John D. Abromeit, Ph.D.

Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley
Modern European Intellectual History, German History, Critical Social Theory

Courses Taught

Undergraduate: 20th-Century European History. 20th-Century German History. Modern France. 19th-Century Intellectual History. 20th-Century Intellectual History. French Revolution to Fascism: European Political Thought in the Long 19th-Century. The Rise of Modern Market Society and its Consequences. Historiography.

Graduate: History and Theories of Prejudice. 19th-Century Intellectual History. 20th-Century Intellectual History. French Revolution to Fascism: European Political Thought in the Long 19th-Century. The Rise of Modern Market Society and its Consequences. Historiography.

Publications

Books

Siegfried Kracauer: Selected Writings on Media, Propaganda, and Political Communication, co-edited with Jaeho Kang and Graeme Gilloch. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022).

Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas: History and Recent Tendencies, co-edited with Bridget Chesterton, York Norman and Gary Marotta (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).

Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School. Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Herbert Marcuse: Heideggerian Marxism, co-edited with Richard Wolin. University of Nebraska, 2005.

Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader, co-edited with W. Mark Cobb. Routledge, 2004.

Articles / Book Chapters

“The Concept of Pseudo-Conservatism as a Link Between The Authoritarian Personality and Early Critical Theory.” Polity: The Journal of the Northeastern Political Science Association. Vol. 54. No. 1 (January, 2022). Italian translation: “Il concetto di neoconservatorismo come legame tra La personalità autoritaria e la prima Teoria critica.” Modernità e critica Modernity and Critique – Modernité et critique. Ed. Raffaele Carbone. Naples: La Città del Sole, 2022.

“Siegfried Kracauer and the Early Frankfurt School’s Analysis of Fascism as Right-Wing Populism,” in Théorie Critique de la Propagande, eds. Pierre-François Noppen and Gerard Raulet (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2020), 251-78. Republished in Siegfried Kracauer: Selected Writings on Media, Propaganda, and Political Communication (op. cit.), pp. 395-421.

“The Personal and Theoretical Relationship Between Jürgen Habermas and Max Horkheimer,” The Cambridge Habermas Lexicon, eds. Eduardo Mendieta and Amy Allen. Cambridge University Press, 2019.

“The Vicissitudes of the Politics of “Life”: Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse’s Reception of Phenomenology and Vitalism in Weimar Germany” Enrahonar: An International Journal of Theoretical and Practical Reason, vol. 62 (2019), 39-58.

“Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the Persistence of Authoritarian Populism in the United States,” in Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism, ed. Jeremiah Morelock (University of Westminster Press, 2018), 3-27. Republished in: Die Wiederkehr des autoritären Charakters: Transatlantische Perspektiven. Ed. Manuel Clemens, Thorben Päthe and Marc Petersdorff. Springer, 2022.

“Proti Ústřednosti Práce: Moishe Postone o asketickém charakteru a nové citlivosti,” Czech translation of “Moishe Postone, Max Horkheimer and the Critique of Labor in Modern Capitalist Societies,” published in A2 (a Prague-based cultural magazine) in the July, 2018 issue. https://www. advojka.cz/autori/john-abromeit

“Revisiting Max Horkheimer’s Early Critical Theory,” The Routledge Handbook of the Frankfurt School, eds. Axel Honneth, Espen Hammer and Peter Gordon. Routledge, 2018.

“Max Horkheimer and the Model of Early Critical Theory,” Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, eds. Werner Bonefeld, Chris O’Kane and Neil Larson. Sage, 2018.

 “Right-Wing Populism and the Limits of Normative Critical Theory,” Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture. Vol. 16. No. 1 (January, 2017).

“The Center Will Not Hold: The Neo-Liberalization of the Center-Left in Europe and the United States and the Rise of Populism from the 1980s to the Present,” World Geography: Understanding a Changing Word (ABC-CLIO, 2017).

“Critical Theory and the Persistence of Right-Wing Populism,” Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture. vol. 15, no. 2 (September, 2016). Spanish translation: “La teoría crítica de la Escuela de Frankfurt y la persistencia del populismo autoritario en Estados Unidos,” Devenires: Revista de Filosofía y Filosofía de la Cultura, vol. 18, no. 36 (2017), 165-202. Portuguese translation: A Teoria Crítica da Escola de Frankfurt e a persistência do populismo autoritário nos Estados Unidos* in Cadernos de Filosofia Alemã, vol. 22, no. 1 (2017), 13-38. German translation: “Kritische Theorie des autoritären Populimus in den USA: Ihre Geschichte und Aktualität,” Dialektik der Aufklärung in Amerika, ed. Robert Zwarg (Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture, forthcoming). 

“Genealogy and Critical Historicism: Two Concepts of Enlightenment in the Writings of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno,” Critical Historical Studies, vol. 3, no. 2 (Fall, 2016), 283-308. Portuguese translation: “Genealogia e historicismo crítico: dois modelos de Esclarecimento nos escritos de Horkheimer e Adorno,” Cadernos de Filosofia Alemã: Crítica e Modernidade, vol. 22, n. 2 (2017), 13-38.  French translation: “Généalogie et historisme critique: deux modèles de l’Aufklärung dans les écrits de Horkheimer et Adorno,” in La dialectique de la raison : sous bénéfice d’inventaire, eds. Gerard Raulet and Katia Genel (Paris: Editions de la maison des sciences de l'homme, 2017), 45-68.

“Transformations of Producerist Populism in Western Europe,” in Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas: History and Recent Tendencies, eds. John Abromeit, Bridget María Chesterton, Gary Marotta and York Norman (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), pp. 231-64.

 “Whiteness as a Form of Bourgeois Anthropology?  Historical Materialism and Psychoanalysis in the Work of David Roediger, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse.”  Radical Philosophy Review, vol. 16, no. 1 (2013), pp. 325–343.

“Max Horkheimer et le concept matérialiste de la culture,” Les Normes et le possible: Héritage et perspectives de l’École de Francfort, eds. Gerard Raulet, Iain McDonald and Pierre-Francois Noppen, (Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2012), pp. 53-70.

“The Limits of Praxis: The Social Psychological Foundations of Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno’s Interpretations of the 1960s Protest Movements,” Changing the World, Changing Oneself: Political Protest and Collective Identities in the 1960s/70s West Germany and U.S., eds. B. Davis, W. Mausbach, M. Klimke and C. MacDougall (Berghahn Books, 2010).

“The Origins and Development of the Model of Early Critical Theory in the Work of Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse,” Politics and the Human Sciences, ed. David Ingram. In Volume 5, of the History of Continental Philosophy, ed. Alan Schrift (London: Acumen Publishing, 2010).

“Left Heideggerianism or Phenomenological Marxism? Revisiting Herbert Marcuse’s Critical Theory of Technology.” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory Vol. 17, Issue 1 (March, 2010). Portuguese translation: “Heideggerianismo de esquerda ou marxismo fenomenológico? Reconsiderando a Teoria Crítica da Tecnologia de Herbert Marcuse.” Caderno CRH (Universidade Federal da Bahia), Vol. 24, No. 62 (maio-agosto, 2011).

Book Reviews / Review Essays

Review of: Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (Harvard University Press, 2016) for the Journal of Modern History, vol. 90, no. 4 (December, 2018), 968-71.

Review of: Nitzan Shoshan, The Management of Hate: Nation, Affect and the Governance of Right-Wing Extremism in Germany (Princeton University Press, 2016), in German Studies Review, vol. 41, no. 3 (October 2018), 660-662.

“A Critical Review of Recent Literature on Populism,” Politics and Governance, vol. 5, no. 4 (December, 2017), 177-86. https://www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandgovernance/article/view/1146

Review of Jack Jacobs, The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism (Cambridge University Press, 2015) in The German Quarterly, vol. 89, no. 1 (Winter, 2016), pp. 80-100.

Review of Lawrence J. Friedman, The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013) in The American Historical Review, vol. 119, no. 3 (June, 2014), pp. 846-47

“Anti-Semitism among American Workers and the Aftermath of National Socialism in Germany: Reconsidering the Empirical Social Research of the Frankfurt School in the 1940s and 1950s.” Journal of Modern History, vol. 85, no. 1 (March 2013), pp. 161-168.  Review of: Theodor W. Adorno and Friedrich Pollock, Guilt and Defense: On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar Germany and Group Experiment and Other Writings: The Frankfurt School on Public Opinion in Postwar Germany. Eds. and trans. Andrew Perrin and Jeffrey K. Olick, (Harvard University Press, 2010 and 2011); and Mark Worrell, Dialectic of Solidarity: Labor, Antisemitism, and the Frankfurt School (Haymarket Books. 2009).

“Anti-Semitism and Critical Social Theory: The Frankfurt School in Exile.”  Review of Eva-Maria Ziege, Antisemitismus und Gesellschaftstheorie: Die Frankfurter Schule im amerikanischen Exil (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009). Theory, Culture, and Society, vol. 30, no. 1 (January, 2013), pp. 140–151.

Review of Thomas Wheatland’s The Frankfurt School in Exile: “Reconsidering the History of the Frankfurt School in America.” Reviews in American History, vol. 39, no. 2 (June 2011).