The Haunted Present

The year is 1949. Theodor Adorno returns from New York to bombed-out Frankfurt, tasked with finding enlightenment from within ruin. Susan Sontag is reborn in San Francisco. Michel Foucault attempts suicide, again, in Paris. Paul Feyerabend, crippled by a war wound, recircles his native Vienna. The wars aftermath calls for the world to be remade, and over the coming decades this quartet of thinkers will revolutionise how we think about society, culture and science.

The Haunted Present follows in its protagonists footsteps from Los Angeles to London, Harvard to Hanoi, as each seeks ways into a new philosophy. We see them moving through a world seething with change, grappling courageously with the violent collision of critical theory, aesthetic rebellion, scientific scepticism and political disillusionment that defined their era, and now haunts our own. Through their lives and thought, Wolfram Eilenberger reveals the competing intellectual impulses that emerged to produce the faultlines and crises of the present - and the power of philosophy to escape its constraints.