Critical Theory and Frankfurt Theorists: Correspondence, Speeches, and Origins Book

This fourth and final collection of Lowenthal's writings rounds out our understanding of his intellectual history. It begins with his essays on Jewish intellectuals in Germany from the late eighteenth century to the Weimar period. It continues through 1926, when he became one of the earliest members of the founding generation of Critical Theory at the University of Frankfurt.

The core of this volume is its presentation of Lowenthal's sixty-year-long intellectual career as a critical theorist and sociologist. The book includes some of his speeches on Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin and presents excerpts from conversations on various aspects of his life as a scholar and teacher, as managing editor of the Institute's famous journal, as government servant during and immediately after the war, and as observer and critic of the contemporary cultural and political scene. Together these selections present an intriguing biographical panorama of a major intellectual figure of this century as he nears his ninetieth birthday. Though the volume is largely retrospective, Lowenthal also deals provocatively-with contemporary issues in post-Nazi Germany.

As Robert N. Wilson observed in a review of the second volume in the Communication in Society series, "Lowenthars long career in the United States is a sterling example of the benefits the American academic community derived from the murderous idiocy of Nazi Germany, since he was one of the most prominent among the emigre intellectuals of the 1930s.... C. Wright Mills defined the task of the sociologist as lying at the intersection of biography and history. This is the precise location of Lowenthal's scrutiny."