Critical Theory arose in the 1930s in the midst of social unrest and turmoil, not unlike today’s: massive poverty, growing inequality, and the rise of fascism throughout Europe. Why under these conditions did socialist revolutions not happen? In order to answer that question, the Frankfurt School’s leading theorists argued that the persistent forms of domination were not just economic, but pervasive throughout society: in its politics, in technology, in the new media, in culture – literature, music, movies; social forms not only dominate, they shape the very psychology of those they exploit making them susceptible to right-wing propaganda. In this course we will explore how the Frankfurt School’s founding theorists sought to critically diagnose the persistent forms of domination and social contradictions that shape modernity in an effort to illuminate, however dimly, the possibility of emancipation in the present. Beginning with Critical Theory’s foundations in German Idealism and Marxism, we will proceed to engage with Critical Theory’s core concerns through close engagements with primary texts on the critique of late capitalism, the Enlightenment, traditional theory, mass culture, aesthetics, history, progress and fascism. We then consider how these debates have developed and been transformed in contemporary critical thought. Particular attention is given to the ways Critical Theory has informed—and been expanded and challenged by—feminist and queer theory, critical race and postcolonial thought, and contemporary analyses of ecological crisis. The course includes key readings by Theodor Adorno, Gunther Anders, Walter Benjamin, Joni Alizah Cohen, Angela Davis, Iyko Day, Maya Gonzalez, G.W.F Hegel, Max Horkheimer, Georg Lukács, Herbert Marcuse, Karl Marx and Moishe Postone.