+1 These are incredible lectures and there's another series from Rick Roderick on the history of western philosophy that I also love: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxPmwaGMOAvsZp9vavFkyxYFZ...

For the benefit of those like me who haven't heard of Roderick, some further digging leads to this: https://rickroderick.org/max-roderick/

Major, major rabbit hole warning. You think you're about to read something about a philosophy professor, and what you get is an Alice Munro/Larry McMurtry mashup. His son seems to be a pretty amazing writer in his own right.

Perhaps the missing component is that not only is rationality communicable, but so is irrationally.

The memetic material out there has had an incredible and tumultuous era of rapid evolution. Theres been such radical pressure to get better at consuming our attention, at trying to get ideas to spread. The means have perhaps outstripped the Humana ability to communicate & make sense of so much highly weaponized memetic systems.

I like Luhmann’s theory better. What i like about it is that Luhmann argues that the smallest denominator of a social system is a realation between two. Habermas says it can be brought down to an individual. Which in my mind defeats the “social” part.

The Frankfurter Schule was politically conservative, the "leftism" of present-day identity politics is a rehash of radical 1970s Maoism that simply coopts the Frankfurter Schule lexicon in agitating for a new "Great Cultural Revolution" throughout the West, consequences be damned. This is the "counter-enlightenment" part: the Maoist "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" saw Enlightenment values as reflecting "bourgeois privilege", and identity politics has wholly inherited this point of view. Frankfurter Schule members would have disagreed quite sharply with that position, their outlook was defined by a whole lot of nuance.

"Frankfurt School Critical Theory" went through several generations with different commitments and each of those generations was quite politically and theoretically diverse.

The only true statements that hold for all writers at all times are largely uninteresting.

What can be said with confidence is that Frankfurt School theorists were not "counter-enlightenment".

Adorno and Horkheimer were explicitly trying to explain why the ideal of the enlightenment - greater rationality in social and political affairs and a fuller realization of individual moral autonomy - had not been achieved in their time. They saw themselves, rightly, as more faithful heirs to the tradition in their attempt to "rescue" it than those who insisted it did not require rescue. You may disagree - many within the tradition of critical theory have - but I don't think readings of their texts which see them as "counter-enlightement" can be sustained.

"I wondered to which extent Habermas with the Frankfurter Schule and Critical Theory could be held partially responsible for postmodernism's march through the institutions, identity politics, and indirectly for Trump's two election victories."

With all due respect, this sentence betrays a complete unfamiliarity with "postmodernism", "the long march through the institutions", and "identity politics". It wildly anachronistic to conflate these. It makes about as much sense as saying that Mitterand was an Avignon pope.

Yes very interesting topic and HIGHLY relevant.

Here is a good essay from Moira Weigel that you might want to read: https://www.boundary2.org/2020/07/moira-weigel-palantir-goes...

It is called „ Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School“ and analysis Karp‘s PhD thesis. Which, even though he didnt write it under Habermas supervision, was highly influenced by the Frankfurt school (Adorno et al).

The author also provides some thoughts on your question. The connection between Critical Theory and Trumpism

Maybe he was critical, but he was also a part of them.

Very much so, I hold this view as someone who reads a bit of Critical Theory; Catherine Liu recently makes a case for this as well as disparate other public intellectuals from Chomsky to Zizek have also generally critiqued CT academics, postmodernists, etc. The basic argument is something like, Frankfurt School itself had a tension over their primary text (Dialectic of Enlightenment) by Adorno and one faction basically got totally divorced from Marxist ideas, and the result of that was bad theories and bad praxis and then even worse being coopted as a capitalist intelligentsia. See also Thomas Picketty's Brahmin Left. I'm oversimplifying but there is a continued strain of this criticism (albeit largely on deaf ears).

I find this to be vile political posting, moving responsibility for Trump's rightwing fascism to a social theorists is just misguided, banal and does not belong here. Don't you have X for that?