The task of critical theory today : rethinking the critique of capitalism and its futures / Moishe Postone -- Profit maxims : capitalism and the common sense of time and money / David Norman Smith -- Theorizing modern society as an inverted reality : how critical theory and indigenous critiques of globalization must learn from each other / Asafa Jalata, Harry F. Dahms -- The neo-idealist paradigm shift in contemporary critical theory / Michael J. Thompson -- toward a critical ontology of the social : Hegel, Luka<U+0301>cs, and the challenge of mediation / Reha Kadakal -- Critical theory and practice : bridging the global and the Personal. A lecture / Courtney Jung -- Call for a new social theory : re-igniting radical imagination / James E. Block -- Imperial homunculi : the speculative singularities of American hegemony (drones, suicide bombers, and rampage killers, or, an excursion into Durkheimian geometry) / Mark P. Worrell -- How legends become brands : the culture industry in the second enclosure movement / Daniel Krier, William J. Swart -- Thick description, nomological laws and ideal types : which methodology helps most with praxis? / J.I. (Hans) Bakker.

In recent years, under the impression and the burden of globalization and neoliberalism, debates about the relationship between the theory and practice of progress - including the theory and practice of social critique - have gone through an unexpected and momentous revival, renewal and rejuvenation. This is due in large part to the proliferation of manifest crises in the early years of the twenty-first century. The terrorist attacks in September of 2001, the financial crisis of 2008 that spawned the Great Recession, the Euro crisis that began in fall 2010 - these events provided glimpses of the existing system of political economy, and opportunities to begin to grasp and reveal the ongoing reconstruction of business-labor-government relations in the early 21st century. Yet, in a variety of ways, the notions that theories and practices of rigorous social critique in and of modern societies could become outdated, or that they were based on a categorical misunderstanding of the nature of social, economic, political and cultural life in the modern world, were symptomatic of an ongoing reconfiguration of the system of political economy itself.

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