ABSTRACT
In social theory and increasingly in sociological theory, a school of writers of German origin, whose leading figures are Habermas, Adorno, and Benjamin, have been pitted against a group of writers of French background, whose leading lights are Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard, in the controversies between critical theory and poststructuralism. This chapter argues in what follows that Walter Benjamin, probably critical theory's foremost sociologist of culture, is not in any simplistic sense a modernist, but that instead his analyses have important connections with the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of postmodernism. Critical theory differs from more positivist versions of the sociology of culture in a number of respects. The chronology involved is one that conceives of culture as part of a unified social totality until the rise of capitalist modernity, at which point the cultural sphere gains autonomy and separateness from every-day social life.
