Postone to study Frankfurt School with NEH award

Moishe Postone, Associate Professor in History, Jewish Studies and the Social Sciences Collegiate Division, has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

During the next academic year, Postone will take a leave of absence to complete his book Critical Theory and the Twentieth Century, forthcoming from the University Press.

In the book, he will focus on the group of German-Jewish thinkers known as the Frankfurt School. The book will devote one chapter each to Georg Luk·cs, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and J¸rgen Habermas.

“I hope to deepen our understanding of the Frankfurt School,” Postone wrote in his grant application, “while contributing to the ongoing project of developing a critical social theory adequate to the contemporary world.”

Postone, who began his career at the University in the Sociology Department and later joined the History Department, brings this historical approach to the thinkers he will be grappling with: “I’m trying to contextualize these important theories of context,” he said.

Postone is chairman of “Self, Culture and Society,” the yearlong social science sequence taken by most undergraduates.