The challenge with a volume like this one is how to address the breadth and depth of the ideas advanced by the Frankfurt School, whose members’ work encompasses a wide variety of economic, social, political, and aesthetic topics, ranging from the critique of monopoly capitalism, art, the commons, the public sphere, and consumerism, to studies of false consciousness. Concerned with both the radicality of the Enlightenment and its relation to modernity, they explore the contradictions of public life brought about by the psychodynamics of fascism, the manipulation of public opinion, the substitution of information for knowledge, material excess, mass consumerism, and the breakdown of communication. The essays under review here ably address this diverse array of thinking and illustrate its ongoing relevance to academic debate and public discourse.

The editors adopt a conceptual focus so that the core of discussion turns on the notion of publics—public squares, public spheres, public identities, and public life. The intellectual point of departure is Jürgen Habermas’s notion of public space, which he explains at length in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere ([1962] 1989), and again in Between Facts and Norms (1996). Whereas the first generation of critical theorists devoted their life’s work to concerns with the crisis of capitalism and the elaboration of Hegel’s dialectics, there is a shift in emphasis under Habermas’s influence, as he turns to focus on understanding the conditions of communicative action coordinated through speech acts.

Eleven chapters explore different theoretical and methodological questions raised by Habermas’s work as part of an effort to reclaim the radical legacy of critical theory. As Stephen Bronner puts it in the introductory essay, critical theory has undergone a “crisis of purpose,” having fallen into what he characterizes as an “establishmentarian malaise.” Critical theory, he says, lost its “radical bite” (p. ix). To remedy this, he invites readers to rediscover the critical tradition, whereby public philosophy might be called upon to explain transformations in the public sphere and public space that have become accelerated due to developments wrought by global capitalism.

Bronner is followed by Doug Kellner, whose essay serves up a primer on Habermas. Readers will find this helpful insofar as Kellner balances explanation and critique, taking care not to digress too much into point-by-point analysis. His summary makes cogent distinctions between Habermas’s early and late work. This essay effectively sets the stage and opens to a broader consideration of how Habermas and critical theory in general might be repurposed and expanded to inform an understanding about the nature of contemporary politics, protest, and resistance.

The subsequent essays likewise engage in thoughtful critique of Habermas’s major themes and concepts, which are further read through the work of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and others like Hannah Arendt and C. Wright Mills. In the return to Habermas and critical theory, one might recall the original succession of events: After Horkheimer and Adorno, who argued that something went wrong with “Enlightenment,” Habermas contended that something likewise went wrong with the public square. The individual chapters explore this central problematic as they aim to offer insight by engaging different variations of the question: What happened to the public square? Here we discover there is some debate.

Recent events, including the Occupy movement, Arab Spring, and the Gezi Park protests, are explored at length to illustrate, albeit differently, how public space has been rendered problematic in our current time. Problems singled out for analysis include reactionary identity formation, social passivity, the commodification and commercialization of public space, and the large-scale manipulation of public opinion. Materialist as well as immaterial and affective psychosocial dynamics are explored as part of an effort to explain social change in the contemporary era. In what is perhaps this work’s major contribution, it forgoes textual exegesis of early foundational work in order to privilege a more practical approach to understanding and problem solving. The aim here is to illustrate how original works might be deployed to support the advancement of new theory. To this end, the authors contrast Habermas’s strengths with accepted critiques of his work. The result is a more nuanced reading of Habermas that helps move the debate beyond concerns over epistemology and linguistic turns. This approach demonstrates critical theory’s potential for political praxis insofar as the critique moves in the direction of considering solutions for problems in connection with public space.

The psychoanalytic perspective is well represented by Michael Diamond’s essay, which reminds us that the public square is not only a physical place; it also exists in the “unconscious.” Diamond’s review of the roots of psychoanalytic thinking among Frankfurt School writers transitions to a consideration of psychodynamic changes occurring in the present era with regard to public space, which, he argues, is being eroded and contested. One of Habermas’s major concerns, of course, was the decline of the public arena as a site of deliberative discourse and individual agency. The author extends Habermas’s thinking to explore questions of personal agency and reflexivity in terms of self and other relations. Juxtaposing Habermas with Freudian and Kleinian object relations theory, Diamond explores how individuals move in and out of the public space, changing self and world in the process. This gives way to a discussion of large-group identity formation, where he draws from Arendt to discuss “public and persecutory space” within the context of public and private space. From here he moves to a consideration of how these changes potentially challenge self-identity and subjectivity.

Social space, it is argued, is subject to ongoing mutation and transformation, which significantly transgresses material as well as immaterial boundaries. Spatial tensions brought about by the contestation and deliberate boundary blurring between public and private social space offer potential explanation for contemporary American anxiety in connection with border security and public safety issues. This creates an opening to consider the persecutory nature of public space, where individuality and difference come under attack within a social context that rewards regressive action and a retreat to conformity, homogeneity, and dependence on authority.

Contemporary developments in digital technology and the power of the media are taken up by David Ingram and Asif Bar-Tura, who draw from Habermas’s discourse theory to look at the problem of citizens’ passive consumption of information and public opinion. Structural problems with regard to the ways that media are disseminated and consumed are examined, as the authors look at Internet access and the digital divide and how this stratifies citizens into skill groups—those who have access versus those who do not. In the case of the latter, the poor, uneducated, and elderly are increasingly being left behind.

Horkheimer and Adorno’s culture Industry theories are resurrected by different authors to examine contemporary social problems. Malcom Miles examines urban redevelopment schemes and challenges the idea that democracy and access to public space are aligned. Bryant Park in New York City, Millennium Place, Coventry, and Occupy are looked at critically within this context. Fred Alford’s essay, likewise, critically challenges the idealization of public space, which, he argues, was never an ideal of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. The book concludes with a final reflection on the commodification of Occupy Wall Street by Diana Boros and Haley Smith. Boros and Smith draw from Adorno and Marcuse as they consider how the occupation of public space, as imagined by the Adbusters editors who helped launch the movement, lost its momentum over time and faded from public interest.

The Frankfurt School provides us with useful perspectives that we can apply to the study of contemporary society; it also provides a solid underpinning of critique for cultural studies. One of the long-standing critiques of both the Frankfurt School and critical theory in general is that it presented an overwhelmingly negative critique, one that posed few solutions to resolve the contradictions of modern life. The essays here, while they are intellectually provocative and challenge this received wisdom, will not satisfy those who are looking for closure on this issue. The focus on the work of Habermas represents, to some extent, an attempt to move beyond this criticism, as the editors invest effort to distinguish Habermas’s work from the negative dialectics of the school’s founders, Horkheimer and Adorno. In light of this, I find that the authors demonstrate sensitivity to the criticism, as they draw from a range of work to provoke insight into contemporary political happenings. Consequently, even though there are no specific public policy solutions offered, the reader is well positioned to evaluate the different perspectives presented, and where they might step out of the passive role to think critically and constructively in order to engage publics to be part of the solution.

Re-Imagining Public Space delivers a much-needed perspective on the Frankfurt School’s practice of critical theory. The editors and authors advance a strong case to make Enlightenment radical again in the contemporary political moment. Given the striking parallels between the tumultuous times that distinguished the era of the postwar scholars and the current day, this book will serve as an excellent resource for educators, students, journalists, activists, and others who may want to draw upon the writing of the Frankfurt School as a means for reflecting on the history of the present.