Critical Theory

Key Themes in Critical Theory

The Frankfurt School was founded in the late 1920s and gradually developed as one of the most influential intellectual traditions of 20th-century social theory. The most famous names associated with the school are Horkheimer, Adorno, Fromm, Marcuse, and Habermas. Horkheimer formulated the objective of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s: “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.” The ambition was to identify and critically scrutinize social forms, ideologies, and cultural orientations that prevent people from attaining autonomy and producing social conditions in line with their will and interest. A number of social developments led to the gradual transformation of this somewhat grandiose project. In particular, the rise of fascism and authoritarian state socialism in continental Europe and East Europe, the triumph of commodification culture in the West in the postwar period, and the increasing influence of technocracy made Frankfurt School members pessimistic, as reflected in works such as Flight From Freedom, by Fromm in 1941; Dialectics of Enlightenment, by Horkheimer and Adorno in 1947; and One-Dimensional Man, by Marcuse in 1964. Gradually, they moved over into a more skeptical project of producing negative and disillusioned work, although still with a hope of critical protest and some form of agency. Modern civilization, Horkheimer and Adorno argued, had become progressively mesmerized by the power of a one-sided, instrumental conception of reason. The key statement of Dialectics of Enlightenment is now famous: “In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.”

The overall theme of CT's attack on the Enlightenment is that it has been transformed into something leading to a gigantic apparatus of institutions, forms of knowledge, and ideologies around instrumental reason and technical rationality not only controlling nature, but also being turned on human beings and domesticating them in the service of this apparatus and the one-sided emphasis on economic growth, consumerism, passive adaptation, and comfort. Still, many later critical theorists, especially Habermas, focus on the incompletion of the positive potentialities of the Enlightenment. This is, for example, reflected in Habermas's influential formulation of knowledgeconstitutive interests. He distinguishes among three such interests: A technical interest in establishing means–ends relations through controlled experiments is viewed as important and legitimate for mastering nature and is seen as the form of knowledge guiding the natural sciences. A practical (or historicalhermeneutic) interest concerns the understanding of language and culture and aims to create knowledge about ways of achieving mutual understanding and human beings in the context of traditions-transmitting institutions. This is the task of the humanities; the knowledge form here is hermeneutics and the aim is understanding. An emancipatory interest concerns the development of knowledge about constraints and repression associated with irrational social institutions and ideologies. The task for social science, Habermas claims, is to encourage the transformation of these social conditions through critical examination.

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