Excerpt

The critical theory that animated Telos in its early years was centrally concerned with the concept of alienation as it had evolved from Hegel and Marx and was reformulated in the writings of the young Lukács. The description of a “transcendental homelessness” in Lukács's early work The Theory of the Novel informed an understanding of the generalized displacement in modern societies, implicit in the neo-Marxist accounts that proliferated at the end of the second third of the twentieth century.¹ There is no need to recount here the intellectual history of the investigations of that defining concept. Anyone interested should review…