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Human rights are “not a good subject for political philosophy,” because they do not “involve very interesting philosophical problems.” Thirty years ago, that was the judgement of Charles Beitz (a professor at Princeton); he himself mentions this fact in a recent book, on the subject of – well, human rights. [1] He has abandoned his previous assessment, because in the meantime human rights have emerged as the main criterion for evaluating political legitimacy and as the most common idiom of social demands. In political thought, after a long period spent on standby, individual rights is once more an essential philosophical topic. It is significant that Frédéric Worms, in his book La philosophie en France au XXe siècle [Philosophy in France in the Twentieth Century], constructs his last chapter (“Le moment présent”) around two debates, the first of which, arising in the late 1970s, concerned the idea of human rights. Moreover, he emphasizes that this discussion deserves attention because it is not just one theme among others, “but an argument about the very principles of politics, or rather about whether we should treat the issue of human rights as the first principle of politics.” [2] In fact, a good many contemporary controversies come down to asking whether human rights claims are a source of depoliticization, or are vehicles of a revival of democratic ambitions. The Revival of Human Rights The idea of human rights has probably never been “taken as seriously” as it is today – at least, not since the American and French Revolutions. Indeed, the question of when this concept emerged in our political discourse and practice has inspired a rich historiographical debate between those who point to the postwar world and those who refer instead to the late 1970s. [3] In political thought, however, it seems to be accepted that it is only really in the last three or four decades.
1. Biographical Sketch Born on September 11, 1903 as Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund, Adorno lived in Frankfurt am Main for the first three decades of his life and the last two (Müller-Doohm 2005, Claussen 2008). He was the only son of a wealthy German wine merchant of assimilated Jewish background and an accomplished musician of Corsican Catholic descent. Adorno studied philosophy with the neo-Kantian Hans Cornelius and music composition with Alban Berg. He completed his Habilitationsschrift on Kierkegaard's aesthetics in 1931, under the supervision of the Christian socialist Paul Tillich. After just two years as a university instructor (Privatdozent), he was expelled by the Nazis, along with other professors of Jewish heritage or on the political left. A few years later he turned his father's surname into a middle initial and adopted “Adorno,” the maternal surname by which he is best known. Adorno left Germany in the spring of 1934. During the Nazi era he resided in Oxford, New York City, and southern California. There he wrote several books for which he later became famous, including Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Max Horkheimer), Philosophy of New Music, The Authoritarian Personality (a collaborative project), and Minima Moralia. From these years come his provocative critiques of mass culture and the culture industry. Returning to Frankfurt in 1949 to take up a position in the philosophy department, Adorno quickly established himself as a leading German intellectual and a central figure in the Institute of Social Research. Founded as a free-standing center for Marxist scholarship in 1923, the Institute had been led by Max Horkheimer since 1930. It provided the hub to what has come to be known as the Frankfurt School. Adorno became the Institute's director in 1958. From the 1950s stem In Search of Wagner, Adorno's ideology-critique of the Nazi's favorite composer;.
Anthologies: Kompridis, Nicolas, ed.  Rethinking Critical Theory: Habermas and Beyond.  International Journal of Philosophical Studies 13.3 (2005).  (available here) O'Neill, John, ed.  On Critical Theory.  1976. Rasmussen, David, ed. Handbook of Critical Theory.  Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Rush, Fred, ed.  Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory.Cambridge: CUP, 2005. Selected Individual Works: Benhabib, Seyla.  Critique, Norm, Utopia: a Study of the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory.  New York: Columbia UP, 1986. Bottomore, Tom.  The Frankfurt School and its Critics.  London: Tavistock, 1984. Bowie, Andrew.  Critical Theory.   Introduction to German Philosophy: from Kant to Habermas.  Cambridge: Polity, 2003.  222-245. Bronner, Stephen Eric.  Of Critical Theory and its Theorists.  1994. Brosio, Richard A.  The Frankfurt School: an Analysis of the Contradictictions and Crises of Liberal Capitalist Societies.  1980. Buck-Morss, Susan.  The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute.  NY: Free Press, 1977. Brosia, Richard A.  The Frankfurt School: an Analysis of the Contradictions and Crises of Liberal Capitalist Society.  Muncie, IND: Ball State UP, 1980. Connerton, Paul.  The Tragedy of Enlightenment: an Essay on the Frankfurt School.  1980. Dews, Peter.  Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory.  London: Verso, 1987. Dubiel, H.  Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory.  Trans. B. Gregg.  Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985. Friedman, George.  The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School.  1981. Geuss, Raymond.  The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School.  Cambridge: CUP, 1981. Held, David.  Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas.  Berkekely: U of California P, 1981. Jay, Martin.  Permanent Exiles: Essays.
The Frankfurt School (German: Frankfurter Schule) is a school of social theory and philosophy associated in part with the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. The school initially formed during the interwar period in Germany and consisted of dissidents who were at home neither in the existent capitalist, fascist, nor communist systems that had formed during the interwar period. Meanwhile, many of these theorists believed that traditional theory could not adequately explain the turbulent and unexpected development of capitalist societies in the twentieth century. Critical of both capitalism and Soviet socialism, their writings pointed to the possibility of an alternative path to social development.[1] Although sometimes only loosely affiliated, Frankfurt School theorists spoke with a common paradigm in mind, thus sharing the same assumptions and being preoccupied with similar questions.[2] To fill in the perceived omissions of traditional Marxism, they sought to draw answers from other schools of thought, hence using the insights of antipositivist sociology, psychoanalysis, existential philosophy, and other disciplines.[3] The school's main figures sought to learn from and synthesize the works of such varied thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Weber and Lukács.[4] Following Marx, they were concerned with the conditions that allow for social change and the establishment of rational institutions.[5] Their emphasis on the critical component of theory was derived significantly from their attempt to overcome the limits of positivism, materialism and determinism by returning to Kant's critical philosophy and its successors in German idealism, principally Hegel's philosophy, with its emphasis on dialectic and contradiction as inherent properties of human reality. Since the 1960s, Frankfurt School critical theory has increasingly.