Critical Theory

A group of theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, founded the [Page 238]Frankfurt school in 1923. The term critical theory represents their approach to the study of society developed between 1930 and 1970. The four most important philosophers belonging to the school were Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and, later, Jürgen Habermas. Rather than one definitive theory, critical theory seems most often a cluster of themes: inclusion of several disciplines of the social sciences, a historical perspective, oppositional (dialectical) contradictions, using formal rationality to deny power to classes of citizens, emancipation, and the elimination of social injustice.

Critical theory has its origins in the philosophies of G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx. Hegel held the belief that a unified theory of reality can be developed that can systematically explain all forms of reality, starting from a single principle or subject. Reason, according to Hegel, was that fundamental unifying principle that explains all reality; reason, however, is a process whose goal is the recognition of reason through itself. Marx, following Hegel's philosophy of the single unifier, held the belief that political life and the ideas associated with it are themselves determined by the characteristics of economic life. His philosophy is based on his belief that one's being consists in labor (the single unifier); however, humans are separated from each other to the extent that, first, the performance of one's labor is according to a division of labor and, second, labor is dictated by the market; thus, political and economic forces impinge on labor, and what we often classify as a worldview is actually the articulations of the dominant class. It is only when labor recovers its collective character that people will recognize themselves as the true creators of history, a progression through stages where, at each stage, the form taken by a society is conditioned by the society's attained level of productivity and the requirements for its increase. Marxism generally focuses on the clash between the dominant and repressed classes in any given age.

The Frankfurt school emerged in the postmodern era from the historical context of post–World War I Germany and the Russian Revolution. With the end of the Enlightenment Era in philosophy, the postmodernists sought to dispel the notion that there is universal objective truth. The connection between technology and progress, and science and moral development, began to collapse in the 1920s. One war had just occurred, and another seemed on the horizon. Postmodernists began to reject artificially sharp dichotomies and to appreciate the inherent irony and particularity of language and life; they began to see multiple realities and questioned traditional absolute truths. Because reality is not purely objective and does not exist independent of the humans who interpret it, postmodernists developed various theories to interpret their environment and reality, including structuralism, semiotics, poststructuralism, critical theory, and deconstruction. Philosophers from the Frankfurt school were attempting to adapt Marxism to the theoretical and political needs of the time.

The critical theorists from the Frankfurt school and anthropologist Bourdieu were opposed to closed philosophical systems and pretensions to absolute truth in which individual autonomy is eliminated. To address the legitimacy of and potential for changing existing power structures, critical theorists generally hold the view that humans create their history and society, which, they believe, should be a society of free actors that go beyond the tension between, and abolish the opposition to, one's purposefulness, spontaneity, and rationality and the results of one's labor. While offering a critique of other social theories, critical theorists provide tools for seeing anew ideas or processes taken for granted. Oppositional thinking is one of the keys for gaining such insight.

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