and David Cook
• Telos Quarterly Journal and New German Critique
• Critical Theory book list
• Benjamin, the Televisual and the "Fascistic Subject" - by Allen Meek
• Origin of Negative Dialectics - by Susan Buck-Morss (1977)
• Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West - by Susan Buck-Morss (Cambridge: MIT, 2000. 432p, $45.00, hardcover. ISBN: 026202464)
• Reclaiming the Fragments: On the Messianic Materialism of Walter Benjamin (part 1 of 2) - by Stephen Bronner
• Reclaiming the Fragments: On the Messianic Materialism of Walter Benjamin (part 2 of 2) - by Stephen Bronner
• The "Third Generation" of the Frankfurt School - by Joel Anderson (Washington University in St. Louis appearing in Intellectual History Newsletter 22 - 2000; see also the Selected Writings of the Third Generation)
• In Defense of Insanity
• Hashish in Berlin: An Introduction to Walter Benjamin's Uncompleted Work On Hashish
• Walter Benjamin, Surrealism and Photography - by Rajeev S. Patke (National University of Singapore)
• Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations - by Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner
• Critical Links
• Panic Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to the Postmodern Scene - by Arthur Kroker, Marilouise Kroker, David Cook
• Beyond Psychoanalysis - by Lyn Marcus (from The Campaigner; Volume 7, Number 1, November 1973)
• Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario
• Major Social Theorists
• The Returns of Alienation - by Erick Heroux
• Historicizing the Spontaneous Revolution: Anarchism and the Spatial Politics of Postmodernism - by Nicholas Spencer
• The Past and the Gift of the Theory (of Debord) - by Anselm Jappe