Critical Theory

Origins and Early Development

The origin of critical theory has to be understood in the context of the deep political and theoretical crisis of the Marxist Second International during and after World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the founding of the Soviet Union under V. I. Lenin. Perry Anderson has coined the term Western Marxism to summarize the different theoretical approaches of Georg Lukàcs, Karl Korsch, and Antonio Gramsci among others, who during the 1920s reacted to this crisis by creating their own rereadings of Marxism. In the late 1920s, this Marx ist revisionism came to be strongly influenced by the first publication of Marx's early so-called humanistic writings. In all their variety, these new approaches were, on the one hand, opposed to the deterministic interpretation of history by “Marxism” (historical materialism) and, on the other, critical of the political instrumentalization of the Marxist approach as a mere power ideology in what soon came to be called “Marxism–Leninism.”

When Horkheimer delivered his famous inaugural speech as director of the Institute in 1932, he introduced a research program that has been called “interdisciplinary materialism” (Wolfgang Bonß & Norbert Schindler, 1982). Its goal was to integrate, in a new manner, the Hegel–Marx tradition of philosophy of history with empirical social research in various disciplines into a new paradigm of practical philosophy. In this project, the role of philosophy was to integrate empirical research into a theoretical totality that could both represent reality and provide a normative perspective on it. Given the fact that in Western societies the proletariat had [Page 498]not proven to be the revolutionary class that would, according to Marx, overthrow the capitalist system of exploitation and alienation, the new paradigm of interdisciplinary materialism nevertheless was to remain devoted to the practical aim of emancipating society in totality by developing its inherent rational potential and its possibilities for liberation. The critique of ideology was one more traditional way to demonstrate the normative cleavages between the universal promises of the French Revolution—liberté, égalité, fraternité—and the unjust class realities of bourgeois society, based on a capitalist economy in which monopolistic structures had irreversibly undermined the socioeconomic foundations of liberalism. Despite the critique of liberalism, critical theory in its normative perspective always favored individualism over collectivism. Only an emancipated society could finally provide the social basis of “real individualism,” while capitalism had reduced “individualism” to mere market-driven egoism and class antagonism.

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