Despite their differences in origin, the three influential schools of twentieth-century continental cultural criticism––the Frankfurt School, existentialism, and poststructuralism––have long been treated as an ensemble and with critical hesitancy. Examining these schools as responses to the apparent collapse of Western civilization in the twentieth-century and as formidable intellectual challenges to the cultural legacies of the Enlightenment, this book provides a productive base for criticism and broadens our understanding of their histories and reception.