critical theory approach to research

Understanding Critical Theory

Charlotte Nickerson

Research Assistant at Harvard University

Undergraduate at Harvard University

Charlotte Nickerson is a student at Harvard University obsessed with the intersection of mental health, productivity, and design.

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Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

On This Page:

• Critical theories aim to change and critique society as a whole by finding the underlying assumptions in social life that prevent people from participating in a “true democracy.”
• Critical Theory developed in the Frankfurt school from scholars such as Horkheimer and Adorno with an emphasis on examining and deconstructing fascism and mass media.
• Habermas continued the tradition of Critical Theory through his notion of the lifeworld and the public sphere. He theorized that political and economic institutions had invaded public life, leading to a lack of nuance in discourse and preventing people from participating in a “real democracy.”
• Critical Theory morphed into critical legal theory in the latter 20th century, which eventually gave rise to branches such as critical race and critical gender theory.

Critical Theory is a social theory that aims to critique and change society as a whole. Critical theories attempt to find the underlying assumptions in social life that keep people from fully and truly understanding how the world works.

These underlying assumptions, in the view of critical theories, create a “False consciousness” that actively undermines people’s progress toward a true democracy.

Critical Theory, first emerging from Horkheimer at the Frankfurt School, bridges its reach to ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of history.

Critical theorists claim that the social sciences must integrate philosophy into their methods to make their findings practical to advance the moral cause of freeing humans from circumstances such as domination and oppression (Horkheimer, 1993).

While Critical Theory is most associated with the Frankfurt School, beginning with Horkheimer and Adorno and ending with Marcuse and Habermas.

Critical Theory has extended to many other disciplines, such as feminism, critical race theory, and critiques of colonialism.

Critical Theories of Gender

Critical theories of gender are concerned with the ways in which literature and other cultural media reinforce or undermine the economic, political, social, and psychological oppression of people of various genders.

Critical feminist theories, in particular, focus on issues of power and seek to explain the origins and consequences of gender relations, particularly those that privilege men.

They study the ways that assumptions and ideologies around gender are produced, reproduced, resisted, and changed in and through the everyday experiences of men and women (Coakley and Pike, 2014).

Like critical theories of race, critical theories of gender see their origins in critical legal studies.

Critical Theories of Race

Racism is prevalent in everyday life, and Critical Theory scholars agree that the ideology and assumptions of racism are so ingrained in the political and legal structures of society as to be nearly unrecognizable (Parker and Roberts, 2005).

The critical study of race and ethnicity is centered on examining the experiences of racial oppression in the context of an attempt to challenge existing assumptions about the construction of race.

Critical theories of race can also trace their roots to philosophical, historical, and sociological critiques of oppression, such as Marxism , feminist theory, and postcolonialism (Parker and Roberts, 2005).

Critical Race Theory emerged as an outgrowth of the critical legal studies movement originating at Harvard Law School in the early 1980s.

Law professors and students criticized how the law served to privilege the wealthy and powerful in US society while impeding the poor from using the courts as a means of writing their own wrongs (Parker and Roberts, 2005).

One of the main tenets of critical race theory is that, while classical racism has subsided, everyday racism remains alive, characterized by mundane practices and events infused with varying degrees of racism, such as “microaggressions” and other subtle, automatic, non-verbal exchanges.

For example, an educational institution can commit a microaggression by creating hostile environmental encounters for African Americans, such as seeing black males engaged in black youth culture as predatory (Parker and Roberts, 2005).

Globalization

One criticism of the Frankfurt school is that it lacked a solid grounding in social reality (Kozlarek, 2001).

Kozlarek (2001) argues that Horkheimer and Adorno take an overly euro-centric stance on the world and that Eurocentrism is a crucial impediment to Critical Theory, and suggests alternatives to the Eurocentric worldview in modern Critical Theory research.

Rather than philosophically constructing ideas of what should be normal and an ideal society, Kozlarek claims, one must ask where the underlying assumptions of Critical Theory come from and what their sociocultural functions were and are.

Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School

Critical Theory has many distinct historical phases spanning several generations; however, it was born in the Frankfurt School.

The Frankfurt School opened as the Institute for Social Research in the 1920s in the social context of rising fascism in Germany and Italy. The theorists of the Frankfurt school went into exile in Switzerland and the United States before returning to Frankfurt in 1953.

According to the theorists in the Frankfurt School, a so-called “Critical Theory” could be distinguished from a “traditional” theory in that critical theories have a specific practical purpose, such as promoting an understanding of the world that leads to human “emancipation from slavery” (Horkheimer, 1973).

In order for a Critical Theory to be a Critical Theory in Horkheimer’s view, it must be explanatory, practical, and normative.

By these, Horkheimer means that the theory must explain what is wrong with the current social reality, identify the people and actors that can change it, and provide both achievable, practical objectives for social transformation and ways of criticizing those objectives (Horkheimer, 1972).

Research that furthers Critical Theory must, in this view, combine psychological, cultural, and social dimensions, as well as an examination of institutional forms of domination.

Horkheimer’s Critical Theory, heavily influenced by Marxism, aimed to transform contemporary capitalist society into a more consensual one.

By this, Horkheimer meant that a capitalist society could only be transformed by becoming more democratic in order to make sure that all of the conditions of social life that are controllable by people can be determined by the consensus of the people living in that society (Horkheimer, 1972).

The Frankfurt School theorists extended the work of Marx, Weber, and Freud, as well as considering the pull of authoritarian regimes, the relationship between art, technology, mass society, and social psychology.

Initial Concerns of the Frankfurt School

In its initial phases, Critical Theory attempted to differentiate the idea of a “real democracy” from the forms of government then present in Western societies.

According to critical theorists, real democracy is rational because it allows individuals to gain control over the social processes that affect themselves and their life choices.

The next phases of Critical Theory were concerned with anti-democratic trends, such as the emergence of fascism in the 1930s. These studies focused on phenomena such as fascist states and authoritarian personalities.

Horkheimer saw these anti-democratic trends and a process called reification as undermining people’s ability to determine their own social circumstances.

Reification is a complex idea where something that is immaterial — like happiness, fear, or evil — is treated as a material thing. In the context of Critical Theory’s early musings about authoritarianism, this meant that the spread of increasingly abstract but fascist social principles led to societies that were more fascist on a concrete level.

To critical theorists in the 1940s, reification happened at two different levels. Firstly, reification happened at a small scale, and theorists could examine the psychological conditions that lead to people supporting democracy or authoritarianism.

Secondly, reification also happened at a larger scale and over a longer time period, where people explained enduring societal trends by projecting their democratic or authoritarian principles onto retellings of history (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Habermas sought to develop a level of analysis between that of the individual and the entire society. He called this intermediate level the “public sphere” or Offentlichkeit.

Ideology Critique

One of the main concerns of the scholars of the Frankfurt School was the rise of “mass culture” — the technological developments that allow cultural products, such as music, movies, and art, to be distributed on a massive scale.

Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse speculated that technology allowed audiences to consume content passively rather than actively engaging with one another, making people intellectually inactive and politically passive.

Contemporary Critical Theory: Habermas

Habermas was a member of the second generation of Critical Theory. Habermas’s Critical Theory went beyond the theoretical roots of the Frankfurt school and became more life-American pragmatism, which holds that both the meaning and the truth of any idea are a function of its practical outcome.

Haabermas’ work in Critical Theory was concerned with two main issues: developing a justification for the normative dimension of critical social theory and the problem of establishing a connection between the theory and political practice.

These problems were carried over from the Frankfurt school (Roderick, 1986).

The first of these problems dealt with what counts as a rational criticism of society, while the second is directed at how these criticisms can be used to construct a society that is more rational.

Habermas dealt with three kinds of knowledge: empirical knowledge, which is technical or scientific; Hermeneutic or interpretive knowledge, which is interested in human understanding and cooperation; and critical knowledge, which is focused on freeing humans from societal assumptions.

Habermas acknowledged that science cannot be value-free and that those who study society are part of its subject matter. Critical Theory, to Habermas, unmasks the distortions, representations, and politics embedded in our knowledge and speech.

The Lifeworld

Habermas focused on the idea of the lifeworld, which is a person’s everyday life and experiences. The lifeworld encompasses culture, social relations, and everyday communication.

Habermas’s theory is that the lifeworld is increasingly being taken over by political and economic systems. As politics is about power, attempts at becoming more powerful by politicians and the interests of political parties affect everyday lives.

People also, according to Habermas, are heavily influenced by the system of capitalism – they talk about companies, work at them, and consume constantly. Habermas believed that the lifeworld could not be reduced to what he calls “media ” — such as the power of the state and money.

However, the modern state and economic systems have imposed their media on the lifeworld, and as money and politics seek to dominate the local lifeworld of people, they impede them from achieving a “true democracy.”

To Habermas, value rationality — attempts to achieve value-based goals that make life meaningful, such as being a good father — is tied to the lifeworld. Meanwhile, instrumental rationality — such as calculations of the means necessary to achieve a particular end — is tied to the state and economy.

The everyday relationships of people in society in modernity have been overtaken by a social structure that promotes money and power as keys to success and what is seen as morally right.

Habermas emphasized that money and power, and the instrumental relationships that people form in trying to achieve them, cannot be the sole foundation for consensus and communication.

The Colonization of the Public Sphere

Another idea that Habermas considers is the colonization of the public sphere. Habermas believed that news sources motivated by profit, promoting entertainment, and oversimplification dominated public life.

Rather than focusing on the nuances of issues through lengthy public debate, these colonizers encouraged arguments between people with simplified perspectives.

Habermas sets an ideal for public discourse, which he calls ideal speech communities. Habermaass differentiated communicative action — any action that someone takes with the intent to communicate — from strategic speech — which is instrumentally based and permeates the lifeworld under capitalist-based societies.

Rather than trying to simply communicate with people, those who use strategic speech are trying to manipulate people into achieving an end.

Habermas believed that the promise and hope of enlightenment and modernity is a society where people can talk in order to reach a consensus and make reasoned decisions. To have this, everyone needs an equal chance to speak without coercion, where any topic can be discussed, and where everyone can keep their speech free from ideology.

Such a situation constitutes the ideal speech community, which is the basis for and gives rise to civil society. This civil society must develop in the context of a liberal political culture that promotes equality and draws strong boundaries between large institutions and the lifeworld.

In the public sphere of real democracy, the state’s power is limited, and people can use persuasion but cannot obtain political power in the public sphere (Roderick, 1986).

Critical Evaluation

As a broad-ranging philosophical project, Critical Theory has experienced many tensions between theorists both in the same generation and across different generations of the tradition.

Critical Theory has also drawn criticism from outside.

Perhaps the most major criticism of Critical Theory is that it fails to provide rational standards by which it can show that it is superior to other theories of knowledge, science, or practice.

Gibson (1986), for example, says that critical theories suffer from cliquishness, conformity, elitism, immodesty, anti-individualism, contradictoriness, criticalness, and naivety.

As Hughes and Hughes say of Habermas’s theory of ideal public discourse, it “says much about rational talkers talking, but very little about actors acting: Felt, perceptive, imaginative, bodily experience does not fit these theories” (1990).

Critical Theory has also been criticized from a feminist perspective. This feminist criticism of Critical Theory contends that critical theories can be as narrow and oppressive as the rationalization, bureaucratization, and cultures they seek to unmask and change.

Ellsworth (1989), for example, acknowledges that critical theories are often so tied to their vision of the truth that they fail to see themselves as one of many voices and that the enlightening of the false consciousness of others may be a form of domination rather than liberation.

Coakley, J., & Pike, E. (2014). EBOOK: Sports in Society. McGraw Hill.

Critical Theory. (2005). In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/

Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard educational review, 59(3), 297-325.

Gibson, R. (1986). Critical Theory and education. Hodder and Stoughton.

Habermas, Jürgen (1990a): Moral consciousness and communicative action. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (trans.). Maldon, MA: Polity Press.

Horkheimer, M. (1972). Critical Theory: Selected essays (Vol. 1). A&C Black.

Horkheimer, M. (1993). The present situation of social philosophy and the tasks of an institute for social research. Between philosophy and social science: Selected early writings, 11.

Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. (1973). The Dialectic of Enlightenment (London, Allen Lane).

Kozlarek, O. (2001). Critical Theory and the challenge of globalization. International Sociology, 16(4), 607-622.

Parker, L., & Roberts, L. (2005). Critical theories of race. RESEARCH METHODS, 74.

Roderick, R. (1986). Habermas and the foundations of Critical Theory. Macmillan International Higher Education.

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Critical Theory (Frankfurt School)

[ Editor’s Note: The following new entry by Robin Celikates and Jeffrey Flynn replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author. ]

“Critical theory” refers to a family of theories that aim at a critique and transformation of society by integrating normative perspectives with empirically informed analysis of society’s conflicts, contradictions, and tendencies. In a narrow sense, “Critical Theory” (often denoted with capital letters) refers to the work of several generations of philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School. Beginning in the 1930s at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, it is best known for interdisciplinary research that combines philosophy and social science with the practical aim of furthering emancipation. There are separate entries on influential figures of the first generation of the Frankfurt School – Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), and Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) – and the leading figure of the second generation, Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929).

In a broader sense, there are many different strands of critical theory that have emerged as forms of reflective engagement with the emancipatory goals of various social and political movements, such as feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory, and postcolonial/decolonial theory. In another, third sense, “critical theory” or sometimes just “Theory” is used to refer to work by theorists associated with psychoanalysis and post-structuralism, such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida (see these separate entries as well as the entry on postmodernism ).

This entry is primarily focused on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, but broadens outward at various points to discuss engagements by that tradition with a range of critical theories and social developments. The need for a broad approach to critical theory is prompted today by a range of contemporary social, political, economic, and ecological crises and struggles as well as the critique of Eurocentric forms of knowledge production.

1.1 Origins and Generations

1.2 influences, 1.3 critical theory versus traditional theory, 1.4 studies on authoritarianism and mass culture, 1.5 the dialectic of enlightenment, 1.6 the communicative turn, 1.7 a continuing and contested tradition, 2.1 immanent critique, 2.2 normative foundations for critique, 2.3 reconstructive critique, 2.4 disclosive critique, genealogy, and the critique of normativity, 2.5 current challenges, 3.1 alienation, 3.2 reification, 3.3 ideology, 3.4 emancipation, 4.1.1 gender, 4.1.3 colonialism and post-colonialism, 4.2.1 economic crises, 4.2.2 ecological crises, 4.2.3 political crises, 4.3 critical practices, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the frankfurt school: origins, influences, and development.

The “Frankfurt School” of critical theory is not really a school at all. It is a loosely held together tradition constituted by ongoing debates among adherents about how best to define and develop that tradition. This includes disagreements about methods, about how to interpret earlier figures and texts in the tradition, about whether past shifts in focus were advances or dead ends, and about how to respond to new challenges arising from other schools of thought and current social developments. This section tells a largely chronological story, focusing on the origins, influences, and key texts of the Frankfurt School, and concludes with reference to ongoing debates on how to inherit and continue the tradition.

In their attempt to combine philosophy and social science in a critical theory with emancipatory intent, the wide-ranging work of the first generation of the Frankfurt School was methodologically innovative. They revised and updated Marxism by integrating it with the work of Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, and Friedrich Nietzsche while developing a model of radical critique that is immanently anchored in social reality. They used this model to analyze a wide range of phenomena – from authoritarianism as a political formation and as it manifests in both the nuclear family and deep-seated psychological dispositions, to the effects of capitalism on psychological, social, cultural, and political formations as well as on the production of knowledge itself (for excellent guides, see Thompson 2017 and Gordon et al. 2019).

Max Horkheimer outlined the original research agenda for the Frankfurt School in his 1931 inaugural lecture upon becoming director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt (founded in 1923). He proposed an interdisciplinary research program combining philosophy and social theory with psychology, political economy, and cultural analysis (Horkheimer 1931). In that way, “social philosophy” aims at providing an encompassing interpretation of social reality as a whole – as “social totality,” to use a concept central to the Marxist tradition (Jay 1984).

Other key figures of the first generation include Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin, along with Erich Fromm, Friedrich Pollock, Leo Löwenthal, Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, and figures like Siegfried Kracauer, who belonged to the broader circle for a few years (for rich historical accounts, see Jay 1973, Buck-Morss 1977, Dubiel 1978, Wiggershaus 1986, Wheatland 2009). The work of the largely Jewish members of the first generation was deeply marked by the rise of National Socialism, the experience of exile, and, for some of its inner circle, their return to Germany after 1945. After the Nazis closed the Institute, Horkheimer, who had already moved it to Geneva, re-established it at Columbia University in 1934, where he was soon joined by Pollock, Marcuse, and Löwenthal, while Adorno did not emigrate to the US until 1938. Horkheimer, Adorno, and Pollock moved the Institute from New York to Los Angeles in 1941. Those three reestablished the Institute in Germany after the War, with Horkeimer as director from 1951 to 1958 and Adorno from 1958 to 1969. Key figures who worked with first generation figures during this period emerged as the second generation: Jürgen Habermas, Alfred Schmidt, Albrecht Wellmer, Oskar Negt, and Claus Offe.

Habermas was the leading figure of this second generation, taking up Horkheimer’s chair in Frankfurt in 1964 before moving to a research post in Starnberg in 1971. Habermas returned to Frankfurt in 1981, retiring from this position in 1994. Axel Honneth worked closely with Habermas in the 1980s and took over the chair in social philosophy in Frankfurt in 1996; Honneth was also director of, and largely responsible for the revival of, the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt from 2001 to 2018. He is considered a leading figure in the third generation, along with Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, and Christoph Menke (Anderson 2000, Allen 2010). Going beyond the second and third generations of the Frankfurt School, there are far too many figures to list; and the focal points for critical theory in this tradition have expanded, both geographically – with prominent figures in the United States and an active reception in Latin America – and thematically – for example, with a turn to feminism (see §4.1.1 ).

The first generation of the Frankfurt School took inspiration from an earlier generation of critical theorists: “Left Hegelians” in Germany who, after Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s death in 1831, applied his philosophy critically to social and political phenomena like religion and the state, maintaining that the progressive realization of freedom in history that was central to Hegel’s thought was not yet complete and required a fundamental transformation of the status quo. Karl Marx became the most influential of this group. In a materialist transformation of Hegel’s thought, Marx analyzed the concrete conditions for realizing autonomy for all and viewed philosophy itself as conditioned by socioeconomic developments. By developing a critique of political economy in order to analyze the nature of capitalism and the possibilities for revolutionary social transformation, Marx set the standard for future generations of critical theory by combining radical philosophy with a critique of the best available social science of the day in the pursuit of emancipation.

Marx’s early writings, in the 1840s, were written when capitalist modernization was only just beginning in Germany, but he already saw contradictory social relations as the objective condition of capitalist society and exploited workers as a nascent revolutionary force. By the time the Frankfurt School began working out a critical theory of society in the 1930s much had changed as Germany had emerged as a leading economic power in an industrialized, capitalist Europe. Frankfurt School theorists were committed to social transformation, but the vehicle for change Marx identified – workers in advanced capitalist states like Germany – not only lacked revolutionary consciousness, but would soon embrace fascist politics when faced with economic crisis and mass unemployment. Radical social theorists would need revised analytical tools.

To study the psychology of individuals and groups along with social and cultural influences on that psychology, they could not rely on the then-dominant dogmatic versions of scientific Marxism (Pensky 2019). To understand how social conflicts get denied or repressed, and why individuals and groups turn to authoritarian politics that seem not to align with their class interests, they turned to Freudian psychoanalysis. In contrast to orthodox Marxism, they analyzed individual and group psychology, changes in the modern family, and the cultural “superstructure” of society, not just the material “base,” in order to understand how the rise of “mass culture” and the decline of authority figures in the family led to the decline of critical capacities both in the individual psyche and in society generally. This effort to combine Marx and Freud is one of the distinctive features of the Frankfurt School; exactly how to integrate psychoanalytic theory into critical theory has been a long-standing debate (Marcuse 1955, Whitebook 1995, Honneth 2010, Part IV; Allen and O’Connor 2019, Allen 2021).

In addition to incorporating insights from Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, early critical theorists drew on Max Weber’s social theory to analyze contemporary society. Crucial here was Weber’s theory of rationalization, which stressed the growing dominance of instrumental rationality, or means-end reasoning, through the expanding bureaucratization of society. Weber posited a loss of freedom, due to the “iron cage” of modern bureaucracy, and a loss of meaning generated by the “disenchantment of the world” associated with secularization. Weber’s work was crucial for Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of instrumental reason (1947) as well as for Habermas’s later theory of communicative action (1981).

In synthesizing Marx and Weber, the first generation of critical theory was heavily influenced by Georg Lukács’s attempt to do the same in his ground-breaking 1923 essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” (see Brunkhorst 1983). Radically extending Marx’s analysis of commodities by analyzing how they transform the character of society as a whole, and drawing on Weber to describe a process of rationalization that extends to all aspects of life, Lukács used the term “reification” (see 3.2 below) to describe how the commodity form transforms the consciousness of those living in capitalist societies, who then see all social relations, even their relation to themselves, as taking on a “thing-like” character.

The classic philosophical influences on the Frankfurt School range widely, from Immanuel Kant and German Idealism to Nietzsche. In some form, Kant’s appeal to Mündigkeit (autonomy, maturity, responsibility) in his famous essay “What is Enlightenment?” – with its call for freely and publicly making use of reason – animates the ideal of emancipation throughout the work of the Frankfurt School, along with the Kantian conception of the critique of reason: the use of reason to reflect on the limits of reason. But its adherents follow Hegel and Marx in focusing on the social, cultural, and material conditions for achieving autonomy and insisting that reason is always socially and historically embedded. For first generation critical theorists, this entailed a critique of Kant’s own individualist and repressive understanding of autonomy as it arises within capitalist social conditions (Horkheimer 1933) and formalizes the domination of our own inner nature (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947, Excursus II, Adorno 1963a, Chs. 10–11). Some later critical theorists have engaged more positively with Kant, as in Habermas’s attempt to “detranscendentalize” core aspects of Kant’s transcendental philosophy (Habermas 2005, Ch. 2) and Rainer Forst’s Kantian constructivism in moral and political theory (Forst 2007, 2021a).

Hegel’s work has been a continual reference point for Frankfurt School philosophers, with key figures in the tradition – from Marcuse (1941) and Adorno (1963b) to Benhabib (1986, Part I) and Honneth (1992, 2001, 2011) – contributing both substantive studies and relying on Hegel’s methodology either for its holistic approach or as a paradigm of immanent critique while eschewing his metaphysical, teleological, and reconciliatory tendencies. Honneth first built on Hegel’s account of the struggle for recognition and the intersubjective conditions for living an autonomous life (Honneth 1992) before developing his own account of the practices and institutions of modern ethical life that realize freedom in a way that goes beyond its liberal and Kantian interpretations (Honneth 2011). Rahel Jaeggi builds on Hegel’s method of immanent critique in her account of progressive social change as learning processes in response to problems, contradictions, and crises that arise from within ethically thick forms of life (Jaeggi 2014).

In aiming to explain irrationality, the first generation extended the critique of reason, going beyond rationalist philosophers like Kant and Hegel to figures like Freud and Nietzsche. They turned to Nietzsche in particular as a critic of modern bourgeois culture and the violent formation of individual subjectivity. Engagement with Nietzsche’s thought extends from early essays by Horkheimer (1933, 1936a) through Horkheimer and Adorno’s shift toward doing critical theory in a more Nietzschean spirit with the genealogy of reason in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), and Habermas’s more critical take on Nietzsche’s supposed irrationalism (1985, Ch. 3–4), to contemporary authors such as Menke, who returns to Nietzsche as a positive reference point in the critique of the repressive dimensions of the modern ideal of equality (2000) and for a genealogical analysis of the modern subject who demands rights (2015).

One way of categorizing work by later generations of the Frankfurt School is to note how, even when drawing on a range of theoretical resources, they give pride of place to the legacy of a particular figure like Kant, Hegel, Marx, or Nietzsche (often via Foucault), or how they combine approaches. For instance, Honneth and Jaeggi are more Hegelian while Forst is more Kantian, and Benhabib is, like Habermas, a Hegelianized Kantian, and Fraser draws heavily on Marx in recent work while Amy Allen and Martin Saar are influenced by Foucauldian genealogy. The latter is part of a broader engagement between the Frankfurt School and post-structuralism, ranging from the more critical (Habermas 1985) through the more sympathetic (Honneth 1985, Menke 1988, 2000) to attempts to combine deconstructive and reconstructive approaches to critical theory (McCarthy 1991; see also Fraser 1989).

It is not easy to capture key features of an intellectual tradition shaped by such a variety of influences, including multiple figures whose own thinking changed over time, and a body of work addressing a vast range of topics spanning from the 1930s to the present. The rest of this section outlines some of the main arguments and focal points of key texts by key figures. It is not meant to be exhaustive, but to identify influential methodological approaches, arguments, and themes that are indicative of the work of the Frankfurt School and still provide important reference points for contemporary debates.

One largely undisputed reference for defining Frankfurt School critical theory is Horkheimer’s 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in which he defines critical theory by contrasting it with traditional theories that take the existing social order as given. Social sciences do this, for example, when they model themselves after the natural sciences in attempting to descriptively mirror a given set of facts or establish law-like generalizations. The point is not that empirical social research is invalid, but that traditional theories fail to analyze the broader social context in which they are embedded. This form of “positivism” views science as a purely theoretical undertaking divorced from practical interests even while it actually serves a particular social function in relying on established concepts and categories in a way that reinforces dominant ideologies and power structures. In that way, the forms of knowledge production that we rely on for insight into the social order become obstacles to social change.

Critical theory, by contrast, reflects on the context of its own origins and aims to be a transformative force within that context. It explicitly embraces an interdisciplinary methodology that aims to bridge the gap between empirical research and the kind of philosophical thinking needed to grasp the overall historical situation and mediate between specialized empirical disciplines. Critical theory aims not merely to describe social reality, but to generate insights into the forces of domination operating within society in a way that can inform practical action and stimulate change. It aims to unite theory and practice, so that the theorist forms “a dynamic unity with the oppressed class” (1937a [1972, 215]) that is guided by an emancipatory interest – defined negatively as an interest in the “abolition of social injustice” (ibid., 242) and positively as an interest in establishing “reasonable conditions of life” (ibid., 199). “The theory never aims simply at an increase of knowledge as such,” but at “emancipation from slavery” (1937b [1972, 246]) in the broadest sense of eliminating all forms of domination. The critique of traditional social science was further developed by Adorno and Habermas in the so-called positivism dispute in German sociology (Adorno et al. 1969, Wellmer 1969) and Horkheimer’s model of critical theory continues to inform discussions about how social critique might be carried out today in a variety of contexts (Outlaw 2005, Collins 2019, 57–65).

Nothing epitomizes the Frankfurt School’s interdisciplinary approach to analyzing irrational elements of modern society better than their studies of authoritarianism, beginning with studies of German society in the 1930s and continuing with studies of the U.S. in the 1940s. This work combined philosophy, social theory, and psychoanalytic theory with empirical research.

The first substantial foray was Studies in Authority and the Family (Horkheimer 1936b), the product of five years of research carried out by members of the Institute as part of the research agenda outlined by Horkheimer when he became director in 1930. In an essay articulating the study’s theoretical framework, Erich Fromm argued that the “drives underlying the authoritarian character” are “the pleasure of obedience, submission, and the surrender of one’s personality” along with “aggression against the defenseless and sympathy with the powerful” (Fromm 1936 [2020, 39, 41]). A main concern of the Studies was that the nuclear family had lost the power it once had to counter other socializing forces, which could now more directly influence the individual, and that individuals who view the world as governed by irrational forces submit to powerful leaders who ease their feelings of powerlessness.

The focus on authoritarianism continued into exile, with Neumann and Kirchheimer focusing more on distinctly political phenomena such as law, the state structure, and competing political groups under the Nazi regime (see Neumann 1944, Scheuerman 1996). Neumann and Kirchheimer were the main legal and political analysts of the first generation, but were outside the inner circle and less influential on the trajectory the Frankfurt School took in the 1940s (see Scheuerman 1994 and Buchstein 2020 for attempts to revive interest in their legal and political analysis).

The work on authoritarianism that the Institute is most well-known for came with the publication of The Authoritarian Personality (1950), the result of research conducted by Adorno in collaboration with a team of psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley. The aim was to identify personality types that might be susceptible to authoritarianism, based not on explicit commitments to fascist political movements but on psychological characteristics and social attitudes (measured on an “F-scale”). The researchers posited that individuals with an authoritarian personality tend to exhibit traits such as rigid conformity to conventional norms, a tendency toward stereotypical thinking, a preference for strong authority figures and disdain for perceived weakness, a preoccupation with power and status, and a propensity for prejudice and hostility towards minority groups. The book explored the link between authoritarianism and antisemitism, highlighting the role of scapegoating and the projection of repressed aggression onto targeted minority groups.

The text was published in a series edited by Horkheimer, titled Studies in Prejudice , along with other innovative studies such as Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1949), a psychoanalytic analysis of the rhetoric and tropes of American demagogues authored by Frankfurt School member Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman. If The Authoritarian Personality studied the kinds of people potentially receptive to the messages of authoritarian leaders, Prophets of Deceit studied the content of the messaging itself. Adorno would later follow up on all these themes – both the form and content of fascist agitation and the social and psychological conditions under which it can succeed (1951b, 1967a).

The Authoritarian Personality had a major impact on the field of political sociology, inspiring a wave of similar studies and commentary. The recent resurgence of authoritarian populism has inspired renewed interest in Frankfurt School analysis of authoritarianism (see Section 4.2 below) in conjunction with publication of new editions of some of the classic texts along with previously untranslated work by Kracauer on totalitarian propaganda dating from the late 1930s (Kracauer 2013 [2022]) and a 1967 lecture by Adorno on “Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism” (Adorno 1967a [2020]).

One point of continuity between the studies of authoritarianism and Frankfurt School cultural analysis more broadly was the idea that “mass culture” was one of the powerful forces playing an increasing role in the direct socialization of individuals, a role that led to the “disappearance of the inner life” of the individual (Horkheimer 1941) and an increasing loss of the ability to imagine a world any different than the existing one. In its various forms, this general thesis was common to Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse in their critiques of mass culture from the 1930s to the 1960s.

More generally, the Frankfurt School is known for its analysis of popular culture. By contrast to orthodox Marxist dismissal of cultural analysis for focusing on the less consequential “superstructure” of society, Frankfurt School theorists attentively analyzed the form and content of cultural objects along with the genres and modes of producing works of art and popular culture. In an early essay titled “Mass Ornament” (1927), Kracauer argued that analyzing the “inconspicuous surface-level expressions” of an epoch, by virtue of their “unconscious nature,” can disclose its “fundamental substance” and “unheeded impulses” (1927 [1975, 75]). Adorno would later maintain that “cultural criticism must become social physiognomy” (1951a [1967, 30]), a method he pursued in his interpretations of works of literature and music by interpreting the surface features and forms of various cultural artifacts in relation to underlying social conditions as a mode of disclosive critique.

The more pessimistic analysis of mass culture of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse can be distinguished from the more optimistic views developed by Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. Benjamin posited, in his famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility” (1936), that the rise of technologies for mechanical reproduction, such as photography and film, led to the decline of the “aura” surrounding traditional works of art – the “authenticity” associated with the unique presence of the original in space and time – in part because it makes no sense to talk about the “original” version of a photograph. The resulting changes in perception and modes of collective experience and participation in cultural production could, Benjamin hoped, also bring about political forms of art and a more general democratization of culture. He contrasted this emancipatory potential of mass culture, through a politicization of aesthetics, with the aestheticization of politics under fascism (Buck-Morss 1992). Adorno expressed his disagreement in an earlier letter to Benjamin and in published work (Adorno 1936, 1938). As Wellmer puts it, “in technologized mass culture, Benjamin sees elements of an antidote to the psychic destruction of society, whereas Adorno regards it above all as a medium of conformism and psychic manipulation” (1985/86 [1991, 32–33]). While Benjamin placed hope in mass culture, Adorno saw it lying in the kind of autonomous art that resists reconciling subjects to their social world, instead offering a kind of “promise of happiness” in a transfigured future that lies beyond that social world (Adorno 1970, Finlayson 2015, Gordon 2023).

The critique of mass culture took its most dramatic form in the chapter on the “culture industry” in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (first circulated in 1944 and published in 1947). They introduced the term “culture industry” to underline the fact that “mass culture” is not something “the masses” spontaneously generate (Adorno 1967b [1991, 98]), but is manufactured using the same standardized and profit-oriented methods as any industrial production method. In this sense, culture is no longer a relatively autonomous realm of meaning (that might aim, at its best, at beauty, freedom, and truth) or source of critical awareness, but is thoroughly commodified by the “distraction factories” of the culture industry. “Cultural entities typical of the culture industry are no longer also commodities, they are commodities through and through” (ibid., 129). Entertainment replaces experience, numbing the audience’s capacity for critical thought and reconciling them to the status quo in a form of domination far more subtle than direct tyranny.

In this way, Dialectic of Enlightenment , which is perhaps the most influential text by Frankfurt School philosophers, analyzes two forms of mass society, fascist Germany and the United States, focusing primarily on the latter. Co-authored by Horkheimer and Adorno between 1939 and 1944 at the height of Nazi rule and World War II, the text opens with these lines:

Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity (1947 [2002, 1]).

The book is a genealogy of reason that traces its self-destruction from the dawn of human history to the present. Reason was supposed to liberate human beings. Instead, in the dominant form it takes as instrumental rationality, it has become the primary instrument of their domination. With reason taking this form, humans lose their capacity for critical reflection as their thinking is increasingly oriented solely toward self-preservation within a system in which they are powerless. “Thought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process, aping the machine it has itself produced, so that it can finally be replaced by the machine” (ibid., 19).

The root of the catastrophic dynamic lies not just with modernity or capitalism, but goes back to humanity’s earliest attempts to dominate nature. A core thesis of the book is that myth and enlightenment are entwined. The process of enlightenment began with the earliest attempts to overcome “mythic fear” as a way of explaining the unknown and mitigating threats from nature. This anthropological claim about enlightenment is combined with a historical claim about the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science and technology. This is when instrumental rationality truly comes to dominate, as means-end calculation is the kind of reasoning required for capitalist production and efficient bureaucracy. “Enlightenment is totalitarian” (ibid., 50), Adorno and Horkheimer argue; it subsumes everything under its dissolvent rationality. In this way, enlightenment reverts back to myth.

The book represents a shift away from the critique of political economy, indebted to Marx, to the critique of instrumental reason, indebted to Weber (Benhabib 1986, 149–163). Although this shift is sometimes attributed to the growing pessimism of its authors during National Socialism, it was also motivated by Pollock’s analysis of the shift from nineteenth-century liberal capitalism to “state capitalism”: increased intervention by the state into the economy meant that the primacy of the economy posited by Marx had been replaced by the primacy of politics (1941). This claim supported the focus in Dialectic of Enlightenment on the administered control of society by the state apparatus. The book paints a bleak picture of a society in which people live “totally administered lives” under the sway of efficient and calculating institutions. For the sake of self-preservation, they adapt themselves entirely to this apparatus. All the while the culture industry, as an “organ of mass deception,” keeps them entertained at the price of numbing their critical capacities, producing conformity, and undermining any sense of individuality or capacity for autonomy. The book also represents a shift away from the earlier idea of critical theory as interdisciplinary social theory, which could marshal the findings of empirical social science toward the practical aim of emancipation, and more toward speculative history. In the story they tell, the effects of domination are so ubiquitous that every form of scientific knowledge is corrupted.

If Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment was supposed to provide the grounds for a positive concept of enlightenment – as they maintained in its preface (1947 [2002, xviii]) – many critics have wondered what that is supposed to be (Wellmer 1983). Habermas would later argue that the authors needed to leave “at least one rational criterion intact for their explanation of the corruption of all rational criteria” in order to “set the normative foundations of critical social theory;” but they failed to do so (1985 [1987, 127–9]; see also Benhabib 1986).

Reappraisals of the text in recent decades range from defending its approach as a form of world-disclosive critique (Kompridis 2006) that reveals our familiar social world as pathological by using techniques like “rhetorical condensation” (Honneth 1998), to reading it as developing a dialectical conception of progress – not simply a history of decline – aimed at making us more aware of the inevitable entanglement of reason with power (Allen 2014, 2016), and attempts to build on the chapter on antisemitism, which analyzes its social function in providing a “release valve” that allows rage to be “vented on those who are both conspicuous and unprotected” (1947 [2002, 140]), thereby stabilizing domination by channeling potential resistance to social suffering into hatred of a group (Rabinbach 2000, Rensmann 2017).

Herbert Marcuse’s influential book One-Dimensional Man (1964) – best summarized by its subtitle, Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society – can be read as an attempt to update Dialectic of Enlightenment in the form of a diagnosis of U.S. society and its perfected mechanisms of pacification and social control, ranging from art, sexuality, and politics to philosophy and the very act of thinking. Marcuse argues that all forms of critical thought and practice, having been wholly integrated into the wasteful, dehumanizing, profit-seeking, imperialist logic of advanced capitalism, are subsumed by one-dimensional ideology, a “flattening out of the antagonism between culture and social reality” (61).

Marcuse developed his influential concept of “repressive desublimation” to explain how the manipulated need for instant gratification has sanitized any transgressive forces within the domains of sexuality and art. Prior to the rise of the “affluent society,” art contained a transcendent capacity in the sense that it thought of, engaged with, and appropriated the idea of breaking out of the world in which one lived and embodied the hope for a better one to replace it. Within late capitalism, art has lost this critical aspect and dissolved into consumer culture and technological rationality, masking the “surplus repression” that shapes human instincts and needs in line with the functional requirements of social domination and the reproduction of the status quo.

Marcuse’s work has been criticized for its totalizing diagnosis of domination, his reliance on an objectivist account of human nature and needs, and the paternalistic or even authoritarian implications that possibly result from combining these two elements (Jaeggi 2014 [2018, 104–108]). Nonetheless, it has remained an important reference point for the critique of technology (Feenberg 2023a, 2023b, Fong 2016, Ch. 5) and of false needs, and of new right-wing forms of “repressive desublimation” that affirm the status quo in a transgressive mode (Brown 2019, 165–169). Regardless of how one today assesses Marcuse’s concrete analyses, his work exemplifies a tension that all critical theories have to address between the dominating forces of one-dimensionality and the possibility of breaking free of them.

First-generation critical theorists posited various responses to their own bleak diagnoses of society from the 1940s to the 1960s. Marcuse supported rebellious social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, in contrast to other leading representatives of critical theory who kept a conspicuous distance. In One-Dimensional Man , he placed hope for overcoming the repressive, one-dimensional society in a “Great Refusal” to abide by its norms, as carried out by the “substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable” (1964, 256). He later expressed solidarity with, and saw as examples of this refusal in, both the global student movement (1968, 119) and the feminist movement with its aim of overcoming dominant forms of aggressive masculinity (1974). He likewise praised counter-cultural movements for expressing sexual, moral, and political rebellion in a non-aggressive form of life that might generate a total change in values (1967). For Marcuse, emancipation involves a new morality that fulfills the vital needs for joy and happiness and encompasses an aesthetic-erotic dimension that is foreshadowed in alternative artistic tastes and new social and cultural practices. While Horkheimer and Adorno were less supportive of rebellious social movements, they did become important institutional figures and public intellectuals after their return to Germany (Müller-Doohm 2003, part IV; Demirović 2016). Adorno’s radio addresses in particular can be viewed as an attempt to educate the public for autonomy and so as a kind of response to their own bleak diagnoses of society.

But the core of Adorno’s response, from the early essay on the culture industry to his posthumously published Aesthetic Theory (1970), was to posit that “autonomous” or “authentic” art, by contrast to the products of the culture industry, maintains a utopian impulse insofar as it points beyond, and provides a moment of resistance to, the status quo. For example, atonal music by composers like Arnold Schoenberg generates dissonance in the listener by challenging the unity of the whole found in more harmonious music. Adorno maintained that such art, in challenging aesthetic norms and conventions, can provide aesthetic experiences that are resistant to the homogenizing forces of the culture industry. Critics of this turn to the aesthetic have wondered how this is supposed to provide a sound basis for a critical theory of society (Benhabib 1986, 222).

But one can argue that Adorno’s later work was an attempt to push against that kind of grounding for critical theory. The title of Adorno’s 1966 magnum opus, Negative Dialectics (1966a), refers to a methodology that takes from traditional Hegelian dialectics the emphasis on difference and mediation but abandons the attempt to overcome difference through a unifying synthesis. Instead, taking up an argument already developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment , Adorno argues that “identity thinking” and the “identity principle” have been at the basis of humanity’s destructive project of cognitive as well as practical domination of external as well as internal nature, thereby linking the philosophical to the social oppression of particularity. Adorno rejects “identity thinking” in favor of affirming the negative, namely “non-identity,” that is, the irreducible particularity of objects, experiences, and persons that cannot be subsumed under concepts.

This approach undermines the totalizing aspirations of theoretical systems in philosophy as traditionally understood. The struggle to recognize that which is nonidentical is not only an epistemological but also an ethical and political project that seeks to do justice to both the object and the subject of cognition in their irreducible individuality (Bernstein 2001). Linking epistemology and the philosophy of language to critical theory of society, this leads Adorno to reject not only Hegel’s affirmative synthesis but also Heideggerian ontology and Kantian dualism. Methodologically, Adorno explores alternative ways of thinking about how to use and develop philosophical concepts, taking up the Benjaminian notion of constellation and developing “critical models” in order to articulate the complexity of experience, and suffering, without reducing or constraining it. In Adorno’s view, negative dialectics is a form of immanent critique engaged in a dynamic and transformative process, as it “must transform the concepts which it brings, as it were, from outside into those which the object has of itself, into what the object, left to itself, seeks to be, and confront it with what it is” (Adorno 1957 [1976, 69]). In his cultural criticism and interventions in public debates, Adorno follows this paradigm by exploring how concrete experiences exemplify a form of social domination that is obscured by mass culture but also open up the possibility of transcending reified consciousness by articulating the internal contradictions within social reality.

Jürgen Habermas, who worked closely with Horkheimer and Adorno in the 1950s until he fell out of favor with Horkheimer for seeming too radical, inherited one of the central claims of the Dialectic of Enlightenment , namely that Enlightenment is inseparable from the self-critique of Enlightenment, while also insisting on the context-transcending force of reason embedded in everyday practice.

Two works from the 1960s established his status as a leading figure in the second generation: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) and Knowledge and Human Interests (1968b). In the former, Habermas provides a historical and conceptual reconstruction of the idea of the public sphere in which subjects recognize each other as equals, submit to the “force of the better argument,” and subject legislation to the public use of reason. Against the backdrop of its emergence in eighteenth-century European societies, Habermas identifies the internal contradictions of the public sphere under the conditions of capitalism and traces its decline under the combined pressure of mass culture and mass media that has gradually transformed a reasoning public into passive consumers – a claim consistent with the “culture industry” thesis.

Critics argued that Habermas’s historical narrative of decline presupposes highly idealized versions of public debate and a “reasoning” public – a public that has always in truth been fragmented by class, gender, and race-based domination – and neglects the political significance of a multiplicity of subaltern and non-official public spheres and counter-publics (Negt and Kluge 1972, Fraser 1990, Warner 2002, Allen 2012). Nevertheless, his critical analysis of a contemporary public of consumers as the objects of processes of de-politicization, commercialization, political manipulation, and refeudalization seems to have lost nothing of its relevance (Seeliger and Sevignani 2022). The claim that a robust and independent public sphere is crucial to a healthy democracy is central to Habermas’s later, systematic contribution to democratic theory in Between Facts and Norms (1992), and he continues to analyze recent transformations in the structures and modes of communication within the public sphere (Habermas 2006, 2021).

Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests (1968b) was an ambitious attempt to ground critical social theory as a form of inquiry aimed at fostering a distinct type of knowledge tied to a deep-seated human interest in emancipation. This was a return to Horkheimer’s methodological aims in “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937), but with a novel set of arguments, such as Habermas’s claim that the method of critical theory can be illuminated by way of an analogy with psychoanalysis – “the only tangible example of a science incorporating methodological self-reflection” (1968b [1971, 124]). Like Horkheimer, Habermas was critical of the positivist understanding of science for failing to see the connection between specific kinds of inquiry and fundamental human interests. Habermas posited that both the natural sciences and the “human sciences” (interpretive social sciences and humanities) are grounded in distinct practical interests. The natural sciences are a reflective extension of “labor” (instrumental action), which is tied to the practical interest in material reproduction. The human sciences are a reflective extension of “interaction” (linguistic communication), which is tied to the practical interest in symbolic reproduction. Habermas distinguished “critique” or “reflection” as a third practice organized around the interest in emancipation, understood in terms of overcoming various forms of heteronomy, domination, and dependency.

In the early 1970s, Habermas largely abandoned this framework, based in an anthropology of knowledge, though he did continue to pursue some of its themes, and epistemological questions have remained central to his work in at least two domains: first, in his “postmetaphysical” (non-foundationalist and fallibilistic) understanding of philosophy as a form of critical reflection at the intersection between science and society (Habermas 1983a, Ch. 1) and, second, in his critique of naturalism, especially neuroscience as a form of positivism or scientism that absolutizes the observer’s perspective, thereby negating the irreducibility of the participants’ perspective and occluding the normative structure of interpersonal communication (Habermas 2005, Ch. 6).

Habermas increasingly came to the view that critical theory needed more robust social-theoretical and normative foundations, since, in his eyes, the totalizing critique of the first generation had proven to be self-undermining (1985, Ch. 5) and his own approach in Knowledge and Human Interests had conflated the reconstruction of invariant structures of communication (formal pragmatics) with the critique of the false consciousness of particular persons and societies (1973a). Habermas’s alternative path, after abandoning that methodological framework, was to focus on communicative reason in a two-volume magnum opus titled The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). By contrast with an instrumentalist understanding of reason and action, Habermas’s “communicative turn” starts from a reconstruction of the rational and normative potential of everyday interactions.

This turn involves a multidimensional paradigm shift, illustrating the theoretical ambition of Habermas’ enterprise. He develops a theory of communicative action and rationality that is anchored in everyday practices of communication, in which we raise validity claims whose normative dynamic is context-transcendent and which allow for consensus-based coordination of action. He provides a historical reconstruction of modern rationalization processes, in which social integration via authority or shared tradition has been increasingly replaced by an expanded use of communicative reason in response to the pressure to cooperate. Finally, he constructs a two-level model of society based on the distinction between “system” and “lifeworld,” claiming that the regulation of coexistence in modern societies depends on both communication oriented towards mutual understanding (“lifeworld”) and on the anonymous systems of state bureaucracy and the capitalist market (“system”).

For the methodological renewal of critical theory, Habermas’s central claim is that within complex societies, social order always has a double form: It must simultaneously be viewed as lifeworld and as system. The lifeworld can only be understood from the hermeneutic perspective of its participants while the mechanisms of systemic integration only come into view from a system-theoretical or external perspective. Critical theory needs both perspectives in order to identify distorting effects of the system on the lifeworld. Habermas famously and controversially diagnoses a “colonization of the lifeworld” by the systemic media of money and power, which impose economic and administrative rationality – the main forms of “functionalist reason” – on areas of the lifeworld whose reproduction relies on communicative processes of cultural reproduction, social integration, and socialization that cannot be subsumed under the media of money and power without generating resistance. This provides a new foundation for critical theory by updating the critique of reification in the form of a critique of systematic distortions of communication. The “critique of functionalist reason” becomes a central task for critical theory, along with the aim of diagnosing the “selective pattern” of capitalist modernization that only partially realizes the actually available potential for rationality and learning within society.

In the ensuing discussion, Habermas was accused of reifying the “system” by conceptualizing the capitalist market and the bureaucratic state as functionally necessary and supposedly norm-free systems that lie beyond the theoretical reach of critical social theory and the political reach of emancipatory politics (Honneth and Joas 1991), of idealizing the lifeworld in ways that largely ignore the domination and exploitation of women and minorities (Fraser 1985), of subscribing to a progressivist theory of modernization and history that is Eurocentric and insensitive to the continuing effects of colonial domination (Allen 2016, Ch. 2), and of underestimating how deeply power penetrates into and distorts the very heart of communicative reason (Allen 2008, Chs. 5–6).

Habermas and his followers insist that while these phenomena are real, it is only the power of communicative reason – and the public discourses and deliberations in which it manifests itself and gets institutionalized – that allows us to detect, criticize, and ultimately overcome (if only partially and temporarily) those forms of domination. Whether one agrees or not that the communicative turn enables critical theory to analyze and bring to agents’ attention the distortions that block them from addressing and overcoming obstacles to emancipation, one important legacy of Habermas’s theory can be seen in opening up space for a methodologically pluralist critical theory in response to the fundamental need to capture the perspective of both participants and observers (Bohman 2003). Some Frankfurt School theorists have also built on Habermas’s system-lifeworld distinction in maintaining that social change must be viewed from the perspective of both “evolution” and “revolution” (Brunkhorst 2002, 2014).

One dominant story told about the Frankfurt School begins with Horkheimer’s original research program in the 1930s and views Horkheimer and Adorno’s radical departure from that vision in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) as an intellectual dead end from which Habermas rescued the tradition and returned it to its original methodology. From this perspective, the second generation, dominated by Habermas, superseded the first (see Kompridis 2006, 255–258, for a critique of this story). An alternative story would point out that Dialectic of Enlightenment was in many ways consistent with themes first articulated by Adorno in work from the 1930s – particularly his 1931 inaugural lecture, heavily inspired by Benjamin – that ultimately came to fruition in Negative Dialectics (1966a). To complicate matters in another way, while collaborating on Dialectic of Enlightenment in the 1940s Adorno also contributed to the interdisciplinary collaboration that culminated in The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a product of Horkheimer’s original vision for critical theory that combined social theory with empirical research.

Rather than viewing the second generation solely in terms of Habermas overcoming deficits in the first, this alternative story recognizes that there have always been multiple models and styles of critical theory operating simultaneously within the tradition ​​and that Adorno was heavily influenced by Benjamin prior to collaborating with Horkheimer (Buck-Morss 1977, Wolin 1994, 166, 265–274). Moreover, Adorno’s influence is evident in work by figures in the second generation such as Albrecht Wellmer (1933–2018), who used Adorno’s work as a basis for challenging Habermas’s approach (Wellmer 1985/86, 1993) and was far more sympathetic with post-structuralism than Habermas – also true of Wellmer’s students in the third generation, Christoph Menke (1988, 2000) and Martin Seel. Adorno scholars have defended his work directly against Habermas’s criticisms (Cook 2004, O’Connor 2004: 165–170), and critical theorists continue to defend Adorno’s approach to critical theory (Allen 2016, 2021, 175–183, Marasco 2015, Ch. 3).

To complicate the story further, Benjamin’s work has had an enormous influence on work by a variety of critical theorists, though his wider influence had to wait until Adorno collected Benjamin’s essays for a German audience in 1955 and Hannah Arendt edited them for English readers in 1968. There have been significant studies of Benjamin’s work by scholars working within the Frankfurt School tradition (see Buck-Morss 1989 and Pensky 1993), while many critical theorists beyond the Frankfurt School have engaged Benjamin’s critique of linear notions of progress, and the ways in which they fail to break with the catastrophic continuity of the present (Benjamin 1940, see Löwy 2001), as well as his analysis of the constitutive relation between law and violence (Benjamin 1920/21; see the recently published critical edition, 2021), to mention only Jacques Derrida’s “Force of Law” (1990), Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (1995), and Judith Butler’s Parting Ways (2012) (see also Loick 2012).

Methodological debates within the Frankfurt School focus not only on the legacy of first-generation theorists but also on Habermas’s earlier work, with some arguing that Knowledge and Human Interests is worth revisiting because it was more attuned than his subsequent work to the dynamics of power and domination, making it more apt for addressing oppression based on gender (Allen 2008) or race (McCarthy 2004), or for developing a more comprehensive critical theory of domination (Klein 2020). Honneth (2017) has recently taken Habermas’s text as a jumping off point for refocusing critical theory on the task of elaborating the relation between emancipatory interests and emancipatory knowledge. Honneth nonetheless maintains that Habermas’s use of the methodology of psychoanalysis as a model for emancipatory critique is not apt, while others argue that it is still in many ways productive (Celikates 2009 [2018, 137–157]; see Allen 2021, Ch. 5 for a critique of Habermas, Honneth, and Celikates).

The latter debate is part of the resurging interest in psychoanalysis by some theorists working in the Frankfurt School tradition. Habermas’s own engagement with Freud and psychoanalysis in Knowledge and Human Interests was largely methodological in contrast to the substantive use of Freudian ideas by the first generation (in their analysis of the entanglement of reason and repression and the concrete forces of fascism and antisemitism), and Habermas (1983a) subsequently abandoned psychoanalytic theory entirely in favor of engagement with developmental psychologists like Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg. In developing his theory of recognition, Honneth (1992, Ch. 5) returned to psychoanalysis in the form of object relations theory, primarily in the work of Donald Winnicott, arguing that the experience of fusion and symbiosis that characterizes the early infant-mother relationship is foundational in two ways: It serves as the template for the type of recognition Honneth calls “love” and explains why individuals and groups continue to experience existing relations of recognition – that necessarily fall short of fusion and symbiosis – as unsatisfactory and continue to struggle for recognition. While Honneth’s use of Winnicott is controversial (McAfee 2019, Ch. 2; Whitebook 2021, Deranty 2021), recent debates have more generally focused on how to take up object relations within critical theory (Allen and O’Connor 2019). As a result, the divide now seems to be primarily between those who focus on the pro-social implications of psychoanalytic theory (Honneth 2010, Part IV) and those who also stress asocial or antisocial forces of Freud’s drive theory in general and the death drive in particular in order to avoid what they see as the risk of over-idealization and romanticization built into Honneth’s way of integrating psychoanalysis into his theory of recognition (Allen 2021, Ch. 5). Those critics advocate returning to the more negativistic approaches familiar from first-generation critical theorists (Fong 2016, McAfee 2019, Allen 2021).

Honneth’s return to the question of struggles oriented by emancipatory interests (2017) hearkens back to a shift that began in the 1980s, when a significant strand of Frankfurt School critical theory, including Honneth’s early work (1985), aimed at recovering the connection between theory and practice by linking the development of theory itself to social conflicts and movements. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s Public Sphere and Experience (1972) is an early example of a critique of the bourgeois (i.e. hegemonic) public sphere that invokes proletarian or plebeian non-state forms of the public and the divergent critical experiences they articulate as alternative sources of normativity, while also identifying blockages they face in the form of the “consciousness industry” and the pacification of social conflicts through “pseudo-publics.”

In a more explicit vein, Nancy Fraser contributed to the feminist turn in Frankfurt School critical theory – for which the work of Seyla Benhabib, Jean Cohen, and Amy Allen has also been decisive – in echoing Marx by arguing that critical theory should frame its “research program and its conceptual framework with an eye to the aims and activities of those oppositional social movements with which it has a partisan, though not uncritical, identification” (Fraser 1985, 97), and that the Frankfurt School in general and Habermas in particular had failed to theorize one of the most significant struggles against domination: the feminist movement (see §4.1.1 ).

Honneth has also sought to systematically reconstruct the link between theory development and struggles by taking experiences of misrecognition that lead to social struggles for recognition as a pre-theoretical reference point (1992). Drawing on a wide range of philosophical work, psychological and psychoanalytic accounts of identity-formation, and sociological and historical accounts of social movements struggling for recognition, Honneth has developed a theory of recognition that is the most prominent alternative paradigm, within Habermasian critical theory broadly construed, to Habermas’s theory of communicative action (Honneth 2000, Zurn 2015). Honneth maintains Habermas’s focus on intersubjectivity, but instead of linguistic practice and the ideal of “undistorted communication,” he focuses on relations of mutual recognition and the ideal of “undistorted recognition,” which then serve as the basis for the critique of “social pathologies” that he considers central to the project of critical theory (Honneth 2004).

In short, the Frankfurt School of critical theory is today constituted by lively debates, discussed more below, about how to deploy various critical methods ( Section 2 ) and concepts ( Section 3 ) while remaining attuned to social struggles and crises ( Section 4 ) and positioning itself in relation to critical theories developed out of other traditions.

2. Critical Methods

Frankfurt School critical theory is best characterized by a set of methodological aspirations that set it apart from many other forms of social and political theorizing (both in philosophy and the social sciences): It aspires to be (1) self-reflexive , accounting for its own embeddedness in specific social and historical conditions, (2) interdisciplinary , integrating philosophical analysis with social theory and empirical social research, (3) materialist , grounding critical theorizing in social reality, and (4) emancipatory , orienting itself toward the goal of social emancipation. These commitments situate the Frankfurt School firmly in the Marxist tradition, and that tradition’s aim of overcoming the division between theory and practice without uncritically subsuming one under the other.

This has given rise to three interrelated methodological challenges: how to conceptualize (1) the relation of theory to social reality, (2) the role and standpoint of critical theorists, and (3) the normative foundations, content, or force of their critical theorizing. In light of historical developments in the first half of the twentieth century – the rise of fascism and Stalinism and the integration of the working class into the liberal welfare state – Frankfurt School theorists lost confidence in an identifiable direction of history or an identifiable collective subject like the proletariat to lead the way. It became increasingly unclear how to uphold a link between their theories and a pre-theoretical anchor within social reality – such as oppositional experiences, forms of consciousness, practices of resistance, or social struggles and movements – or even to see how the conditions for any of those things to emerge were present at all.

Against this backdrop, this section first sketches the common ground most Frankfurt School theorists find in the approach of immanent critique ( §2.1 ) before tracing the various ways in which they have sought normative foundations ( §2.2 ) in a more or less constructive or reconstructive ( §2.3 ) register, then turns to methods such as disclosive and genealogical critique that are critical of those normative approaches ( §2.4 ), and concludes by outlining a set of methodological challenges that shape contemporary debates ( §2.5 ).

In responding to the three-pronged methodological challenge of relating theory to social reality, reflecting on the standpoint of critique, and spelling out its normativity, Frankfurt School critical theory moves beyond the usual juxtaposition between internal and external critique. Frankfurt School theorists rely on a third model of critique, which builds on Hegel and Marx and is often understood as immanent or reconstructive. Critique proceeds immanently or reconstructively when it seeks to secure its normative resources and epistemic standpoint from the (often implicit) normative structures and epistemic possibilities of the practices and self‐understandings that are constitutive of the (type of) society in question. Immanent critique avoids the dichotomy between an internal critique that refers to standards and standpoints that are already recognized by those criticized and an external critique that refers to standards and standpoints that are not (or not yet) recognized and therefore have to be derived independently from the agents’ perspective and their social context (see Jaeggi 2005, 2014, Celikates 2009, Stahl 2013a). Critical theory understood in this way is both grounded in social reality as it exists and emancipatory in seeking to radically transform this reality.

The critique of ideology can both serve as a paradigmatic example of immanent critique in this sense and illustrate some of the challenges this model faces (Ng 2015). Ideology critique is immanent insofar as it starts from the contradictions of a social and ideological constellation and the experience of those affected, which is shaped by these contradictions. It does not criticize an ideological form of consciousness because it is immoral or unethical, but because of its epistemic, functional, and genetic features, i.e. for being false or distorted, for contributing to the reproduction of relations of domination, and for arising from within such relations in ways that are relatively immune to self-reflection. Consequently, the critique of ideology does not focus primarily on the injustice or domination found in society, but on the forms of consciousness, culture, practice, habit, and affect that make this injustice or domination seem natural or unavoidable (Jaeggi 2008). On this view, any critical theory that aims at emancipation must first aim at diagnosing and overcoming those obstacles that keep agents from fully experiencing, critically reflecting on, and collectively acting against the unjust and dominating conditions under which they live. The question is how critical theorists can do so without falling back into epistemologically and politically problematic distinctions between false and true consciousness, between ideology and scientific insight, and between true (“objective”) and false (“purely subjective”) interests and needs (Celikates 2006; see Section 3.3 below).

These challenges are among the many challenges critical theorists face in developing an immanent critique that is linked to social reality and practice, a link that comes out in two ways. First, theory is anchored in social reality in terms of its genesis, as it is shaped by the social context from which it emerges. Second, theory aims at a practice that transforms social reality. This dual commitment to linking theory and practice is spelled out in two rather different ways, both in the history of the Frankfurt School and in contemporary discussions. One way of anchoring theory in social reality – call it the crisis approach – starts with social contradictions, antagonisms, and crises, along with the practical challenges and conflicts that result, and maintains that identifying those conflicts requires socio-theoretical analysis and sociological research (Jaeggi 2017a, Fraser and Jaeggi 2018). A second way of anchoring theory in social reality – call it the struggles approach – takes social struggles and movements and the practices of critique and resistance of oppressed groups as its starting point. This approach incorporates alternative standpoints and counter-hegemonic epistemologies into its theorizing with the aim of countering the potentially disempowering and anti-emancipatory effects that arise when critical theorists view crises mainly in terms of structural contradictions while ignoring or underestimating the ways that social and political movements themselves can produce and intensify crises (Collins 2019, Celikates 2022).

While this distinction between crisis and struggle is useful for heuristic purposes, it should not be overstated. Most critical theorists share a commitment to the emancipatory role of theory as well as an immanent anchoring of theory in social reality, whether qua crises or struggles. The distinction is a matter of degree and starting points, and it is usually agreed that crises and struggles stand in need of mutual articulation (see Benhabib 1986, 123–133, and Section 4.1 and Section 4.2 below).

Horkheimer maintained that a critical theory should not have an external relation to, but must enter into a “dynamic unity” with, practice, so that it is “not merely an expression of the concrete historical situation but also a force within it to stimulate change” (1937a [1972: 215], see also Marcuse 1937, Horkheimer 1937b). But under social conditions that neutralize social struggles or turn them into regressive backlash movements, the “dynamic unity” envisaged by Horkheimer can appear foreclosed. Even for Adorno, whose diagnosis of the “totally administered world” is the most radical example of this foreclosure, however, it would be a mistake to conceptualize existing society as a perfectly closed, monolithic, and functionally integrated self-reproducing totality. Rather, even when society is viewed as a totality, it has to be understood not in terms of homogeneity or frozen stability but in terms of structural antagonisms (Adorno 1957 [1976, 77]), conflict, and process (Adorno 1966b), i.e. as riddled with contradictions that, at least in principle, allow for forms of oppositional experience, consciousness, or practice that a critical theory can build on. In one of his last texts written shortly before his death, Adorno concludes that “critical theory is not aiming at totality, but criticizes it. This also means, however, that it is, in its substance, anti-totalitarian, with the utmost political determination” (Adorno 1969a; our translation). Even – or especially – in the face of the closure of political space, the political significance of a critical theory can consist in safeguarding the link between theory and the possibility of a radically different practice. At the same time, this defense of the relation to practice needs to be complemented by a defense of theory in the face of what Adorno identified as an “actionist” and anti-theoretical ideology of “pseudo-activity” in arguing that “praxis without theory, lagging behind the most advanced state of cognition, cannot but fail, and praxis, in keeping with its own concept, would like to succeed” (Adorno 1969b [1998, 265]).

Despite this more nuanced reading of Adorno on the relation between theory and practice, the broader diagnosis – put forth in different guises by Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse – that social integration, the pacification of class conflict, and the internalization of conformist attitudes had robbed critical theory of any pre-theoretical anchor, provides an important background for Habermas’s break with the first generation. That break concerns not only their “pessimism,” but the basic methodological and substantial premises of their theories. In Habermas’s view, the first generation had navigated themselves into a dead end with their totalizing diagnosis of an all-encompassing state of delusion dominated by instrumental rationality. In response, and in order to provide firm normative foundations for critical theory, Habermas advocates a “communicative turn,” reformulating social critique in terms of a critique of the conditions of communication and grounding it in the normative content presupposed within the practice of linguistically mediated social interaction and argumentation.

This element of normative validity – as opposed to merely factual social validity that is forced, imposed, or presupposed – is elaborated in Habermas’s discourse theory, originally referred to as “discourse ethics” (Habermas 1983a, Ch. 4) but later evolving into a differentiated approach that distinguishes between ethical and moral norms (Habermas 1991) and a discourse theory of law and democracy (Habermas 1992). At the heart of discourse theory is a principle of discursive justification that Habermas refers to as the “discourse principle” or “D,” which states: “just those norms of action are valid if all persons affected could agree as participants in rational discourse” (Habermas 1992 [1996, 107]). He further specifies discourse theory with a universalization principle (“U”) that is operative when arguing about moral norms, and a democratic principle that is operative when attempting to justify legal norms within a democratic society. Habermas does not naively suggest that actually existing discourses correspond to these ideals, but maintains that in those discourses participants necessarily make idealizing presuppositions that can then be used to identify and criticize the shortcomings of actual discourse as distorted by interests, power relations, and ideologies.

As a response to the challenges of immanent critique outlined above, Habermas’s work can be understood in terms of a “dialectics of immanence and transcendence” (Cooke 2006, Ch. 3). Habermas maintains the need to situate reason historically and within social reality – the largely Hegelian, pragmatist, or reconstructive element of his thought. But the idealizations that are immanent in our linguistic practices point toward context-transcending validity claims that must be defended in a discursive procedure – the Kantian or constructivist element in his thought. Habermas now refers to his attempt to “de-transcendentalize Kant” as a form of “Kantian pragmatism” (Habermas 1999; see also Bernstein 2010, Ch. 8; Baynes 2016, Ch. 4; Flynn 2014b).

Some interpretations of Habermas stress that his theory of communicative action is still a form of immanent critique (Finlayson 2007, Stahl 2013b) while others object to his increasingly Kantian focus on moral norms (Heath 2014). To provide empirical confirmation of his rational reconstruction of the “moral point of view,” further situating it within social reality, Habermas drew on Kohlberg’s developmental moral psychology, itself decidedly Kantian in its defining the highest stage of moral development in terms of the ability to make universalizable moral judgements (Habermas 1983a, Ch. 4; for a critique, see Benhabib 1992, Chs. 5–6, which, drawing on Carol Gilligan’s critique of Kohlberg, distinguishes a “generalized other” from a “concrete other” whose experience cannot be accounted for by abstract conceptions of the moral standpoint).

Habermas’s shift toward a Kantian position is particularly evident in the Rawls-Habermas debate (Habermas 1995a, Rawls 1995, Habermas 1996), widely viewed as a “family quarrel” among two Kantian political philosophers. In his early work on discourse ethics, Habermas compared his own principle (U) to Rawls’s “original position,” arguing that his approach was the better way to “operationalize” the moral point of view as a form of moral constructivism that tests moral norms in a discursive procedure posited as a dialogical alternative to Kant’s categorical imperative (Habermas 1991). The debate shifted in the 1990s with their contributions to legal-political constructivism: Rawls’s Political Liberalism (1993) and Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms (1992), in which he provides a rational reconstruction of the institutions of constitutional democracy. In that context, Habermas argues that Rawls’s approach is not transcendent enough, since in Habermas’s view Rawls reduces normative validity to the notion of reasonableness immanent within liberal democratic societies (for the implications of their debate for multiple issues in moral and political philosophy, see Hedrick 2010, Baynes 2016, Chs. 6–7, and Finlayson 2019).

Habermas’s Kantian turn also came to the fore when extending his work in a cosmopolitan or “post-national” direction (beginning with Habermas 1995b), even if he has continued to combine a Kantian approach to justifying universal norms with a wide-ranging analysis of the empirical phenomena of globalization (1998). This combination of normative and empirical theorizing, a hallmark of the Frankfurt School, is present in a range of work by other critical theorists addressing global issues (Ingram 2019, Ibsen 2023), from the challenge of disaggregating citizenship from the nation-state (Benhabib 2004) to transnationalizing the public sphere (Fraser et al. 2014), and theorizing new forms of transnational democracy (Bohman 2007). Rather than simply defending abstract cosmopolitan norms, such approaches typically aim at some form of critical cosmopolitanism (Milstein 2015), with some stressing the crucial role of political contestation of allegedly universal norms “from below” (J. Ingram 2013) or of concrete struggles for rights as part of a broadly construed intercultural dialogue on human rights (Flynn 2014a).

In light of Habermas’s turn to Kant, a significant focus of debate among Habermasians and interpreters of Habermas has been the status of idealizing presuppositions and the ultimate status of the principles of justification within discourse theory. Defenders of discourse theory can be divided up into those who focus more on immanence – pointing in a Hegelian, pragmatist, contextualist, or reconstructive direction – and those who focus more on transcendence – pointing in a Kantian or constructivist direction. Among the former, some argue, echoing Hegel’s critique of Kant, that Habermas should situate reason more thoroughly within its social and historical context in order to avoid an overly rationalistic, abstract, or gendered approach (Benhabib 1986, 1992), while others have argued for Habermas to embrace a more pragmatist (McCarthy 1991, Bernstein 2010) or contextualist approach (Rorty 1985, Allen 2008, Ch. 6). Habermas’s most recent work (2019) attempts a kind of middle path, going in a decidedly historical direction by tracing the provincial, European origins of his “post-metaphysical” mode of theorizing as a preparatory stage to a fully inclusive, global intercultural dialogue as the way to establish its universal validity in a world characterized by “multiple modernities” (see Forst 2021b, Chambers 2022, and Flynn 2022 for critical assessments).

Those who have taken discourse theory in a more Kantian or transcendental direction include Habermas’s long-time interlocutor Karl Otto-Apel, who argued that the dynamic of universal validity claims in practices of argumentation transcendentally presupposes an ideal communication community from which universal normative foundations for the assessment of discourses can be derived (Apel 1985). Apel maintained that grounding reason, and thereby critique, requires a more transcendental justification (or “ultimate grounding”) than Habermas has provided (Apel 1989; see Habermas’s most recent reply to Apel in 2005, Ch. 3).

More recently, Rainer Forst has embraced Kantian constructivism in positing that every human being has a “right to justification,” a right to demand reciprocal and general reasons for the practices, institutions, and structures that affect them (Forst 2007). Forst views moral and political constructivism as distinct, but integrated stages. While the task of moral constructivism is to construct a list of basic moral rights that cannot be reasonably rejected, those abstract rights must be given concrete content by citizens in a process of political constructivism. He maintains that his approach is immanent insofar as the right to justification is “recursively grounded” by reconstructing the validity claims implicit in all morally justified claims, while maintaining a moment of transcendence since the right to justification can be justifiably claimed in any context. Forst views this as the normative core of a critical theory that understands society as an ensemble of practices of justification. In that sense, the concept of justification is both descriptive (referring to actual arguments given within a particular social order) and normative (referring to reasons that could or should be accepted), and Forst maintains both perspectives are needed for a critique of existing justification narratives and relations of justification (see the Introductions to Forst 2011 and 2021a).

Various critics of Habermas have argued that his normative turn and shift to Kant risks transforming critical theory into something that looks increasingly like a liberal theory of justice. They posit alternative approaches such as reconstructive, disclosive, and genealogical critique that also return to questions and arguments developed by the first generation.

Those who subscribe to the model of reconstructive critique emphasize the downsides of uncoupling normative argument from social analysis and social theory. In Axel Honneth’s work, this shift takes two forms. In his earlier work (1992), he argues that the relatively narrow rationalist focus on communicative reason occludes more fundamental and often prelinguistic experiences and intersubjective relations that give rise to struggles for recognition and that his Hegel-inspired theory is better able to articulate, thus reestablishing the link between theory and social reality in more substantial ways. Relatedly, Honneth insists that critical theory can be distinguished from other normative enterprises by its reference to “the pretheoretical resource in which its own critical viewpoint is anchored extra-theoretically as an empirical interest or moral experience” (Honneth 1994 [2007, 63–64]).

Expanding on this earlier commitment, in his later work Honneth argues against the division of theoretical labor in which (constructivist) philosophy engages in normative theorizing while empirical sociology investigates our social reality (2011). By contrast, he undertakes a “normative reconstruction” of how modern society – its legal, moral, political as well as social and economic practices and institutions – came to be centered around individual freedom as the highest value of this cultural formation. Honneth wants to show that we can only gain an adequate theoretical understanding of, and critical perspective on, modern society if we analyze its different social spheres as attempts to institutionalize the value of freedom. In contrast to both revolutionary and conservative approaches, he wants to show that the structure of this institutionalization allows for a progressive realization of the value of freedom as social actors appeal to the constitutive idea of freedom to challenge the concrete forms of unfreedom that remain characteristic of our social reality.

Similar to Honneth methodologically, Rahel Jaeggi argues, in her reconstructive approach to the critique of forms of life, that bracketing the question of how to rationally evaluate and criticize forms of life as a whole, as Rawlsians do in the name of liberal neutrality and Habermasians in the name of “ethical abstinence,” ends up hindering precisely the kind of experimental learning processes that are crucial for forms of life to remain dynamic and avoid stagnation and failure (2014 [2018, 9–24, 318–319]). But Jaeggi places a greater emphasis on contradictions, crises, and conflicts than the later Honneth (see also Schaub 2015).

The approaches of both Honneth and Jaeggi exemplify a conception of immanent critique that closely links analysis and critique, issuing in a critique that is neither a mere description of what exists nor a normative demand imposed on what exists from the outside. Accordingly, it does not proceed in a free-standing, normative way, but relies on a specific combination of philosophical reflection and social-theoretical as well as empirical research that is grounded in social developments and crises and actual social experiences and self-understandings. This methodological reorientation has also led to a more substantial engagement with questions of the economy and the sphere of work, both from a more Durkheim-inspired (Honneth 2022, 2023, Celikates, Honneth, and Jaeggi 2023) and a more Marx-inspired (Fraser 2022) position that has also resulted in a fundamental (non-reformist) critique of capitalism (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018).

While these approaches seek to develop a socially grounded form of normativity, critics argue that they are still too idealizing in their understanding of social reality and its historical genesis, as well as too normative in their methods from the point of view of yet another model of critique, which has been called disclosive or genealogical.

Disclosive critique typically takes its cue from Adorno (and sometimes other theoretical sources from Heidegger to contemporary aesthetics), moving beyond the dichotomy between literary world-disclosure and philosophical reason-giving or the quest for normative foundations. On this view, critique has the task of revealing the world in a new and different light, disclosing unrecognized suffering and intricate forms of domination that are not only occluded by dominant ideologies but also shape the norms that emanate from that order in ways that escape more strongly normative versions of immanent critique that build on them. Dialectic of Enlightenment can be read as an exercise in disclosive critique that seeks to defamiliarize the social world for its readers and thereby break open their unquestioned acceptance of how things appear to them (Honneth 1998).

This negative orientation of disclosive critique can be complemented by a more positive one, in which what is disclosed also involves potentialities and horizons that have no space or way to articulate themselves within the existing social and normative order. Walter Benjamin’s writings on the radical potential of mass culture or Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) can be seen as examples of disclosive critique that involve both the disruption of established and the experimental opening up of new experiences and schemas (Vogelmann 2016).

Some critical theorists attempt to integrate a more positive idea of disclosure into critical theory while maintaining that this is not at odds with expanded conceptions or normativity. Some draw on Heidegger to develop an account of world-disclosive critique that rethinks reason and agency, stressing receptivity and “self-decentering” as an alternative model to Habermas’s focus on procedural reason (Kompridis 2006). Others stress that while disclosure can and must be subject to intersubjective validation through argumentation, critical theory must have recourse to the disclosive power of imagination, which is revealed in the force of exemplarity (Ferrara 2008), in focusing attention on the aesthetic dimension of narratives that social movements use to imagine alternative possibilities (Lara 1998, 2021), or in the way that powerful representations of the good society function to disclose a transcendent object that cannot be fully known or represented but can nonetheless provide ethical orientation (Cooke 2006). In a variety of different ways, these approaches attempt to maintain the utopian dimension of critique (Marcuse 1937).

Genealogical critique, by contrast, can be seen as a form of disclosive critique that is more focused on problematizing, unmasking, and disrupting (Saar 2002, Koopman 2013). Given its association with Nietzsche and Foucault, it also has a distinct trajectory, set of methodological commitments, and theoretical implications. Taking aim at social practices, self-understandings, identities and normative commitments that are seen as natural or accepted as given, genealogical critique traces their historical emergence, highlighting their contingency and denaturalizing them with the aim of opening up the possibility of thinking and acting differently. From this perspective, the search for normative foundations is misguided as it both underestimates how normativity is shaped by unacknowledged histories and power relations and overestimates the transformative power of a normative critique that appeals to reason alone. Genealogical critique, by contrast, seeks to destabilize and decenter the subject and its fundamental commitments (Owen 2002, Hoy and McCarthy 1994; for a version of this claim that builds on psychoanalytic theory, see Allen 2021, Ch. 5).

While earlier engagements with genealogical critique, especially Foucault’s, were marked by criticisms of his supposed rejection of all normative and rational standards, lack of social theorizing, and relativism (Habermas 1985, Chs. IX–X, Fraser 1981, Dews 1987), more recently critical theorists have sought to emphasize the potential convergence and mutual illumination of genealogy and Frankfurt School critical theory in providing an analysis of the workings of contemporary forms of power and domination (Allen 2008, Koopman 2013, Ch. 7, Saar 2018). At the same time, a recent debate between Forst and Wendy Brown exemplifies how the earlier split between Habermas and Foucault is rearticulated today, with Forst taking a broadly Habermasian position in arguing that his “respect conception of tolerance” manages to safeguard the autonomy of individuals by grounding toleration in the right to justification, and Brown insisting, with Foucault, on the normalizing, disciplining, and depoliticizing effects of liberal discourses of toleration that ultimately obfuscate the complex operations of social power (Brown and Forst 2014, see also Vogelmann 2021).

A genealogical orientation also characterizes postcolonial critiques of Frankfurt School critical theory that point out the lack of explicit and sustained engagement with European colonialism and imperialism and its legacies, including contemporary forms of racism, and the ways in which these have enabled and shaped the processes of “modernization” and thus the formation of “modern”’ societies, subjects, and forms of knowledge and rationality, all of which critical theorists purport to investigate critically (see §4.1.3 below).

Exponents of genealogical critique and struggle-centered approaches problematize forms of immanent or reconstructive critique that take institutional achievements as their starting point, challenging them by excavating the histories of domination and repression, as well as struggles, that have constituted these institutions and continue to shape their functioning. This gives rise to numerous challenges that continue to animate methodological debates in critical theory: (1) how (or even whether) to defend the putative normative achievements of liberal democracies, and if those are to be defended as achievements, then (2) how to theorize about the relation between struggles, crises, and institutional achievements, in contexts that may involve either (3) an absence of struggles, or (4), the opposite problem, a proliferation and fragmentation of struggles:

From the perspective of genealogical and post-colonial critique, the commitment to the institutions of the modern liberal nation-state (Habermas 1992, Honneth 2011) relies on an idealizing view of the history and present of this political formation that ignores, or treats as historically contingent and philosophically inconsequential, the forms of domination and exclusion that have accompanied it. At a time when the putative institutional achievements of liberal democracies – such as the separation of powers, the independence of the judiciary, the integrity of elections, or the protection of fundamental rights, especially for minorities – have come under attack from right-wing and neo-authoritarian movements and governments, the question is how critical theorists can defend the normative achievements of the existing order despite its systemic shortcomings. Offering a more radical challenge, some critical race theorists and post-colonial critics argue that those shortcomings reveal that what were thought to be normative achievements were historically premised on, and continue to functionally presuppose, domination and exclusion both at a societal and global level (see §4.1.2 and §4.1.3 below). On a methodological level, this involves the challenge of revising or going beyond the normative and sociological categories of critical theory that seem, at least in part, to be tied to a specifically Western experience.

Many critical theorists who accept the claim that these are normative achievements insist that a more complex view of the relation between institutions, struggles, and crises is necessary. As mentioned above, an alternative strand within critical theory that reaches from Negt and Kluge’s recovery of proletarian counterpublics through Fraser’s theorization of feminist movements to current attempts to reconnect critical theory with the struggles of our age, has insisted that abstracting from collective movements and struggles and relocating the emancipatory potential in the normative achievements of the existing institutional order risks underestimating how institutional dynamics, the inherent crisis tendencies of (more or less) liberal democracies, and social struggles are inextricably intertwined. Beyond a merely historical and social-theoretical point, how this question is answered will also affect how to conceptualize the role of emancipatory as opposed to regressive struggles in the face of the new authoritarianism (see §4.2.3 below).

More abstractly, critical theorists must account for situations in which there seem to be no struggles or forms of critical consciousness to latch onto, or only highly constrained forms of them. How can a critical theory respond to a situation in which domination is more or less total and has managed to suppress any critical consciousness and practice? Some of Marcuse’s descriptions of contemporary society come closest to this scenario. One might respond that “a society of happy slaves, genuinely content with their chains,” a society in which domination is experienced not as domination but as freedom, might be the critical theorists’ nightmare, but it “is a nightmare, not a realistic view of a state of society which is at present possible” (Geuss 1981, 83–84). Nevertheless, the challenge points to a dilemma critical theorists need to navigate. On the one hand, a critical theory requires a starting point in the forms of consciousness, experience, and practice of its addressees, but, on the other hand, critical theory should respond to and address distortions and blockages of precisely these forms of consciousness, experience, and practice. While these distortions and blockages will in most cases turn out to be partial rather than total and thus allow for some form of problematization to emerge (Celikates 2009, Part III), it seems equally important to not simply tie a critical theory to already existing social movements and thus to “goals that have already been publicly articulated” since this “neglects the everyday, still unthematized, but no less pressing embryonic form of social misery and moral injustice” (Honneth 2003, 114; see also Renault 2004, 2008).

The opposite problem can arise when critical theorists diagnose a proliferation of social struggles and lines of conflict beyond the classic antagonism of labor and capital. After the demise of the kind of philosophy of history that identified the proletariat as the revolutionary subject and the workers’ movement as the emancipatory force to which critical theory could and should attach itself, it has become unclear how critical theorists can determine with which of the different emancipatory movements of their day to enter into the kind of alliance envisaged by Marx and Horkheimer and which “forms of existing social critique” or “experiences of injustice” to pick up on. This difficulty is not only due to the plurality – or intersectionality – of movements, practices of critique, and experiences of injustice, but also due to the fact that struggles are often far from perfectly aligned and can operate at cross-purposes, with regard to both their aims and their methods. In answering this challenge, critical theorists can neither simply deduce the “correct” struggle from some overarching laws of historical development (the pole of determinism), nor claim that theorists simply have to decide which struggle or movement to link their theory to (the pole of voluntarism).

Insofar as critical theory is committed to immanent critique, focusing on the internal contradictions and crises of a specific social order and the struggles and movements that arise from within it, these challenges cannot be easily resolved. Rather than seeking to resolve them at an abstract level, they could instead be viewed as opening up a field of tensions that critical theorists need to navigate within the specific constellation they find themselves in. While critical theory needs to be anchored in actually existing forms of theoretical as well as practical critique, in the social struggles that people actually engage in, it also has the task of articulating the experiences of those who are blocked from engaging in struggles of their own and of contributing to the further theoretical articulation of existing struggles. At times, critical theory may need “to push beyond the ‘subjective’ elements of struggle and languages of claims-making to the more ‘objective’ dimensions of contradictions and crises, which turn more on the dynamics of systemic elements operating independently of whether or not people actually thematize them via struggle” (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018, 11), without losing sight of the epistemic and political risks this involves.

In addressing these risks, one way forward has been to embrace methodological pluralism and to understand critical theory less as a comprehensive social theory and more as a critical practice, as something critics do (Bohman 2003, Kompridis 2006, Celikates 2019a). This approach can more systematically incorporate alternative standpoints and epistemologies and the practices of epistemic resistance they are tied to, and more easily build on other traditions and paradigms of critical theory, such as feminist, anti-colonial, and anti-racist struggles and theorizing (Mills 1988, Collins 1990, 2019, Medina 2013, Loick 2021, Celikates 2022; see Section 4.1 below). Anchoring the perspective of critical theory within the social struggles and epistemic standpoints of the oppressed can serve as a counterweight – in the sense of “reflexive accountability” (Collins 2019) – to the tendency of actually existing critical theories to set in motion a disempowering spiral of epistemic asymmetries that denies the existence of theoretically sophisticated practices of critique and resistance on the ground and thereby reproduces existing obstacles to equal participation in knowledge production and to radical social transformation. On this view, critical theorizing is itself a social practice that recognizes its addressees as equal partners in a dialogical struggle for appropriate interpretations and realization of transformative potentials that is informed by social theory and sociological research. As such, it can make use of a variety of critical methods – reconstructive, constructive, disclosive, or genealogical (Freyenhagen 2018) – that are not easily subsumed under one unified metatheoretical framework, even if they can be seen as various attempts to spell out the idea of a critical theory as self-reflexive, interdisciplinary, materialist, and emancipatory.

3. Critical Concepts

The basic concepts of Frankfurt School critical theory – such as alienation, reification, ideology, but also emancipation – are expressive of the specific methodology, or set of methodologies, that critical theorists in this tradition employ. As explained in the previous section, critical theory in this tradition proceeds in an immanent way, and this implies that its concepts are both developed from within a certain social constellation and seek to go beyond the self-understanding characteristic of this constellation, they are both descriptive and evaluative, and they exemplify the unity of analysis and critique inherited from Marx. While some concepts are primarily “anticipatory-utopian” (like emancipation) and others primarily “explanatory-diagnostic” (like alienation, reification, and ideology, as obstacles to emancipation) (Benhabib 1986), they are all “thick concepts” whose descriptive content is irreducibly social-theoretically as well as evaluatively loaded.

In addition, some of the critical concepts developed by Frankfurt School authors – again alienation, reification and ideology are the clearest examples – point to second-order phenomena. In contrast to substantial first-order injustices, these concepts seek to critically diagnose what happens when unjust (or exploitative or oppressive) social relations are not experienced as unjust (or exploitative or oppressive) but are accepted as legitimate or natural, or if they are intuitively experienced but not explicitly recognized as such, or recognized but not adequately interpreted and articulated. These concepts pick out social phenomena that are often ignored by more mainstream approaches in moral and political philosophy that focus on the moral status of the individual and their actions, or the legitimacy of institutional arrangements, to the neglect of the domain of the social, with its distinct structure, dynamics, and challenges (see, e.g., Honneth 2000, Ch. 1, Zurn 2011, Neuhouser 2022, Ch. 1). The following subsections introduce four key concepts that exemplify both the critical methodologies discussed in the previous section and the substantial social-theoretical and diagnostic contributions to our understanding of contemporary society that Frankfurt School critical theory aspires to. There are of course other concepts used by critical theorists – from normativity, justice, and autonomy to power, domination, and oppression – but the focus here is on concepts less widely discussed in other traditions or to which Frankfurt School theorists have made distinctive contributions.

The concept of alienation has a long history within critical theory. The basic concept refers to the idea of humans being separated, estranged, or distanced from something crucial to their freedom or capacity to flourish. One is alienated when one has a distorted or deficient relation to oneself or to the natural or social world. Critical theorists face a number of challenges in developing a critique of alienation. Classic critiques of alienation, Rousseau and the early Marx for example, relied on substantive conceptions of human nature or self-realization to ground their diagnoses and provide standards for critique. Thick accounts of human nature are less compelling today, which means contemporary critics of alienation have pursued alternative approaches. Since a critique of alienation attempts to diagnose a social pathology, not a problem with particular individuals, critical theorists must also provide a social theory that can convincingly diagnose the social causes of, and possible paths for overcoming, alienation.

Rousseau can be credited with inaugurating “social philosophy” as a domain of inquiry while developing a critique of alienation (Honneth 2000, Ch. 1). Although he does not refer to alienation in his “Second Discourse” (1755), the term captures his argument that living in society leaves human beings disconnected from their true desires and passions, which he explored by speculating about what humans would have been like in a state of nature. Within Hegelian and Marxist social criticism, the concept of alienation has been used to capture the idea that something produced by humans is wrongly taken by them as something given or outside their conscious control (Jaeggi 2005 [2014, 13–14]). In his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel first develops a concept of alienation to describe the relation of the human mind to reality when the products of human reason are not recognized as our own creation but are instead experienced as alien forces. In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), Marx analyzed how wage labor within capitalist societies causes alienation. Workers produce a world of objects, but the products of their labor as well as their own productive activity are commodities over which they have no control; the world they create becomes an alien power with increasing control over them. They are alienated from the kind of spontaneous and creative productive activity that Marx, in his early work, posits as the essence of human nature.

The concept of alienation was influential among first-generation Frankfurt School theorists, particularly in the work of Marcuse and the later work of Erich Fromm (1961). In Dialectic of Enlightenment , Horkheimer and Adorno echo Rousseau in telling a story of alienation going back to the dawn of civilization. They maintain that human beings, in their quest to dominate the natural world (external nature) and to acquire mastery over themselves (inner nature), become estranged from both aspects of nature, failing to see what Enlightenment denies: that we are fundamentally natural beings (Vogel 1996, 69).

Contemporary critical theorists have attempted to rejuvenate the concept of alienation without relying on overly substantive accounts of human nature and without the totalizing diagnosis of Dialectic of Enlightenment . Rahel Jaeggi formalizes key elements of the Hegelian-Marxist approach in developing a philosophical account of alienation focused on how failure to adequately appropriate oneself or the world results in a “relation of relationlessnes” (2005). In this way, the non-alienated self is not defined by a substantive conception of human nature but by the quality of one’s relation to the world: whether this relation is sustained by successful processes of appropriation. Hartmut Rosa also defines alienation as a distorted relation to the world but with a more substantive approach to the quality of non-alienated relations to the world. For this, he has developed a multifaceted concept of “resonance” to capture a kind of vibrant or responsive relation to the world by contrast with the alienated experience of the world as ossified, mute, or hostile (2016). In contrast to these approaches, which are largely framed in terms of necessary conditions for living a good life, Rainer Forst has argued that deontological aspects of the critique of alienation have been neglected, and that there is a kind of “noumenal alienation” that results from not being recognized, or failing to recognize oneself, as an agent of justification (2017).

Reification is a concept with close ties to alienation. If alienation is viewed as diagnosing a distorted relation to the world, reification can be understood as one way of articulating the form that distortion can take. In the broadest sense, reification is a term used to critique cases in which some entity that should not be viewed as an object – oneself, other people, or some segment of the social or natural world – is treated as a thing-like object. It is instrumentalized, objectified, or quantified in a way that is inappropriate according to some critical standard. One challenge for critical theorists is articulating the standard or perspective – a non-reified relation or perspective – according to which the reified stance is not appropriate.

Georg Lukács’s classic 1923 essay on reification heavily influenced the Frankfurt School. Lukács combined Marx’s analysis of the “fetishism of commodities” – which causes social relations between human beings to appear as quantifiable and thing-like – with Weber’s analysis of bureaucracy – which extends this instrumentalizing attitude to all social domains. Reification becomes “the necessary, immediate reality of every person living in capitalist society” (1923 [1971, 197]), which can refer to an instrumentalizing attitude taken toward objects (whose qualitative feature are reduced to quantitative terms), other people, and features of one’s own personality when viewed solely from the perspective of their marketability.

Different critical theorists have appealed to the concept of reification to capture similar but not identical phenomena, with differing definitions corresponding to differences in the larger theoretical framework in which they deploy the concept. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the concept captures the dominance of instrumental reason and the totally administered world that results (1947). Habermas reinterpreted the concept to describe the ways in which systems such as the economy and the bureaucratic state, which function properly as spheres in which instrumental rationality dominates, extend too far into spheres of everyday life that he refers to as the lifeword (1981). This “colonization” of the lifeworld by the system results in the communicative structures of the lifeworld becoming reified. Honneth, by contrast, takes up the concept of reification in relation to his theory of recognition, arguing that reification involves a kind of forgetting of a primary relation of mutual recognition that he calls “empathetic engagement” (2005). Within Rosa’s theory of resonance, in which he attempts to capture one side of the history of modernity as a “catastrophe of resonance,” reification can be viewed as a “forgetfulness of resonance” (2016 [2019, 325]). The revival of this concept has been extended in other ways by using reification as a guiding concept for analyzing the relation between economics and subject formation within a “political economy of the senses” (Chari 2015) or pairing reification with a suitably modified notion of reconciliation to assess experiences of exclusion and integration within modern social orders (Hedrick 2019).

Ideology is similar to alienation and reification in being both a concept critical theory inherits from the Marxist tradition and one that is used to identify a distorted relationship to the world and one’s own place in it (Eagleton 1991). In the Marxist tradition, it has played a prominent role in answering questions such as why people accept social and political conditions that seem to be contrary to their own interests, or how it is possible that subjects feel free although they are dominated. When people experience and describe relations of exploitation and domination as natural and without alternative or even as just, this seems to be an effect of ideology. Ideology, on this critical understanding, usually denotes a more or less coherent system of action-guiding beliefs, such as liberal individualism, that is said to obscure social reality – especially power relations, crisis tendencies, and social conflicts. As Marx (1844, 1846, 1867) and subsequent critical theorists argue, by obscuring these, ideology contributes to the reproduction of the prevailing order (Rosen 1996). Accordingly, any radically transformative and emancipatory practice presupposes that this ideological obfuscation must be recognized as such, criticized, and overcome. The challenge to such critical reflection is particularly acute when the possibility of even asking questions about how we might want to live, if we could transform society, is occluded by a technocratic ideology that reframes such practical questions as technical problems with narrow solutions (Habermas 1963, 1968a).

Ideology differs from mere deception, propaganda, or conspiracy theories. Because it is structurally anchored in social reality and plays a functional role for its reproduction, it cannot be explained with reference to the individual psyche or manipulation by others alone. Even if false consciousness is an element of ideology, critical theorists from Adorno to Jaeggi emphasize the practical nature of ideology as it shapes identities, is embedded in social practice, and functions via affects and habitus.

According to one influential interpretation, the critical notion of ideology developed in the Frankfurt School is characterized by three dimensions (Geuss 1981, Jaeggi 2008). In the first, epistemic dimension, ideologies always encompass epistemically deficient beliefs and attitudes that can range from substantially false beliefs to the confusion of particular and universal interests and inadequate concepts (such as “illegal alien” to refer to undocumented immigrants). In the second, functional dimension, ideologies are seen as playing a necessary, or at least supporting, role for the stabilization and legitimation of social relations of domination, i.e. for their more or less smooth reproduction. In the third, genetic dimension, ideologies are shaped, in ways that are not transparent to the agents themselves, by the social conditions under which they emerge, so that it is not an accident that people end up with the specific sets of beliefs they end up with in a specific type of society.

Radicalizing the Marxist notion of ideology as “necessarily false consciousness,” i.e. consciousness that is false (and not simply morally problematic) for structural reasons (and not just accidentally), Adorno and Marcuse often seem to argue that ideology reaches into the innermost core of subjects, who are shaped all the way down to their psychological and physical impulses, leading them to affirm the existing order and thereby preempting any resistance to domination. While this might help explain the resilience of ideology and its continued effectiveness, it also poses the challenge for critical theorists to find an anchor for their critique in the forms of consciousness, experience, and practice of its addressees (Celikates 2006, and Section 2.5 above).

Due to its emancipatory orientation, the critique of ideology must connect up with the self-understanding of those affected by trying to initiate learning processes, which in turn are supposed to lead to a transformation of those social conditions that are hidden behind ideologies. At the same time, without recourse to critical theories agents themselves will often continue to face obstacles to identifying, diagnosing, and explaining the effects of ideology on their critical capacities and practices. Arguably, showing that a contradiction is inscribed in the existing social order and can only be “dissolved” if this order itself is fundamentally transformed is also a task for a critical theory.

Although for most critical theorists ideology is not merely false consciousness but embedded in social practices and identities, ideology critique has been criticized for being overly cognitivist and underestimating the role of habitualized attitudes and cultural practices, for relying on an overly strong distinction between true and distorted consciousness, and for presupposing an idealized notion of the subject. Critics such as Foucault and Bourdieu speak instead of power-knowledge (Foucault 1973, 15) or of symbolic power and its embodiment (Bourdieu 1980, Ch. 8). The epistemological and political challenges the notion of ideology gives rise to continue to animate discussions (Celikates, Haslanger, and Stanley (eds.) forthcoming), including, more recently, on the relation between ideology and epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007, Mills 2017), cultural technē (Haslanger 2017a), and propaganda (Stanley 2015).

Frankfurt School critical theory inherits its emancipatory orientation from Marx, in the sense that it aims not only to understand, but also to contribute to a radical transformation of the social world that is already under way, and the commitment to real emancipation as requiring a radical, irreducibly social and political transformation that overcomes the fundamental contradictions of modern society instead of partial or local reforms aimed at surface-level symptoms. Emancipation is thus understood as liberation, including self-liberation, from domination by social, political, and economic powers, both personal and structural. Against this background, however, critical theorists have given different accounts of what emancipation is, what it requires, and how much can be said about it as a process and as an aim or state. While some (Horkheimer 1937a, Habermas 1968b) have thought of emancipation as a process of enlightenment and self-reflection that would allow for the realization of a rational organization of society, others thought of emancipation as sensual liberation (Marcuse 1969), or as emancipation from the (internalized) destructive imperatives of capitalism towards a state “of lying on water and looking peacefully at the sky” (Adorno 1951c [2005, 157]).

At the same time, and insofar as the working class has been integrated, fragmented, or at least reconstituted, it has become increasingly less clear who is to be emancipated (or self-emancipated) from which forms of domination and how. The challenges to the possibility of emancipation include reflections on the potentially overblown ideals of autonomy, sovereignty, and transparency that seem to underlie it (Laclau 1992), the limits of active self-transformation under conditions in which subjects have been shaped by power-ridden forms of subjectivation (Allen 2015), and the prospects of overcoming capitalism given the apparent lack of any clear and viable alternative. Today, critical theorists also face the challenge of reorienting the emancipatory project in the face of a catastrophic climate crisis that seems to privilege adaptation, mitigation, and sheer survival over utopian visions of emancipation that have also served historically as a pretext for an extractive and dominating relation to nature (Brown 2022).

In light of these challenges, a critical theory that wishes to hold on to its emancipatory orientation will need to articulate emancipation as an immanent possibility that is enabled and in some ways required by unprecedented historical developments. Whether in doing so it can build on the presumption of an emancipatory interest of the oppressed that theorists from Marx and Horkheimer to Habermas and Honneth (2017) have sought to identify remains contested. But thinking of emancipation as a second-order process that aims at enabling collective practices of self-determination over and against the obstacles picked out by concepts such as alienation, reification, and ideology, rather than as a substantial ideal or positive utopian vision of emancipation to be attained, might provide a starting point. Insofar as critical theory continues to see the existing social order as one of structurally entrenched domination, exploitation, and alienation, it will also continue to rely on some notion of an emancipatory process that points beyond those structures, even if this process is invariably plural, non-teleological, open-ended, and negative in orientation.

4. Critical Theories Today

Marx defined critical theory as the “self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age” (Marx 1843). The vitality of this approach to critical theory depends on continually taking up this task in new social contexts, as the first generation of the Frankfurt School did. Contemporary critical theorists continue this legacy by engaging with and theorizing in relation to contemporary struggles, crises, and practices. This has meant engaging a much wider range of emancipatory social movements than earlier generations of the Frankfurt School, who focused more on class struggle and capitalism (and the ways these were entangled with antisemitism and fascism) while largely neglecting issues like colonialism, racism, and the subordination of women. Contemporary critical theorists have expanded and enriched the Frankfurt School tradition by engaging with, and in some cases making contributions to, feminist theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial and decolonial theory (4.1), enlarging their analyses of crises beyond capitalism and its contradictions (4.2), and exploring a variety of critical practices ranging from civil disobedience to prefigurative, abolitionist, and revolutionary practices (4.3).

4.1 Theorizing Struggles and Movements

As emphasized above, Frankfurt School critical theory is methodologically interdisciplinary and defined by its aim of contributing to the emancipatory transformation of society by critically reflecting on the ways in which thinking itself can be distorted by structures of domination. This is also true of the various forms of critical theorizing that have emerged from and in relation to struggles against gendered oppression, racism, and colonialism and its legacies. Indeed, those critical theories bring to light structures of domination and modes of thinking (patriarchy, white supremacy, neocolonialism and Eurocentrism) that have until recently been neglected by the Frankfurt School and must be taken into account by any theory that aims to be critical and emancipatory.

More than one feminist theorist has argued that engaging feminism has been, and still is, crucial to renewing Frankfurt School critical theory both methodologically and in order to live up to its emancipatory aims (Fraser 1985, Ferrarese 2018). But analyzing the intersection between feminist theory and the Frankfurt School is complicated by the diverse array of theorists on both sides of that intersection. Some of the debates among feminist critical theorists mirror debates already discussed, for instance between those who draw on first generation versus Habermas or those who embrace Habermasian versus poststructuralist critical theory.

In most accounts, the first generation of the Frankfurt School is portrayed as not including any women and, with the exception of Marcuse in the 1970s (Marcuse 1974), its main protagonists largely failed to theorize about gender-based oppression or engage with feminist movements or the feminist theory of their time (there is, however, a new research project at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt that aims to challenge the dominant historiography by highlighting contributions of female researchers such as Käthe Weil and Else Frenkel-Brunswik and feminist work within the Frankfurt School). While fully acknowledging why feminists might find little of value in the first generation, some feminist theorists have highlighted important methodological affinities between, and potential for productive engagement with, that body of work (Brown 2006, Heberle 2006, Marasco 2006). In spite of the first generation’s nostalgia for the authority of the patriarchal family, their studies of authoritarianism were groundbreaking in analyzing the family as a political institution and breeding ground for fascism (Marasco 2018). Recent interest in Adorno’s work in particular builds on his theory of the nonidentical as support for the feminist critique of essentialist identities as well as affinities between feminist aims and his deconstruction of dualisms like nature and history or reason and desire, and his appeal to lived experience as crucial to philosophy and critique (Heberle 2006, 5–6). Attempts at synthesis include using his theory of the nonidentical, in dialogue with Lacan and Marx, to theorize a new approach to feminist political subjectivity (Leeb 2017), and combining Adorno’s insights into “bourgeois coldness” with the feminist ethics of care to rethink the fragility of our concern for others within a capitalist form of life that fosters “generalized indifference” while also producing a gendered form of attention to others (Ferrarese 2018).

Turning to the second generation, the critique of Habermas’s failure to adequately theorize gender in his Theory of Communicative Action (1981) was a turning point. In a now-classic essay, Nancy Fraser (1985) took a cue from the Marx quote about critical theory reflecting on the struggles of the age to criticize the Frankfurt School, and Habermas in particular, for failing to theorize one of the most significant struggles against domination. Seyla Benhabib raised similar concerns about whether the theory of communicative action could adequately theorize the feminist movement (1986, 252), and in Situating the Self (1992) aimed to make Habermasian discourse theory more cognizant of the self as gendered (see also the essays collected in Meehan 1995). In his later discourse theory of democracy, Habermas does engage the feminist theory and politics of equality to illuminate his core thesis about how private and public autonomy mutually presuppose each other (1992 [1996, 418–427]). But feminist critical theorists maintain that his rationalist approach fails to adequately capture the way power operates (Allen 2008, Ch. 5; McNay 2022, Ch. 1) or to incorporate forms of communication like narrative that have been crucial to feminism (Lara 1998, 2021; Young 2000).

The third generation of the Frankfurt School represents a crucial shift, with prominent feminist theorists like Fraser and Benhabib attempting to make critical theory more amenable to feminism from within the tradition, while also engaging in debates with leading figures in the poststructuralist strand of feminist critical theory like Judith Butler (Benhabib et. al. 1995). A core issue in these debates has been between Habermasian feminists who stress autonomy and poststructuralists who stress the idea of subjection – the ways in which power is central to the formation of subjects and their desires (Butler 1997). Amy Allen critically engages and synthesizes insights from both sides of this debate in viewing subjects as both constituted through relations of power and able to exercise autonomy in the form of critical reflection (Allen 2008). Axel Honneth, another key figure in the third generation, has engaged with feminist theory (Honneth 2000) and the feminist movement (2011 [2014, 154–176]), and in debates with feminist critical theorists including Fraser (Fraser and Honneth 2003) and Butler (Ikäheimo et al. 2021), but his work has also been the subject of sustained feminist critique of his conception of love, the family, and caring labor (Young 2007, Rössler 2007, Wimbauer 2023).

Fraser has, over several decades, developed a systematic defense of socialist feminism while charting various shifts in the feminist movement (see the essays collected in Fraser 2013), recently making the case that the contemporary crisis in care work must be understood as part of a larger general crisis in capitalist society (Fraser 2016, 2022, Ch. 3). Other feminist critical theorists also argue for a return to the critique of capitalism as crucial to feminist theorizing (Leeb 2017). From a different perspective, Lois McNay argues that recent Frankfurt School theorists, not only Honneth and Forst but also Fraser and Jaeggi, have failed to adequately incorporate the experience of gendered oppression into critical theory (McNay 2022). Another set of challenges arises from the need to develop an intersectional analysis of power and domination while engaging with a broader range of work in feminist and gender theory including queer and trans* theory as well as transnational and postcolonial feminism (Allen 2019, 537–538).

Apart from the influential studies on antisemitism and fascism by the first generation, Frankfurt School theorists have until recently shown little interest in issues of race and racism despite the prominence of anti-racist struggles and theorizing throughout the twentieth century and the present. The silence is of course not total. Early analyses point to prejudice toward Jews and other minority groups as an important part of the authoritarian personality and a key mechanism of providing “pseudo-orientation in an estranged world” (Adorno et al. 1950, 622), diagnose a culturalist transformation of the earlier biological racism at the center of fascism in post-war Europe that serves to maintain white supremacy (Adorno 1955, 148–9), and identify the phantasmatic dimension of racism and its fictions of homogeneity, purity, and essential difference (Adorno 1967a). Arguably, there are also broader methodological lessons from the relational and materialist theory of antisemitism developed by Adorno and Horkheimer that also hold for the study of racism (even if their relation remains contested, see Catlin 2023), namely the rejection of psychologizing and individualizing approaches, the insistence that the pathology always lies in the antisemitic or racist subjects and not in their victims, and the emphasis on structural factors that include the functional role of racism in the context of the crisis of capitalism and democracy (see Postone 1980 for an early attempt to explain modern antisemitism in relation to the nature of capitalism and the anti-capitalism of National Socialism).

Despite these openings, there has not been any sustained engagement with the phenomena of race and racism or with anti-racist struggles and theorizing, an eminently emancipatory form of knowledge production that, from W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon to Black feminism (Collins 1990, 2019, Mills 2017), has been engaged in crossing the theory-practice divide and articulating dominated standpoints in ways that should have been of significant interest to Frankfurt School theorists (Outlaw 2005; for a relatively early exception see McCarthy 2009).

This missed opportunity is all the more astonishing as the intersection of class and race, of racism and capitalism has been at the center of theorists that share a Marxist orientation, and even some closeness to the Frankfurt School, most notably Angela Davis – who had studied with Marcuse in the US and with Adorno in Frankfurt, and, following Marcuse, insists on the need to bridge the gap between theory and practice and to combine the critique of racism as well as gender-based domination with a critique of capitalism (Davis 1983, 2004) – and Stuart Hall, who, building on Marxist and post-Marxist approaches, theorizes racism as a historically variable response to crisis and as a mechanism that allows capital to divide the working class (Hall 2021).

In contrast to the first generation’s focus on the “dark side” of modernity, later theorists, from Habermas to Honneth, developed a stronger commitment not only to Enlightenment values, but to the belief that these have been, more or less successfully, institutionalized in Western societies. As a result, their views clash with a core aim of Critical Race Theory (Crenshaw et al. 1995) – itself influenced by Marxist theories of the state and the law – namely, the aim of debunking the idea that the law and the state are neutral institutions that secure the common good and the rights of all as an ideology masking their character as instruments of racial (and class) oppression, as evidenced by massive and persistent inequalities that systematically disadvantage Blacks in the US in particular and racialized populations on a global scale, in various areas of life, from access to education, health, jobs, and housing to the risk of becoming a victim of police violence. According to this view, the forms of freedom and solidarity realized in liberal-democratic societies are not just contingently accompanied by exclusions of racialized groups, as if these values had only been insufficiently realized up to now and only need to be extended to those hitherto excluded. Rather, the thesis is that these exclusions have played a constitutive role in the history of these societies and their value systems and continue to shape them to this day, and that radical emancipation would therefore require developing entirely different visions of living together in freedom and solidarity (Kelley 2002).

More recently, Nancy Fraser (2022, Ch. 2) has picked up on Black Marxist discussions of racial capitalism (prominently Du Bois 1935) by arguing that capitalism provides a structural basis for racial oppression and thus exhibits an inherent (even if historically variable) tendency to racialize populations in order to more effectively expropriate and exploit them. Others have elaborated a relational and materialist understanding of racism that builds on how antisemitism was theorized in the early Frankfurt School, and how racism was rearticulated in a culturalist register in reaction to anticolonial and antiracist struggles (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991, Bojadžijev 2020). What these approaches share, and what might be a distinctive contribution of a critical theory of race and racism, is a commitment to understanding racism as a comprehensive social relation that needs to be understood in relation to broader (capitalist) social formations, “race” as an ideological effect rather than an unquestioned category for social analysis, and anti-racist struggles as a starting point for critical theorizing about race – commitments that are at least partially shared with important contributions in the critical philosophy of race (Mills 2003, Shelby 2003, Haslanger 2017b).

For all its focus on modes of domination in modern society, Frankfurt School critical theory has largely failed to address European colonialism and imperialism (Said 1993, 278) and their continuing effects in a world structured by massive inequalities and asymmetries between the Global North and the Global South. With a few recent exceptions to be discussed here, critical theorists in this tradition have not engaged much with the large body of postcolonial and decolonial theory, even if in recent years debates about the universal validity of human rights and cosmopolitanism, globalization and multiple modernities, religious pluralism and postsecularism, have provided ample occasion to go beyond still operative Eurocentric limitations and become more globally relevant (Mendieta 2007, Butler et al. 2011, Baum 2015, Ingram 2019, Kerner 2018; on some early Frankfurt School engagement with Chinese thought, specifically in Benjamin’s work, see Ng 2023).

The main target of postcolonial critique is the idea of a universal history in which the central engine of progress is located in modern Europe while non-Europeans are viewed as always lagging behind. The story has taken many forms, from narratives of progress in Enlightenment thinkers and their critics, such as Hegel (Buck-Morss 2009), to nineteenth-century theories of racial hierarchy and twentieth-century theories of development that have been shaped by, and in turn, rationalized, racism, slavery, and imperialism (McCarthy 2009, Bhambra and Holmwood 2021). Both anticolonial struggles and theorizing (in the work of Mahatma Gandhi, Aimé Césaire, Fanon and others) have insisted that the history and present of capitalism and of modern European and North American societies are constitutively entangled with colonialism, imperialism, and their afterlives, and that taking their trajectory as paradigmatically modern ends up representing a specific and heterogeneous trajectory and experience as universal and self-contained (Grüner 2010). While some aspects of postcolonial critique can be seen as overlapping with the critique of conceptions of the subject, reason, and universal history in the early Frankfurt School, the former also goes beyond the latter by understanding these as the effects of specifically colonial forms of domination and by tracing a different genealogy of fascism through its roots in the colonialism of the nineteenth century (Bardawil 2018).

Recent decades have seen attempts to bring postcolonial theory into dialogue with the Frankfurt School. From the side of decolonial theory, Enrique Dussel has been one of the most prominent decolonial philosophers to engage with Frankfurt School philosophers, developing a global ethics of liberation in critical dialogue with the discourse ethics of Apel and Habermas (Dussel 1998; see also Dusell 2011 and Allen and Mendieta 2021).

From the side of Frankfurt School critical theory, postcolonial critique has been taken up in a variety of ways (see also Vázquez-Arroyo 2018). In the same spirit of Horkheimer and Adorno’s attempt to critique enlightenment in the name of an alternative conception of enlightenment, both Susan Buck-Morss (2009) and Thomas McCarthy (2009) attempt to salvage something of the core idea that is the target of their critique: “universal history” for Buck-Morss, and “development” for McCarthy.

Amy Allen (2016), on the other hand, is more decidedly critical of the role of the discourse of “progress” and the role of such concepts in grounding normativity and shaping assumptions about historical development, modernization, and reason in the work of Habermas, Honneth, and Forst. She regards the latter approaches as deeply Eurocentric and contrasts them with a contextualist form of critique, inspired by Foucault and Adorno, that takes the form of a critical history of the present that uncovers the deep entanglement between reason and domination. Calling for an even more thorough revision of historical narratives, conceptual frameworks, and normative criteria, Gurminder Bhambra (2021) argues that the prevalent understanding of modernity as an endogenous European achievement obscures the fact that colonization and slavery were integral to and constitutive of the Enlightenment project of modernity in both its epistemic and institutional dimensions, a task for which historical and theoretical resources beyond Adorno and Foucault would be required. Fundamental questions about modernity, the human subject, and freedom also emerge from an encounter between critical theory in the Frankfurt School tradition and Caribbean thought (Sealey and Davis forthcoming). In a similar vein, contemporary critics of the persistence of colonial structures point to how a denial of the colonial past reaffirms a violent global color line (Mbembe 2016) that affects how societies treat Indigenous peoples (Coulthard 2014) and racialized and migrant populations (Celikates 2022).

4.2 Diagnosing Crises

Diagnosing crises, and the social contradictions that give rise to them, is a hallmark of Hegelian-Marxist critical theory. Marx famously diagnosed capitalism as a crisis-ridden social system, and the early work of the first generation of the Frankfurt School was a response to the economic, social, and political crises of their time. Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947) can be understood as addressing the crisis of reason that was experienced with the rise of National Socialism, but the critique of instrumental reason was disconnected from more concrete crises and struggles. Habermas aimed to restore the link between critique and crisis beginning with his 1973 book Legitimation Crisis (Benhabib 1986, 252–3, Cordero 2017, Ch. 3). Writing in the context of state-managed capitalism, Habermas diagnosed the distinctively political contradictions and potential for political crises within a social system that aims to steer the economy and manage economic crises (a point influentially elaborated by Offe 1984).

In subsequent decades, crisis critique, along with the critique of capitalism, was largely abandoned by Frankfurt School theorists (for a notable exception see Postone 1993). Renewed theoretical interest has coincided with rising public concern about social, political, and economic systems currently in, or always seemingly on the brink of, crisis, all against the backdrop of the unfolding effects of the ongoing climate catastrophe.

Nancy Fraser was one of the first critical theorists to revive crisis critique and to do so as part of a comprehensive critique of capitalism that renews the link between analytical diagnosis and critique (Fraser 2011, 2014; see Wellmer 2014 for a critique of the Frankfurt School’s earlier neglect). What distinguishes Fraser’s approach is that it posits capitalism as the unifying causal link among seemingly distinct crises – in relation to care work, the environment, and political institutions – by viewing capitalism as an institutionalized social order in which the economic system “cannibalizes” the very conditions that make it possible within the spheres of social reproduction, the natural environment, and the political system (Fraser 2022). Fraser combines analysis of “objective” social conditions – contradictions and crises – with an orientation toward social movements by analyzing the “boundary struggles” that arise at the seams between the economic system and other domains, making the case for these struggles to unite around an anti-capitalist agenda.

In a similar way, Rahel Jaeggi has developed a crisis-oriented theory of immanent critique (2014, Ch. 6) that is not limited to diagnosing systemic dysfunction but includes the normative expectations and self-understandings of social agents (Jaeggi 2017a; see Fraser and Jaeggi 2018), but at a more abstract theoretical level than Fraser’s immanent analysis of capitalism as a social order. Like Fraser and Jaeggi, Albena Azmanova argues for renewed attention to the critique of capitalism but is skeptical about how helpful “crisis” talk is (2014) and maintains that radical social change is possible without crisis, revolution, or utopia through a united struggle against forms of precarity that are endemic to contemporary capitalism (2020). More generally, the turn to economic crisis dynamics has also led to a renewed interest in work – its general significance, pathologies, and emancipatory potential (Jaeggi 2017b, Dejours et al. 2018, Honneth 2023).

Turning specifically to the ecological crisis, Frankfurt School theorists have only recently begun taking seriously the task of rethinking their approach to critical theory in the current context of an ongoing ecological disaster on a global scale (for an early exception, see Vogel 1996). Some critical theorists argue that this situation calls for a new paradigm of “Critical Naturalism” (Gregoratto et al., 2022); others argue for a fundamental rethinking of Western conceptions of human freedom and a radical shift in conceptions of the ethically good life as a precondition for the kind of radical social change required by the current crisis (Cooke 2020, 2023). Fraser focuses on the role of capitalism in the climate catastrophe and the need for eco-politics to be anti-capitalist so that we can reassert control over, and begin to reinvent from the ground up, our relation to nature (Fraser 2021, 2022; see Bernstein 2022 for a recent approach to such rethinking).

In rethinking our conception of nature, given the lack of serious attention to theorizing about nature in the second and, until quite recently, third generation of the Frankfurt School, it is not surprising that many critical theorists have looked more to the first generation (see the collected essays in Biro 2011), with Adorno’s work viewed as a promising starting point for rethinking humans’ relation to nature (Cook 2011, Cassegård 2021, Ch. 3). Cook argues that the “project of showing that human history is always also natural history and that non-human nature is entwined with history… informs all Adorno’s work” and that there are important affinities between his work and proponents of radical ecology (Cook 2011, 1, 5–6). On the other hand, the view of nature as having a kind of otherness that is beyond and not fully graspable by humans – a view expressed at times by Adorno and Horkeimer as well as Marcuse – has been criticized in favor of a more Hegelian-Marxist approach that sees “nature” as a product of human activity (Vogel 1996, 2011). Others argue for reviving critical engagement with Marcuse’s work as a resource for addressing the ecological crisis, with its combination of a critique of science and technology (most radically, as a call for a “new science”) with the idea that social transformation must include a changed, aesthetic relation to nature (Feenberg 2023a, 2023b). At this point, it is clear that there must be more engagement between Frankfurt School theorists and the many “critical ecologies” being developed today, e.g., deep ecology, eco-feminism, eco-socialism, ecological Marxism, environmental justice, indigenous and decolonial ecologies, and new materialism (on the recent dialogue between Frankfurt School theorists and new materialism, see Rosa et al., 2021).

Finally, Frankfurt School theorists have turned their attention to political crises and the rise of right-wing populist, authoritarian, and neo-fascist movements, parties, and governments (Brown, Gordon, and Pensky 2018, Gordon 2017, Abromeit 2016). This crisis is particularly important because adequately addressing the economic and ecological crises of our time requires political solutions, which will be hindered by political systems that are themselves in crisis, thereby contributing to a regressive dynamic (Jaeggi 2022, Forst 2023).

From the perspective of critical theorists, there seem to be two aspects of the political crisis that are often missing from mainstream liberal accounts. The first pertains to the genesis and the causes of the crisis (Brown 2019, Gambetti 2020). Against accounts that see authoritarianism only in terms of a rupture with and as entirely foreign to liberal democracy, they argue that we need to examine the continuities and enabling conditions that allow authoritarian tendencies to arise from within liberal-democratic capitalist societies. Without analyzing the neoliberal restructuring of social relations and the ways in which populist and authoritarian movements exploit electoral strategies, fragmented public spheres, and liberal ideological frameworks such as “freedom of speech,” the critique of and resistance to them will necessarily remain truncated.

The second aspect pertains to the dynamic of authoritarianism and the political crisis it engenders. Beyond focusing on its political dimension (e.g. political aims and values), critical theorists have sought to analyze the socio-cultural, affective, and psycho-social dynamics of authoritarianism and its attractiveness to populations that seem to have little to gain from the election of populist leaders (Marasco 2018, Brown 2019, McAfee 2019, Redecker 2020, Zaretsky 2022). These approaches can draw on and are supported by Adorno’s analysis (1967a) of core features of authoritarian right-wing populism. First, it is not so much actual abandonment but a feared, anticipated, or imagined abandonment, along with a perceived loss of privileges that had come to seem natural, that are the driving force of the rise of a reactionary authoritarianism that then gets misdescribed as a revolt of the oppressed and exploited. Second, the proponents of authoritarianism, following an antisemitic and/or racist logic, personalize the blame for their fears and feelings of abandonment by projecting it onto groups they classify as alien, rather than attributing it to structural features of society.

In responding to all the crises discussed here – economic, ecological, and political – critical theorists must grapple with a number of challenges. Purely at the level of theory, there is the question of whether positing unity or convergence among crises is diagnostically accurate. At a practical level, it remains to be seen whether a unity thesis will be politically motivating and whether a convergence of social struggles is indeed on the horizon. The issue of practice also bears on the question of whether and to what extent the objective conditions of crisis and contradiction diagnosed by critical theorists actually affect people’s everyday lived experience and become motivating factors for political movements (see Section 2.5 ). Such questions about the relation between theory and practice have long been a focus of critical theorists and have recently gained attention in theorizing about a range of critical and political practices.

While overcoming the gap between theory and practice has been a central methodological and political concern for critical theorists, critics have pointed out the prominent turn away from practice to theory in the first generation – accused by Lukács of taking up residence in the “Grand Hotel Abyss” (Lukács 1963, 22) – and the continued marginalization of critical praxis in later generations (Harcourt 2020). There are multiple grounds for challenging this assessment. Frankfurt School theorists had arguments all along about how to assess and relate to radical movements, such as the student movement of 1968 (Adorno and Marcuse 1969, Freyenhagen 2014, Pickford 2023), and there has always been a strand that continuously engaged with struggles and movements, from Marcuse to Negt and Kluge and Fraser. Some critical theorists have focused on deliberative democracy, the public sphere, and civil society (Habermas 1962, 1992, 2021, Cohen and Arato 1992, Benhabib 2004, Lafont 2019) as core fora for critical practice, while others have argued for critical theory itself to be democratized and understood as a critical practice (Bohman 2003, Celikates 2009).

Still, many of these approaches have been criticized for prioritizing institutional achievements over struggles and critical practices, and reform over revolution. Given the challenges outlined above (4.2), it is not surprising that some recent work tries to reverse this tendency by exploring more radical responses to such crises. These attempts notably push beyond the dichotomy between reform and revolution – for example, by promoting non-reformist reforms that could “alter the terrain on which future struggles will be waged, thus expanding the set of feasible options for future reforms” (Fraser, in Fraser and Honneth 2003, 79) – and mine the rich history and present of radical struggles outside traditional forms of political organizing such as the party or reimagine the party in radical ways (Dean 2016).

The range of critical practices engaged with by critical theorists past and present is extensive (for an inventory, see Harcourt 2020, Ch. 15). Frankfurt School theorists of earlier generations covered various forms of resistance, from the “Great Refusal” of the 1960s (Marcuse) and the potential for resistance in independent thinking and critical analysis in the face of universal reification (Adorno) to civil disobedience as a sign of a dynamic public sphere and civil society (Habermas 1983b, Cohen and Arato 1992, Ch. 11). More recently, critical theorists within various traditions have analyzed forms of disobedience (direct, digital, migrant etc.) as political practices of contestation and struggles for democratization “from below” (Young 2001, Smith 2013, Scheuerman 2018, Celikates 2019b). Other practices of resistance that do not directly engage with state institutions or appeal to the broader public include forms of sabotage (Malm 2020), fleeing, withdrawal, or defection. These turn away from what are seen as state-oriented struggles for visibility, recognition, or representation (Virno 2004, Roberts 2015) and towards subaltern forms of sociality (Moten and Harney 2013) and counter-communities that prefigure fundamental alternatives for living together (Loick 2021). Emphasizing the revolutionary dimension of critical practices, theorists have drawn on the abolitionist tradition of struggles against slavery and colonialism, and its revitalization in movements like Black Lives Matter, to call for a fundamental critique of racial capitalism and its entanglement with the punitive state, and a correspondingly radical transformation of all social relations and institutions (Davis 2005, Gilmore 2022). Critical theorists have also explored political practices of assembling (Butler 2015), occupying, striking, and reorganizing processes of social reproduction (Gago 2019), linking these to the need to rethink revolution beyond the model of a single break or event and more as an interstitial process (Redecker 2018, Saar 2020).

Whether the new revolutionary subjects and struggles that emerge in these critical practices will indeed converge to fundamentally challenge the existing order, open up new pathways to emancipation, and develop emancipated – more just, democratic, and sustainable – modes of living together remains to be seen. Horkheimer’s quip still holds: “if the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the eating here is still in the future” (1937a [1972, 220–1]). Against this background, theoretical explorations of critical practices – in the multiplicity of their forms, terrains, and actors – can be seen as part of the ongoing attempt to bring theory and practice together with an emancipatory orientation in light of the crises and struggles of the age. This approach has characterized the Frankfurt School from its very beginnings and has been a driving force in its continual (self-)transformation, making it into one of the most influential paradigms in social philosophy today.

• Abromeit, John, 2016, “Critical Theory and the Persistence of Right-Wing Populism”, Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture , 15(2) [ Abromeit 2016 available online ].
• Adorno, Theodor W., 1931 [year this lecture was given], “Die Aktualität der Philosophie”, in Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften I: Philosophische Frühschriften , Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973, pp. 325–344; translated as “The Actuality of Philosophy”, Benjamin Snow (trans.), Telos , 31 (1977): 120–133.
• –––, 1936 “Wiesengrund-Adorno an Benjamin, 18. März 1936”, in Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Briefwechsel 1928–1940 , Henri Lonitz (ed.), Frankfurt am Main, 1994, pp. 168–177; translated as March 18, 1936, “Wiesengrund-Adorno to Benjamin, March 18, 1936”, Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin , The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940 ,, Nicholas Walker (trans.), Henri Lonitz (ed.), Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999, pp. 127–133.
• –––, 1938, “Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 7(3), 321–356; translated as “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening”, Susan L. Gillespie (trans.), in Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music , Richard Leppert (ed.), Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, pp. 288–317.
• –––, 1951a, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft”, in Karl Gustav Specht (ed.), Soziologische Forschung unserer Zeit , Köln and Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1951, pp. 228–240, republished in Theodor W. Adorno, Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1955, pp. 7–31; translated as “Cultural Criticism and Society”, in Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms , Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981, pp. 17–34.
• –––, 1951b, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda”, in Géza Roheim (ed.), Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences Vol. 3 , New York: International Universities Press, 279–300. Reprinted in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture , Jay Bernstein (ed.), New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 132–157.
• –––, 1951c, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life , Edmund Jephcott (trans.), London: Verso, 2005.
• –––, 1955, “Schuld und Abwehr”, in Friedrich Pollock (ed.), Gruppenexperiment: Ein Studienbericht , Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 278–428; translated as Guilt and Defense: On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar Germany , Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin (eds./trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
• –––, 1957, “Soziologie und empirische Forschung”, in K . Ziegler (ed.), Wesen und Wirklichkeit des Menschen: Festschrift für Helmuth Plessner , Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, pp. 245–260; translated as “Sociology and Empirical Research”, Glyn Adey and David Frisby (trans.), in Theodor W. Adorno et al. (eds.), The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology , London: Heinemann, 1976, pp. 68–86.
• –––, 1963a [year this transcribed lecture course was given], Probleme der Moralphilosophie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996; translated as Problems of Moral Philosophy , Rodney Livingstone (trans.), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
• –––, 1963b, Drei Studien zu Hegel , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Hegel: Three Studies , Shierry Weber Nicholsen (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.
• –––, 1966a, Negative Dialektik , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Negative Dialectics , E. B. Ashton (trans.), New York: Seabury Press, 1973.
• –––, 1966b, “Gesellschaft”, in Hermann Kunst and Siegfried Grundmann (eds.), Evangelisches Staatslexikon , Stuttgart: Kreuz Verlag, pp. 636–643; translated as “Society”, Fredric R. Jameson (trans.), Salmagundi , 10–11 (1969): 144–153.
• –––, 1969a, “Zur Spezifikation der kritischen Theorie”, in Theodor W. Adorno Archiv (ed.), Adorno. Eine Bildmonographie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 292.
• –––, 1969b, “Marginalien zu Theorie und Praxis”, Die Zeit , No. 33 (1969); translated as “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis”, Henry W. Pickford (trans.), in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords , New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, pp. 259–278.
• –––, 1967a [year this transcribed lecture was given], Aspekte des neuen Rechtsradikalismus , Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1999; translated as Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism , Wieland Hoban (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2020.
• –––, 1967b, “Résumé über Kulturindustrie”, in Theodor W. Adorno, Ohne Leitbild: Parva Aesthetica , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 60–70; translated as “The Culture Industry Reconsidered”, Anson G. Rabinbach (trans.), in Jay Bernstein, (ed.), The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture , New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 98–106.
• –––, 1970, Ästhetische Theorie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Aesthetic Theory , Robert Hullot-Kentor (trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977.
• Adorno, Theodor W., Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, 1950, The Authoritarian Personality , with a new Introduction by Peter E. Gordon, New York: Verso, 2019.
• Adorno, Theodor W., Hans Albert, Ralf Dahrendorf, Jürgen Habermas, Harald Pilot, and Karl R. Popper, 1969, Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie , Neuwied/Berlin: Luchterhand; translated as The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology , Glyn Adey and David Frisby (trans.), London: Heinemann, 1976.
• Adorno, Theodor W. and Herbert Marcuse, 1969, “Correspondence on the German Student Movement”, New Left Review , 233 (1999), 123–136.
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• –––, 2021, Critique on the Couch: Why Critical Theory Needs Psychoanalysis , New York: Columbia University Press.
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• –––, 1989, “Normative Begründung der ‘Kritischen Theorie’” durch Rekurs auf lebensweltliche Sittlichkeit? Ein transzendentalpragmatisch orientierter Versuch, mit Habermas gegen Habermas zu denken”, in Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer (eds.), Zwischenbetrachtungen im Prozess der Aufklärung: Jürgen Habermas zum 60. Geburtstag , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 15–65; translated as “Normatively Grounding ‘Critical Theory’ through Recourse to Lifeworld? A Transcendental-Pragmatic Attempt to Think With Habermas Against Habermas”, William Rehg (trans.), in Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer (eds.), Philosophical Interventions Into the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992, pp. 125–70.
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• –––, 2020, Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Balibar, Etienne, and Immanuel Wallerstein, 1988, Race, nation, classe: les identités ambiguës , Paris: La Découverte; translated as Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities , Chris Turner (trans.), New York: Verso, 1991.
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• –––, 1992, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2004, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Benhabib, Seyla, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, 1995, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange , New York: Routledge.
• Benjamin, Walter, 1920/21, “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”, in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik , 47(3): 809–832; translated as “Toward the Critique of Violence”, Julia Ng (trans.), in Peter Fenves and Julia Ng (eds.), Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition , Stanford University Press, 2021, pp. 39–60.
• –––, 1936, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”, originally published as “L’œuvre d’art à l’époque de sa réproduction mécanisée”, Pierre Klossowski (trans.), Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 5(1), 40–68, all textual variants can be found in Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Walter Benjamin Werke und Nachlaß: Kritische Gesamtausgabe vol. 16), Burkhardt Lindner (ed.), Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012, the essay was translated as “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility”, Michael W. Jennings (trans.), Grey Room , 39 (2010): 11–37. doi:10.1162/grey.2010.1.39.11
• –––, 1940, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte”, in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften I , Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (eds.), Frankfurt am Main, 1974, pp. 691–706; translated as “On the Concept of History”, Harry Zohn (trans.) in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds.) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings (Volume 4), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, pp. 389–400.
• –––, 1955, Schriften , 2 vols., Theodor W. Adorno and Gretel Adorno (eds.), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated in parts as Illuminations , Harry Zohn (trans.), Hannah Arendt (ed.), New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.
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• –––, 2022, The Vicissitudes of Nature: From Spinoza to Freud , Malden, MA: Polity.
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• –––, 2007, Democracy Across Borders: From Dêmos to Dêmoi, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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• –––, 2019, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West , New York: Columbia University Press.
• –––, 2022, “Rethinking Politics and Freedom in the Anthropocene”, Crisis and Critique , 9(2): 24–44 [ Brown 2022 available online ].
• Brown, Wendy, and Rainer Forst, 2014, The Power of Tolerance: A Debate , New York: Columbia University Press.
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• Brunkhorst, Hauke, 1983, “Paradigmenkern und Theoriedynamik der Kritischen Theorie der Gesellschaft”, Soziale Welt , 34: 22–36; translated as “Paradigm-core and theory-dynamics in critical social theory: people and programs”, Peter Krockenberger (trans.), Philosophy & Social Criticism , 24(6) (1998): 67–110.
• –––, 2002, Solidarität: Von der Bürgerfreundschaft zur globalen Rechtsgenossenschaft , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community , Jeffrey Flynn (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
• –––, 2014, Critical Theory of Legal Revolutions: Evolutionary Perspectives , New York: Bloomsbury.
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• –––, 1989, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• –––, 1992, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered”, October , 62: 3–41. doi:10.2307/778700
• –––, 2009, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History , Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
• Butler, Judith, 1990, Gender Trouble , London: Routledge.
• –––, 1997, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• –––, 2012, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism , New York: Columbia University Press.
• –––, 2015, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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• –––, 2019a, “Critical Theory and the Unfinished Project of Mediating Theory and Practice”, in Peter Gordon, Espen Hammer, and Axel Honneth (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School , London: Routledge, pp. 206–220.
• –––, 2019b, “Constituent Power Beyond Exceptionalism: Irregular Migration, Disobedience, and (Re-)Constitution”, Journal of International Political Theory , 15(1): 67–81. doi:10.1177/1755088218808311
• –––, 2022, “Remaking the Demos ‘from Below’? Critical Theory, Migrant Struggles, and Epistemic Resistance”, in Didier Fassin and Axel Honneth (eds.), Crisis Under Critique: How People Assess, Transform, and Respond to Critical Situations , New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 97–120.
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• Collins, Patricia Hill, 1990, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment , London: Routledge. Second edition published in 2000.
• –––, 2019, Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory , Durham and London: Duke University Press. doi:10.1515/9781478007098
• Cook, Deborah, 2004, Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society , London and New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2011, Adorno on Nature , Durham: Acumen.
• Cooke, Maeve, 2006, Re-Presenting the Good Society , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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• Cordero, Rodrigo, 2017, Crisis and Critique: On the Fragile Foundations of Social Life , New York: Routledge.
• Coulthard, Glen Sean, 2014, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, 1995, “Introduction”, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement , New York: The New Press, pp. viii–xxxii.
• Davis, Angela Y., 1983, Women, Race and Class , New York: Vintage.
• –––, 2004, “Marcuse’s Legacies”, in John Abromeit and W. Mark Cobb (eds.), Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader . New York, Routledge, pp. 43–50.
• –––, 2005, Abolition Democracy , New York: Seven Stories Press.
• Dean, Jodi, 2016, Crowds and Party , London: Verso.
• Dejours, Christophe, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Emmanuel Renault, and Nicholas H. Smith, 2018, The Return of Work in Critical Theory: Self, Society, Politics , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Demirović, Alex, 2016, “The Frankfurt School, Critical Theory, and Sociology at the Institute for Social Research (1950 to 1960)”, in Gabriel R. Ricci (ed.), The Persistence of Critical Theory , London: Routledge, pp. 25–40.
• Deranty, Jean-Philippe, 2021, “Negativity in Recognition: Post-Freudian Legacies in Contemporary Critical Theory”, in Ikäheimo, Heikki, Kristina Lepold and Titus Stahl (eds.), Recognition and Ambivalence , New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 223–255.
• Derrida, Jacques, 1990 [year the lecture was given], Force de loi , Paris: Galilée, 1994; translated as “The Force of Law”, Mary Quaintance (trans.), in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David G. Carlson (eds.), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice , New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 3–67.
• Dews, Peter, 1987, Logics of Disintegration: Poststructuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory , London: Verso.
• Dubiel, Helmut, 1978, Wissenschaftsorganisation und politische Erfahrung: Studien zur frühen Kritischen Theorie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory , Benjamin Gregg (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985.
• Du Bois, W. E. B., 1935, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 , New York: The Free Press, 1998.
• Dussel, Enrique, 1998, Ética de la Liberación en la edad de globalización y de la exclusión ; translated as Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion , Eduardo Mendieta, Camilo Pérez Bustillo, Yolanda Angulo, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres (trans.), Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.
• –––, 2011, “From Critical Theory to the Philosophy of Liberation: Some Themes for Dialogue”, Transmodernity , 1(2): 16–43. doi.org:10.5070/T412011806
• Eagleton, Terry, 1991, Ideology: An Introduction , London, Verso.
• Feenberg, Andrew, 2023a, “Marcuse’s Critique of Technology Today”, Philosophy & Social Criticism 49(6): 672–685. doi:10.1177/01914537231164657
• –––, 2023b, The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing: Nature and Revolution in Marcuse’s Philosophy of Praxis , London: Verso.
• Ferrara, Alessandro, 2008, The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Ferrarese, Estelle, 2018, La fragilité du souci des autres: Adorno et le care , Lyon: ENS Éditions; translated as The Fragility of Concern for Others: Adorno and the Ethics of Care , Steven Corcoran (trans.), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
• Finlayson, James Gordon, 2007, “Political, Moral and Critical Theory: On the Practical Philosophy of the Frankfurt School”, in Michael Rosen and B. Leiter (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 626–670.
• –––, 2015, “The Artwork and the Promesse du Bonheur in Adorno”, European Journal of Philosophy , 23(3): 392–419. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0378.2012.00542.x
• –––, 2019, The Habermas-Rawls Debate , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Flynn, Jeffrey, 2014a, Reframing the Intercultural Dialogue on Human Rights: A Philosophical Approach , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2014b, “Truth, Objectivity, and Experience after the Pragmatic Turn: Bernstein on Habermas’s ‘Kantian Pragmatism’ ”, in Judith M. Green (ed.), Richard J Bernstein and the Pragmatist Turn in Contemporary Philosophy , Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 190–209.
• –––, 2022, “Decentering Eurocentrism through Dialogue”, in Tom Bailey (ed.), Deprovincializing Habermas: Global Perspectives , Second Edition , New York: Routledge, pp. 249–270.
• Fong, Benjamin Y., 2016, Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Forst, Rainer, 2007, Das Recht auf Rechtfertigung: Elemente einer konstruktivistischen Theorie der Gerechtigkeit , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translated as The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice , Jeffrey Flynn (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
• –––, 2011, Kritik der Rechtfertigungsverhältnisse , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translated as Justification and Critique: Towards a Critical Theory of Politics , Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2014.
• –––, 2017, “Noumenal Alienation: Rousseau, Kant and Marx on the Dialectics of Self-Determination”, Kantian Review , 22(4): 523–551. doi:10.1017/S1369415417000267
• –––, 2021a, Die noumenale Republik: Kritischer Konstruktivismus nach Kant , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translation, The Noumenal Republic: Critical Constructivism after Kant , Ciaran Cronin (trans.), forthcoming.
• –––, (ed)., 2021b, “Symposium on Jürgen Habermas, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie ”, Constellations , 28(1): 1–147.
• –––, 2023, “The rule of unreason: Analyzing (Anti-)Democratic Regression”, Constellations , 30(3): 217–224. doi:10.1111/1467-8675.12671
• Foucault, Michel, 1973 [year this lecture was given], “La vérités et les formes juridiques”, Chimères , 10 (1990): 8–28; translated as “Truth and Juridical Forms”, in Michel Foucault, Power , ed. James D. Faubion, New York: New Press, 2000, pp. 31–45.
• Fraser, Nancy, 1981, “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions”, PRAXIS International , 3: 272–287.
• –––, 1985, “What’s Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender”, New German Critique , 35: 97–131. doi:10.2307/488202
• –––, 1989, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• –––, 1990, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text , 25/26: 56–80.
• –––, 2011, “Marketization, Social Protection, Emancipation: Toward a Neo-Polanyian Conception of Capitalist Crisis”, in Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derlugian (eds.), Business as Usual: The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown , New York University Press, pp. 137–58.
• –––, 2013, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis , London: Verso.
• –––, 2014, “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode”, New Left Review , 86: 55–72.
• –––, 2016, “Contradictions of Capital and Care”, New Left Review , 100: 99–117.
• –––, 2021, “Climates of Capital”, New Left Review , 127: 94–127.
• –––, 2022, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – And What We Can Do about It , New York: Verso.
• Fraser, Nancy, et al., 2014, Transnationalizing the Public Sphere , Kate Nash (ed.), Cambridge: Polity.
• Fraser, Nancy, and Axel Honneth, 2003, Redistribution or Recognition? A Philosophical-Political Exchange , New York: Verso.
• Fraser, Nancy and Rahel Jaeggi, 2018, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory , Brian Milstein (ed.), Cambridge: Polity.
• Freyenhagen, Fabian, 2014, “Adorno’s Politics: Theory and Praxis in Germany’s 1960s”, Philosophy & Social Criticism , 40: 867–893. doi:10.1177/0191453714545198
• –––, 2018, “Critical Theory: Self-Reflexive Theorizing and Struggles for Emancipation”, in: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics [ Freyenhagen 2018 available online ].
• Fricker, Miranda, 2007, Epistemic Injustice , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Fromm, Erich, 1936, “Studien über Autorität und Familie. Sozialpsychologischer Teil”, in Max Horkheimer (ed.), Schriften des Instituts für Sozialforschung, Vol. V: Studien über Autorität und Familie , Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan; translated as “Studies on Authority and the Family. Socio-psychological Dimensions”, Fromm Forum , 24 (2020): 8–58.
• –––, 1961, Marx’s Concept of Man , New York: Continuum.
• Gago, Verónica, 2019, La potencia feminista: O el deseo de cambiarlo todo , Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón; translated as Feminist International: How to Change Everything , Liz Mason-Deese (trans.), London: Verso, 2020.
• Gambetti, Zeynep, 2020, “Exploratory Notes on the Origins of New Fascisms”, Critical Times , 3(1): 1–32. doi:10.1215/26410478-8189841
• Geuss, Raymond, 1981, The Idea of a Critical Theory , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, 2022, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation , London: Verso.
• Gordon, Peter, 2017, “The Authoritarian Personality Revisited”, boundary 2 , 44(2): 31–56. doi:10.1215/01903659-3826618
• –––, 2023, A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity , Chicago: University of Chicago Press. doi:10.4324/9780429443374
• Gordon, Peter, Espen Hammer, and Axel Honneth (eds.), 2019, The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School , London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780429443374
• Gregoratto, Federica, Heikki Ikäheimo, Emmanuel Renault, Arvi Särkelä, and Italo Testa, 2022, “Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto”, Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy , 42(1): 108–24. doi:10.21827/krisis.42.1.38637
• Grüner, Eduardo, 2010, La oscuridad y las luces , Buenos Aires: Edhasa; translated as The Haitian Revolution: Capitalism, Slavery and Counter-Modernity , Ramsey McGlazer (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2019.
• Habermas, Jürgen, 1962, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft , Neuwied, Berlin: Luchterhand; translated as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society , Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.
• –––, 1963, Theorie und Praxis: Sozialphilosophische Studien , Neuwied am Rhein and Berlin: Luchterhand. New and extended edition Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971; translated as Theory and Practice , John Viertel (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press, 1973.
• –––, 1968a, Technik und Wissenschaft als ‘Ideologie’ , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Chapters 4–6 of Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics , Jeremy J. Shapiro (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press, 1970.
• –––, 1968b, Erkenntnis und Interesse , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Knowledge and Human Interests , Jeremy J. Shapiro (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press, 1971.
• –––, 1973a, “Nachwort”, in Jürgen Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse, Mit einem neuen Nachwort , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 367–417; translated as “A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests ”, Christian Lenhardt (trans.), Philosophy of the Social Sciences , 3: 157–189.
• –––, 1973b, Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Legitimation Crisis , Thomas McCarthy (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press, 1975.
• –––, 1981, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns , 2 vols., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as The Theory of Communicative Action , 2 vols., Thomas A. McCarthy (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press, 1984.
• –––, 1983a, Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, translated as Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action , Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.
• –––, 1983b, “Ziviler Ungehorsam: Testfall für den demokratischen Rechtsstaat”, in Peter Glotz (ed.), Ziviler Ungehorsam im Rechtsstaat , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 29–53; translated as “Civil Disobedience: Litmus Test for the Democratic Constitutional State”, Berkeley Journal of Sociology , 30: 95–116.
• –––, 1985, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures , Frederick Lawrence (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.
• –––, 1991, Erläuterungen zur Diskursethik , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics , Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.
• –––, 1992, Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy , William Rehg (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
• –––, 1995a, “Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s Political Liberalism”, The Journal of Philosophy , 92(3): 109–131. doi:10.5840/jphil199592335
• –––, 1995b, “Kants Idee des ewigen Friedens aus dem historischen Abstand von 200 Jahren”, Kritische Jusitiz , 3: 293–319; translated as “Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the Benefit of Two Hundred Years’ Hindsight”, in James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (eds.), Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997, pp. 113–153.
• –––, 1996, “Vernünftig versus Wahr oder die Moral der Weltbilder”, in Die Einbeziehung des Anderen: Studien zur politischen Theorie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as “‘Reasonable’ versus ‘True,’ or the Morality of Worldviews”, Ciaran Cronin (trans.), in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory , Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff (eds.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998, pp. 75-105.
• –––, 1998, Die postnationale Konstellation: politische Essays , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays , Max Pensky (ed./trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
• –––, 1999, Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung: philosophische Aufsätze , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Truth and Justification , Barbara Fultner (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
• –––, 2005, Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion. Philosophische Aufsätze , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Between Naturalism and Religion , Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Malden, MA: Polity, 2008.
• –––, 2006, “Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research”, Communication Theory , 16(4): 411–426. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2006.00280.x
• –––, 2019, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie , 2 vols., Berlin: Suhrkamp; part of volume 1 translated as Also a History of Philosophy, Volume 1: The Project of a Genealogy of Postmetaphysical Thinking , Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2023.
• –––, 2021, “Überlegungen und Hypothesen zu einem erneuten Strukturwandel der politischen Öffentlichkeit”, in: Martin Seeliger and Sebastian Sevignani (eds.), Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit? , Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag, 470–500; translated as “Reflections and Hypotheses on a Further Structural Transformation of the Political Public Sphere”, Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Theory, Culture & Society , 39(4) (2022): 145–171. doi:10.1177/02632764221112341
• Hall, Stuart, 2021, Selected Writings on Race and Difference , Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Harcourt, Bernard E., 2020, Critique and Praxis , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Haslanger, Sally, 2017a, “Culture and Critique”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Supplementary Volume), 91: 149–173. doi:10.1093/arisup/akx001
• –––, 2017b, “Racism, Ideology, and Social Movements”, Res Philosophica , 94(1): 1–22. doi:10.11612/RESPHIL.1547
• Heath, Joseph, 2014, “Rebooting Discourse Ethics”, Philosophy & Social Criticism , 40(9): 829–866. doi:10.1177/0191453714545340
• Hedrick, Todd, 2010, Rawls and Habermas: Reason, Pluralism, and the Claims of Political Philosophy , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• –––, 2019, Reconciliation and Reification: Freedom’s Semblance and Actuality from Hegel to Contemporary Critical Theory , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Heberle, Renée (ed.), 2006, Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno , University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania University Press.
• Honneth, Axel, 1985, Kritik der Macht: Reflexionsstufen einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory , Kenneth Baynes (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
• –––, 1992, Kampf um Anerkennung: Zur moralischen Grammatik sozialer Konflikte , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts , Joel Anderson (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 1995.
• –––, 1994, “Die soziale Dynamik von Mißachtung: Zur Ortsbestimmung einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie”, Leviathan , 22(1): 78–93; translated as “The Social Dynamics of Disrespect: On the Location of Critical Theory Today”, John Farrell (trans.), Constellations , 1(2): 255–69, reprinted in in Axel Honneth, Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory , Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007, pp. 63–79.
• –––, 1998, “Über die Möglichkeit einer erschließenden Kritik. Die Dialektik der Aufklärung im Horizont gegenwärtiger Debatten über Sozialkritik”, Paradigmi. Rivista di critica filosofica , 16(48): 501–514; translated as “The Possibility of a Disclosing Critique of Society: The Dialectic of Enlightenment in Light of Current Debates in Social Criticism”, Constellations , 7(1) (2000): 116–127. doi:10.1111/1467-8675.00173
• –––, 2000, Das Andere der Gerechtigkeit ; translated as Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory , Joseph Ganahl (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2007.
• –––, 2001, Leiden an Unbestimmtheit: Eine Reaktualisierung der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie , Stuttgart: Reclam; translated as The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel’s Social Theory , Ladislaus Löb (trans.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
• –––, 2003, “Redistribution as Recognition”, in N. Fraser and A. Honneth (eds.), Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange , London: Verso, pp. 110–197.
• –––, 2004, “Eine soziale Pathologie der Vernunft. Zur intellektuellen Erbschaft der Kritischen Theorie”, in Christoph Halbig and Michael Quante (eds.), Axel Honneth: Sozialphilosophie zwischen Kritik und Anerkennung , Münster: LIT-Verlag, pp. 9-32; translated as “A Social Pathology of Reason: On the Intellectual Legacy of Critical Theory”, in A. Honneth , Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory , New York: Columbia University Press, 2009, pp. 19-42.
• –––, 2005, Verdinglichung: Eine anerkennungstheoretische Studie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Reification , Martin Jay (ed.), New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• –––, 2010, Das Ich im Wir: Studien zur Anerkennungstheorie , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translated as The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition , Joseph Ganahl (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2012.
• –––, 2011, Das Recht der Freiheit: Grundriß einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translated as Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life , Joseph Ganahl (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
• –––, 2017, “Is There an Emancipatory Interest? An Attempt to Answer Critical Theory’s Most Fundamental Question”, European Journal of Philosophy , 25: 908–920. doi:10.1111/ejop.12321
• –––, 2022, “‘Labour’, A Brief History of a Modern Concept”, Philosophy , 97(2), 149–167. doi:10.1017/S003181912100036X
• –––, 2023, Der arbeitende Souverän , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translation, The Working Sovereign , Cambridge: Polity, forthcoming.
• Honneth, Axel, and Hans Joas (eds.), 1986, Kommunikatives Handeln: Beiträge zu Jürgen Habermas ‘Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action, Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
• Horkheimer, Max, 1931, “Die gegenwärtige Lage der Sozialphilosophie und die Aufgaben eines Instituts für Sozialforschung”, Frankfurter Universitätsreden , XXXVII: 3–16; translated as “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research”, John Torpey (trans.), in Max Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993, pp. 1–14. Retranslated as “The State of Contemporary Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research”, Journal for Cultural Research , Peter Wagner (trans.), 22(2) (2018): 113–121. doi:10.1080/14797585.2018.1461354
• –––, 1933, “Materialismus und Moral”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 2(2): 162–197; translated as “Materialism and Morality”, G. Frederick Hunter (trans.), in Max Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings , Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993, pp. 15–47.
• –––, 1936a, “Egoismus und Freiheitsbewegung: Zur Anthropologie des bürgerlichen Zeitalters”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 5(2): 161–234; translated as “Egoism and Freedom Movements: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Era”, G. Frederick Hunter (trans.), in Max Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings , Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993, pp. 49–110.
• ––– (ed.), 1936b, Studien über Autorität und Familie: Forschungsberichte aus dem Institut für Sozialforschung , Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan.
• –––, 1937a, “Traditionelle und kritische Theorie”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 6(2): 245–294; translated as “Traditional and Critical Theory”, Matthew J. O’Connell (trans.), in Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays , New York: Continuum, 1972, pp. 188–243.
• –––, 1937b, “Nachtrag”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 6(3): 625–631; translated as “Postscript”, Matthew J. O’Connell (trans.), in Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays , New York: Continuum, 1972, pp. 244–252.
• –––, 1941, “Art and Mass Culture”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 9(2), 290–304, republished in Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays , New York: Continuum, 1972, pp. 273–290.
• Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno, 1947, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente , Amsterdam: Querido; translated as Dialectic of Enlightenment , Edmund Jephcott (trans.), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
• Hoy, David Couzens and Thomas McCarthy, 1994, Critical Theory , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Ibsen, Malte Froslee, 2023, A Critical Theory of Global Justice: The Frankfurt School and World Society , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Ikäheimo, Heikki, Kristina Lepold and Titus Stahl (eds.), 2021, Recognition and Ambivalence , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Ingram, David, 2018, World Crisis and Underdevelopment: A Critical Theory of Poverty, Agency, and Coercion , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Ingram, James, 2013, Radical Cosmopolitics: The Ethics and Politics of Democratic Universalism , New York: Columbia University Press.
• –––, 2019, “Critical Theory and Postcolonialism”, in Gordon, Peter, Espen Hammer, and Axel Honneth (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School , London: Routledge, pp. 500–513.
• Jaeggi, Rahel, 2005, Entfremdung: Zur Aktualität eines sozialphilosophischen Problems , Campus; translated as Alienation , Frederick Neuhouser and Alan E. Smith (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
• –––, 2008, “Re-Thinking Ideology”, in Christopher Zurn, Boujdewijn de Bruijn (eds.), New Waves in Political Philosophy , Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
• –––, 2014, Kritik von Lebensformen , Berlin.: Suhrkamp; translated as Critique of Forms of Life , Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.
• –––, 2017a, “Crisis, Contradiction, and the Task of a Critical Theory”, in Banu Bargu und Chiara Bottici (eds.), Feminism, Capitalism, and Critique. Essays in Honor of Nancy Fraser , Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 209–224.
• –––, 2017b, “Pathologies of Work”, Women’s Studies Quarterly , 45(3/4): 59–76. doi:10.1353/wsq.2017.0044
• –––, 2022, “Modes of Regression: The Case of Ressentiment”, Critical Times , 5(3): 501–537. doi:10.1215/26410478-10030204
• Jay, Martin, 1973, The Dialectical Imagination , Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown.
• –––, 1984, Marxism and Totality , Cambridge: Polity.
• Kelley, Robin D. G., 2002, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination , Boston: Beacon Press. Revised and expanded edition published in 2022.
• Kerner, Ina, 2018, “Postcolonial Theories as Global Critical Theories”, Constellations , 25(4): 614– 628. doi:10.1111/1467-8675.12346
• Klein, Steven, 2020, The Work of Politics: Making a Democratic Welfare State , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Kompridis, Nikolas, 2006, Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Koopman, Colin, 2013, Genealogy as Critique , Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Kracauer, Siegfried, 1927, “Das Ornament der Masse”, Frankfurter Zeitung , July 9–10, 1927; translated as “Mass Ornament”, Barbara Correll and Jack Zipes (trans.) New German Critique , 5 (1975): 67–76.
• –––, 2013, Totalitäre Propaganda , Bernd Stiegler (ed.), Berlin: Suhrkamp. Selections are translated as part of “Studies of Totalitarianism, Propaganda, and the Masses (1936–1940)” in Siegfried Kracauer, Selected Writings on Media, Propaganda, and Political Communication , Jaeho Kang, Graeme Gilloch, and John Abromeit (eds.), New York: Columbia University Press, 2022.
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Adorno, Theodor W. | alienation | Benjamin, Walter | colonialism | critical philosophy of race | disability: critical disability theory | feminist philosophy, interventions: epistemology and philosophy of science | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on power | Foucault, Michel | Habermas, Jürgen | Horkheimer, Max | Lukács, Georg [György] | Marcuse, Herbert | postmodernism | recognition

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Amy Allen, Axel Honneth, Noëlle McAfee, and Martin Saar for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts and Christian Meyer for judicious editorial assistance.

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Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The frankfurt school and critical theory.

The Frankfurt School, known more appropriately as Critical Theory, is a philosophical and sociological movement spread across many universities around the world. It was originally located at the Institute for Social Research ( Institut für Sozialforschung ), an attached institute at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. The Institute was founded in 1923 thanks to a donation by Felix Weil with the aim of developing Marxist studies in Germany. After 1933, the Nazis forced its closure, and the Institute was moved to the United States where it found hospitality at Columbia University in New York City.

The academic influence of the critical method is far reaching. Some of the key issues and philosophical preoccupations of the School involve the critique of modernity and capitalist society, the definition of social emancipation, as well as the detection of the pathologies of society. Critical Theory provides a specific interpretation of Marxist philosophy with regards to some of its central economic and political notions like commodification, reification, fetishization and critique of mass culture.

Some of the most prominent figures of the first generation of Critical Theorists were Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), Friedrich Pollock (1894-1970), Leo Lowenthal (1900-1993), and Eric Fromm (1900-1980). Since the 1970s, a second generation began with Jürgen Habermas, who, among other merits, contributed to the opening of a dialogue between so-called continental and the analytic traditions. With Habermas, the Frankfurt School turned global, influencing methodological approaches in other European academic contexts and disciplines. It was during this phase that Richard Bernstein, a philosopher and contemporary of Habermas, embraced the research agenda of Critical Theory and significantly helped its development in American universities starting from the New School for Social Research in New York.

The third generation of critical theorists, therefore, arose either from Habermas’ research students in the United States and at Frankfurt am Main and Starnberg (1971-1982), or from a spontaneous convergence of independently educated scholars. Therefore, the third generation of Critical Theory scholars consists of two groups. The first spans a broad time—denying the possibility of establishing any sharp boundaries. It can be said to include also scholars such as Andrew Feenberg, even if he was a direct student of Marcuse, or people such as Albrecht Wellmer who became an assistant of Habermas due to the premature death of Adorno in 1969. Klaus Offe, Josef Früchtl, Hauke Brunkhorst, Klaus Günther, Axel Honneth, Alessandro Ferrara, Cristina Lafont, and Rainer Forst, among others, are also members of this group. The second group of the third generation is instead composed mostly of American scholars who were influenced by Habermas’ philosophy during his visits to the United States.

Table of Contents

• Critical Theory: Historical and Philosophical Background
• Traditional and Critical Theory: Ideology and Critique
• The Theory/Practice Problem
• The Idea of Rationality: Critical Theory and its Discontents
• Concluding Thoughts
• References and Further Reading

1. Critical Theory: Historical and Philosophical Background

Felix Weil’s father, Herman, made his fortune by exporting grain from Argentina to Europe. In 1923, Felix decided to use his father’s money to found an institute specifically devoted to the study of German society in the light of a Marxist approach. The initial idea of an independently founded institute was conceived to provide for studies on the labor movement and the origins of anti-Semitism, which at the time were being ignored in German intellectual and academic life.

Not long after its inception, the Institute for Social Research was formally recognized by the Ministry of Education as an entity attached to Goethe University Frankfurt. Felix could not imagine that in the 1960s Goethe University Frankfurt would receive the epithet of “Karl Marx University”. The first officially appointed director was Carl Grünberg (1923-9), a Marxist professor at the University of Vienna. His contribution to the Institute was the creation of a historical archive mainly oriented to the study of the labor movement (also known as the Grünberg Archiv ).

In 1930, Max Horkheimer succeeded to Grünberg. While continuing under a Marxist inspiration, Horkheimer interpreted the Institute’s mission to be more directed towards an interdisciplinary integration of the social sciences. Additionally, the Grünberg Archiv ceased to publish and an official organ was instead launched with a much greater impact: the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung . While never officially supporting any party, the Institute entertained intensive research exchanges with the Soviet Union.

It was under Horkheimer’s leadership that members of the Institute were able to address a wide variety of economic, social, political and aesthetic topics, ranging from empirical analysis to philosophical theorization. Different interpretations of Marxism and its historical applications explain some of the hardest confrontations on economic themes within the Institute, such as the case of Pollock’s criticism of Grossman’s standard view on the pauperization of capitalism. This particular confrontation led Grossman to leave the Institute. Pollock’s critical reinterpretation of Marx received support also from intellectuals who greatly contributed to later developments of the School as, for instance, in the case of Leo Lowenthal, Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno and Erich Fromm. In particular, with Fromm’s development of a psychoanalytic trend at the Institute and with an influential philosophical contribution by Hokheimer, it became clear how under his directorship the Institute faced a drastic turning point which characterized all its future endeavors. The following sections, therefore, briefly introduce some of the main research patterns introduced by Fromm and Horkheimer, respectively.

Since the beginning, psychoanalysis in the Frankfurt School was conceived in terms of a reinterpretation of Freud and Marx. The consideration of psychoanalysis by the Frankfurt School was certainly due to Horkheimer’s encouragement. It was Fromm, nevertheless, who achieved a significant advancement of the discipline; his central aim was to provide, through a synthesis of Marxism and psychoanalysis, “the missing link between ideological superstructure and socio-economic base” (Jay 1966, p. 92). A radical shift though occurred in the late 1930s, when Adorno joined the School and Fromm decided, for independent reasons, to leave. Nevertheless, the School’s interest in psychoanalysis, particularly in Freud’s instinct theory, remained unaltered. This was manifest in Adorno’s paper Social Science and Sociological Tendencies in Psychoanalysis (1946), as well as in Marcuse’s book Eros and Civilization (1955). The School’s interest in psychoanalysis coincided with a marginalization of Marxism, a growing interest into the interrelation between psychoanalysis and social change, as well as with Fromm’s insight into the psychic (or even psychotic) role of the family. This interest became crucial in empirical studies of the 40s that led, eventually, to Adorno’s co-authored work The Authoritarian Personality (1950). The goal of this work was to explore, on the basis of empirical research making use of questionnaires, to define a “new anthropological type”—the authoritarian personality (Adorno et. al. 1950, quoted in Jay 1996, p. 239). Such a character was found to have specific traits such as: compliance with conventional values, non-critical thinking, as well as absence of introspectiveness.

As pointed out by Jay: “Perhaps some of the confusion about this question was a product of terminological ambiguity. As a number of commentators have pointed out, there is an important distinction that should be drawn between authoritarianism and totalitarianism [emphasis added]. Wilhelminian and Nazi Germany, for example, were fundamentally dissimilar in their patterns of obedience. What The Authoritarian Personality was really studying was the character type of a totalitarian rather than an authoritarian society. Thus, it should have been no surprise to learn that this new syndrome was fostered by a familial crisis in which traditional paternal authority was under fire” (Jay 1996, p. 247). Horkheimer’s leadership provided a very distinct methodological direction and philosophical grounding to the research interests of the Institute. As an instance of Horkheimer’s aversion to so-called Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life), he criticized the fetishism of subjectivity and the lack of consideration for materialist conditions of living. Furthermore, arguing against Cartesian and Kantian philosophy, Horkheimer, by use of dialectical mediation, attempted to rejoin all dichotomies including the divide between consciousness and being, theory and practice, fact and value. Differently from Hegelianism or Marxism, dialectics amounted for Horkheimer to be neither a metaphysical principle nor a historical praxis; it was not intended as a methodological instrument. On the contrary, Horkheimer’s dialectics functioned as the battleground for overcoming overly rigid categorizations and unhelpful dichotomies and oppositions. It originated from criticism by Horkheimer of orthodox Marxism’s dichotomy between productive structures and ideological superstructure, as well as positivism’s naïve separation of social facts and social interpretation.

In 1933, due to the Nazi takeover, the Institute was temporarily transferred, first to Geneva and then in 1935 to Columbia University, New York. Two years later Horkheimer published the ideological manifesto of the School in his Traditional and Critical Theory ([1937] 1976) where he readdressed some of the previously introduced topics concerning the practical and critical turn of theory. In 1938, Adorno joined the Institute after spending some time as an advanced student at Merton College, Oxford. He was invited by Horkheimer to join the Princeton Radio Research Project. Gradually, Adorno assumed a prominent intellectual leadership in the School and this led to co-authorship, with Horkheimer, of one of the milestones works of the School, the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1947. During the time of Germany’s Nazi seizure, the Institute remained the only free voice publishing in German language. The backlash of this choice, though, was a prolonged isolation from American academic life and intellectual debate, a situation described by Adorno with the iconic expression “message in the bottle” to refer to the lack of a public American audience. According to Wiggershaus: “The Institute disorientation in the late 1930s made the balancing acts it had always had to perform, for example in relation to its academic environment, even more difficult. The seminars were virtually discussion groups for the Institute’s associates, and American students only rarely took part in them” (1995, p. 251).

Interestingly, and not surprisingly, one of the major topics of study was Nazism. This led to two different approaches in the School. One marshaled by Neumann, Gurland and Kirchheimer and oriented mainly to the analysis of legal and political issues by consideration of economic substructures; the other, instead, guided by Horkheimer and focusing on the notion of psychological irrationalism as a source of obedience and domination (see Jay 1996, p. 166).

In 1941, Horkheimer moved to Pacific Palisades, near Los Angeles. He built himself a bungalow near other German intellectuals, among whom were Bertold Brecht and Thomas Mann as well as with other people interested in working for the film industry (Wiggershaus 1995, p. 292). Other fellows like Marcuse, Pollock and Adorno followed shortly, whereas some remained in New York. Only Benjamin refused to leave Europe and in 1940, while attempting to cross the border between France and Spain at Port Bou, committed suicide. Some months later, Arendt also crossed the same border, passing on Adorno Benjamin’s last writing: Theses on the Philosophy of History .

The division of the School into two different premises, New York and California, was paralleled by the development of two autonomous research programs led, on the one hand, by Pollock and, on the other hand, by Horkheimer and Adorno. Pollock directed his research to study anti-Semitism. This research line culminated into an international conference organized in 1944 as well as a four-volume work titled Studies in Anti-Semitism ; Horkheimer and Adorno, instead, developed studies on the reinterpretation of the Hegelian notion of dialectics as well as engaged into the study of anti-Semitic tendencies. The most relevant publication in this respect by the two was The Authoritarian Personality or Studies in Prejudice . After this period, only few devoted supporters remained faithful to the project of the School. These included Horkheimer himself, Pollock, Adorno, Lowenthal and Weil. In 1946, however, the Institute was officially invited to join Goethe University Frankfurt.

Upon return to West Germany, Horkheimer presented his inaugural speech for the reopening of the institute on 14 November 1951. One week later he inaugurated the academic year as a new Rector of the University. Yet, what was once a lively intellectual community became soon a small team of very busy people. Horkheimer was involved in the administration of the university, whereas Adorno was constantly occupied with different projects and teaching duties. In addition, in order to keep US citizenship, Adorno had to go back to California where he earned his living by conducting qualitative research analysis. Horkheimer, instead, attempted to attract back his former assistant Marcuse when the opportunity arose for a successor to Gadamer’s chair in Frankfurt, but neither this initiative nor further occasions were successful. Marcuse remained in the United States and was offered a full position at Brandeis University. Adorno returned to Germany in August 1953 and was soon involved again in empirical research, combining quantitative and qualitative methods in the analysis of industrial relations for the Mannesmann Company. In 1955, he took over Horkheimer position as director of the Institute for Social Research, and on 1 July 1957 he was appointed full professor in philosophy and sociology. Even though greatly influential in philosophy, Adorno’s most innovative contribution is unanimously thought to be in the field of music theory and aesthetics. Some of his significant works in this area included Philosophy of Modern Music (1949) and later Vers une Musique Informelle . In 1956, Horkheimer retired just when several important publications were appearing, such as Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and the essay’s collection Sociologica . These events marked the precise intellectual phase of maturity reached at that time by the Frankfurt School.

The sixties—which saw famous student protests across Europe—also saw the publication of Adorno’s fundamental work, Negative Dialectics (1966). This study, while far from either materialism or metaphysics, maintained important connections with an “open and non-systemic” notion of dialectics. It appeared only a few years later than One-Dimensional Man (1964), where Marcuse introduced the notion of “educational dictatorship”— a strategy intended for the advancement of material conditions aimed at the realization of a higher notion of the good. While Marcuse, quite ostensibly, sponsored the student upheavals, Adorno maintained a much moderate and skeptical profile.

In 1956, Habermas joined the Institute as Adorno’s assistant. He was soon involved in an empirical study titled Students and Politics . The text, though, was rejected by Horkheimer and it did not come out, as it should have, in the series of the Frankfurt Contributions to Sociology . Only later, in 1961, it appeared in the series Sociological Texts (see Wiggershaus 1995, p. 555). Horkheimer’s aversion towards Habermas was even more evident when he refused to supervise his Habilitation . Habermas obtained his Habilitation under the supervision of Abendroth at Marburg, where he addressed the topic of the bourgeois formation of public sphere. This study was published by Habermas in 1962 under the title of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere , just before he handed in his Habilitation . With the support of Gadamer he was, then, appointed professor at Heidelberg. Besides his achievements, both in academia and as an activist, the young Habermas contributed towards the construction of a critical self-awareness of the socialist student groups around the country (the so-called SDS, Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund ). It was in this context that Habermas reacted to the extremism of Rudi Dutschke, the radical leader of the students’ association who criticized him for defending a non-effective emancipatory view. It was principally against Dutschke’s positions that Habermas, during a public assembly labeled such positions with the epitome of “left-wing fascism”. How representative this expression was of Habermas’ views on student protests has often been a matter of contention.

Discussions of the notion of emancipation had been at the center of the Frankfurt School political debate since the beginning. The concept of emancipation ( Befreiung in German), covers indeed a wide semantic spectrum. Literarily it means “liberation from”. The notion spans, therefore, from a sense related to action-transformation to include also revolutionary action.

After his nomination in 1971 as a director of the Max Planck Institute for Research into the Conditions of Life in the Scientific-Technical World at Starnberg, Habermas left Frankfurt. He returned there only in 1981 after having completed The Theory of Communicative Action . This decade was crucial for the definition of the School’s research objectives. In The Theory of Communicative Action (1984b [1981]), Habermas provided a model for social complexities and action coordination based upon the original interpretation of classical social theorists as well as the philosophy of Searle’s Speech Acts theory. Within this work, it also became evident how the large amount of empirical analysis conducted by Habermas’ research team on topics concerning pathologies of society, moral development and so on was elevated to a functionalistic model of society oriented to an emancipatory purpose. The assumption was that language itself embedded a normative force capable of realizing action co-ordination within society. In this respect, Habermas defined these as the “unavoidable pragmatic presuppositions of mutual understanding”. Social action whose coordination-function relies on the same pragmatic presuppositions was seen as connected to a justification discourse based on the satisfaction of specific validity-claims.

Habermas described discourse theory as relying on three types of validity-claims raised by communicative action. He claimed that it was only when the conditions of truth, rightness and sincerity were raised by speech-acts that social coordination could be obtained. As noticed in the opening sections, differently from the first generation of Frankfurt School intellectuals, Habermas contributed greatly to bridging the continental and analytical traditions, integrating aspects belonging to American Pragmatism, Anthropology and Semiotics with Marxism and Critical Social Theory.

Just one year before Habermas’ retirement in 1994, the directorship of the Institut für Sozialforschung was assumed by Honneth. This inaugurated a new phase of research in Critical Theory. Honneth, indeed, revisited the Hegelian notion of recognition ( Anerkennung ) in terms of a new prolific paradigm in social and political enquiry. Honneth began his collaboration with Habermas in 1984, when he was hired as an assistant professor. After a period of academic appointments in Berlin and Konstanz, in 1996 he took Habermas’ chair in Frankfurt.

Honneth’s central tenet, the struggle for recognition, represents a leitmotiv in his research and preeminently in one of his most important books, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts ([1986]). This work represents a mature expansion of what was partially addressed in his dissertation, a work published under the title of Critique of Power: Stages of Reflection of a Critical Social Theory (1991 [1985]). One of the core themes addressed by Honneth consisted in the claim that, contrary to what Critical Theory initially emphasized, more attention should have been paid to the notion of conflict in society and among societal groups. Conflict represents the internal movement of historical advancement and human emancipation, falling therefore within the core theme of critical social theory. The so-called “struggle for recognition” is what best characterizes the fight for emancipation by social groups. This fight represents a subjective negative experience of domination—a form of domination attached to misrecognitions. To come to terms with negations of subjective forms of self-realization means to be able to transform social reality. Normatively, though, acts of social struggle activated by forms of misrecognition point to the role that recognition plays as a crucial criterion for grounding intersubjectivity.

Honneth inaugurated a new research phase in Critical Theory. Indeed, his communitarian turn has been paralleled by the work of some of his fellow scholars. Brunkhorst, for instance, in his Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community (2005 [2002]), canvasses a line of thought springing from the French Revolution of 1789 to contemporary times: the notion of fraternity. By the use of historical conceptual reconstruction and normative speculation, Brunkhorst presented the pathologies of the contemporary globalized world and the function that solidarity would play.

The confrontation with American debate, initiated systematically by the work of Habermas, became soon an obsolete issue in the third generation of critical theorists—not only because the group was truly international, merging European and American scholars. The work of Forst testifies, indeed, of the synthesis between analytical methodological rigor and classical themes of the Frankfurt School. Thanks to Habermas’ intellectual opening, the third generation of critical theorists engaged into dialogue with French post-modern philosophers like Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard and so forth, which according to Foucault are the legitimate interpreters of some central aspects of the Frankfurt School.

2. What is Critical Theory?

“What is ‘theory’?” asked Horkheimer in the opening of his essay Traditional and Critical Theory [1937]. The discussion about method has been always a constant topic for those critical theorists who have attempted since the beginning to clarify the specificity of what it means to be “critical”. A primary broad distinction that Horkheimer drew was that of the difference in method between social theories, scientific theories and critical social theories. While the first two categories had been treated as instances of traditional theories, the latter connoted the methodology the Frankfurt School adopted.

Traditional theory, whether deductive or analytical, has always focused on coherency and on the strict distinction between theory and praxis. Along Cartesian lines, knowledge has been treated as grounded upon self-evident propositions or, at least, upon propositions based on self-evident truths. Accordingly, traditional theory has proceeded to explain facts by application of universal laws, that is, by subsumption of a particular to a universal in order to either confirm or disconfirm this. A verificationist procedure of this kind was what positivism considered to be the best explicatory account for the notion of praxis in scientific investigation. If one were to defend the view according to which scientific truths should pass the test of empirical confirmation, then one would commit oneself to the idea of an objective world. Knowledge would be simply a mirror of reality. This view is firmly rejected by critical theorists.

Under several aspects, what Critical Theory wants to reject in traditional theory is precisely this “picture theory” of language and knowledge as that defined by “the first” Wittgenstein in his Tractatus . According to such a view, later abandoned by “the second” Wittgenstein, the logical form of propositions consists in showing a possible fact and in saying whether this is true or false. For example, the proposition “it rains today” shows both the possibility of the fact that “it rains today” and it affirms that it is the case that “it rains today.” In order to check whether something is or is not the case, one must verify empirically whether the stated fact occurs or not. This implies that the condition of truth and falsehood presupposes an objective structure of the world.

Horkheimer and his followers rejected the notion of objectivity in knowledge by pointing, among other things, to the fact that the object of knowledge is itself embedded into a historical and social process: “The facts which our senses present to us are socially preformed in two ways: through the historical character of the object perceived and through the historical character of the perceiving organ” (Horkheimer [1937] in Ingram and Simon-Ingram 1992, p. 242). Further, with a rather Marxist twist, Horkheimer noticed also that phenomenological objectivity is a myth because it is dependent upon “technological conditions” and the latter are sensitive to the material conditions of production. Critical Theory aims thus to abandon naïve conceptions of knowledge-impartiality. Since intellectuals themselves are not disembodied entities observing from a God’s viewpoint, knowledge can be obtained only from a societal embedded perspective of interdependent individuals.

If traditional theory is evaluated by considering its practical implications, then no practical consequences can be actually inferred. Indeed, the finality of knowledge as a mirror of reality is mainly a theoretically-oriented tool aimed at separating knowledge from action, speculation from social transformative enterprise. Critical Theory, instead, characterizes itself as a method contrary to the “fetishization” of knowledge, one which considers knowledge as something rather functional to ideology critique and social emancipation. In the light of such finalities, knowledge becomes social criticism and the latter translates itself into social action, that is, into the transformation of reality.

Critical Theory has been strongly influenced by Hegel ’s notion of dialectics for the conciliation of socio-historical oppositions as well as by Marx’s theory of economy and society and the limits of Hegel’s “bourgeois philosophy”. Critical Theory, indeed, has expanded Marxian criticisms of capitalist society by formulating patterns of social emancipatory strategies. Whereas Hegel found that Rationality had finally come to terms with Reality with the birth of the modern nation state (which in his eyes was the Prussian state), Marx insisted on the necessity of reading the development of rationality through history in terms of a class struggle. The final stage of this struggle would have seen the political and economic empowerment of the proletariat. Critical theorists, in their turn, rejected both the metaphysical apparatus of Hegel and the eschatological aspects connected to Marx’s theory. On the contrary, Critical Theory analyses were oriented to the understanding of society and pointed rather to the necessity of establishing open systems based on immanent forms of social criticism . The starting point was the Marxian view on the relation between a system of production paralleled by a system of beliefs. Ideology, which according to Marx was totally explicable through an underlying system of production, for critical theorists had to be analyzed in its own respect and as a non-economically reducible form of expression of human rationality. Such a revision of Marxian categories became extremely crucial, then, in the reinterpretation of the notion of dialectics for the analysis of capitalism. Dialectics, as a method of social criticism, was interpreted as following from the contradictory nature of capitalism as a system of exploitation. Indeed, it was on the basis of such inherent contradictions that capitalism was seen to open up to a collective form of ownership of the means of production, namely, socialism.

a. Traditional and Critical Theory: Ideology and Critique

From these conceptually rich implications one can observe some of the constant topics which have characterized critical social theory, that is, the normativity of social philosophy as something distinct from classical descriptive sociology, the everlasting crux on the theory/practice relation and, finally, ideology critique. These are the primary tasks that a critical social theory must accomplish in order to be defined as “critical”. Crucial in this sense is the understanding and the criticism of the notion of “ideology”.

In defining the senses to be assigned to the notion of ideology, within its descriptive-empirical sense “one might study the biological and quasi-biological properties of the group” or, alternatively, “the cultural or socio-cultural features of the group” (Geuss 1981, p. 4 ff). Ideology, in the descriptive sense, incorporates both “discursive” and “non-discursive” elements. That is, in addition to propositional contents or performatives, it includes gestures, ceremonies and so forth (Geuss 1981, pp. 6-8); also, it shows a systematic set of beliefs—a world-view—characterized by conceptual schemes. A variant of the descriptive sense is the “pejorative” version where a form of ideology is judged negatively in view of its epistemic , functional or genetic properties (Geuss 1981, p. 13). On the other hand, if one takes “ideology” according to a positive sense, then, reference is not with something empirically given, but rather with a “ desideratum ”, a “ verité a faire ” (Geuss 1981, p. 23). Critical Theory, distances itself from scientific theories because, while the latter understands knowledge as an objectified product, the former serves the purpose of human emancipation through consciousness and self-reflection.

If the task of critical social theory is to evaluate the degree of rationality of any system of social domination in accordance to standards of justice, then ideological criticism has the function of unmasking wrong rationalizations of present or past injustices—that is, ideology in the factual and negative sense—such as in the case of the belief that “women are inferior to men, or blacks to whites…”. Thus ideological criticism aims at proposing alternative practicable ways for constructing social bounds. Critical Theory moves precisely in between the contingency of objectified non-critical factual reality and the normativity of utopian idealizations, that is, in between the so-called “theory/practice” problem (see Ingram 1990, p. xxiii). Marcuse, for instance, in the essay Philosophie und Kritische Theorie (1937), defends the view that Critical Theory characterizes itself as being neither philosophy tout court nor pure science, as it claims to be instead an overly simplistic approach to Marxism. Critical Theory has the following tasks: to clarify the sociopolitical determinants that explain the limits of analysis of a certain philosophical view as well as to transcend the use of imagination—the actual limits of imagination. From all this, two notions of rationality result: the first attached to the dominant form of power and deprived of any normative force; the second characterized, on the contrary, by a liberating force based on a yet-to-come scenario. This difference in forms of rationality is what Habermas has later presented, mutatis mutandis , in terms of the distinction between instrumental and communicative rationality. While the first form of rationality is oriented to a means-ends understanding of human and environmental relations, the second form is oriented to subordinating human action to the respect of certain normative criteria of action validity. This latter point echoes quite distinctively Kant’s principle of morality according to which human beings must be always treated as “ends in themselves” and never as mere “means”. Critical Theory and Habermas, in particular, are no exception to these view on rationality, since they both see Ideologiekritik not just as a form of “moralizing criticism”, but as a form of knowledge, that is, as a cognitive operation for disclosing the falsity of conscience (Geuss 1981, p. 26).

This point is strictly connected to another conceptual category playing a great role within Critical Theory, the concept of interest and in particular the distinction between “true interests” and “false interests”. As Geuss has suggested, there are two possible ways to propose such separation: “the perfect-knowledge approach” and “the optimal conditions approach” (1981, p. 48). Were one to follow the first option, the outcome would be one of falling into the side of acritical utopianism. On the contrary, “the optimal conditions approach” is reinterpreted, at least for Habermas, in terms of an “ideal speech situation” that by virtually granting an all-encompassing exchange of arguments, it assumes the function of providing a counterfactual normative check on actual discursive contexts. Within such a model, epistemic knowledge and social critical reflection are attached to unavoidable pragmatic-transcendental conditions that are universally the same for all.

The universality of such epistemological status differs profoundly from Adorno’s contextualism where individual epistemic principles grounding cultural criticism and self-reflection are recognized to be legitimately different along time and history. Both versions are critical in that they remain faithful to the objective of clearing false consciousness from ignorance and domination; but whereas Habermas sets a high standard of validity/non-validity for discourse theory, Adorno’s historicism remains sensitive to degrees of rationality that are context-dependent. In one of his later writings of 1969 (republished in Adorno 2003, pp. 292 ff.), Adorno provides a short but dense interpretation in eight theses on the significance and the mission of Critical Theory. The central message is that Critical Theory, while drawing from Marxism, must avoid hypostatization and closure into a single Weltanschauung on the pain of losing its “critical” capacity. By interpreting rationality as a form of self-reflective activity, Critical Theory represents a particular form of rational enquiry that must remain capable of distinguishing, immanently, ideology from a Hegelian “Spirit”. The mission of Critical Theory, therefore, is not exhausted by a theoretical understanding of social reality; as a matter of fact, there is a strict interconnection between critical understanding and transformative action: theory and practice are interconnected.

b. The Theory/Practice Problem

During the entire course of its historical development, Critical Theory has always confronted itself with one crucial methodological concern: the “theory/practice” problem. To this puzzle critical theorists have provided different answers, such that it is not possible to regroup them into a homogeneous set of views. In order to understand what the significance of the theory/practice problem is, it is useful to refer back to David Hume’s “is/ought” question. What Hume demonstrated through the separation of the “is” from the “ought” was the non-derivability of prescriptive statements from descriptive ones. This separation has been at the basis of those ethical theories that have not recognized moral statements as a truth-property. In other words, alternative reading to the “is/ought” relation have defended either a cognitivist approach (truth-validity of moral statements) or, alternatively, a non-cognitivist approach (no truth-validity), as in the case of emotivism.

Even if characterized by several internal differences, what Critical Theory added to this debate was the consideration both of the anthropological as well as the psychological dynamics motivating masses and structuring ideologies.

As far as the anthropological determinants in closing up the gap of the “theory/practice” problem is concerned, it is possible to take into consideration Habermas’ Knowledge and Human Interest ([1968] 1971). There Habermas combined a transcendental argument with an anthropological one by defending the view according to which humans have an interest in knowledge insofar as such interest is attached to the preservation of self-identity. Yet, to preserve one’s identity is to go beyond mere compliance with biological survival. As Habermas clarifies: “[…] human interests […] derive both from nature and from the cultural break with nature” (Habermas [1968], in Ingram and Simon-Ingram,1992, p. 263). On the contrary, to preserve one’s identity means to find in the emancipatory force of knowledge the fundamental interest of human beings. Indeed, the grounding of knowledge into the practical domain has quite far-reaching implications as, for instance, that interest and knowledge in Habermas find their unity in self-reflection, that is, in “knowledge for the sake of knowledge” (Habermas [1968], in Ingram and Simon-Ingram 1992, p. 264).

The Habermasian answer to the theory/practice problem comes from the criticism of non-cognitivist theories. If it is true, as non-cognitivists claim, that prescriptive claims are grounded on commands and do not have any cognitive content which can be justified through an exchange of public arguments, it follows that they cannot provide an answer to the difference between what is a “convergent behavior”, established through normative power on the basis, for example, of punishment and what is instead the notion of “following a valid rule”. In the latter case, there seems to be required an extra layer of justification, namely, a process through which a norm can be defined as valid. Such process is for Habermas conceived in terms of a counterfactual procedure for a discursive exchange of arguments. This procedure is aimed at justifying those generalizable interests that ought to be obeyed because they pass the test of moral validity.

The Habermasian answer to the is/ought question has several important implications. One implication, perhaps the most important one, is the criticism of positivism and of the epistemic status of knowledge. On the basis of Habermasian premises, indeed, there can be no objective knowledge , as positivists claim, detached from intersubjective forms of understanding. Since knowledge is strictly embedded in serving human interests, it follows that it cannot be considered value-neutral and objectively independent.

A further line of reflection on the theory/practice problem comes from psychoanalysis where a strict separation has been maintained between the “is” and “ought” and false “oughts” have been unmasked through the clarification of the psychological mechanisms constructing desires. Accordingly, critical theorists like Fromm referred to Freud’s notions of the unconscious which contributed defining ideologies in terms of “substitute gratifications”. Psychoanalysis represented such a strong component within the research of the Frankfurt School that even Adorno in his article Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda (1951) analyzed Fromm’s interconnection between sadomasochism and fascism. Adorno noticed how a parallel can be drawn between the loss of self-confidence and estimation in hierarchical domination, on the one hand, and compensation through self-confidence which can be re-obtained in active forms of dominations, on the other hand. Such mechanisms of sadomasochism, though, are not only proper of fascism. As Adorno noticed, they reappear under different clothes in modern cultural industry through the consumption of so-called “cultural commodities”.

Notwithstanding the previous discussions, the greatest philosophical role of psychoanalysis within Frankfurt School was exemplified by Marcuse’s thought. In his case, the central problem became that of interpreting the interest in the genealogical roots of capitalist ideology. How can one provide an account of class interests after the collapse of classes? How can one formulate, on the basis of the insights provided by psychoanalysis, the criteria through which it can be distinguished true from false interests? The way adopted by Marcuse was with a revisitation of Freud’s theory of instinctual needs. Differently from Freud’s tensions between nature and culture and Fromm’s total social shaping of natural instincts, Marcuse defended a third—median—perspective where instincts were considered only partially shaped by social relations (Ingram 1990, p. 93 ff). Through such a solution, Marcuse overcame the strict opposition between biological and historical rationality that was preventing the resolution of the theory/practice problem. He did so by recalling the annihilation of individual’s sexual energy laying at the basis of organized society and recalling, in its turn, the archetypical scenario of a total fulfillment of pleasure. Marcuse took imagination as a way to obtain individual reconciliation with social reality: a reconciliation, though, with an underlying unsolved tension. Marcuse conceived of overcoming such tensions through the aestheticization of basic instincts liberated by the work of imagination. The problem with Marcuse’s rationalization of basic instincts was that by relying excessively on human biology, it became impossible to distinguish between the truth and the falsity of socially dependent needs (see on this Ingram 1990, p. 103).

c. The Idea of Rationality: Critical Theory and its Discontents

For Critical Theory, rationality has always been a crucial theme in the analysis of modern society as well as of its pathologies. Whereas the early Frankfurt School and Habermas viewed rationality as a historical process whose unity was taken as a precondition for social criticism, later critical philosophies, influenced mainly by post-modernity, privileged a rather more fragmented notion of (ir)rationality manifested by social institutions. In the latter views, social criticism could not act as a self-reflective form of rationality, since rationality cannot be conceived as a process incorporated in history. One point shared by all critical theorists was that forms of social pathology were connected to deficits of rationality which, in their turn, manifested interconnections with the psychological status of the mind (see Honneth 2004, p. 339 ff.).

In non-pathological social aggregations, individuals were said to be capable of achieving cooperative forms of self-actualizations only if freed from coercive mechanisms of domination. Accordingly, for the Frankfurt School, modern processes of bureaucratic administration exemplified what Weber considered as an all-encompassing domination of formal rationality over substantive values. In Weber, rationality was to be interpreted as purposive rationality, that is, as a form of instrumental reason. Accordingly, the use of reason did not amount to formulating prescriptive models of society but aimed at achieving goals through the selection of the best possible means of action. If in Lukács the proletariat was to represent the only dialectical way out from the total control of formal rationality, Horkheimer and Adorno saw technological domination of human action as the negation of the inspiring purposes of Enlightenment. In the already mentioned work—>Dialectic of Enlightenment (1969 [1947])—Horkheimer and Adorno emphasized the role of knowledge and technology as a “means of exploitation” of labor and viewed the dialectic of reason as the archetypical movement of human self-liberation. Nevertheless, the repression by formal-instrumental rationality of natural chaos pointed to the possible resurgence of natural violence under a different vest, so that the liberation from nature through instrumental reason opened to the possibility of domination by a totalitarian state (see Ingram 1990, p. 63).

According to this view, reason had been seen essentially as a form of control over nature characterizing humanity since its inception, that is, since those attempts aimed at providing a mythological explanation of cosmic forces. The purpose served by instrumental rationality was essentially that of promoting self-preservation, even if this goal turned paradoxically into the fragmentation of bourgeois individuality that, once deprived of any substantive value, became merely formal and thus determined by external influences of mass-identity in a context of cultural industry.

Rationality, thus, began assuming a double significance: on the one hand, as traditionally recognized by German idealism, it was conceived as the primary source of human emancipation; on the other, it was conceived as the premise of totalitarianism. If, as Weber believed, modern rationalization of society came to a formal reduction of the power of rationality, it followed that hyper-bureaucratization of society led not just to a complete separation between facts and values but also to a total disinterest in the latter forms. Nevertheless, for Critical Theory it remained essential to defend the validity of social criticism on the basis of the idea that humanity is embedded in a historical learning process where clash is due to the actualization of reason re-establishing power-balances and struggles for group domination.

Given such a general framework on rationality, it can be said that Critical Theory has undergone several paradigm revolutions, both internally and externally. First of all, Habermas himself has suggested a further pre-linguistic line of enquiry by making appeal to the notion of “authenticity” and “imagination”. This suggests a radical reformulation of the same notion of “truth” and “reason” in the light of its metaphorical capacities of signification (see Habermas 1984a). Secondly, the commitment of Critical Theory to universal validity and universal pragmatics has been widely criticized by post-structuralists and post-modernists who have instead insisted respectively on the hyper-contextualism of the forms of linguistic rationality, as well as on the substitution of a criticism of ideology with genealogical criticism. While Derrida’s deconstructive method has shown how binary opposition collapses when applied to the semantic level, so that meaning can only be contextually constructed, Foucault has oriented his criticisms to the supposedly emancipatory power of universal reason by showing how forms of domination permeate micro-levels of power-control such as in sanatoriums, educational and religious bodies and so on. The control of life—known as bio-power—manifests itself in the attempt of normalizing and constraining individuals’ behaviors and psychic lives. For Foucault, reason is embedded into such practices which display the multiple layers of un-rationalized force. The activity of the analyst in this sense is not far from the same activity of the participant: there is no objective perspective which can be defended. Derrida, for instance, while pointing to the Habermasian idea of pragmatic of communication, still maintained a distinct thesis of a restless deconstructive potential of any constructing activity, so that no unavoidable pragmatic presuppositions nor idealizing conditions of communication could survive deconstruction. On the other hand, Habermasian theory of communicative action and discourse ethics, while remaining sensitive to contexts, pretended to defend transcendental conditions of discourse which, if violated, were seen to lead to performative contradictions. Last but not least, to the Habermasian role of consensus or agreement in discursive models, Foucault objected that rather than a regulatory principle, a true critical approach would simply enact a command in case of “nonconsensuality” (see Rabinow, ed. 1984, p. 379 ff).

3. Concluding Thoughts

The debate between Foucault and Critical Theory—in particular with Habermas—is quite illuminating of the common critical-universalist orientations of the first phase of the Frankfurt School versus the diverging methodologies defended starting from the Habermasian interpretation of modernity. For Foucault it was not correct to propose a second-order theory for defining what rationality is. Rationality is not to be found in abstract forms. On the contrary, what social criticism can only aim to achieve is the unmasking of deeply enmeshed forms of irrationality deposited in contingent and historical institutional embeddings. Genealogical methods, though, do not reject the idea that (ir)-rationality is part of history; on the contrary, they rather pretend to illuminate abstract and procedural rational models by dissecting and analyzing concrete institutional social practices through immanent criticism. To this views, Habermas has objected that any activity of rational criticism presupposes unavoidable conditions in order to justify the pretence of validity of its same exercise. This rebuttal reopened the demands of transcendental conditions for immanent criticism revealed along the same pragmatic conditions of social criticism. For Habermas, criticism is possible only if universal standards of validity are recognized and only if understanding ( Verständigung ) and agreement ( Einverständnis ) are seen as interconnected practices.

A further line of criticism against Habermas, one which included also a target to Critical Theory as a whole, came from scholars like Chantal Mouffe (2005). What she noticed is that in the notion of consensus it nested a surrendering to a genuine engagement into “political agonism”. If, as Mouffe claimed, the model of discursive action is bound to the achievement of consensus, then, what rolecan be left to politics once agreement is obtained? The charge of eliminating the consideration of political action from “the political” has been extended by Mouffe also to previous critical theorists such as Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse. Criticism concerned the non-availability of context-specific political guidance answering the question “What is to be done?” (see Chambers 2004, p. 219 ff.). What has been noticed is that whereas Critical Theory has aimed at fostering human emancipation, it has remained incapable of specifying a political action-strategy for social change. For the opponents to the Critical Theory paradigm, a clear indication in this sense was exemplified by Marcuse’s idea of “the Great Refusal”, one predicating abstention from real political engagement and pretences of transformation of the capitalist economy and the democratic institutions (Marcuse 1964). It was indeed in view of the reformulation of the Critical Theory ambition of presenting “realistic utopias”, that some of the representatives of the third generation directed their attention. Axel Honneth, for instance, starting from a revisitation of the Hegelian notion of (mis)-recognition and through a research phase addressing social pathologies, has proposed in one of his latest studies  a revisited version of socialism, as in The Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal (2017). Nancy Fraser, instead, by focusing on the notion of redistribution has provided key elements in understanding how it is possible to overcome economic inequalities and power-imbalances in post-industrial societies where cultural affiliations are no longer significant sources of power. In his turn, Alessandro Ferrara along his recent monograph The Democratic Horizon (2014), has revived the paradigm of political liberalism by addressing the significance of democracy and tackled next the problem of hypepluralism and multiple democracies. For Ferrara, what is inherent to democratic thinking is innovation and openness. This notion bears conceptual similarities with what Kant and Arendt understood in terms of “broad mindedness”. Seyla Benhabib, along similar lines, has seeked to clarify the significance of the Habermasian dual-track model of democracy, as one based on the distinction between moral issues that are proper of the institutional level (universalism) and ethical issues characterizing, instead, informal public deliberations (pluralism). Whereas the requirement of a universal consensus pertains only to the institutional sphere, the ethical domain is instead characterized by a plurality of views confronting each other across different life-systems. Benhabib’s views, by making explicit several Habermasian assumptions, aim to countervail both post-structuralist worries as well as post-modern charges of political action ineffectiveness of Critical Theory models. Finally, Forst’s philosophical preoccupation has been that of addressing the American philosophical debate with the specific aim of constructing an alternative paradigm to that of liberalism and communitarianism. Forst’s attempt has integrated analytic and continental traditions by radicalizing along transcendental lines some core Habermasian intuitions on rights and constitutional democracy. In his collections of essays, The Right to Justification , Forst suggests a transformation of the Habermasian “co-originality thesis” into a monistic “right to justification”. This move is aimed at suggesting an alternative and hopefully more coherent route of explanation for the understanding of the liberal constitutional experience (Forst, [2007] 2014, see also Forst, [2010] 2011).

4. References and Further Reading

• Adorno, Theodor W. et al. The Authoritarian Personality , New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950.
• Adorno, Theodor W. Eine Bildmonographie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003.
• Adorno, Theodor W. “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda” (1951), in Arato, Andrew and Eike Gebhardt (eds.). The Essential Frankfurt School Reader , Continuum: New York, 1982.
• Brunkhorst, Hauke. Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community , trans. by J. Flynn, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, [2002] 2005.
• Chambers, Simone. “The Politics of Critical Theory”, in Fred Rush Fred (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
• Couzens, David and Thomas McCarthy. Critical Theory . Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
• Ferrara, Alessandro. The Democratic Horizon. Hyperpluralism and the Renewal of Political Liberalism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
• Forst, Rainer. “The Justification of Human Rights and the Basic Right to Justification. A Reflexive Approach”, Ethics 120:4 (2010), 711-40, reprinted in Claudio Claudio (ed.). Philosophical Dimensions of Human Rights. Some Contemporary Views , Dordrecht: Springer 2011.
• Forst, Rainer. The Right to Justification. Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice , New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2014.
• Geuss, Raymond. The Idea of a Critical Theory. Habermas & the Frankfurt School , New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
• Habermas, Jürgen. Knowledge and Human Interests . Boston: Beacon Press, [1968] 1971.
• Habermas, Jürgen. “Questions and Counter-Questions”, Praxis International 4:3 (1984a).
• Habermas, Jürgen. The Theory of Communicative Action , vols. 1 and 2, Boston: Beacon Press, [1981] 1984b.
• Honneth, Axel. Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory , trans. by Kenneth Baynes. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, [1985] 1991.
• Honneth, Axel. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts , trans. by Joel Anderson. Cambridge: Polity Press, [1986] 1995.
• Honneth, Axel. “The Intellectual legacy of Critical Theory”, in Fred Rush (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
• Honneth, Axel. The Idea of Socialism: towards a Renewal , Polity Press, Cambridge, 2017.
• Horkheimer, Max. “Traditional and Critical Theory”, in Paul Connerton (ed.). Critical Sociology: Selected Readings , Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1937] 1976.
• Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment , New York: Continuum, [1947] 1969.
• Ingram, David. Critical Theory and Philosophy , St. Paul: Paragon House, 1990.
• Ingram, David and Julia Simon-Ingram. Critical Theory: The Essential Readings , St. Paul: Paragon House, 1992.
• Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination , Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
• Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness , Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, [1968], 1971.
• Marcuse, Herbert. “Philosophie und Kritische Theorie”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung VI:3 (1937).
• Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society , Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.
• Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox , London: Verso, 2005.
• Rabinow, Paul (ed.). “Politics and Ethics: An Interview”, in The Foucault Reader , New York: Pantheon, 1984.
• Rush, Fred. Critical Theory , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
• Wiggershaus, Rolf. The Frankfurt School , Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995.
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , London: Routledge, 2001 [1st English edition 1922].

Author Information

Claudio Corradetti Email: [email protected] University of Rome Tor Vergata Italy

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(page 1) p. 1 Introduction: what is critical theory?

• Published: October 2017
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Interdisciplinary and uniquely experimental in character, deeply skeptical of tradition and all absolute claims, critical theory was always concerned not merely with how things were, but how they might be and should be. This ethical imperative led its primary thinkers to develop a cluster of themes and a new critical method that transformed our understanding of society. The Introduction describes some of the many sources of critical theory, including Immanuel Kant, Hegel, Karl Marx, Karl Korsch, Georg Lukács, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, and Max Horkheimer. The two ideas most commonly associated with critical theory are alienation and reification.

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Critical Theory in Social Research: A Theoretical and Methodological Outlook

• First Online: 27 October 2022

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• Ashek Mahmud 4 &
• Farhana Zaman 4  

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Critical theory, a multidisciplinary and multifaceted approach, was put forward to reconstruct dominant ideology by the critical task of explaining and criticizing. Contextualizing this new approach, the chapter is designed to focus on the development of social thought and its application in social research grounding on the critical theory. The discussion, drawing from many kinds of literature, depicts that critical theory as a perspective of social praxis unveils the critical reality through a detailed analysis of leading texts, pervasive conversations, social interactions, and persistent social practices. Thereby, critical theory provides insight to form ‘Critical paradigm’ and ‘Critical Realist Paradigm’ that generates ‘Ideology critique’, ‘Critical action research’, and ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’ (CDA) as the dynamic research methods. With those, researchers can explain the relationship between theory and practice linking language, ideas and social actions. By highlighting the basic characteristics of critical theory, this chapter analyses its application in the field of social research focusing on when and in which context critical theory is applied. Finally, the chapter attempts to ascertain the emancipatory function of this new approach by providing some examples of research output in connection to perpetual social problems in modern social settings.

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Mahmud, A., Zaman, F. (2022). Critical Theory in Social Research: A Theoretical and Methodological Outlook. In: Islam, M.R., Khan, N.A., Baikady, R. (eds) Principles of Social Research Methodology. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5441-2_7

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