Theoretical foundations

Most lists of the critics of modern culture would include Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Martin Heidegger, and T. W. Adorno before writers in other languages. The perceived importance of such German critics of modern culture has much to do with the desire to understand the disastrous course of German history in the first half of the twentieth century as a model of the dangers of modernity. From the Romantic period onwards many of the critiques of culture which preceded the catastrophic events reflect concerns about the destruction of tradition which became central to those events, and during the events themselves ideas about culture became dangerous political issues. It is, though, often unclear what links together the abovementioned thinkers as proponents of a 'critique of culture': neither term in this notion - which, as Adorno says of the word Kulturkritik, 'like “automobile” ... is stuck together from Latin and Greek' - is self-explanatory. The meaning of the word 'culture', with its links both to the search for permanence and to growth and development, is, for example, significantly suspended between the ideas of identity and change.