Martin Jay applies lessons he has learned from a long and distinguished career as a European intellectual historian to a wide range of current issues in politics and culture. Theoretically informed but accessibly written, these essays tackle a number of timely and controversial issues: Trump’s debts to the Left, the rise of conspiracy theories, the lack of empathy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the declining interest in the concept of alienation, the role of lying in politics, the challenges faced by Black artists, the dubious idea of the judgment of history, the demonization of social abstractions, the effect of contrasting an active notion of “the people” to a passive one of “the population,” and the implications of a “unified executive theory.” Among the theorists whose legacies are examined are Jürgen Habermas, Zygmunt Baumann, and Alfred Sohn-Rethel.
Price: $90.00
Pages: 320
Publisher: Ibidem Press
Imprint: Ibidem Press
Publication Date:
October 6, 2026
Trim Size: 8.27 X 5.83 in
ISBN: 9783838221304
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
POLITICAL SCIENCE / General, Politics and government, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Cultural & Ethnic Studies / General, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Communication
Martin Jay is a distinguished American intellectual historian and the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for over four decades after receiving his PhD from Harvard in 1971. Renowned for his seminal 1973 work The Dialectical Imagination, a foundational history of the Frankfurt School, he has explored critical theory, social theory, visual culture, and modern European intellectual history through influential books such as Downcast Eyes and Songs of Experience. His scholarship has profoundly shaped the understanding of critical theory and cultural criticism across generations.
