President Barack Obama was elected to office on a wave of hope. With his tenure as President of the United States now concluded it is time to take stock of his record at home and abroad. The Bitter Taste of Hope is a collection of essays that critically evaluate America's domestic landscape on the one hand, particularly new social movements, and the nation's foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, on the other. Stephen Eric Bronner engages a wide-ranging set of political and ideological conflicts that defined the "Age of Obama," especially the most pressing international...

Critical theory emerged in the 1920s from the work of the Frankfurt School, the circle of German-Jewish academics who sought to diagnose -- and, if at all possible, cure -- the ills of society, particularly fascism and capitalism. In this book, Stephen Eric Bronner provides sketches of leading representatives of the critical tradition (such as George Lukacs and Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas) as well as many of its seminal texts and empirical investigations.

This Very Short Introduction sheds light on the cluster of concepts...