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There are at least five obstacles to the viability of ideology critique as a method of analysis in current conditions: (1) there is no ideology-free, God's-eye view through which the critical theorist can analyze other ideologies; (2) few people really believe in explicit ideological justifications for exploitation and domination today, a widespread skepticism that could annul the warrant for ideology critique; (3) conspiracy theories and identity politics have superseded more universalistic and structural forms of critique, which, due to their real and superficial similarities with ideology critique, represent troublesome competitors; (4) ecological degradation is undermining the possibility of the free future that ideology critique implicitly anticipates; and (5) due to the decline of radical labor movements and near-absolute control of consciousness by the culture industry, the audience for ideology critique is so small and distracted that thoughtful, written analyses of ideology may be pointless. Despite these obstacles, I defend ideology critique as a viable and beneficial method. Barrier (5) is the only obstacle that I think has the potential to deliver a death blow to ideology critique in the foreseeable future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a gap between concern about environmental degradation such as climate change and effective action taken against the forces that drive degradation. This paper argues that real helplessness, a social condition producing powerless, stupefied, and repressed actors, is a fortified barrier between climate concern and effective climate action. Political‐economic analysis has theoretical and methodological implications for environmental social science and helps explain a current conundrum in critical sociology: Why are alternatives to a system that drives climate change and other catastrophic risks still seen as unrealistic? We suffer from a political‐economic system impervious to transformation before we suffer from a lack of alternative ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project clarifies the notoriously ambiguous concept of reification through analytical descriptions of reificatory modes of experience in social context. The experience of social constructions as fixed and unchangeable ("subjective reification") is manifest in four interrelated experiential modes: (1) doxa, taking the social world for granted; (2) identification, experiencing abstractions as realer than particular objects; (3) enframing, the experience of means (technology and economic production) as ends and ends (humanity and life) as means; and (4) detachment, experience after suspending genuine emotional engagement. Each experiential mode is rooted in historically contingent yet objective social conditions ("objective reification") and, thus, has a degree of validity – hence the power of reification, in comparison to legitimation, in social reproduction. Methodologically, the difficult path remains theorizing society as a totality without losing sight of its human formation with due attention to the everyday actors who reproduce and, every so often, challenge this totality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Frankfurt School formulated a negative dialectics that keeps open the possibility for alternative social futures by explaining and diagnosing the non-existence of 'real possibilities' to actualize a better world. Ernst Bloch's category of 'mere possibility' makes a 'warmer' negative dialectics viable, a form that faces a grim reality head on yet loosens the prohibition against identifying pathways toward alternative social futures latent in social conditions, possibilities with the potentiality (the objective-external dimension of possibility), but lack the capacity (the subjective-internal dimension of possibility), to become actual. This allows negative dialectics to engage in relatively programmatic 'prospect-exploration' when tackling dire issues like climate change, even if the proposed solutions are deficient. Identifying merely possible climate change solutions skirts three problematic tendencies in prescriptive assessments of climate politics: (1) promoting the continuation of ineffective mitigation strategies (e.g., carbon markets), (2) calling for a revolution without a revolutionary subject, and (3) fatalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why have societies failed to effectively respond to climate change? We address the question of climate change inaction by (1) examining how an unambiguously ominous report about climate change (IPCC 2018) was made palatable by news media and (2) explaining why climate change is typically unthematized in everyday life. Drawing on Adorno and Schutz, we develop a political‐economic theory of relevance. The imperative to accumulate capital is not only a social‐structural reality but also shapes why particular facts are regarded as relevant in experience (topical relevance) as well as how relevant material is interpreted (interpretative relevance) and acted toward (motivational relevance). Applying this framework, we (1) argue that media popularizations of the IPCC's dire Global Warming of 1.5°C (2018) are constituted by relevance systems conditioned by a capitalist social context and (2) strengthen Ollinaho's (2016) Schutzian explanation for climate change inaction by examining how productive relations and the culture industry perpetuate climate change irrelevance in everyday life. Schutz's framework helps conceptualize the intricacies of ideology and, when revised with Adorno's sociology, shines new light on an old question: the relations between social conditions and knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Degrowth—the reduction of energy and material throughput via shrinking total economic production and consumption in a socially sustainable way—would entail fewer working hours. However, work time reduction is not a sufficient condition for lower throughput because people may engage in environmentally harmful activities during expanded leisure. The purpose of this paper is to revisit the pessimistic and critical traditions to explicate unconventional utopian images of inactivity as a valuable feature of a better society. Pessimism makes a case for renouncing dissatisfaction-causing desires, an ethic that takes on a collective and futuristic form in Eduard von Hartmann and Emil Cioran. In the critical tradition, an indirect foundation of degrowth thinking, the central goal of the abolition of alienated labor is elevated to utopian heights in Theodor W. Adorno's brief portrayal of peace as humanity reconciled with nature in rest. These forecasts and hopes help envision what aspects of leisure may look like in post-growth society. For example, work time reduction policies should be paired with consumption-curbing policies, especially advertising limits. I warn against recuperation via "minimalist" commodities. Readers interested in degrowth and sustainability will benefit from contributions to discussions surrounding work time reduction, sustainable consumption, and post-growth imaginaries. Highlights • Work time reduction is not a sufficient condition for degrowth. • Increased inactivity is an underexplored form of low-impact leisure. • Pessimism and critical theory help visualize an idler society. • The argument is formulated as resignation from desire in the pessimistic tradition. • Critical theory envisions reconciliation, perpetual peace in a post-work society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The menace of pessimism in early critical theory is often criticized for being antithetical to Marxism’s emancipatory vision and/or implicitly conservative, a position memorably illustrated in Lukács’ appraisal of Adorno as a resident of Schopenhauer’s “Grand Hotel Abyss,” where one enjoys a nihilistically detached yet aesthetically pleasurable stay without mounting any real challenges to the miseries of the real world. This stance, reworked in numerous assessments of the first-generation Frankfurt School, presupposes that radicalism and pessimism are antagonistic positions. By rethinking early critical theory in light of discussions of “nonideal” alternatives to the ideal theories of liberal egalitarian thinkers, I argue that the Frankfurt School salvaged the prospects of emancipation precisely due to their view from the “Grand Hotel Abyss.” Through their gloomy reply to Marx in nonideal conditions, the Frankfurt School’s negative views paradoxically preserved the possibility for historical alternatives and serve two functions for social theory today: (1) to help bring the causes of injustice to consciousness and (2) to preserve a messianic hope. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Well before the now flourishing field of animal studies, the thinkers associated with Frankfurt, Germany’s Institute of Social Research theorized and problematized society’s troubling relationship with animals. Early critical theory explored the various manifestations of “unrelenting exploitation” animals have experienced in human societies and maintained that the domination of animals is intimately linked to the domination of human beings, especially of women and racial and ethnic minorities. They criticized Western thought for instrumentalist attitudes toward animals and were committed to extending compassion to animals. Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse mount four challenges to sociologists today: (1) to unmask the shared forms of domination experienced by both animals and marginalized human beings, (2) for environmental sociologists to make animals a principle subject of investigation, (3) for sociological animal studies scholars to engage with philosophy, and (4) to adopt a critical and normative sociological perspective when studying human–animal relations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]