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Critical Theory In Revolt: Angela Davis, Rudi Dutschke, Hans-Jürgen Krahl And The Frankfurt School, 1964-1972, Cecilia Sebastian

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation charts an alternative history of Frankfurt School Critical Theory through its critical reception and appropriation by students involved in anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist social movements in the United States and West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. There, many student readers of the tradition, including those named in the title, found opportunities to refine and critique their mentors’ ideas about capitalism and the state, racism and fascism, technology and mass culture, and the nexus of theory and praxis. They resisted the domestication of Critical Theory into the purely academic discourse of philosophy, sociology, and political theory, and instead …