Negativity and Democracy

Vasilis Grollios teaches under contract at the Greek Open university.

‘ … it (the book) definitely deserves our attention as it provides a perspective on all of the key figures of the first generation of the Frankfurt school, from an entirely different angle from that of the well know classical studies of Martin Jay and David Held, with which the book can be compared.’ — Evangelos Liotzis, Capital and Class'How do we get out of here? We know that capitalism is a catastrophe for humanity, but we seem to be trapped. All our struggles seem to lead us back to the same starting point: the reproduction, in one way or another, of the logic of capital, the logic of death and destruction. We desperately need to break the grammar of capital, the conceptual and organisational framework that leads us round and round in circles. That is why Vasilis Grolios’s book is so important. It is not just an excellent development of an intellectual tradition: it confronts us with the need to break deadening, death-bringing mainstream theory. Read it.' — John Holloway, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla‘I would highly recommend this book both to professional academics and students of political and social philosophy, sociology and political science, and to everyone non-academic who would like to develop a critical perspective of modern societies and their various and enduring pathologies.’ — Yiorgos Moraitis, Critical Sociology‘Vasilis Grollios has written a timely and courageous book. His book is timely because, as Werner Bonefeld points out in his Foreword, ‘conventional democratic processes have been rocked by populist assertions about making this or that political economy great and strong’. His book is courageous because, as its subtitle indicates, it explores not merely specific formulations by a given theorist but Marxism and the ‘critical theory tradition’ as a whole.’ — Richard Gunn, Journal of Classical Sociology‘… without question a work of important scholarship, in particular, his strong chapters on Adorno and Horkheimer as well as Marx demonstrate a powerful mind at work.’— Michael J. Thompson, Socialism and Democracy

• ContentsForewordWerner BonefeldAcknowledgementsIntroductionChapter 1: Marx and Engels’s Critique of Democracy:The Materialist Character of their Concept of AutonomyChapter 2: Dialectics and the Transition to Socialism in Late F. Engels’s Philosophy of History: Freeing Marx from the ‘Withering Away of the State’ theoryChapter 3: Max Horkheimer’s Dialectics Rehabilitated: How Horkheimer’s ‘Open Marxism’ Cracks CapitalismChapter 4: Dialectics and Democracy in Georg Lukacs’ MarxismChapter 5: False Social Totality and the Ineffable Integrity in T. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics: The Critical Theorist and the Challenges of the 21st CenturyChapter 6: Determinate Negation of the One-dimensional Society: How Herbert Marcuse’s Great Refusal Cracks CapitalismChapter 7: Finding Hope in the Nihilism of Bourgeois Life. Ernst Bloch’s Open Marxism ReconsideredChapter 8: The Descendants of Negative Dialectics. Dialectics and Democracy in Open Marxism