Against Orthodoxy

Stanley Aronowitz is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Urban education at the City University of New York Graduate Center, USA. His classic study of the US working class, False Promises is still in print forty-two years after it was first published and he has written over 19 books during his career. He is also a veteran political activist and cultural critic, an advocate for organized labor and a member of the interim consultative committee of the International Organization for a Participatory Society.

"Stanley Aronowitz is a national treasure and he proves it once again with Against Orthodoxy. Every page bristles with brilliance as he weaves his way through the work of some of the intellectual giants of social theory. Not only does this book provide a witness to public memory, it also ties together different strands of social theory while providing a historical and relational context for understanding the writers and theories under discussion. This book is invaluable for both academics and the wider public; a gift to theory and why it matters a gift to all of us struggling for a better and more just world." - Henry Giroux, McMaster University, Canada, Author of The Violence of Organized Forgetting

• 1. The Unknown Herbert Marcuse 2. Between Criticism and Ethnography: Raymond Williams and the Invention of Cultural Studies 3. A Critique of Methodological Reason 4. George Lukacs's Destruction of Reason 5. Henri Lefebvre: The ignored Philosopher and Social Theorist 6. Gramsci's Theory of Political Organization 7. Max Horkheimer's Critical Theory 8. Paulo Freire's Radical Democratic Humanism 9. Herbert Marcuse's Concept of Eros 10. Marx, Braverman and the Logic of Capital