Martin Jay Research Articles

Intellectual history as a symbiosis between history and philosophy: critical reflections on Martin Jay

ABSTRACT Intellectual history is usually seen as essentially historical. It is – but it is also essentially philosophical, both when theorising intellectual history, which some intellectual historians do, and when interpreting texts, which all intellectual historians do. I demonstrate this symbiosis between history and philosophy via critical reflections on Martin Jay’s recent book Genesis and Validity. Philosophical analysis, closely integrated with historical examples, suggests that we should significantly rethink Jay’s theorisation of the relationship between genesis and validity (e.g. whether ideas from one context are valid in others). But the symbiosis between history and philosophy matters more when interpreting texts. Philosophical analysis is a powerful tool for recovering what authors meant, understanding how their ideas fit together, and seeing similarities and differences between ideas, as I show with examples from Quentin Skinner’s interpretations of Machiavelli, Hobbes and others. Yet even Jay and Skinner – two of the world’s most philosophically astute intellectual historians – overlook the crucial symbiosis between history and philosophy.

Проблема феномена визуальности в современном англо-американском научном дискурсе

В статье исследовано отражение феномена визуальности в современном англо-американском академическом пространстве. Особое внимание уделено освещению явления визуального поворота в исследованиях, а именно, почему внимание ученых ХХ в. привлекла визуальная культура, и как визуальность завоевывала различные социокультурные пространства. Проанализированы взаимосвязи между визуальным поворотом и привилегией зрения над другими органами чувств (окулоцентризм) и появлением новых технологий. Проникновение визуального в теорию культуры и распространение образов в самой культуре называют «визуальным поворотом» (иногда его также называют «пикториальным поворотом» или «иконическим поворотом») («pictural turn», «iconic turn»). Он был представлен в исследованиях одного из самых выдающихся теоретиков медиа и визуальной культуры У. Дж. Т. Митчелла. Со временем понятие «визуальность» успешно утвердилось не только в самой культуре, но и в других направлениях, таких как культурология, философия, социология и история, которые всебольше переплетаются через изображение. Неудивительно, что в текстах известных исследователей и теоретиков культуры, таких как Стюарт Холл, Гордон Файф, Джон Ло, Джон Питер Бёрджер, Мартин Джей, Элла Шохат, Роберт Стэм, Донна Харауэй и многих других, уделяется большое внимание изучению различных аспектов проблемы визуальности, а фокус академических исследований часто смещается на междисциплинарный уровень. В исследованиях большое внимание уделено определению визуальности и других явлений феномена видимости, онтологии зрения и видения, выявлению границ между видимым и невидимым, освещена проблема образа, теоретических свойств образа в фотографии, кинематографе, искусстве, образовании и т.д. Проблема визуального была возведена в центр новых исследований, заложен фундамент для появления новых направлений исследований, в частности визуальных. Это знаменует начало нового этапа в развитии гуманитарных исследований, когда отпростого наблюдения за тем, что мы живем в эпоху доминирования образов, мы переходим к теоретической концептуализации этого явления.

VALIDITY NOW

ABSTRACTThis review essay offers an extended analysis of Martin Jay's Genesis and Validity: The Theory and Practice of Intellectual History, highlighting Jay's emphasis on the need for intellectual historians to address the question of the present‐day validity of ideas. In this volume of essays on twentieth‐century philosophy and historiography, Jay contends that the perennial tension between historicism and truth value is integral to intellectual history; however, it is establishing the latter that is the most crucial, and perhaps most difficult, part of our practice. In thirteen separate but related pieces, Jay explores subjects such as the common ground shared by Quentin Skinner and Hayden White, the “styles” of thought represented by Walter Benjamin and Isaiah Berlin, and recent French theories of the historical sublime and the “advent” of ideas. This review essay discusses these pieces and compares Jay's essay on historical truthfulness to ancient rhetorical discussions of the many forms of lying about history. Its final section deals with the ways in which insights from the history of science might help us to connect genesis and validity by examining the practices of idea‐ or knowledge‐making, and it argues that validity is also, and perhaps most importantly, something we need to embrace in our roles as teachers. What makes ideas valid is the next generation of thinkers, and to make wise and well‐informed life choices, they need to have a full range of older and newer ideas about the human condition from which to choose.

WITH SPLINTERS (OR STARS) IN OUR EYES: ON READING THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL WITH MARTIN JAY

This mostly admiring review article focuses on Martin Jay's 2020 essay collection entitled Splinters in Your Eye: Frankfurt School Provocations. Though it highlights details and insights from nearly every essay in the collection, the review devotes significant attention to chapter 4, which focuses on the relationship of the Frankfurt School's first-generation scholars with Sigmund Freud. The departure point for my engagement with Jay's fourth chapter is the translation of the German word Trieb (drive) as “instinct” throughout The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Although Jay's treatment of Max Horkheimer's, Theodor W. Adorno's, and Herbert Marcuse's recourses to Freudian psychoanalysis emphasizes their abiding commitment to Freud's theory of instinctual forces (over and against objections to his biologism), the question of whether a drive differs from an instinct does not arise. This question therefore offers an occasion to speculate on how distinguishing more firmly between instinct and drive might matter for the Frankfurt School's opposition between first and second nature. Though I praise Jay's decision to include a chapter on Miriam Hansen's Benjaminian revision of the public sphere, I also criticize his practice, in this volume at least, of consigning most scholarship authored by women to the endnotes rather than engaging with it in the main text.

“LOOK WITH THINE EARS”: THE DEPRECATION OF OCULARCENTRIC CULTURE IN WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR

In his groundbreaking research on the broad phenomenon of Western visual culture in important intellectual eras, Martin Jay touches on the abundance of ocular references in Renaissance literature and cites the example of William Shakespeare whose works are replete with visual metaphors. Notwithstanding extensive research on the role of vision in Shakespeare’s works, it seems that scant attention has been paid to the Bard’s deprecation of ocularcentric culture. Shakespeare was, admittedly, not the first writer who depicted and challenged the biased privileging of sight in Western culture, but the present study focuses on the example of King Lear to show that Shakespearean drama played a significant role in reflecting the dire consequences of ocularcentrism in society. Drawing on first-hand Renaissance accounts of vision, Martin Jay’s exhaustive research into the history of ocularcentrism in the West, and James Shapiro’s historical account of the year Shakespeare’s King Lear was first performed, this study employs a New Historicist methodology to examine how Shakespearean drama marks both a turn away from the traditional hegemony of vision and a turning point in the criticism of modern ocularcentric culture in the West. We conclude that King Lear serves, among other things, to remind us that visual subjugation transcends the boundaries of time and culture and that we could all ourselves be Lears or Gloucesters, deluded by the proverbial concept that “seeing is believing”

Reason After its Eclipse. On Late Critical Theory, Martin Jay


 
 
 A pesar de que Max Horkheimer en Eclipse de la razón había analizado los límites de la razón subjetiva, atendien- do a las posibilidades de retornar a la razón objetiva y a su función después del eclipse, a Jay le parecían aún insuficientes estas respuestas. Por ello, regresó al estudio de las conceptualizaciones filosóficas de los fundadores de la teoría crítica y de quienes se quedaron a cargo del Instituto de Investigación Social en Frankfurt. En este sentido, este texto podría verse en continuidad y a distancia respecto a su primer li- bro: Dialectical Imagination. A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (1973); producto de su trabajo de doctorado, enfocado en la formación del Instituto de Investigación Social; en sus principales integrantes: Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Leo Löwenthal, Walter Benjamin,Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, Henryk Grossmann, Erich Fromm, Karl August Wittfogel; en la integra- ción del psicoanálisis; en su exilio a América; en los estudios empíricos sobre el autoritarismo, la estética y la industria cultural.
 
 

Leo Lowenthal’s Legacy: The Relevance and Response of Critical Theory to Authoritarianism, Austerity and Antisemitism Today: An Interview with Martin Jay

The interview is concerned with the legacy of Leo Lowenthal (1900–1993), who was born into a Jewish family in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Lowenthal belonged to the first generation of Critical Theorists under Max Horkheimer’s directorship at the University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. Taking Lowenthal’s understanding of Critical Theory as their point of departure, the interlocutors – Katrin Stoll and Martin Jay – discuss ways of renewing Critical Theory in general and the necessity of thinking as a form of negation in particular. The interview provides reflections on the current political situation brought about by the global capitalist order, which owes its stability to both objective social processes and to authoritarianism, austerity, autocracy, antisemitism, racism, and fascization. Recasting Critical Theory in new ways, requires, as Martin Jay forcefully argues, creative theoretical experimentation. By way of example, the interlocutors engage in a joint critical rereading and reevaluation of Leo Lowenthal’s and Norbert Guterman’s 1949 book Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator, recently reissued in Germany. Adopting the concept of “racket society”, which was developed by the Critical Theorists in the 1930s and 1940s, after their emigration from Nazi Germany, Martin Jay provides an analysis of current society and political culture in general and the United States in particular. He makes the point that the strongman/client relationship becomes possible through an internalization of patterns of domination as well as by loyalty and protection. The interview closes with a reflection on why it is important to criticize the false way of life and in so doing opening up the possibility of a life that is not wrong.

The Concept of Ocularcentrism & Photographic Models of Vision From the Perspectives of Software Studies and Cultural Analytics Methods of Social Media Images and the Consumer Society Theory

Scientific objective: The concept of ocularcentrism as the dominant ideology acts as a very important role within visual shaping photographic models of vision used by social media and photographic images. The paper focuses on the concept of ocularcentrism as the dominant effect of sight in visual culture, the problems of “ocularcentric discourse,” presented in forms of the “phono-logo-centrism” paradigm, and ocularcentric ways of seeing, or scopic regimes: “Cartesian perspectivalism,” the “Art of Describing,” “baroque vision,” and photographic models of vision that have been discussed in two theoretical contexts: Lev Manovich’s Software Studies and Cultural Analytics methods and Zygmunt Bauman’s consumer society theory that can be understood as the “embodied eye” and the “armed eye” concepts. Research methods: I suggest use of critical methods of Martin Jay’s Visual Studies in the perspective of the history of visuality from the ancient Greek to the philosophical, twentieth-century French thought, undertaking Software Studies and Cultural Analytics methods, in an analysis of the research project of Manovich’s “Phototrails,” as well as Bauman’s consumer society theory in an analysis of the photographic project of Alain Delorme’s “Totems.” Results and conclusions: I hope that exploring theoretical problems of visual culture will allow researchers to open a new field of reciprocal correspondence between the concept of ocularcentrism, photographic models of vision, Software Studies, and Cultural Analytics methods, as well as Bauman’s consumer society theory, based on possibility of coming to conclusions, posing questions, and hypotheses. Cognitive value: The paper is an attempt to make a contribution to the hitherto unexplored research on the concept of ocularcentrism as the dominant effect of sight, subjecting to analysis the research project of Manovich’s “Phototrails,” in the perspective of Software Studies and Cultural Analytics methods within “media visualizations,” as well as the photographic project of Delorme’s “Totems,” in the perspective of Bauman’s consumer society theory, consumerism, consumption, and social exclusion.

The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought, i: The Nineteenth Century; ii: The Twentieth Century. Edited by Warren Breckman and Peter E. Gordon

It is sometimes said that the names of almost all modern political ideologies are formed by words that end in ‘-ism’. The observation applies to the titles of twelve of the twenty chapters of this impressive two-volume history of modern European thought that cover the nineteenth century (think of idealism, romanticism, scepticism, utilitarianism, positivism, liberalism, socialism, conservatism, Darwinism, historicism, nihilism, pessimism, or radicalism). It has much less salience when it comes to the twenty-one chapters that deal with the twentieth century, where the titles of only four chapters contain such words (existentialism, totalitarianism, structuralism, and poststructuralism). This could mean that the twentieth century really did see the end of ideology. It could, however, also mean that twentieth-century European thought continued to remain deeply in thrall to the intellectual life of the nineteenth century, or simply that the initial premise is false. Whatever the case, it certainly does not mean that several significant themes or subjects simply fell through the editorial net. This is as comprehensive a collection of authoritative essays as could be wished for, written by an experienced and able group of contributors, and giving its readers a range of opportunities to acquire new knowledge, make new connections between different topics, or come across new ways of thinking about apparently well-worn subjects. However, readers of French Studies will still have to work quite hard to pick up connections between topics that are often widely dispersed over several different chapters. Socialism, for example, can be followed from its beginnings in France, as described in Gareth Stedman Jones’s wide-ranging chapter, to its appearances in chapters by Mary Pickering on positivism, Claudia Verhoeven on radicalism at the end of the nineteenth century, Erica Benner on nationalist thought, or Jennifer Pitts on ideas of empire, and through to Martin Jay’s excellent essay on sociology and the heroism of modern life and Hagen Schulz-Forberg’s fascinating chapter on modern economic thought and the ‘good society’ in volume ii. The same type of extended thread can be followed in such thinkers as Rousseau, Kant, or Hegel, whose ideas echoed down the ages and were given a proliferating range of sometimes incompatible evaluations as they did so (compare, for example, the descriptions of Kant in Nicholas Halmi’s chapter on European Romanticism in volume i to Joel Isaac’s informative chapter on analytic philosophy in volume ii). Although some subjects — like the state, law, and money — have not attracted as much attention in these two volumes as they were given in the period that they cover, and the ideas of some individuals — such as Victor Hugo on the aesthetics of ugliness, Jules Michelet on Giambattista Vico and his legacy, or Georg Lukács on the political significance of the historical novel — could have been given more prominence, this is a formidable and readable collection that will certainly stand the test of time.

The Power of Assembly

The Power of Assembly

Interview with Martin Jay

Interview with Martin Jay

Letter from the Editors: Contemporary Popular Culture and Social Criticism

Letter from the Editors: Contemporary Popular Culture and Social Criticism

Jews and the Ends of Theory

Jews and the Ends of Theory

Jean Painlevé’s Surrealism, Marine Life and Non-Ocular Modes of Sensing

The obsessive representation of and violence against the eye is inescapable in surrealist art, with works like Un Chien andalou and Histoire de l’oeil being the most renowned for their depictions of acts of ocular defilement. Over the years, scholars have questioned these artists’ intentions and have even gone so far as to position them as anti-ocular. Compromising the physical integrity of the eye is not necessarily an outright rejection of vision, as Martin Jay claims. Instead, it questions the hierarchy of the senses and promotes an enrichment of different sensory modes. The use of marine animals in surrealism seen in works by artists like Jean Painlevé represents beings which rely on other modes of sensing, thus navigating their worlds without visual primacy. I argue they are not anti-ocular but anti-ocularcentristic. Surrealism’s depictions of marine life reflect an interest in alternative sensory regimes and rejects the primacy of vision above other senses. These representations express a desire to move beyond the eye to expand perception and explore faculties of perception denied to the human eye. Moreover, these works also challenge other concepts such as gender roles, anthropocentrism/the human-animal boundary and C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures Theory.

Literary Recordings: Modernism, Media, and Acoustic Modernity

Literary Recordings: Modernism, Media, and Acoustic Modernity Tyler Whitney Modernist Soundscapes: Auditory Technology and the Novel. Angela Frattarola. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018. Pp. 204. $85.00 (cloth). Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings. Jason Camlot. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019. Pp. 248. $55.00 (cloth); $55.00 (eBook). Fifteen years ago the media historian Michele Hilmes identified a “growing bibliography of work on sound” and speculated about the emergence of a new subfield she termed “sound culture studies.”1 Two excellent new titles by Jason Camlot (Concordia University) and Angela Frattarola (Nanyang Technological University) demonstrate the extent to which, in the intervening years, the once “hypothetical field” of which Hilmes caught a glimpse has been codified and transformed. We can now say definitively that the field of sound studies exists. Frattarola’s Modernist Soundscapes: Auditory Technology and the Novel takes up questions of sound and its histories from a distinctly literary perspective. She argues that turn-of-the-century European and North American literature “became increasingly concerned with and influenced by the developing auditory technologies of the time”; specifically, literary works by Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Jean Rhys, and Samuel Beckett served as a means for “educating readers and familiarizing them with a new auditory technology” (3). Formal and linguistic innovations, along with growing skepticism about vision and human ability to know the world, “are in part a result of a growing awareness of and shift toward sound perception made possible through new auditory technologies” (4). Modernist writers were “shaped” by these new listening practices in Frattarola’s account, giving rise to texts characterized by “noisy onomatopoeia” and an extensive use of linguistic repetition—which might be thought productively as samples and loops (15, 147). [End Page 847] Frattarola impressively fleshes out the concrete links between modernist authors and the specific auditory technologies of radio, tape, and the gramophone: Richardson, for example, wrote a column for a film magazine, in which she lamented the death of silent film. Woolf owned a gramophone, subscribed to the National Gramophonic Society, and listened with attentive dismay to the voice of Hitler in radio broadcasts. Joyce was also an avid radio listener, while Rhys spoke of being “haunted by popular songs” captured on gramophone records (quoted in Frattarola, 8). Finally, Beckett experimented formally with radio, tape, television, and film. These authors were not just shaped by auditory technologies and related listening practices: they were dedicated users of these devices, skilled in handling and operating them, familiar with their sensuous, material forms, and conceiving of language and their own literary projects with direct reference to the unique affordances of modern acoustic media. Frattarola’s first chapter offers an overview of existing literature and further theoretical observations on the relationship between sound and vision. Writing against dominant narratives of crisis and modernist disorientation, and drawing on Martin Jay’s influential history of ocularcentrism and the denigration of vision, Frattarola argues that, “we can just as easily tell a story of modernism in which writers revel in the destabilization of vision” (23, emphasis added). Modernists in this account did not necessarily feel themselves to be in a state of crisis as their faith in vision was shaken, experiencing instead (or at least simultaneously) “a sense of liberation from an ocularcentrist orientation” through their encounters and engagement with sound and its mediating technologies (23). Frattarola thus draws a compelling connection between modernism’s oft-cited “crisis of vision” and the surge of literary interest in sound around 1900, suggesting that they are in fact two sides of the same coin. According to this understanding, the disorientation of vision was counterbalanced by a newfound auditory orientation—visual crisis offset by auditory discovery and invention. Frattarola avoids a troubling tendency in sound studies to discuss sound in isolation from the other senses, offering instead a truly audio-visual approach. At the same time, some readers may be left wondering whether Frattarola’s move away from the narrative of crisis is simply a matter of preferring one kind of historical narrative about modernity to another, of focusing on what has been gained rather than lost. As the author herself makes clear, both narratives hold true...

Endgames: The Cult of Death in America and Russia

Endgames:The Cult of Death in America and Russia Martin Jay (bio) The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture By Dina Khapaeva University of Michigan Press, 2017 Treat every person, so commands Kant's categorical imperative, "never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end." In the original German, the final word is "Selbstzweck," which unintentionally gains a suggestive second layer of meaning when translated as "end in itself." For "end" in English implies both a purpose and a termination, the former asserting that persons have intrinsic, unfungible value, the latter acknowledging that they are transient mortals who play a minor role in a drama whose denouement is anything but the flourishing of the individual self. The implicit tension between the two meanings of "end" drives the argument of Dina Khapaeva's The Cele-bration of Death in Contemporary Culture, a deeply felt, urgently driven jeremiad against what she sees as the cult of death in contemporary culture. Trained in classical studies at St. Petersburg State University, Khapaeva left Russia along with her husband, the distinguished European historian Nikolay Koposov, in 2009. Deeply disillusioned with Putin's regime, she spelled out her reasons in a work translated into French as Nouveau portrait de la Russie: Essais sur la société gothique (Khapaeva 2012b), which bemoans the refusal of her countrymen to acknowledge and make amends for the horrors of the Soviet era and their retreat into what she calls a "gothic morality" reminiscent of the Middle Ages. Her most notable previous work in English is a 2012 [End Page 179] study, Nightmare: From Literary Experiment to Cultural Project (Khapaeva 2012a), which traces the evolution of nightmares as mental states in novels to their manifestation in modern consumer society. After several years in Paris and Helsinki, Khapaeva now teaches at the School of Modern Languages at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she combines interests in cultural studies, memory studies, medievalism, and the history of emotions. Khapaeva's explicit normative ground is an unabashed humanism, which urges us to treat every individual in the first sense of the categorical imperative. Defiantly defending what she calls "human exceptionalism," she endorses the conviction that "humans are profoundly different from any other species and are therefore to be uniquely valued" (23). She sees the erosion of this anthropocentric credo at the root of an alarming insouciance toward morbidity evident in a surprisingly wide sample of popular culture, both in America and in the Russia from which she recently emigrated. Squarely placing a large measure of the blame on the influence of late twentieth-century French theory, she bemoans the insidious spread of the ideologies of "post-humanism" and "transhumanism" and even the outright defense of the "inhuman," which have seeded the ground for the celebration of death in popular culture. Although conceding that it may have originally expressed valuable insights, Khapaeva insists that "once critique of humanism was adopted by popular culture … it lost its critical potential … no longer a critical tool but a commodity, antihumanism has acquired a new cultural role and a new cultural meaning" (32–33). Even in the guise of such seemingly progressive movements as "animal rights," it works to undermine respect for the irreducible value of individual human life. Accelerating since the turn of the millennium, when apocalyptic fears gained new currency, an obsession with mortality and its often violent causes, so Khapaeva argues, has informed everything from gothic clothing styles and curiosity about serial killers to monster movies and torture porn. It is evident as well in the exponential rise of Halloween as a major holiday, including in Russia despite attempts by right-wing nationalists and their allies in the Orthodox Church to condemn it as a sign of Western depravity. The widespread fascination with the Mexican "Day of the Dead" and the figure of "Santa Muerte" outside Hispanic communities—presciently anticipating the [End Page 180] success of the Pixar animated film Coco, she claims it is "currently sweeping the United States" (59)—further testifies to the ominous trend. So too does the emergence of "thanotourism," visiting sites associated with mass death, and "murderabilia," the practice of collecting items connected with violent crimes...

Reply to My Critics

AbstractIn this essay I reply to the comments by Daniel Fairbrother, Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, Chiel van den Akker, Martin Jay, Hans Kellner and Jacques Bos on things I wrote on philosophy of history in the last few decades. The reply’s main claim is that not my frequent appeals to Leibniz are surprising, but the total neglect of Leibniz by all philosophers of history since 1945. If only, because in the very first treatise on so-called ‘critical philosophy of history’ – Chladenius’s Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft of 1752 – Leibniz was central already. Think of his notion of the ‘Sehepunckt’ (point of view) that he had taken from Leibniz. Moreover, each practicing historian will recognize straightaway that the notion of the point of view goes to the heart of his work.

Martin Jay: Reason After its Eclipse. On Late Critical Theory

Besprechung von Martin Jay: Reason After its Eclipse. On Late Critical Theory, Madison: University of Wisconsin University Press 2016.

What do the Angels Say? Alterity and the Ascents of Emanuel Swedenborg and the Baal Shem Tov

Abstract This paper examines the history of boundary crossing and boundary preservation between Jews and Christians in the eighteenth century via an unorthodox path. Two men, a Swedish Lutheran natural philosopher and a charismatic Polish Rabbi, give their accounts of ascents to the heavens, both in the 1740s. The lives of Emanuel Swedenborg and the Baal Shem Tov did not intersect, but their otherworldly experiences tell related stories of strife between Jews and Christians while betraying something of a shared horizon concerning the future of their religious communities, and concerning sacred texts and their interpretation. Using a phenomenological framework informed by Emmanuel Levinas, and with theories of experience articulated by Steven Katz and Martin Jay at hand, this paper understands these accounts as articulations of relationship: not just the relationship between the subject and God, scripture, or the heavens, but articulations of the fraught relationship with the religious other in the earthly, human realm. By placing Swedenborg and the Besht, as it were, face to face, this paper emphasizes the presence of the religious other in their experiences, even in their private encounters with the Divine, and even though the intersubjectivity these experiences expose is characterized by difference, difficulty, and asymmetry.

The History and Fulfilment of Western Rationality: Martin Jay’s The Eclipse of Reason

Abstract This review-essay examines Martin Jay’s The Eclipse of Reason: On Late Critical Theory with a view toward understanding the stakes of its interpretative approach to intellectual history. I show how Jay's book aims to provide much more than a mere history of reason (although it does this admirably), for it seeks to legitimate and resuscitate an idea of reason in the face of more than one hundred years of anti-rationalist thought. I contend that Jay offers Habermas’s intersubjective rationality (“late Critical Theory”) as both an alternative to, but also in some sense a continuation of, the dominant forms of subjectivist and objectivist rationality Jay documents in his book. According to the logic of Jay’s account, then, Habermas represents in some sense the fulfillment of the history of Western rationality. My only critique of an otherwise excellent and fascinating study is that Jay’s Frankfurt School-centric narrative effectively inhibits a larger discussion of Habermas’s relevance to recent and current debates about the direction of philosophy. An elaboration specifically of the post-structuralist critique of reason would have greatly enhanced our understanding of the place of "late Critical Theory" in the intellectual landscape of our time.