This post is part of my ongoing blogging project called “Critical Theory Down to Earth.” In these posts I provide summaries of and brief reflections on writings throughout the wider critical theory landscape. Nietzsche begins the essay on a misanthropic note. He rails against the arrogance of humanity in thinking so

Marx, Weber and Durkheim are often accredited with being a kind of triadic foundation to classical sociological theory. All three of them dealt with issues pertaining to the historical development of capitalism and the rise of modernity. In this way, sociology was from its inception a discipline oriented toward theorizing

Was Marx an environmentalist? My overall position on this is skeptical ambivalence. To argue strongly that Marx himself was specifically concerned with nature in a way that is directly consonant with modern day environmental struggles and concerns is going too far. On the other hand, the assertion that Marx had

Figure 1. A “sign o’ the times” offers terror-relieving propaganda during Hawaii’s recent missile alert scare.1  The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas