Explores the practical relevance of these notions for a contemporary democratic theory. Vasilis Grollios offers a unique overview of the key concepts of totality, negativity, fetishization, contradiction, mystification, identity thinking, dialectics and corporeal materialism as they have been employed by the major thinkers of the critical theory tradition - Marx, Engels, Horkheimer, Lukacs, Adorno, Marcuse, E. Bloch and J. Holloway.