Non-Habermasist Critical Theory: Analytical Benefits and Strategy in Social Research

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-63
Author(s):  
Ohyong Kwon
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Social Research

scholarly journals Arguing for classical critical theory

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-10
Author(s):  
David Rasmussen
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Social Research ◽  
The Political ◽  
Specific Interpretation ◽  
The Subject

In my view, making the case for a specific interpretation of Critical Theory is problematic.1 Although the term has a prestigious origin stemming from Horkheimer?s 1937 paper, Traditional and Critical Theory,2 given during his term as Director of the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt University and generating the enthusiasm of its members, the term and the movement associated would be defined and radically redefined not only by subsequent generations but by its very author. One of the merits of the book under discussion is that even before the first chapter an ?Interlude? is presented entitled Arguing for Classical Critical Theory signifying to the reader that Horkheimer got it right when he defined the subject and that it is possible to return to that particular definition after 83 years. This paper challenges Professor S?rensen?s claims for the restoration of classical Critical Theory on three levels: the scientific, the historical and the political level.

Critical theory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond Geuss ◽  
J. M. Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Instrumental Rationality ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Conception Of The Good

The term ‘critical theory’ designates the approach to the study of society developed between 1930 and 1970 by the so-called ‘Frankfurt School’. A group of theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research, the School was founded in Frankfurt, Germany in 1923. The three most important philosophers belonging to it were Max Horkheimer, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. The project was renewed by the second- and third-generation critical theorists, most notably, Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth. Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse feared that modern Western societies were turning into closed, totalitarian systems in which all individual autonomy was eliminated. In their earliest writings from the 1930s they presented this tendency towards totalitarianism as one result of the capitalist mode of production. In later accounts they give more prominence to the role of science and technology in modern society, and to the concomitant, purely ‘instrumental’, conception of reason. This conception of reason denies that there can be any such thing as inherently rational ends or goals for human action and asserts that reason is concerned exclusively with the choice of effective instruments or means for attaining arbitrary ends. ‘Critical theory’ was to be a form of resistance to contemporary society; its basic method was to be that of ‘internal’ or ‘immanent’ criticism. Every society, it was claimed, must be seen as making a tacit claim to substantive (and not merely instrumental) rationality; that is, making the claim that it allows its members to lead a good life. This claim gives critical theory a standard for criticism which is internal to the society being criticized. Critical theory demonstrates in what ways contemporary society fails to live up to its own claims. The conception of the good life to which each society makes tacit appeal in legitimizing itself will usually not be fully propositionally explicit, so any critical theory will have to begin by extracting a tacit conception of the good life from the beliefs, cultural artefacts and forms of experience present in the society in question. One of the particular difficulties confronting a critical theory of contemporary society is the disappearance of traditional substantive conceptions of the good life that could serve as a basis for internal criticism, and their replacement with the view that modern society needs no legitimation beyond simple reference to its actual efficient functioning, to its ‘instrumental’ rationality. The ideology of ‘instrumental rationality’ thus itself becomes a major target for critical theory.

Critical theory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond Geuss
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Instrumental Rationality ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Conception Of The Good

The term ‘critical theory’ designates the approach to the study of society developed between 1930 and 1970 by the so-called ‘Frankfurt School’. A group of theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research, the School was founded in Frankfurt, Germany in 1923. The three most important philosophers belonging to it were Max Horkheimer, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse feared that modern Western societies were turning into closed, totalitarian systems in which all individual autonomy was eliminated. In their earliest writings from the 1930s they presented this tendency towards totalitarianism as one result of the capitalist mode of production. In later accounts they give more prominence to the role of science and technology in modern society, and to the concomitant, purely ‘instrumental’, conception of reason. This conception of reason denies that there can be any such thing as inherently rational ends or goals for human action and asserts that reason is concerned exclusively with the choice of effective instruments or means for attaining arbitrary ends. ‘Critical theory’ was to be a form of resistance to contemporary society; its basic method was to be that of ‘internal’ or ‘immanent’ criticism. Every society, it was claimed, must be seen as making a tacit claim to substantive (and not merely instrumental) rationality; that is, making the claim that it allows its members to lead a good life. This claim gives critical theory a standard for criticism which is internal to the society being criticized. Critical theory demonstrates in what ways contemporary society fails to live up to its own claims. The conception of the good life to which each society makes tacit appeal in legitimizing itself will usually not be fully propositionally explicit, so any critical theory will have to begin by extracting a tacit conception of the good life from the beliefs, cultural artefacts and forms of experience present in the society in question. One of the particular difficulties confronting a critical theory of contemporary society is the disappearance of traditional substantive conceptions of the good life that could serve as a basis for internal criticism, and their replacement with the view that modern society needs no legitimation beyond simple reference to its actual efficient functioning, to its ‘instrumental’ rationality. The ideology of ‘instrumental rationality’ thus itself becomes a major target for critical theory.

Horkheimer, Max (1895–1973)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Edgar
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
The Political ◽  
Pablo Picasso ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
The Social ◽  
Critical Theorist ◽  
The University

Born near Stuttgart, Germany, the philosopher Max Horkheimer, who obtained his doctorate from the University of Frankfurt, is best known as a leader of the Frankfurt School, along with Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas. From 1930 to 1958 (with a significant hiatus from 1934 to 1948), Horkheimer served as the Director of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Frankfurt Institute for Social Research), founded in 1923 to promote multidisciplinary research in the social sciences with a particular focus on Marxian thought; along with his colleague Adorno, Horkheimer was responsible for developing the distinctive form of Marxist philosophy that framed this research through the methodologies of German critical theory. Instead of just describing social systems through "objective" means, critical theory would endeavor to uncover the social context and raise questions about truth and social justice, acknowledging also that critical theory cannot produce universal truths. At best, the critical theorist simply expresses the contradictions and falsehoods of the society within which they work. Critical theory was applied in a sweeping analysis of Western civilization in Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947; Dialectic of Enlightenment), in which Adorno and Horkheimer argued that the progress of enlightened Western culture was simultaneously a regression into a new barbarism and an entanglement in myth. In modernist art, such as the work of James Joyce and Pablo Picasso, Horkheimer identified a crucial source of resistance to the political and economic oppression of late capitalist society. Horkheimer, who was Jewish, escaped Nazi Germany and taught at Columbia University from 1935 to 1941; he lived in Los Angeles during the 1940s, but eventually returned to Germany where died in Nuremburg in 1973.

1. The Frankfurt School

2017 ◽  
pp. 7-16
Author(s):  
Stephen Eric Bronner
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Herbert Marcuse ◽  
Think Tank ◽  
Erich Fromm ◽  
Max Horkheimer ◽  
History Of ◽  
Inner Circle

‘The Frankfurt School’ provides a brief history of the formation of the Frankfurt School, and biographies of prominent members. The Frankfurt School grew out of the Institute for Social Research, the first Marxist think tank. However, in 1930, under the directorship of Max Horkheimer, the organization moved to America to escape the Nazis, and began to concentrate on critical theory. Aside from Horkheimer, notable members of the Frankfurt School's inner circle included Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas. Each member of the inner circle was different, but they all shared the same concerns, and attempted to solve them through intellectual daring and experimentation.

Critical Theory of International Relations

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven C. Roach
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Action ◽  
International Political Economy ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Communicative Action ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Ir Theory

Max Horkheimer, one of the founders of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research established in 1923, coined the term critical theory in 1937. While the school failed to produce what could be called a systematic theory, it drew on, and interweaved, various philosophical strands and prominent themes of political and social thought, including historical materialism (Marxism/Western Marxism), Freudian analysis, cultural disenchantment, Hegelian dialectics, and totality. Yet by the 1940s, many of the first-generation Frankfurt school thinkers sought to counter the emasculation of critical reason, dialectics, and self-conscious theory with a focus on the negativity of dialectics. Later critics would claim that they had abandoned the progressive platform of the Enlightenment, or the project of emancipation from social and political oppression. In the 1980s, Jürgen Habermas’s communicative action theory would provide a so-called critical turn in Frankfurt school critical theory by resituating reason and social action in linguistics. It was during this time that international relations (IR) theorists would draw on Habermas’s theory and that of other critical theorists to critique the limits of realism, the dominant structural paradigm of international relations at the time. The first stages of this critical theory intervention in international relations included the seminal works of Robert Cox, Richard Ashley, Mark Hoffman, and Andrew Linklater. Linklater, perhaps more than any other critical IR theorist, was instrumental in repositioning the emancipatory project in IR theory, interweaving various social and normative strands of critical thought. As such, two seemingly divergent critical IR theory approaches emerged: one that would emphasize the role of universal principles, dialogue, and difference; the other focusing predominantly on the revolutionary transformation of social relations and the state in international political economy (historical materialism). Together, these critical interventions reflected an important “third debate” (or “fourth,” if one counts the earlier inter-paradigm debate) in IR concerning the opposition between epistemology (representation and interpretation) and ontology (science and immutable structures). Perhaps more importantly, they stressed the need to take stock of the growing pluralism in the field and what this meant for understanding and interpreting the growing complexity of global politics (i.e., the rising influence of technology, human rights and democracy, and nonstate actors). The increasing emphasis on promoting a “rigorous pluralism,” then, would encompass an array of critical investigations into the transformation of social relations, norms, and identities in international relations. These now include, most notably, critical globalization studies, critical security studies, feminism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism.

Varieties of Critique in Sociological Theory and Their Methodological Implications for Social Research

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard Delanty
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Critical Realism ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Critical Sociology ◽  
Critical Practice ◽  
Marxist Approach ◽  
Micro Analysis

The notion of critique, as in the idea of a critical theory of society, is in urgent need of clarification both theoretically and methodologically. At least five major uses of the term can be found within sociological theory, the positions associated with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School from Adorno to Habermas and Honneth, Bourdieu's critical sociology, critical realism, Foucault's genealogical critique, and various notions of critical practice, most notably the work of Boltanski and Thévenot. It is possible to detect a movement from the Hegelian-Marxist approach towards interpretative conceptions of critique, leading to a pluralisation of critique and a shift from macro to micro analysis. A theoretical clarification of the notion of critique in these approaches offers a basis for a new and more rigorous methodological application of critique in social research.

scholarly journals Critical Theory: Self-Reflexive Theorizing and Struggles for Emancipation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabian Freyenhagen
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Comprehensive Treatment ◽  
Main Task ◽  
Frankfurt Am Main ◽  
Political Struggles

Critical Theory is an umbrella term to denote those theorists who take up the task described by Karl Marx as the self-clarification of the age struggles and wishes of the age. As such, two elements are crucial: (a) a connection to social and political struggles of emancipation, and (b) self-reflexivity. Critical Theorists differ—sometimes quite fundamentally—about what these two elements require (and how they relate). For example, some such theorists (such as Max Horkheimer or Michel Foucault) take the normative orientations of struggles for emancipation as something that does not require grounding at the level of theorizing, while others (such as Jürgen Habermas) think such grounding is the main task of Critical Theory, securing moral validity for the struggles. These substantive differences also mean that there are no accepted methods on which all Critical Theorists would agree. To stay with the example, those Critical Theorists who reject discursive grounding of its normative standards tend to engage in genealogy and other disclosing forms of social critique; while those who seek discursive grounding employ reconstructive and/or constructivist methods. The existence of fundamental substantive and methodological differences among proponents of Critical Theory means that it is difficult, or perhaps even impossible, to give a uniform characterization of it. Sometimes, Critical Theory is defined institutionally. Then it is denoting a succession of theorists (often classed into different generations) who are connected to the Institute of Social Research and/or the Philosophy Department in Frankfurt am Main, Germany—the so-called “Frankfurt School.” However, this institutional definition has only limited use. The disagreements among thinkers within the Frankfurt School tradition can run deep—sometimes deeper than they run with theorists, like Foucault, who are not connected institutionally to it. And it is an open and contested question whether everyone institutionally connected to the Frankfurt School is engaged in Critical Theory. Thinking systematically about the task of self-reflexively connecting to struggles of emancipation requires a different approach. It is helpful to understand Critical Theory as a broad and varied tradition, with core cases (such as Horkheimer’s 1937 text “Traditional and Critical Theory”), but no sharp boundaries. Understood that way, there cannot be a fully comprehensive treatment of Critical Theory, but it is possible to think of this tradition as involving multiple morphing sequences, whereby approaches are amended in various ways over time and thereby change into something else. One important dividing line is how historical or transcendental one takes Marx’s task to be—some proponents of Critical Theory are, in effect, historical contextualists, while others seek to establish the conditions of possibility of human interaction as such.

scholarly journals Tecnologia e Progresso: Dois pontos de vista da Teoria Crítica/Technology and Progress: two views of critical theory

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (7) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Rafael Cordeiro Silva
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Productive Force ◽  
The Status ◽  
Dual Perspective ◽  
Advanced Industrial Society

O artigo pretende mostrar a discussão sobre a tecnologia no Instituto de Pesquisa Social baseado nos pensamentos de Horkheimer e Marcuse. Embora ambos discutam a tecnologia referenciada socialmente, as conclusões a que chegam não são as mesmas. O pensamento do jovem Horkheimer avalia positivamente a tecnologia enquanto força produtiva capaz de libertar o ser humano. Gradativamente essa posição vai cedendo lugar, a partir dos anos 1940, a uma posição mais cética sobre as possibilidades da tecnologia. Esta passa a ser vista enquanto instância de dominação da natureza e dos homens. A tecnologia é responsável pelo declínio do indivíduo. Ao contrário, desde seu primeiro escrito, Marcuse avalia a tecnologia a partir de uma dupla perspectiva: ela é dominação e libertação. No quadro de referência de sua teoria da sociedade, a tecnologia é concebida como força de libertação. Em suas análises da sociedade industrial avançada, a tecnologia está voltada essencialmente para a dominação e manutenção do status quo. Essa dupla percepção torna o pensamento de Marcuse mais dialético e menos pessimista que o de Horkheimer.Abstract: The article intends to show the discussion on technology at the Institute of Social Research based on the thoughts of Horkheimer and Marcuse. Although both discuss the technology referenced socially, the conclusions they reached are not the same. The thought of the young Horkheimer evaluates technology as a productive force capable of liberating the human being. In the 1940s this position gradually gave way to a more skeptical one about the possibilities of technology. This is now seen as an instance of domination of nature and man. Instead, since his first writing, Marcuse evaluates technology from a dual perspective: it is domination and liberation. In the framework of his theory of society, technology is conceived as a force for liberation. In his analysis of advanced industrial society, technology is geared primarily for the domination and maintenance of the status quo. This dual perception makes Marcuse’s thought more dialectical and less pessimistic than those of Horkheimer. Keywords: Horkheimer, Marcuse, Technology, Progress, Social Theory

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