William Leiss’s The Critical Theory of Society: Present Situation and Future Tasks is an interesting artifact I found on my Telos deep dive. Written around the same time as Goran Therborn’s polemic against the Frankfurt School, Leiss’s work represents one of the first sympathetic overviews of the frankfurt school in the english speaking world. It was part of the edited collection on Marcuse that came out of the first Telos conference, yet it also mentions and focuses other figures who had been neglected at that time: Schmidt, Adorno, and especially the early Horkheimer. Finally, it focuses on how Critical Theory draws on the critique of political economy. Yet rather than treating it as a dead tradition, it points to critical theories contemporary relevance and further development. Sadly, this work would soon be eclipsed by the publication of Dialectical Imagination and its interpretation of the development of critical theory.
reificationofpersonsandpersonificationofthings 