No comments about Helen Macfarlane: A Feminist, Revolutionary Journalist, and Philosopher in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (Raya Dunayevskaya Series in Marxism and Humanism).

No comments about On Arendt (Wadsworth Philosophers Series).

No comments about On Augustine (Wadsworth Philosophers Series).

No comments about Collected Papers of Stig Kanger with Essays on his Life and Work Volume I (Synthese Library).

1 comments about Jose Bergamin: A Critical Introduction, 1920-1936 (University of Toronto Romance Series).

1. This is still the major study of Bergamin's pre-war work and I doubt if it will ver be surpassed. The author demonstrates a phenomenally wide knowledge of the period as well as great critical insight in the different texts studied. Don't miss it! Even if you have to wait to have your order filled.

No comments about C.L.R. James: A Life.

No comments about Hilary Putnam (Philosophy Now).

2 comments about Adorno: A Political Biography.

1. Although an authoritative intellectual biography of Adorno is needed, this book doesn't fill the gap. Despite the sub-title, the author ranges freely across Adorno's work in philosophy, sociology, aesthetics, music and literature, and just over two hundred pages (of main text) is not enough space to deal adequately with the material, let alone with the additional portraits of associates such as Horkheimer and Kracauer. Some of Adorno's major works, such as Negative Dialectics, receive cursory treatment, and either the author, or possibly the translator, is not comfortable with technical philosophical arguments. Some discussions of Heidegger's views, for example, are nonsensical.
   
   This has the appearance of a hasty piece of work, and as one reads on, the impression grows that the author has little respect for his subject. As a person and thinker, Adorno was surely flawed, but his story deserves a more balanced, detailed and informed recounting.



2. Jaeger's book ends with the claim that "by the time that Adorno died in August 1969, the normative potential of his theory was already exhausted," and that "the abstractions of exchange and money [had become] the ideology of a world without symbols, of a universality without culture." There is no recognition that this would imply the continuing 'normative potential' of Adorno's thought. This book is littered with similar mis-steps. Jaeger attacks Adorno's use of psychoanalysis as a critical tool, hut he himself traces Adorno's theory of the relationship between language and music to "an overwhelming sense of gratitude to his mother's voice." How could anyone write a biography on Adorno which fails to reflect on itself to this degree?
   Internal inconsistencies aside, there are problems of content. For no apparent reason, Jaeger stages Adorno's thinking as a clash between Athens and Jerusalem (although the entirely gratuitous mention of Leo Strauss might hint at an esoteric reading of the present book). Jaeger returns again and again to Jewishness, but always other peoples' Jewishness: Horkheimer, Celan... why all this in a book on Adorno? Well, Jaeger has a clear dislike for him. So Adorno - not Jewish enough, too anti-capitalist, too utopian - is often absent. This dislike is in turn understandable, since he is clearly incapable of understanding Adorno's ideas: see, for instance, the section on Heidegger and 'The Jargon of Authenticity'; or Jaeger's 'interpretation' of the Frankfurt School's sociology as a vision of society as "a kind of tabula rasa: people in it live without traditions, without religion, without nations and without a state." Bizarrely, two pages are given over to Ralf Dahrendorf's complaints about the Institute for Social Research, before we learn that Dahrendorf spent barely a month there.
   "Today's reader [of Minima Morali] may be struck not only by the lack of genuine observations on America but may gain only an inadequate idea of the author's empirical existence [sic]: but if Adorno had been identical with the 'implied author' he would no doubt have been prevented from writing the book by sheer unhappiness."
   Like the above sentence, this book is grammatically flawed, rhetorically atrocious (what exactly is a 'genuine observation'? Is it to be distinguished from an ungenuine one?), and showcases a total lack of understanding of its subject. Finally, it is self-absorbed. Jaeger's apparent desire to justify post-modern capitalism crushes any possibility of objective judgement.
   For all that, if read as a collection of portraits (of, amongst others, Kracauer, Horkheimer, Mann and Fromm) it's a nice way to pass a winter afternoon. But don't pay full price.

No comments about A Fated Philosopher.

1 comments about The Quotable Bertrand Russell.

1. Anti-catholic, pro-jewish, and maybe the most important brain of our corrupt, insane, and bygone 20th century, Russell speaks for a generation that is starting to realize certain inviolable truths vital to the continuation of mankind. Doomed as we are, cynical as I am, and one-hundred per cent correct Russell is when stating human nature is actually corrigible. For when this aspect is fixed, and humans will no longer emulate quasi-virus patterns and replicate wars over and over, only then can Russell be judged as right or wrong regarding the fate of man. What is peace? What is war? What is knowledge? I consider Russell the king of intellectual snobs.