The Frankfurt School (German: Frankfurter Schule) refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinarysocial theory,[1] particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main. The school initially consisted of dissident Marxists who, while remaining outspoken critics of capitalism, believed that some of Marx's followers had come to parrot a narrow selection of Marx's ideas, usually in defense of orthodox Communist or Social-Democratic parties. These thinkers were particularly influenced by the failure of the working-class revolution in Western Europe (precisely where Marx had predicted that a communist revolution would take place) and by the rise of Nazism in such an economically and technologically advanced nation as Germany. This led many of them to take up the task of choosing what parts of Marx's thought might serve to clarify contemporary social conditions which Marx himself had never seen. Maintaining the Marxist regard for a cultural 'superstructure' derived from a material 'base', the Frankfurt theorists thus drew on other schools of thought to fill in Marx's perceived omissions. Whilst theantipositivism of Max Weber and Georg Simmel facilitated the movement in general, these tenets were merged with the insights of psychoanalysis, existential philosophy, and other disciplines.[1] The school's emphasis on the "critical" component of theory was derived significantly from their attempt to overcome the limits of positivism, crude materialism, and phenomenology by returning to Kant's critical philosophyand its successors in German idealism, principally Hegel's philosophy, with its emphasis on dialectic andcontradiction as inherent properties of reality. A key influence also came from the publication in the 1930s of Marx's Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts and The German Ideology, which showed the continuity with Hegelianism that underlay Marx's thought. Since the 1960s, Frankfurt School critical theory has increasingly been guided by Jürgen Habermas' work on communicative reason,[2][3] linguistic intersubjectivity and what Harbermas calls "the philosophical discourse of modernity".[4] More recently, critical theorists such as Nikolas Kompridis (a former student of Habermas) have voiced opposition to Habermas, claiming that he has undermined the aspirations forsocial change which originally gave purpose to critical theory's various projects (e.g. the problem of whatreason should mean, the analysis and enlargement of "conditions of possibility" for social emancipation, and the critique of modern capitalism).[5] Kompridis has argued that Frankfurt School critical theory needs to return to the concerns that had previously animated it, in order to help "reopen the future" through practices of what he calls reflective disclosure. It should be noted that the term "Frankfurt School" arose informally to describe the thinkers affiliated or merely associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research; it is not the title of any specific position or institution per se, and few of these theorists used the term themselves. The Frankfurt School is generally associated with the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), which was founded by Carl Grünberg in 1923 as an adjunct of the University of Frankfurt; it was the first Marxist-oriented research center affiliated with a major German university.[1] However, the school can trace its earliest roots back to Felix Weil, who was able to use money from his father's grain business to finance the Institut. Weil was a young Marxist who had written his Ph.D. on the practical problems of implementing socialism and was published by Karl Korsch. With the hope of bringing different trends of Marxism together, Weil organized a week-long symposium (the Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche) in 1922, a meeting attended byGeorg Lukács, Karl Korsch, Karl August Wittfogel, Friedrich Pollock and others. The event was so successful that Weil set about erecting a building and funding salaries for a permanent institute. Weil negotiated with the Ministry of Education that the Director of the Institut would be a full professor from the state system, so that the Institut would have the status of a University institution. Although Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch both attended the Arbeitswoche which had included a study of Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy, both were too committed to political activity and Party membership to join the Institut, although Korsch participated in publishing ventures for a number of years. The way Lukács was obliged to repudiate his History and Class Consciousness, published in 1923 and probably a major inspiration for the work of the Frankfurt School, was an indicator for others that independence from the Communist Partywas necessary for genuine theoretical work.[6] The philosophical tradition now referred to as the "Frankfurt School" is perhaps particularly associated with Max Horkheimer, who took over as the institute's director in 1930 and recruited many of the school's most talented theorists, including Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse and Walter Benjamin.[1] Horkheimer would thus have a decisive role in establishing the Institute's future academic direction. The political turmoil of Germany's troubled interwar years also greatly affected the School's development. As the growing influence of National Socialism became ever more threatening, its founders decided to prepare to move the Institute out of the country.[7] Following Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933, the Institute left Germany for Geneva, before moving again to New York City in 1934, where it became affiliated withColumbia University. Its journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung was accordingly renamed Studies in Philosophy and Social Science. It was at this moment that much of its important work began to emerge, having gained a favorable reception within American and English academia. The Frankfurt School cannot be fully comprehended without equally understanding the aims and objectives of critical theory. Serving as the School's intellectual and academic focus, critical theory refers to a social theory oriented towards critiquing and changing society as a whole, and can thus be opposed to "traditional theory," i.e. theory in the positivistic, scientistic, or purely observational mode. Critical theory hence refers to a critique of society, and is different from that found in literature, literary criticism and cultural studies, where "critical theory" means something quite different, namely criticism used with the purpose of analyzing, understanding and interpreting text. Frankfurt School theorists were explicitly linking up with the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, where the term critique meant philosophical reflection on the limits of claims made for certain kinds of knowledge and a direct connection between such critique and the emphasis on moral autonomy. In an intellectual context defined by dogmatic positivism and scientism on the one hand and dogmatic "scientific socialism" on the other, critical theory meant to rehabilitate Marx's ideas through a philosophically critical approach. Whereas both Marxist-Leninist and Social-Democratic orthodox thinkers viewed Marxism as a new kind of positive science, Frankfurt School theorists rather based their work on the epistemological base of Karl Marx's work, which presented itself as critique, as in Marx's Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. They thus emphasized that Marx was attempting to create a new kind of critical analysis oriented toward the unity of theory and revolutionary practice rather than a new kind of positive science. Critique, in this Marxian sense, meant taking the ideology of a society – e.g. individual freedom or private property under capitalism – and critiquing it by comparing it with the social reality of that very society – e.g. social inequality and exploitation. The methodology on which Frankfurt School theorists grounded this critique came to be what had before been established by Hegel and Marx, namely the dialectical method. The Institute also attempted to reformulate dialectics as a concrete method. The use of such a dialectical method can be traced back to the philosophy of Hegel, who conceived dialectic as the tendency of a notion to pass over into its own negation as the result of conflict between its inherent contradictory aspects.[8] A thesis is opposed by an antithesis, both of which form a contradiction which ends up being sublated by asynthesis. In opposition to previous modes of thought, which viewed things in abstraction, each by itself and as though endowed with fixed properties, Hegelian dialectic thus considers things and ideas in their movements and changes, as well as in their interrelations and interactions.[8] History, according to Hegel, proceeds and evolves in a dialectical manner: the present embodies the rational sublation of past contradictions. History may thus be seen as an intelligible process (often referred to as Weltgeist) which is moving towards a specific condition—the rational realization of human freedom.[9] However, considerations about the future were of no interest to Hegel,[10][11] for whom philosophy cannot beprescriptive because it understands only in hindsight. The study of history is thus limited to the description of past and present realities.[9]Hence for Hegel and his successors, dialectics inevitably lead to the approval of the status quo—indeed, Hegel's philosophy served as a justification for Christian theology and the Prussian state. This was fiercely criticized by Marx and the Young Hegelians, who claimed that Hegel had gone too far in defending his abstract conception of "absolute Reason" and had failed to notice the "real" (i.e. often undesirable and irrational) life conditions of men. Unlike Hegel, Marx maintained a strong concern for the present improvement and future development of human society. By correcting Hegel's dialectical method, Marx advanced his own theory of dialectical materialism. This established a new dialectical law of history, according to which the social and materialcontradictions inherent to capitalism will inevitably lead to its negation—thus replacing capitalism with a new rational form of society, socialism. For their part, Frankfurt School theorists quickly came to realize that a dialectical method could only be adopted if it could be applied to itself—that is to say, if they adopted a self-correcting method—a dialectical method that would enable them to correct previous false dialectical interpretations. Accordingly, critical theory rejected the dogmatic materialism of orthodox Marxism: indeed, the material tensions and class struggles of which Marx spoke were no longer seen as having the same revolutionary potential within contemporary Western societies. Contrary to orthodox Marxist praxis, which solely seeks to implement an unchangeable idea of "communism" into practice, critical theorists held that praxis and theory, following the dialectical method, should be interdependent and should mutually influence each other. When Marx famously stated in his Theses on Feuerbach that "philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it", his real idea was that philosophy's only validity was in how it informed action. Frankfurt School theorists would correct this by claiming that when action fails, then the theory guiding it must be reviewed. In short, socialist philosophical thought must be given the ability to criticize itself and "overcome" its own errors. While theory must inform praxis, praxis must also have a chance to inform theory. The intellectual influences on and theoretical focus of the first generation of Frankfurt School critical theorists can be summarized as follows: These influences combined to create the Critical Theory of Culture: Responding to the intensification of "unfreedom" and irrationality in anadvanced capitalist society, critical theory is a comprehensive, ideology-critical, historically self-reflective, body of theory aiming simultaneously to explain and combat domination and alienation and help bring about a rational, humane, democratic, and socialist society. The critical theorists developed an integrated theory of the economic, political, cultural, and psychological domination structures of advanced industrial civilization, and of the dialectic through which the emancipatory potential of modern society is suppressed and its rationality turns into a positivistic rationality of domination leading to barbarism. The Institute made major contributions in two areas relating to the possibility of human subjects to be rational, i.e. individuals who could act rationally to take charge of their own society and their own history. The first consisted of social phenomena previously considered in Marxism as part of the "superstructure" or as ideology: personality, family and authority structures (one of the earliest works published bore the titleStudies of Authority and the Family), and the realm of aesthetics and mass culture. Studies saw a common concern here in the ability ofcapitalism to destroy the preconditions of critical, revolutionary political consciousness. This meant arriving at a sophisticated awareness of the depth dimension in which social oppression sustains itself. It also meant the beginning of critical theory's recognition of ideology as part of the foundations of social structure. Although Horkheimer's distinction between traditional and critical theory in one sense merely repeated Marx's dictum that philosophers have always interpreted the world and the point is to change it, the Institute, in its critique of ideology, took on such philosophical currents aspositivism, phenomenology, existentialism, and pragmatism, with an implied critique of contemporary Marxism, which had turned dialectics into an alternate science or metaphysics. The Institute attempted to reformulate dialectics as a concrete method, continually aware of the specific social roots of thought and of the specific constellation of forces that affected the possibility of liberation. Accordingly, critical theory rejected the materialist metaphysics of orthodox Marxism. For Horkheimer and his associates, materialism meant the orientation of theory towards practice and towards the fulfillment of human needs, not a metaphysical statement about the nature of reality. The second phase of Frankfurt School critical theory centres principally on two works: Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) andAdorno's Minima Moralia (1951). The authors wrote both works during the Institute's exile in America. While retaining much of the Marxian analysis, in these works critical theory shifted its emphasis. The critique of capitalism turned into a critique of Western civilization as a whole. Indeed, the Dialectic of Enlightenment uses the Odyssey as a paradigm for the analysis of bourgeois consciousness. Horkheimer and Adorno already present in these works many themes that have come to dominate the social thought of recent years: the domination of nature appears as central to Western civilization long before ecology had become a catchphrase of the day. The analysis of reason now goes one stage further. The rationality of Western civilization appears as a fusion of domination and oftechnological rationality, bringing all of external and internal nature under the power of the human subject. In the process, however, the subject itself gets swallowed up, and no social force analogous to the proletariat can be identified that will enable the subject to emancipate itself. Hence the subtitle of Minima Moralia: "Reflections from Damaged Life". In Adorno's words, Consequently, at a time when it appears that reality itself has become ideology, the greatest contribution that critical theory can make is to explore the dialectical contradictions of individual subjective experience on the one hand, and to preserve the truth of theory on the other. Even the dialectic can become a means to domination: "Its truth or untruth, therefore, is not inherent in the method itself, but in its intention in the historical process." And this intention must be toward integral freedom and happiness: "the only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption". How far from orthodox Marxism is Adorno's conclusion: "But beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters."[13] Of this second "phase" of the Frankfurt School, philosopher and critical theorist Nikolas Kompridis writes that: Kompridis claims that this "skeptical cul-de-sac" was arrived at with "a lot of help from the once unspeakable and unprecedented barbarity of European fascism," and could not be gotten out of without "some well-marked Ausgang, showing the way out of the ever-recurring nightmare in which Enlightenment hopes and Holocaust horrors are fatally entangled." However, this Ausgang, according to Kompridis, would not come until later – purportedly in the form of Jürgen Habermas' work on the intersubjective bases of communicative rationality (the fourth phase) – although Kompridis himself has voiced doubts about this paradigm.[14] With the growth of advanced industrial society during the Cold War era, critical theorists recognized that the path of capitalism and history had changed decisively, that the modes of oppression operated differently, and that the industrial working class no longer remained the determinate negation of capitalism. This led to the attempt to root the dialectic in an absolute method of negativity, as in Marcuse's One-Dimensional Manand Adorno's Negative Dialectics. During this period the Institute of Social Research re-settled in Frankfurt (although many of its associates remained in the United States), with the task not merely of continuing its research but of becoming a leading force in the sociological education and democratization of West Germany. This led to a certain systematization of the Institute's entire accumulation of empirical research and theoretical analysis. During this period, Frankfurt School critical theory particularly influenced some segments of the Left wing and leftist thought, particularly theNew Left. Herbert Marcuse has occasionally been described as the theorist or intellectual progenitor of the New Left. Their critique of technology, totality, teleology and (occasionally) civilization is an influence on anarcho-primitivism. Their work also heavily influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies. More importantly, however, the Frankfurt School attempted to define the fate of reason in the new historical period. While Marcuse did so through analysis of structural changes in the labor process under capitalism and inherent features of the methodology of science, Horkheimer and Adorno concentrated on a re-examination of the foundation of critical theory. This effort appears in systematized form in Adorno's Negative Dialectics, which tries to redefine dialectics for an era in which "philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed". Negative dialectics expresses the idea of critical thought so conceived that the apparatus of domination cannot co-opt it. Its central notion, long a focal one for Horkheimer and Adorno, suggests that the original sin of thought lies in its attempt to eliminate all that is other than thought, the attempt by the subject to devour the object, the striving for identity. This reduction makes thought the accomplice of domination. Negative Dialectics rescues the "preponderance of the object", not through a naive epistemological or metaphysical realism but through a thought based on differentiation, paradox, and ruse: a "logic of disintegration". Adorno thoroughly criticizes Heidegger's fundamentalontology, which he thinks reintroduces idealistic and identity-based concepts under the guise of having overcome the philosophical tradition. Negative Dialectics comprises a monument to the end of the tradition of the individual subject as the locus of criticism. Without a revolutionary working class, the Frankfurt School had no one to rely on but the individual subject. But, as the liberal capitalist social basis of the autonomous individual receded into the past, the dialectic based on it became more and more abstract. This stance helped prepare the way for the fourth phase of the Frankfurt School,[citation needed] shaped by the communication theory of Habermas. Habermas's work takes the Frankfurt School's abiding interests in rationality, the human subject, democratic socialism, and the dialectical method and overcomes a set of contradictions that always weakened critical theory: the contradictions between the materialist andtranscendental methods, between Marxian social theory and the individualist assumptions of critical rationalism between technical and social rationalization, and between cultural and psychological phenomena on the one hand and the economic structure of society on the other. The Frankfurt School avoided taking a stand on the precise relationship between the materialist and transcendental methods, which led to ambiguity in their writings and confusion among their readers. Habermas' epistemology synthesizes these two traditions by showing that phenomenological and transcendental analysis can be subsumed under a materialist theory of social evolution, while the materialist theory makes sense only as part of a quasi-transcendental theory of emancipatory knowledge that is the self-reflection of cultural evolution. The simultaneously empirical and transcendental nature of emancipatory knowledge becomes the foundation stone of critical theory. By locating the conditions of rationality in the social structure of language use, Habermas moves the locus of rationality from the autonomous subject to subjects in interaction. Rationality is a property not of individuals per se, but rather of structures of undistorted communication. In this notion Habermas has overcome the ambiguous plight of the subject in critical theory. If capitalistic technological society weakens the autonomy and rationality of the subject, it is not through the domination of the individual by the apparatus but through technological rationality supplanting a describable rationality of communication. And, in his sketch of communicative ethics as the highest stage in the internal logic of the evolution of ethical systems, Habermas hints at the source of a new political practice that incorporates the imperatives of evolutionary rationality. In 2006, Nikolas Kompridis (a former student of Jürgen Habermas) published new criticisms of Habermas's approach to critical theory, calling for a dramatic break with the proceduralist ethics of communicative rationality. He writes: In addition, he writes that: In order to prevent that dissolution, Kompridis suggests that critical theory should "reinvent" itself as a "possibility-disclosing" enterprise, incorporating Heidegger's controversial insights into world disclosure and drawing from the sources of normativity that he feels were blocked from critical theory by its recent change of paradigm. Calling for what Charles Taylor has named a "new department" of reason[19], with a possibility-disclosing role that Kompridis calls "reflective disclosure", Kompridis argues that critical theory must embrace its neglected German romantic inheritance and once again imagine alternatives to existing social and political conditions, "if it is to have a future worthy of its past."[20] Several criticisms of the Frankfurt School have emerged. Some critics[who?] state that the intellectual perspective of the Frankfurt School is aromantic, elitist critique of mass culture with a contrived neo-Marxist guise.[citation needed] Another criticism, originating from the Left, is that critical theory is a form of bourgeois idealism that has no inherent relation to political practice and is totally isolated from any ongoing revolutionary movement. Both of these criticisms were captured in Georg Lukács's phrase "Grand Hotel Abyss" as a syndrome he imputed to the members of the Frankfurt School.[citation needed] Philosopher Karl Popper believed that the school did not live up to Marx's promise of a better future: Conservative author Jonah Goldberg has criticized the Frankfurt School for systematically rejecting theoretical alternatives: "Borrowing fromFreud and Jung, the Frankfurt School describes Nazism and Fascism as forms of mass psychosis. That was plausible enough, but their analysis also held that since Marxism was objectively superior to its alternatives, the masses, the bourgeoisie, and anyone else who disagreed with them had to be, quite literally, mad."[22] Casey Blake and Christopher Phelps also reinforced this critique by stating that: "This procedure excused them from the difficult work of judgement and argumentation. Instead of arguing with opponents, they simply dismissed them on psychiatric gounds."[23] Dasein · Différance · more... Theodor W. Adorno · Louis Althusser · Hannah Arendt · Alain Badiou · Henri Bergson · Albert Camus · Gilles Deleuze ·Jacques Derrida · Michel Foucault · Johann Fichte · Frankfurt School · Jürgen Habermas · Georg Hegel ·Martin Heidegger · Edmund Husserl · Søren Kierkegaard · Jacques Lacan · Claude Lévi-Strauss · Friedrich Nietzsche ·Maurice Merleau-Ponty · Jean-Paul Sartre · Friedrich Schelling · Arthur Schopenhauer · Slavoj Žižek · more ...
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This group of influential left-wing German thinkers set out, in the wake of Germany’s defeat in the First World War, to investigate why their country had not had a Revolution - despite the apparently revolutionary conditions that spread through Germany in the wake of the 1918 Armistice.
To find out why the German workers had not flocked to the Red Flag, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin and others came together around an Institute set up at Frankfurt University, and began to focus their critical attention not on the economy, but on culture, asking how it affected people's political outlook and activities.
But then, with the rise of the Nazis, they found themselves fleeing to 1940s California. And their disenchantment with American popular culture combined with their experiences of the turmoil of the interwar years to produce their distinctive, pessimistic worldview. With the defeat of Nazism, they returned to Germany to try to make sense of the route their native country had taken into darkness.
In the 1960s, the Frankfurt School's argument - that most of culture helps to keep its audience compliant with capitalism - had an explosive impact. Arguably, it remains influential today.
Contributors
Jonathan Rée, a freelance historian and philosopher, currently Visiting Professor at Roehampton University and at the Royal College of Art
Esther Leslie, Professor in Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, University of London
Raymond Geuss, Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of CambridgeFrankfurt School
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Part of a series on the
Frankfurt School
Major works Reason and Revolution
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Minima Moralia
One-Dimensional Man
Negative DialecticsNotable theorists Max Horkheimer · Theodor Adorno
Herbert Marcuse · Walter Benjamin
Siegfried Kracauer · Friedrich Pollock
Franz Neumann · Leo Löwenthal
Erich Fromm · Helmut Reichelt
Jürgen Habermas · Axel HonnethImportant concepts Critical theory · Dialectic · Praxis
Psychoanalysis · Antipositivism
Popular culture · Culture industry
Advanced capitalism · PrivatismContents
[hide][edit]Historical origins
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[edit]Works
[edit]Theoretical foundations
[edit]Critical theory
[edit]Dialectical method
[edit]Early influences
Historical context Transition from small-scale entrepreneurial capitalism to monopoly capitalism and imperialism; socialist labor movement grows, turns reformist; emergence of the welfare state; Russian revolution and the rise ofCommunism; neotechnic period; emergence of mass media and mass culture, "modern" art; rise of Nazism. Weberian theory Comparative historical analysis of Western rationalism in capitalism, the modern state, secular scientific rationality, culture, and religion; analysis of the forms of domination in general and of modern rational-legalbureaucratic domination in particular; articulation of the distinctive, hermeneutic method of the social sciences. Freudian theory Critique of the repressive structure of the "reality principle" of advanced civilization and of the normal neurosis of everyday life; discovery of the unconscious, primary-process thinking, and the impact of the Oedipus complexand of anxiety on psychic life; analysis of the psychic bases of authoritarianism and irrational social behavior. Critique of Positivism Critique of positivism as a philosophy, as a scientific methodology, as a political ideology and as everydayconformism; rehabilitation of – negative – dialectic, return to Hegel; appropriation of critical elements inphenomenology, historicism, existentialism, critique of their ahistorical, idealist tendencies; critique of logical positivism and pragmatism. Aesthetic modernism Critique of "false" and reified experience by breaking through its traditional forms and language; projection of alternative modes of existence and experience; liberation of the unconscious; consciousness of unique, modern situation; appropriation of Kafka, Proust, Schoenberg, Breton; critique of the culture industry and "affirmative" culture; aesthetic utopia. Marxist theory Critique of bourgeois ideology; critique of alienated labor; historical materialism; history as class struggle andexploitation of labor in different modes of production; systems analysis of capitalism as extraction of surplus labor through free labor in the free market; unity of theory and practice; analysis for the sake of revolution,socialist democracy, classless society. Culture theory Critique of mass culture as suppression and absorption of negation, as integration into status quo; critique ofWestern culture as a culture of domination, both of an external and internal nature; dialectic differentiation of emancipatory and repressive dimensions of elite culture; Nietzsche's transvaluation and Schiller's aesthetic education. [edit]Dialectic of Enlightenment and Minima Moralia
“ For since the overwhelming objectivity of historical movement in its present phase consists so far only in the dissolution of the subject, without yet giving rise to a new one, individual experience necessarily bases itself on the old subject, now historically condemned, which is still for-itself, but no longer in-itself. The subject still feels sure of its autonomy, but the nullity demonstrated to subjects by the concentration camp is already overtaking the form of subjectivity itself.[12] ” “ According to the now canonical view of its history, Frankfurt School critical theory began in the 1930s as a fairly confident interdisciplinary and materialist research program, the general aim of which was to connect normative social criticism to the emancipatory potential latent in concrete historical processes. Only a decade or so later, however, having revisited the premises of their philosophy of history, Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment steered the whole enterprise, provocatively and self-consciously, into a skeptical cul-de-sac. As a result they got stuck in the irresolvable dilemmas of the "philosophy of the subject," and the original program was shrunk to a negativistic practice of critique that eschewed the very normative ideals on which it implicitly depended.[14] ” [edit]Modern capitalism and Negative Dialectics
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Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged andremoved. (November 2009)[edit]Habermas and communicative rationality
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Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged andremoved. (November 2009)[edit]Critical Theory "Between Past and Future"
“ For all its theoretical ingenuity and practical implications, Habermas's reformulation of critical theory is beset by persistent problems of its own… In my view, the depth of these problems indicate just how wrong was Habermas's expectation that the paradigm change to linguistic intersubjectivity would render "objectless" the dilemmas of the philosophy of the subject.[15]Habermas accused Hegel of creating a conception of reason so "overwhelming" that it solved too well the problem of modernity's [need for] self-reassurance.[16] It seems, however, that Habermas has repeated rather than avoided Hegel's mistake, creating a theoretical paradigm so comprehensive that in one stroke it also solves too well the dilemmas of the philosophy of the subject and the problem of modernity's self-reassurance.[17] ” “ The change of paradigm to linguistic intersubjectivity has been accompanied by a dramatic change in critical theory's self-understanding. The priority given to questions of justice and the normative order of society has remodeled critical theory in the image of liberal theories of justice. While this has produced an important contemporary variant of liberal theories of justice, different enough to be a challenge to liberal theory, but not enough to preserve sufficient continuity with critical theory's past, it has severely weakened the identity of critical theory and inadvertently initiated its premature dissolution.[18] ” [edit]Critical responses
“ Marx's own condemnation of our society makes sense. For Marx's theory contains the promise of a better future. But the theory becomes vacuous and irresponsible if this promise is withdrawn, as it is by Adorno and Horkheimer.[21] ” [edit]Notable theorists
[edit]See also
[edit]References
This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (April 2009)
cf. Hegel, G. W. F. (1821). Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, p.13
cf. Peĺczynski, Z. A. (1971). Hegel's political philosophy--problems and perspectives: a collection of new essays, CUP Archive. Google Print, p.200[edit]Further reading
[edit]External links
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Thursday, 14 January 2010
THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL
This article is about the philosophical school. For the business school, see Frankfurt School of Finance & Management.
Main article: Institute for Social Research
Main article: Jürgen Habermas
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