ABSTRACT
In this chapter we first introduce some basic Hegelian and Marxist ideas which have been important in the development of post-modern thinking. Hegel and Marx also point to another current in European philosophy, to the body of thought known as Critical Theory and to the work of the Frankfurt School and of those around it: Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas. The constraints of this volume do not allow us to begin to do justice to this current (although we shall note some of Habermas’s critiques of post-modernism in Chapter 5), nor to other important post-Marxist thinkers such as Louis Althusser, with his post-structural re-reading of Marx. We do, however, provide some key references at the end of this chapter.
