Critical Theory in Revolt:How Angela Davis and the New Left Remade the Frankfurt School

Critical Theory in Revolt is a much-needed antidote to prevailing misconceptions about the Frankfurt School’s relationship to the New Left and its place in political history. In this carefully-researched work, Sebastian introduces us to the Frankfurt School’s other “Third Generation” of 1960s student radicals who stayed true to the emancipatory promise of critical theory. A must-read for anyone interested in this tradition of Marxist thought.

Cecilia Sebastian has totally reset the terms of the debate around the early Frankfurt School and the politics of critical theory. Placing the early Frankfurt School within a larger context that included anticolonial struggle, the antiwar and student movements, penal reform and prison abolitionism, and the feminist critique of the family, Sebastian sidesteps abstract debates about normativity and reason and draws our attention instead to concrete questions of politics, political struggle, and liberation. Critical Theory in Revolt is the book we have been waiting for, arriving just in time for the renewal of critique in the political struggles of the present.

Critical Theory thrives when it actively engages with the struggles and crises of the present, yet its rise to academic prominence has come at the price of severing theory from political practice. In this timely and compelling intervention, Cecilia Sebastian recovers the radical legacy of Angela Davis and her New Left comrades, who sought to transform Critical Theory in the 1960s and ‘70s by opening it to anticolonial struggle and global solidarity, to the ways gender and race structure class domination, and to new forms of political organization. By recasting the relation between Critical Theory and left-wing struggle, Sebastian expands our understanding not only of what Critical Theory has been but of what it could be.