Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
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, tthird generation of Critical Theory
scholars consists of two groups. The first group 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
1. Critical Theory: Historical and Philosophical Background
2. What is Critical Theory?
1. Traditional and Critical Theory: Ideology and Critique
2. The Theory/Practice Problem
3. The Idea of Rationality: Critical Theory and its Discontents
3. Concluding Thoughts
4. References and Further Reading
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).
Author Information
Claudio Corradetti
Email: Claudio.Corradetti@uniroma2.it
University of Rome Tor Vergata
Italy
© Copyright Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and its Authors | ISSN 2161-0002