Critical Theory
"Critical theory" is used to refer to the diverse body of work produced by members and associates of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research after Max Horkheimer became its director in 1930. The first generation of what came to be called the Frankfurt school included, in addition to Horkheimer, such prominent figures as Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Leo Löwenthal, Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, and Frederick Pollock. The most influential members of the second generation are Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, and Albrecht Wellmer. As the variety of backgrounds and interests might suggest, critical social theory was conceived as a multidisciplinary program linking philosophy to history and the human sciences in a kind of "philosophically oriented social inquiry," as Horkheimer put it. Though very strongly influenced by Immanuel Kant and neo-Kantianism, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and German idealism, Max Weber and Sigmund Freud, it was understood as a renewal of Marxism inspired in part by the earlier work of Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch. This updated Marxism would take account of the altered historical realities of advanced capitalism and integrate areas of inquiry neglected by traditional Marxism, such as philosophy and political theory, cultural studies (including studies of mass culture), and social psychology (appropriating psychoanalysis for social theory). With the rise of National Socialism, the institute moved briefly to Geneva and Paris in 1933 and then in 1934 to Columbia University in New York, where its journal, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, continued to be published until 1941, the last volume in English. Early in the 1950s, Horkheimer and Adorno reestablished the institute in Frankfurt. Habermas became an assistant there in 1955.
The original project of a critical social theory advanced by Horkheimer was a version of Karl Marx's Aufhebung of philosophy in social theory and practice. Philosophy was to become a sociohistorical, practically oriented critique of reason and its claimed realizations. While the dominant forms of reason were often distorted in the interests of dominant classes, the aim of critical theory was, not simply to negate them, but, by examining their genesis and functions, to transform them and enlist them in the struggle for a better world. The insistence on the "truth content" of the "bourgeois ideals" of freedom, truth, and justice, the refusal to abandon them as mere ideology, was severely tested by the horrors of World War II. Early in the 1940s, in their collaborative reflections on the "dialectic of enlightenment," Horkheimer and Adorno offered a much more pessimistic view of the history of reason. Keying on a tendency that Weber had emphasized, the relentless spread of "instrumental" rationality, they revered Marx's positive evaluation of scientific-technological progress. It was now seen as the core of a domination that had spread to all spheres of life and, in the process, had immobilized the potential agents of social change. In this "totally administered society" with what Marcuse later called its "one-dimensional man," critical theory could at best reveal the unreason at the heart of what passed for reason, without offering any positive account of its own.
Habermas's work since the 1960s might be viewed as an attempt to avoid this impasse by introducing into critical theory a fundamental shift in paradigms from the philosophy of the subject to the theory of communication and from means-ends rationality to communicative rationality. This serves as the basis for an altered diagnosis of the ills of modernity—as rooted, not in rationalization as such, but in a one-sided rationalization driven by economic and administrative forces—and an altered prescription for their cure, the democratization of public opinion and will formation in an effectively functioning public sphere, where issues of general concern are submitted to rational, critical public debate.
Adorno, Theodor; Apel, Karl-Otto; Benjamin, Walter; Freud, Sigmund; Habermas, Jürgen; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Horkheimer, Max; Kant, Immanuel; Lukács, Georg; Marxist Philosophy; Marx, Karl; Neo-Kantianism; Weber, Max.
Bibliography
Arato, A., and E. Gebhardt, eds. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York: Urizen Books, 1978.
Bronner, S., and D. Kellner, eds. Critical Theory and Society: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Ingram, D., and J. Simon-Ingram, eds. Critical Theory: The Essential Readings. New York: Paragon House, 1992.
Jay, M. The Dialectical Imagination. Boston: Little Brown, 1973.
Wiggershaus, R. The Frankfurt School. Translated by M. Robertson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.
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