This brilliant group biography asks who were the Frankfurt School and why they matter today
Stuart Jeffries worked for the Guardian for twenty years and has written for many media outlets including the Financial Times and Psychologies. He is based in London.
A towering work of staggering scholarship.
*Irish Times*
Stuart Jeffries has produced a compelling and politically pressing
group portrait of the philosophers associated with the Frankfurt
School. Their thinking has never seemed less forbidding and more
inspiring.
*Matthew Beaumont, author of Nightwalking*
This seemingly daunting book turned out to be an exhilarating
page-turner. Grand Hotel Abyss is an outstanding critical
introduction to some of the most fertile, and still relevant,
thinkers of the 20th century.
*The Washington Post*
Jeffries moves swiftly across the decades, retracing the jagged
paths from the official founding of the Institute for Social
Research in Frankfurt in June 1924, through its years in exile in
New York in the '30s and Los Angeles in the '40s and its hasty
return to Frankfurt in the early postwar years, up to the work of
Horkheimer and Adorno's prized protégé Jürgen Habermas and the
Institute's legacy today.
*Bookforum*
Intriguing and provocative...Jeffries has done a great service in
producing such a readable, wry and detailed introduction.
*The Scotsman*
A fractious Europe, a failing currency, a challenged economy,
populist parties on the rise, a divided left, migration from the
east, an atmosphere of fear combined with social and sexual
liberalism. The parallels between Britain today and Germany in the
1920s may well make this a compelling moment to revisit those
postwar German thinkers who gathered in what was known as the
Frankfurt school for social research - something akin to a Marxist
thinktank, though one whose policy papers and brilliant books fed
future generations as much or more than their own...Little wonder,
given the history of the 20th century, that the Frankfurt school
gave us intellectual pessimism and negative dialectics. Jeffries's
biography is proof that such a legacy can be invigorating.
*Observer*
[Gives] a step by step insight into what they thought . A lot of
that stuff they wrote about still applies.
*Guardian*
Throughout the book, Jeffries demonstrates that he is comfortable
and conversant with the often thorny philosophical ideas of his
subjects. A rich, intellectually meaty history.
*Kirkus*
An impressive work of popular intellectual history.
*Open Letters Monthly*
Equally sympathetic and critical, this book is sure to gain an
enthusiastic reception from academics, armchair philosophers, and
fellow travelers.
*Library Journal*
There is much to provoke interest and thought, even entertain, in
Jeffries' informative account of a group of highly intelligent
observers and analysts of the imprisonment of humanity, both
socially and individually by the corrosive system under which it
suffers.
*Morning Star*
Attempts something rather daring ... An easily accessible, funny
history of one of the more formidable intellectual movements of the
20th century ... an easy, witty, pacy read
*Guardian*
Stuart Jeffries's intelligent, accessible new book reminds us of
the value of critical thinking.
*The Globe and Mail*
Marvellously entertaining, exciting and informative
*Guardian [Books of the Year]*
A valuable introduction to the lives and ideas of an influential
group of 20th century philosophers. I recommend it to anyone who
wants to understand why much of what passed for radical thought in
academia in the late 20th century was so obscure and
depressing.
*Climate & Capitalism*
Capacious, absorbing, and timely.
*Hedgehog Review*
An engaging and accessible history of the lives and main ideas of
the leading thinkers of the Frankfurt School.
*New York Review of Books*
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