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Some research was conducted on the conditions that gave rise to the authoritarian personalities at the root of fascism in the 20th century that is the age of wars and mass deaths. One of these is the large-scale research conducted in 1950, known as Authoritarian Personality. Theodor W. Adorno, one of the theorists of the Frankfurt School, is among the thinkers who contributed to this study. Adorno's contribution to the research was published as "The Authoritarian Personality" and was used in critical studies. In this study, Adorno researched what the authoritarian personality is, which he sees among the causes of antisemitism and fascism, and what conditions are effective in the formation of this personality. This article, based on Adorno's work, problematizes authoritarian personality representations in cinema. Authoritarian personality elements were searched and analyzed in the films using sociological criticism, psychoanalytic criticism and ideological criticism in the study. The films named Painted Bird (Nabarvené ptáče, 2019) and The Wave (Die Welle, 2008), which were determined as samples in the study, were analyzed in line with these theoretical discussions. It was concluded that all authoritarian personality traits are represented in both films. The fact that the same result is observed in two different films, set in different countries and depicting events in different social structures, shows that authoritarian personality traits can emerge and turn into a danger when they find a suitable environment. Cinema films that contain the sociological situations of societies also successfully reflect this situation. The events, situations and characters represented in the two films selected as samples also confirm these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a review of Richard Bourke's book, "Hegel's World Revolutions," which focuses on Hegel's political thought and historical method. The book is divided into three parts and covers various topics related to Hegel's engagement with Christianity, his critique of the Roman world and the French Revolution, and his analysis of the modern constitutional state. The reviewer notes that while Bourke's exposition is comprehensive, it lacks critical engagement with the secondary literature. The article also discusses the relationship between Kant's philosophical ideas and the events of the French Revolution, as well as questions about Hegel's interpretation of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason." The text explores the decline of Hegel's reputation after World War II, attributing it to criticisms from philosophers like Heidegger and the Frankfurt School. However, the author argues that Hegel's influence remained strong in France and Germany, and that the criticisms did not diminish the significance of his political ideas. The text also examines Adorno's criticism of Hegel and Bourke's examination of the historical turn in political thought since 1960. Bourke criticizes the Cambridge School for moving away from contextualist analysis and towards historically based moralism, as well as the denigration of Kant's contribution in the realist turn of political philosophy. While Bourke does not fully develop his own methodology for the history of political thought, he emphasizes the importance of understanding political structures as products of earlier forces without conflating past circumstances with the present [Extracted from the article]

Adorno’s conception of ideology was denounced by Habermas as incompatible with a viable form of social critique. By conflating ideology and the ‘identity principle’ inherent to modern Western reason, he argues, Adorno offered an overly negative characterisation of modernity and failed to recognise its rational potential. This paper questions this line of criticism by revisiting Adorno’s position. While he does sometimes associate ideology with identity-thinking, this association does not exhaust his views on the subject. For Adorno, ideology is just as much a matter of Identität as a matter of Schein, or illusion, and its practical effects. Moreover, he views ideology as an intrinsically dynamic concept, whose definition has changed throughout human history. Drawing on his late sociological writings, I distinguish three major stages in the development of the concept of ideology, namely (a) ideology as simple illusion, a definition associated with the Enlightenment and expanded by the so-called sociology of knowledge; (b) ideology as necessary illusion, invoked by Marx to capture the structural logic of capitalism; and (c) ideology as disillusionment, related to the positivism of late capitalist society. Finally, I reflect on what this survey reveals about the relationship between illusion and identity in Adorno’s theory of ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the dialectical relationship between myth and utopia, fantasy and reason. The text presents 'interpretive keys' that enable historical consciousness to interpret the past and critically decipher glimpses of utopia in the traces of the present. The presented theoretical models are primarily those of the Frankfurt School philosophers Benjamin and Adomo, who base their positions on Hegel’s philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this article I take a closer look at Adorno's methodology, and specifically the question of how – in Adorno's view – philosophy ought to be done. In this, my aim is to see whether there might be ‘quietist’ elements in his methodological account, i.e. the meta‐philosophical position of quietism as it stands against (scientific) naturalism in recent discussions. Recent work on Adorno and classical critical theory has discussed numerous similarities and overlaps with the post‐analytical work of, e.g., John McDowell and Michael Thompson. Building on this recent work, my article suggests further points of contact, by focusing on the interplay of question and answer present in both McDowell and Adorno. To do this, I first outline McDowell's version of quietism. From there, an interpretation of Adorno can proceed along the lines developed with McDowell, centering the idea of unanswerable philosophical questions that need to be treated instead of answered straightforwardly. I demonstrate the relation he draws from disappearance of questions to ‘praxis’ and suggest how this differs from McDowell yet might still be viewed as an account related to quietism. I conclude by suggesting taking up Adorno's term ‘immanent criticism’ as a methodological concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Adorno's thought for business ethicists working in the critical tradition by showing how his critique of modern social life anticipated, and offers continuing illumination of, recent technological transformations of capitalism. It develops and extrapolates Adorno's thought regarding three central spheres of modern society, which have seen radical changes in light of recent technological developments: work, in which employee monitoring has become ever more sophisticated and intrusive; leisure consumption, in which the algorithmic developments of the culture industry have paved the way for entertainment products to dominate us; and political discourse, in which social media has exacerbated the anti-democratic tendencies Adorno warned of in the mid-twentieth century. We conclude by presenting, as a rejoinder to these developments, the contours of an Adornian ethics of resistance to the reification and dehumanisation of such developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text focuses on the legacy of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their contemporary times. The initial point is Adorno - Horkheimer's ideas regarding the critique of change in the social space. These changes are caused by a whole range of factors - the separation from nature, technological progress and the associated increase of consumerism, the dumbing down of society due to movies or cartoons etc. These changes bring phenomena that can be called morbid symptoms. These symptoms are an integral part to the interregnum. Morbid symptoms described by Adorno and Horkheimer are identical to those manifested nowadays. These symptoms are presented by the Czech philosopher Michael Hauser. The pivotal aim of the text is to point out the connection between the ideas of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer whose legacy is still alive in the social space, and the contemporary interregnum presented by Michael Hauser. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the figure of pedagogical tact in its cultural and social entanglements and transformations. Tact is reconstructed from a dialectical-relational perspective as a utopian figure which arises both within pedagogical relationships and from the relationships to the respective cultural and social conditions – more precisely: from a criticism of them. In this dialectical tension, it is argued that relationships are both transformative and, in turn, require transformations in order to enable tactful pedagogical action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, reflection on pedagogical tact has made a comeback in the international debate. Tact is a fundamental disposition of the educator, albeit one that is scarcely addressed in the training of teachers and educators. The question is whether it is possible to treat this pedagogical propensity as a teachable habit, and to what extent. Here we propose that tact can be understood as a teachable frame of mind of the educator by analysing tactlessness. In other words, in order to become a tactful teacher, one has to pass through situations in which tact is not enacted, because the absence of tact – as Adorno proposes in his dialectical-negative perspective – becomes a condition for soliciting doubts about one's educational action, metareflexive rethinking and finally tactful responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"I am extremely interested in the new upheavals taking place in music - I was completely isolated from all this in Hungary"2, Ligeti wrote to Wolfgang Steinecke, then director of the Darmstadt Summer Course for New Music, in spring 1957. In the summer of the same year, he attended his first seminars and lectures at this internationally renowned forum - and just a few years later, he took on the same place an important role as a lecturer and source of inspiration. Despite this and many other clear indications of Ligeti's central role in new music since 1950, the references to other important European composers of the 20th/21st century are sometimes downplayed in Musicology, to simultaneously emphasize the conservative aspects of some of his statements about music. But does this help us to understand Ligeti's music? It seems to me that the answer to this question is clearly in the negative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new avant-garde art of the mid-nineteenth century and beyond firmly rejected the old normative aesthetics as inadequate. It effectively addressed the theoretical gap by introducing manifestos and other public creative programs. Suddenly the obsolete aesthetics fell into a deep crisis and was forced to seek - through various new paradigms - a close, immediate contact with avant-garde artistic achievements. On this path of theoretical renewal, it has been moving faster or slower ever since. Aesthetics cannot exist outside the world of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study discusses how People's Music (1950-2019) in relation to the path of Taiwan's pop as a discourse has undergone the 'hostility', 'yellow music', 'spiritual pollution', followed by a 'legitimation'. The paper then identifies the later decline in importance for social critique and the move towards a 'media & culture' discourse after 2001. The paper argues that this has involved the binary structure of a feeling of sacred-profane construction, and negotiates its role as a propaganda institute in the dominant discourse of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It reveals the governmentality of the CCP towards foreign cultures. This article problematized the musical discourse of People's Music as a sociological discourse, in the hope of expanding the direction of cultural sociology. This paper finds that Taiwanese pop has transitioned from the sacred-profane to an acceptable form of media culture, and that its legitimacy has contributed to its gradual absence from People's Music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to address a significant far-right political phenomenon that is emerging in Brazilian society, particularly in the sphere of basic education, stirring up controversy in school communities and in the field of education research. We noticed that the outcome of the drafting of the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC), published in 2018, took place at the dawn of the political and educational experience that we are now discussing. Against this backdrop, we analyzed the context in which the document was implemented. We are looking precisely at whether the BNCC document is based on a perspective that is considered emancipatory, within the conceptual framework offered by Theodor Adorno's (1995) critical theory, due to his concern with the theme of emancipation in the educational sphere. In conclusion, we emphasize that the emerging social forces of neoliberalism and Brazilian-style fascism have guided the production - and not the determination - of the pedagogical guidelines that currently prescribe what should be taught in the teaching profession in the country's public and private schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I assess some recent critical realist constructive criticisms of Theodor Adorno, one of the leading thinkers of the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory. I argue that while there are similarities between Adorno's treatment of causality and the critical realist notion of powers, these connections should not be taken to imply that Adorno's conception of critique requires a critical realist powers ontology. I show that Bhaskar's transcendental realism is at odds with the basic commitments of Adorno's historical materialism. I go on to clarify such materialism and show that to Adorno, capital is the historical compulsion characteristic of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Text se zaměřuje na odkaz Theodora Adorna-Horkheima v současné době. Výchozím bodem jsou myšlenky Adorna-Horkheima týkající se kritiky proměn ve společenském prostoru. Tyto změny jsou způsobeny celou řadou faktorů – odloučením od přírody, technologickým pokrokem a s ním spojeným rostoucím konzumem, otupělostí společnosti díky filmu či karikaturám atd. Tyto změny přinášejí jevy, které lze nazvat morbidními symptomy. Tyto symptomy jsou nedílnou součástí interregna. Morbidní symptomy, které popisuje Adorno a Horkheimer, jsou totožné s těmi, které se projevují dnes. Symptomy interregna prezentuje rovněž český filozof Michael Hauser. Stěžejním cílem textu je poukázat na propojení myšlenek Theodora Adorna a Maxe Horkheimera, jejichž odkaz je ve společenském prostoru stále živý, se současným interregnem prezentovaným Michaelem Hauserem.

Este artigo tem a intenção de abordar um expressivo fenômeno político de extrema-direita que emerge na sociedade brasileira, em particular na esfera da Educação Básica, suscitando controvérsias em comunidades escolares e no campo das pesquisas em Educação. Notamos que o desfecho da elaboração da Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC), publicada em 2018, ocorreu ainda no alvorecer da experiência política e educacional que então colocamos em tela. Diante dessa conjuntura, realizamos uma análise do contexto em que o documento foi implementado. Averiguamos justamente se o documento da BNCC se fundamenta sob uma perspectiva considerada emancipatória, nos contornos do quadro conceitual oferecido pela teoria crítica de Theodor Adorno (1995), em razão da preocupação dele com o tema da emancipação no âmbito educacional. Em conclusão, destacamos que as emergentes forças sociais do neoliberalismo e do fascismo à brasileira balizaram a produção – e não uma determinação – das diretrizes pedagógicas que atualmente prescrevem o que deve ser ensinado no ofício da docência nas escolas públicas e privadas do país.

“I am extremely interested in the new upheavals taking place in music - I was completely isolated from all this in Hungary”, Ligeti wrote to Wolfgang Steinecke, then director of the Darmstadt Summer Course for New Music, in spring 1957. In the summer of the same year, he attended his first seminars and lectures at this internationally renowned forum - and just a few years later, he took on the same place an important role as a lecturer and source of inspiration. Despite this and many other clear indications of Ligeti’s central role in new music since 1950, the references to other important European composers of the 20th/21st century are sometimes downplayed in Musicology, to simultaneously emphasize the conservative aspects of some of his statements about music. But does this help us to understand Ligeti’s music? It seems to me that the answer to this question is clearly in the negative.

Resumo: Nas “Conferências introdutórias à psicanálise” (1916-1917), Freud argumenta pela participação fundamental da regressão na etiologia tanto da neurose, quanto da perversão. Em “O fetichismo” ( 1927 ), o autor formula uma nova versão desse conceito, de modo que as características do fetichismo passam a representar a estrutura geral de todas as perversões. Em 1938, Adorno, filósofo e sociólogo da Escola de Frankfurt, publica o ensaio “O fetichismo na música e a regressão da audição”, no qual ele aborda ambos os conceitos em uma perspectiva sociológica. Nosso objetivo aqui é analisar comparativamente como os conceitos de fetichismo e regressão são definidos e empregados pelos dois autores, assim como examinar a influência da teoria freudiana sobre Adorno, a partir dos textos mencionados. Esse é um tema muito pouco explorado na literatura da área, de modo que sua discussão pode contribuir para uma melhor compreensão dos conceitos e do impacto de suas diferentes interpretações.

Abstract: This article draws out a critical, yet under-appreciated political theme in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, namely his emphasis on guilt and atonement. First, the article assesses how Adorno’s Marxism allows him to think justice and guilt beyond the familiar legalistic frame. Second, the article reconstructs Adorno’s treatment of guilt as a distinctly political capacity to imagine one’s boundedness and indebtedness to others, and the affective engine enabling us to engage in a political ethic distinct from familiar categories of reparation. Third, the article shows how the themes of guilt and atonement give us a more complete picture of Negative Dialectics. This inquiry also intervenes in contemporary debates regarding the political status and emancipatory potential latent within guilt-feelings, and claims Adorno gives us a path forward to imagine the relation between guilt and politics in a novel way.

This article aspires to show that duende belongs to the sphere of action, rather than solely to that of aesthetics. I depart from Lorca's concept and demonstrate that it dialectically unifies the acts of creation, performance, and reception, and therefore it transforms the aesthetic object to a deed immersed in life and history. Viewed as such, duende affects the way in which the aesthetic field enters the broader system of social institutions, while modifying the paradigm of art as sovereign, championed by the Avant-garde at the beginning of the twentieth century. Drawing on the epistemological debates around imagination, this article posits that duende's aptitude of continuously actualizing the work of art resides in the artistic form: the sound of the voice that sings and is heard, the shape of the body that dances and is felt, the plasticity given to and perceived in volumes, colors, words. This is possible because duende's creación en acto bridges the gulf between two fundamentally different qualities of the aesthetic object: representation and performance. The multidimensional nature of duende facilitates passages from one category to the other, thus giving way to a dialogue that is an inexorable part of the aesthetic experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I evaluate Larry Alan Busk's critique of contemporary democratic theorists and contemporary "democratic" politics in Democracy in Spite of the Demos in the context of Carl Schmitt's critique of modern democracy. I argue that Busk shares Schmitt's general conception of democracy and of the dangers attending any appeal to it. Though Busk presents Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno as alternatives to the current crop of democratic theorists, I demonstrate that Marcuse fell prey to the most significant of the paradoxes and ambivalences that Schmitt prognosticated. Adorno, I argue, is less unsteady an ally, but one that stays further back from politics than Busk evidently wishes. In the end, Busk's Schmittian critique of democracy and democratic theory extends further than he himself suggests and reveals, not to a solution to our problems, but a new way of understanding them and their severity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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As Wittgenstein still eludes classification as either an analytic or a poetic philosopher, this article considers his work under the perspective of essayism as a hybrid intellectual attitude that combines elements from both modes of thinking. Drawing on Adorno's and Musil's accounts, I present four characteristics of essayism that can be applied to Wittgenstein's writing: (a) essayism does not claim access to primal knowledge or an absolute starting point of thought, but typically reacts to given ideas; (b) it is systematic insofar as it is concerned with words, things, and events in systemic contexts rather than in isolation; (c) it is anti‐systematic insofar as it neither accepts the given conceptual system nor strives for an ultimate system in which all things are in their place and all problems ultimately solved; (d) it is aware of, and emphasizes, the mediatedness of its objects and warns of any equation of the conceptual ordering with the order of reality. As a consequence, essayism goes beyond a particular text form, but concerns an attitude towards the world that manifests itself in various forms. It thus turns out to be not merely a form of writing but ultimately a form of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers how students, reflecting on a pedagogy combining academic literacies and critical analysis, emphasised the importance of the learning community it promoted. The pedagogy drew on insights from the work of Theodor Adorno. Through qualitative research, the students confirmed their experience of a vibrant, productive learning community. They wholeheartedly accepted the invitation to be a part of the creation of this community, a community they reported ownership of. They felt responsible for each other, gave and received support and encouragement and developed trust; enough trust to push past their comfort zones and certainties and experiment, drawing on their own knowledges and experience. Their view of the pedagogy highlights the significance of relationships as the key to building strong learning communities that enable effective learning. Significantly they argue, the pedagogy itself was instrumental in fostering these relationships and countering repressive liberal ways of being, which idealise decontextualised, value-neutral knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Adorno, the only possibility for understanding history is to relate it to the natural through his idea of natural-history. Agreeing with Whitehead, for Adorno the natural lacks temporal existence and can only be accessed through a temporally affective sense - which can be illuminated through Charles Hartshorne's distinction between existence and actuality - in Adorno's 1932 article Idea of Natural History. Adorno's conception is related to the historical by demonstrating how standard interpretations of history, which can be cast within three broad approaches, are not historical since they fail to acknowledge the significance of 'second nature'. Given that demonstration, it can then be shown how 'all history is natural' by employing Walter Benjamin's notion of a constellation. A return can then be made to Hartshorne's distinction to show how a past event's existence can be related to Benjamin's claims by means of his 'dialectics at a standstill' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue is devoted to highlighting thinkers who have been overlooked within business ethics and who have important contributions to make to our field. We make the case that, as scholars of a hybrid discipline that also aims to address important issues of business practice, we need to look continually for new sources of insight and wisdom that can both enrich our discourse and improve our ability to generate ideas that have a positive impact on business practice. In this introductory essay, we discuss our rationale for creating this special issue, summarize the articles contained within, and close with thoughts on its significance for the field going forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given his view that the modern world is "radically evil," Theodor Adorno is an unlikely contributor to business ethics. Despite this, we argue that his work has a number of provocative implications for the field that warrant wider attention. Adorno regards our social world as damaged, unfree, and false, and we draw on this critique to outline why the achievement of good work is so rare in contemporary society, focusing in particular on the ethical demands of roles and the ideological nature of management's self-understanding. Nevertheless, we show that Adorno's comments on activities such as art and philosophy mean that it is possible to draw on his work in a way that contributes constructively to the conversation about good and meaningful work within business ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a criticism of the narrative self-understanding offered by advocates of Ordinary Aesthetics. Even though the frustration with the philosophy of art (in contrast with philosophical aesthetics) is, in many ways, an overdetermined result, the sense of the ordinary as available through the withdrawal of this art-centred concern is misguided. This article argues that the reported death of art and the seemingly consistent suggestion that “anything goes” do not relieve contemporary philosophy from its being situated precisely in the wake of these practices of sense-making. I claim that Ordinary Aesthetics is dealing in an illusory conceit to the extent that defences of Ordinary Aesthetics are indebted to a demand that aesthetics may be a living field of philosophical inquiry today only if the fate of artworks is deleted from that narrative. Arguing this point requires an account of the idea of the death of art, associated with Hegel but perhaps more recently with Danto, and I sketch how Danto’s account does not cohere with the account provided in Ordinary Aesthetics. But because the claim of Ordinary Aesthetics amounts to a claim about the capacities of human sense-making independent of historical trajectories and a sense of the ordinary as that which is just available to a timeless abstraction of the human sensorium, my criticism of Ordinary Aesthetics requires a deeper defence of the relation of the faltering of narratives of art with the philosophical effort to make sense of ordinary experiences. Doing so requires that I provide alternatives: what I regard as two related though quite different philosophical approaches, namely, Cavell’s Ordinary Language Philosophy (which is startlingly absent from defences of Ordinary Aesthetics) and the program of a philosophical aesthetics elaborated in Adorno.

The article explores Adorno’s understanding of fetishism and melancholy as immanent to the artwork’s autonomous structure. In order to understand the relation between them, the Freudian understanding of fetishism and melancholy has to be considered along with the more explicit reference to the Marxist concept of commodity fetishism. Analysing the implications of Adorno’s claim that commodity fetishism is at the origin of artistic autonomy, the article shows how it should be understood not only as a materialist demystification but also as a reaffirmation of art’s apparent self-sufficiency and its capacity to resist the commodification of society. Nevertheless—the article claims—thas this is only possible if art’s fetishism is dialectically opposed to its melancholy, through which art establishes a relation to the heterogeneous element of the lost object produced by its autonomous form.

Cet essai part d’une lecture de l’essai classique « Vers une Musique Informelle », en se concentrant sur le concept d’« informel » qu’Adorno a utilisé pour penser son utopie musicale. Il s’agira de l’élargir à deux lieux que le philosophe n’a pas su souligner ou anticiper. D’une part, l’improvisation (musicale et au-delà) et, d’autre part, à partir des recherches de Christoph Türcke, une réflexion possible sur la configuration du monde du capital après la mort du philosophe de Francfort.

Adorno's social theory is enjoying renewed attention, as is the debate to what extent is it Marxist. A central issue remains Adorno's concept of social totality: capitalism as a fully integrated society in which every difference is levelled. One problem this raises is why is he still committed to the Marxist concept of class. And second, how to understand his critique of the idea of proletarian class-consciousness, which seems to leave his critical theory without an addressee. The article suggests that, for Adorno, capitalist society exhibits what is termed here "differential integration." It is predicated both on the labor/capital distinction and, at the same time, on sufficient homology between the two, such that the qualitative class divide is experienced as mere quantitative variance. This efficacious gap between social structure and social experience is at the center of his concept of ideology. Ideology-critique for Adorno is mainly the critique of symptomatic misconceptions of how ideology functions, due to lack of attention to how the class structure is in fact not experienced as such. Adorno's alternative to proletarian class consciousness is "differential solidarity": consciousness of social domination that is on the one hand found across class divides yet is experienced differentially between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adorno and Benjamin's common intellectual project has been labeled, by Adorno, an Inverse Theology. This re-translation of theology into it's metaphysical truth contents can be only fully comprehended by taking into account their position towards the work of art. In this article, I locate the place where the categorical framework of "inverse theology" is displayed in a most complete manner in the discussion of Kafka's prose and extrapolate the outline of an Inverse theology from Adorno and Benjamin's readings of some of his most famous texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]