Theodor Adorno The greatest pure philosopher of the Frankfurt School, who followed through on Benjamin's path-breaking conceptual innovations to create invaluable concepts such as the constellation, the micrology, the bane, transience, and the total system. Adorno's readings of 19th century musical modernism and the Second Viennese school, summarized in Philosophy of Modern Music, have become classics of European musicology. Minima Moralia (written 1944-1947 and published in 1951) rehearses an astonishingly acute wide array of gender ideologies, identity politics, micropolitics, forms of cultural praxis, and the historical categories of monopoly capitalism; Against Epistemology (1954) is a critical reckoning with Husserlian epistemology and logical positivism. Negative Dialectics (1966) is Adorno's most extensive treatment of the 20th century philosophic modernisms, as well as the founding text of multinational Marxism, the prescient analysis of the post-Cold War world-system already beginning to emerge in the late 1960s. Most of all, Adorno stressed the role of cultural theory and critical thinking in resisting the agenda of Eastern bloc cadre capitalism and Western bloc state-monopoly consumerism.

Walter Benjamin One of the great cultural theorists of the 20th century, loosely associated with the leading figures of the Frankfurt School, who wrote a ground-breaking, gorgeous literary analysis of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mals (Flowers of Evil), called Charles Baudelaire: a lyric poet in the era of high capitalism; also wrote seminal essays on Brecht, surrealism, Europe's interwar modernisms, and a magnificent theoretical testament, the Theses on History. Alas, Benjamin perished in 1940, and never completed the Passagen-Werk, a cultural analysis of the Parisian arcades which would have opened a whole new era of cultural criticism. The International Walter Benjamin Society is located in Duesseldorf.

Ernst Bloch One of the great intellectuals of the 20th century, whose Principle of Hope set a whole new standard for cultural theory. Bloch's greatest insight was that aesthetics has an unquenchably utopian or forwards-looking dimension; he combined remarkable historical erudition with a Central European brand of liberation theology.

Pierre Bourdieu The premier Eurosociologist of the late 20th century, who played a key role in the formation of the contemporary Euroleft. He wrote the path-breaking study on aesthetic taste and symbolic capital, Distinction (1975), pioneered the concepts of the multinational habitus or class fraction and the multinational field or niche market in Outline of a Theory of Practice, and rewrote the field of Flaubert criticism (long a posthumous monopoly of Sartre) in The Rules of Art (1991). He also did a wonderful study of the prehistory of the evolution of French academia in the period immediately prior to May 1968, entitled Homo Academicus. The Nobility of the State is an extensive study of the class composition of the French state cadres, a.k.a. the future Eurocracy. One of Bourdieu's greatest achievements was to recuperate the dialectical machinery of Sartre's work in the 1960s in the context of the prehistory of the EU, by leveraging an analysis of the Francophone zone of Western Europe into a theory of Eurocapitalism. One of the central tasks of theorists in the next ten years will be to grapple with Bourdieu's last work of theory, Pascalian Meditations (1998). Much of Bourdieu's work is available online at HyperBourdieu.

Judith Butler The author of Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, Butler is in many ways the 1990s version of Foucault, who drove the whole discourse of 1990s micropolitics in new and productive directions. Her biography and publications are available at the European Graduate School.

Jacques Derrida The innovator of deconstruction, one of the main strands of post-structuralism, Derrida's most significant works were Of Grammatology (1968) and Glass (1973). His main conceptual innovations -- the trace and dissemination -- are deeply entwined with the arrival of Francophone micropolitics in the 1970s, and draw their energy from a deeply progressive, forwards-thinking telecommunicatory idealism.

Erik Erikson Erikson's two great works, Young Man Luther (1954) and Gandhi's Truth (1965) almost single-handedly created the genre of psychobiography. Though the first work is probably more famous, the latter is especially relevant nowadays, due to Erikson's patient, thorough field-work in India, his careful documentation, his self-reflection on strategies of the journalistic interview, political theater, decolonization and national identity, and his exemplary respect for the cultures in which he was a guest (e.g. taking the time to track down Gandhi's original writings in the Gujarati language, visiting his Gandhi's friends and relations in Ahmedabad, etc.).

Michel Foucault The leading late 20th century theorist of the sociology of power, control, discipline and authority, and one of the pioneers of queer theory, whose work on the juridical principles of the prison system, madness, state authority and the policing of bodies has become startling relevant to Prisonhouse America (an astonishing 3% of the US adult population is in jail, in prison, or otherwise enmeshed in the criminal justice system, a devastating indictment of the cruelty, greed and stupidity of Wall Street capitalism). The Order of Things (1970) and Discipline and Punish (1977) are his classic texts; also be sure to check out his History of Sexuality.

Sigmund Freud Freud is usually thought of as a psychoanalyst or psychologist, but in fact he was one of the founding theorists of consumerism and industrial mass-culture, who combined supreme diagnostic skill and subtlety with boundless analytic drive. Before Freud, identity was treated as something fixed and immutable; afterwards, people had to take the notion of subjective transformation seriously (very much as Marx showed that what was advertised as a fixed and immutable economic system was dynamic, explosive and subject to massive crises and expansions). Check out Freud's 1899 breakthrough study, The Interpretation of Dreams, which first categories the notion of an unconscious and the structure of dream-works and wish-fulfillments, as well as Fragment of a Hysteria-Analysis (1905), the so-called Dora case study; Remarks on an Autobiographical Case of Paranoia (1911), the Schreber case study; and the 1919 essay, The Uncanny. Freud innovated many of the basic terms of cultural criticism, ranging from the diagnostic case study to the wish-fulfillment, and from familial identification to the entire complex process of internalization and identity formation.

Stephen Jay Gould Gould was the premier evolutionist of the late 20th century, who revolutionized the field of paleoontology through concepts such as contingency and punctuated equilibrium. He was also one of the great partisans of science in the public interest, and his signature essays never failed to be sharp, stylish, witty, and endlessly illuminating about the social responsibilities of the natural sciences.

Gyorgy Lukacs Eastern Europe's greatest philosopher and social critic, Lukacs was instrumental in pioneering a theory of the realist novel, while History and Class Consciousness pioneered the study of reification, one of the indispensable concepts in cultural analysis.

Fredric Jameson Simply the greatest North American Marxist of the 20th century (there are others who've made significant contributions, but none can compare to the scale, scope and depth of Jameson's work). A brilliant cultural theorist, whose readings of the 19th century novel, postmodernism, science fiction and blockbuster cinema opened up an interstellar gateway to whole new dimensions of cultural criticism. Not the least of Jameson's contributions was to popularize the 20th century Western Marxists (Lukacs, Benjamin, Adorno and Sartre) in Marxism and Form (1971) for a North American audience; later The Political Unconscious (1981) sketched out the first genuine reading of multinational capital as a cultural form. Jameson not only popularized the term postmodernism to signify the cultural logic of consumer capitalism, but was also one of the key players in transforming the practice of Comparative Literature into a truly global discipline. Check out Jameson's official faculty page, or see William McPheron's overview of Jameson’s career.

Claude Levi-Strauss The leading theorist of structuralism and in many ways one of the two great cultural theorists of Eurocommunism, along with Gramsci, whose study of the indigenous peoples of the Brazilian rainforest, Tristes Tropiques, revolutionized anthropological fieldwork and theory, folklore, and sociology. What he discovered was that preindustrial cultures, far from being savage or crude, were tremendously subtle, complex, and dynamic societies, no less interesting than the cultures of late capitalism. He also helped develop the mapping strategies which structuralist literary criticism, most notably Barthes, would apply to the consumer culture.

Karl Marx We don't usually think of Karl Marx, the famed social critic and prophet of revolution, as a cultural theorist. But he is, mostly because his theory of capitalism provides us with a fantastically complex and powerful set of concepts, critical instruments and mapping strategies, which have lots of applications to the world of aesthetics and culture. Marx's most famous insight was that capital is a worldwide social relation, not a thing; one of the consequences of this is that capitalist societies are incessantly dynamic, and driven by the compulsion to expand, i.e. accumulate more and more capital, in the framework of the world-market. But his single greatest contribution to aesthetics was undoubtedly the concept of the genealogy, a.k.a. the historical trajectory of a given social formation through time. The first great sketch of this concept was the 1860 essay The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The Brumaire was a stinging, slashing, uproariously funny and absolutely devastating analysis of Napoleon III, a military adventurer who, in cahoots with various powerful French business interests, hijacked the French state in 1851 and crowned himself Emperor. Unlike the original Bonaparte, this Emperor was neither a bonafide heroic military leader nor the incarnation of a revolutionary national peasantry, but he sure did know how to play one on the 19th century equivalent of TV: namely, the street theater of urban Paris. Instead of merely denouncing Napoleon III as the cretin he indeed was, Marx goes further, and provides us with what's really a theory of capitalist culture: the rule of the Emperor was based on the limited class (un)consciousness of the French peasants, who were being squeezed dry by rampant industrialization and wanted a strong leader to save their bacon. Marx's point was that even though, in reality, Napoleon III was the creature of the urban financiers who were living high off colonial speculations, the sweat of the peasantry, and the labor of the nascent proletariat, and carried out policies beneficial to the rich and obnoxious for everyone else, large numbers of French citizens thought of the monarch as their Emperor. The rule of capital, in short, rested just as much on ideological appearance as on the implacable economic laws of accumulation. It isn't that one is more important or fundamental than the other, but that each mediates (and is, in turn, intermediated by) the other.

Friedrich Nietzsche The greatest contribution of this famed 19th century German philosopher and social critic was his critique of Victorian-era moralism, which he diagnosed as an inverted power-ideology, the resentment-filled compensation of the weak who try to scapegoat the potentially strong. At his best, Nietzsche was an inveterate foe of ideology in the bad, mystificatory sense of the term; he was a tremendous prose stylist, whose pithy remarks, stinging insights and poetic inversions anticipated Karl Kraus and other cultural critics of the 20th century.

Jean-Paul Sartre The exemplary theorist of existentialism and one of the towering figures of late 20th century Francophone Marxism (the other being Bourdieu). After writing the founding work of French existentialism, Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre plunged intrepidly onwards to the full-fledged dialectics of Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), one of the truly indispensable meditations on monopoly capitalism and its cultural mediations. Among other key innovations, Sartre theorized the notion of the practico-inert (the storehouse of narratives and cultural which form a kind of accumulated symbolic capital within subjects), the role of violence and tool-making praxis in human relations, the dialectics of the gaze (really a prototypical theory of film), the existential horizon and project, and even a nascent theory of multinational micropolitics. His committed resistance to France's atrocious colonial wars in Algeria and Vietnam, support for magnificent radical artists such as Jean Genet, and public embrace of the May 1968 rebellion, made him a legendary figure in France, the 20th century equivalent of Victor Hugo, truly the conscience of Gaullist France. Last but not least, his final work, The Family Idiot, is one of the indispensable psychobiographies of the 20th century, a lengthy, four-volume analysis of Gustave Flaubert's writings and works.

Gayatri Spivak The indispensable theorist and critic of post-colonialism, whose work can best be described as the radical constellation of Second World deconstruction, Third World feminism, and Fourth World indigenous activism. Spivak's mid-1980s essays, Outside in the Teaching Machine, sketch out the post-colonial revolution she would carry out in A Critique of Post-colonial Reason (1998), a text brimming with intriguing speculations about the impending convergence of postmodernism and postcolonialism. One of the key English translators of Derrida, she also did a superb translation of Indian indigenous writer Mahasweta Devi's stories. Emory University maintains a page detailing her biography and publications, and B. Venkat Mani provides this overview.

Slavoj Zizek Zizek is one of the Eurostate's most promising thinkers, who synthesized a heady admixture of Lacan, Marx, Freud and Lukacs into a powerful critique of neoliberalism. Verso has a fine array of Zizek's books, and try downloading one of his signature lectures (this link is RealMedia), which burst with dialectical energy, flair and wit. Check out Zizek's official bibliography as well as his listing at the European Graduate School.
 

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