as though love were a full comprehensive insurance policy that could protect both parties from the vicissitudes of the real world of loss and disappointment

Habermas argued that the protests were against ‘the statesmen ruling in our name’ and called for a plebiscite on the army being equipped with nuclear weapons

It’s as though deindustrialisation and desublimated sexuality are engaged in some hard-faced, glumly raunchy, lubricious lambada across the workplace carpet tiles.

in the literature of advanced industrial society such antinomian characters

The paradoxical German term ‘aufheben’, which means three different and contradictory things – to preserve, to elevate and to cancel – and which, in its philosophical usage, is usually translated as ‘sublate’, is important here

Adorno, very sensibly, waited until he came to edit the book containing these vituperative speeches to deliver his judgement on Albert’s outburst

Adorno rounded on Marcuse for siding with the students, given their outrageous tactics and their jejune politics that his old, misguided friend seemed to share

Dialectics had been brought to a standstill, though not in quite the edifying way Benjamin had hoped for

That sounds anodyne, but

For it is in the lifeworld that Habermas finds the potential bulwarks against the evisceration of social life by capitalism, state and what his colleague Marcuse called one-dimensional society