Nostalgia as critique

Peter V. Zima

Chapter 35 in Research Handbook on Critical Theory, 2026, pp 403-415 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter is an attempt to locate critical theory of the Frankfurt School between late modernity and postmodernity by relating its criticism of late capitalism to the crisis of liberal individualism and its culture. Although critical theory sets out from some Marxist premises in the early phases of its development (i.e. in the 1930s), it changes radically its orientation after the Second World War and, instead of pursuing Marxist goals, turns to liberal individualism, whose values – for example, individual subjectivity – seem threatened by both monopoly capitalism and Stalinism. First of all, some affinities between early German sociology (Tönnies, Simmel, M. Weber) are discussed in relation to the decline of individualism. Then I will explore how the understanding of art as critique and emancipation, as found in Adorno and Horkheimer, is lost in Lyotard, Baudrillard and Bauman, who view art as destruction and commerce. In the following sections, it is shown to what extent liberal and individualist values defended with a certain nostalgia by Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse are also disavowed by Bauman, Baudrillard and Lyotard. These postmodern thinkers can no longer believe that individual subjectivity can resist the pressures of global capitalism. At the same time, they abandon Marcuse's idea of a second dimension, which could be defined as a search for qualitative values that lie outside the world of profit. According to Baudrillard, the exchange value is omnipresent so that a second dimension is obliterated. Bauman completes this postmodern view of society by arguing that “there is no alternative” to the present order, and Lyotard negates Habermas's liberal ideal of intersubjective communication by emphasising the incommensurability of language games and the impossibility of consensus among them.

Keywords: Postmodernity; Late Modernity; Marxism; Critical Theory; Liberalism; Individualism; Second Dimension; Nostalgia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781800373754
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