The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory

Much has been written about the lack of foundations for the critical method. In keeping with its original purpose, however, critical theory requires foundations very different from those demanded by traditional theory. This chapter begins by highlighting the transformative project of critical theory and the preconditions for privileging this kind of interpretation. Recent trends toward the metaphysics of “recognition” or insistence upon the “pragmatic universals” of language need to make way for a concern with uncovering the conflict-ridden constitution of the historical totality, or what Marx termed the “ensemble of social relations,” and how any transformative project rests on illuminating the ways in which freedom is linked with necessity.

This chapter traces Marx’s influence on the development of the early Frankfurt School, making explicit the Marxist dimensions of its cultural critique, its dialectical, historical, and materialist methods, as well as the role of praxis and class in its critical social theory. The author outlines the general characteristics of Western Marxism and then contrasts them with the deterministic doctrines of the Second International and Soviet Marxism. He then examines the Marxist heritage of the Institute of Social Research’s influential and programmatic texts of the 1930s, beginning with Horkheimer’s inaugural address of 1931. Although the chapter briefly discusses the work of Institute members such as Henryk Grossmann, Leo Löwenthal, and Erich Fromm, its primary focus is on the work of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse.

This chapter begins with a brief reconstruction of Lukács’ theory of reification, then goes on to consider the theory’s critical reception by Theodor W. Adorno, Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth. The author focuses on the critical reservations of these main representatives of the three generations of critical theory on Lukács’ theory, while also briefly referring to their attempts to preserve its true core. The chapter culminates in a broad assessment of the Frankfurt School’s critique of the theory and an attempt to determine the lead that a contemporary update should take.

Critical theory has usually been regarded as a unique amalgamation of ideas drawn from Marx, Weber, and Freud, among other sources. What this view tends to minimize or overlook is the unique role of the critical theorists, beginning with Georg Lukács (a critical theorist “before the fact”), in reviving, interpreting, and further developing a distinctively Hegelian approach to the problems of knowledge, culture, and politics. This chapter first demonstrates the role of critical theorists in reviving Hegelianism in the early twentieth century. Then, it outlines the role of Hegelian philosophy as the basis for concepts of totality in the thought of Georg Lukács and Max Horkheimer, and of rationality in the thought of Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno. The critique of, and then return to, Hegel in the work of Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth is also considered. The chapter concludes with an evaluation of three historical interpretations of the significance of the Hegelian element in critical theory, a consideration of the limits of Hegelianism for critical theory, and a suggestion of a fourth interpretation.

This chapter discusses the many uses and abuses of the Lukácsian theory and compares them with the actual content of Lukács’s early Marxist work. It presents the core of Lukács’s argument in something like its original meaning and considers its significance for the Frankfurt School, which drew on Lukács’s theory of reification despite strong reservations. The author outlines his own understanding of Lukács’s theory, and then indicates some of the various ways in which Adorno, Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas take up its themes. He considers the critiques of Lukács in Adorno, Habermas, and Axel Honneth, and explains his disagreements with their attempts to come to terms with this influential and inconvenient predecessor. In conclusion, the chapter returns to some suggestive hints in Honneth and Marcuse that could form the basis for further development of Lukács’s concept of resistance.

By analyzing the interrelated approaches formulated in the late 1930s and early 1940s by Friedrich Pollock, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno, this chapter demonstrates that, in spite of the richness of their attempts to formulate a critical theory more adequate than traditional Marxism to the transformations of the twentieth century, these thinkers retained some of its political–economic presuppositions and, as a result, reached a theoretical impasse: in attempting to deal with a new configuration of capitalism, their approach lost its reflexivity; it no longer could account for itself as a historical possibility. This chapter examines the complex relation of classical critical theory to traditional understandings of capitalism in order to clarify the trajectory of the former and also illuminate the limits of the latter. In so doing, it points to a fundamentally different analysis of capitalism, one that—if integrated with the rich concerns of the Frankfurt School—could serve as the point of departure for a critical theory that could both be reflexive and elucidate the nature and dynamic of our global social universe.

This chapter highlights how considering the contributions of critical theory would enhance the work of comparative–historical social scientists, by drawing attention to two dimensions that traditionally have been ignored in comparative–historical analysis. First, comparative–historical analysis tends to sideline the question of whether different social, political, cultural, and economic forms may in fact be expressive of an underlying, historical logic that must not be ignored. Second, comparative–historical analysts do not appear to consider that and how their research agenda may be an expression of the specificity of social–historical circumstances they endeavor to illuminate, but which, in a sense, is being objectified via comparative–historical social scientists’ preferred mode of analysis. For the most part, comparative–historical researchers seems to work from the assumption that there is no need for the examination of how their research agendas, questions, and tools are situated in and reflect the societal universe, beyond the scope of particular cases, similarities, and differences.

This chapter reconstructs critical theory’s engagement with instrumental reason and explicates why the critique of instrumental reason was so central to the work of the first generation of critical theorists and how it posed conundrums that motivated Habermas’s work. The first section deals with the intellectual sources upon which critical theorists drew in developing the critique of instrumental reason, focusing particularly on Max Weber and Georg Lukács. The author then discusses the critique of instrumental reason advanced by the critical theorists, focusing on the figures who most explicitly dealt with the problem, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse, and deals with the problem of instrumental reason as it applies to issues of social scientific method, the Enlightenment, culture, and technology. The third section looks at solutions to the problem of instrumental reason, examining Adorno’s concept of the negative dialectic, Marcuse’s political vision, and, finally, the emergence of Habermas’s theory of communicative reason. The author concludes by discussing the relevance of critical theory’s engagement with instrumental reason in light of contemporary debates in the social sciences.

This chapter explains and defends the sort of materialism that was a core theoretical commitment of Marx and of the early Frankfurt School—in particular, Max Horkheimer—and which has been the subject of aggressive internecine criticisms on the part of later critical theorists, like Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth. The author offers grounds for thinking Marx’s and Horkheimer’s materialism both attractive and plausible. Section 10.1 establishes some necessary distinctions between substantive and explanatory materialism, Sect. 10.2 offers an account of Marx’s materialism, intended to hew closely to Horkheimer’s reading of Marx, Sect. 10.3 discusses Horkheimer’s understanding of materialism as a practical–theoretical commitment, and Sect. 10.4 concludes the chapter by offering some defense of materialism, chiefly centered around the normative importance of social labor, which both Marx and Horkheimer affirm.

This chapter explores the different features of the critical method as an epistemological and methodological underpinning for the critical social sciences and for critical theory more generally, and furthermore calls into question the prevailing methodological assumptions and theses that underpin the mainstream contemporary social sciences. It argues that critique as a method of knowledge production breaks with the most basic and deeply entrenched methodological assumptions and logics of the mainstream social sciences. The author explores the basic pillars of the critical method: the nature of reality as dynamic and processual rather than discrete and static, the nature of the unification of “factual” knowledge claims and “normative” or “evaluative” knowledge claims, and the relation between essence and appearance in the comprehension of social facts and social reality more generally. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the nature of critical judgment as an essential aim of critical theory or critical social sciences.

The main difference between critical theory and others, as famously outlined by Horkheimer, is its critical aim: as opposed to “traditional” theories that mainly try to understand or even explain society, critical theory wants to overcome the current state of society and help erect a more “reasonable” society without exploitation, alienation and unnecessary suffering. However, culture has not always been the central interest of critical theory. The initial approach of Karl Marx rather stressed economic structures and political struggles, whereas later thinkers such as Habermas and Honneth almost exclusively focused on social norms. The focus shifted from political economy to psychoanalysis and culture in the first generation of the Frankfurt School, and further on to moral and legal philosophy in the second generation. This chapter mainly focuses on these theories, in particular on the works of Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. In order to frame these approaches, the chapter starts with an overview of Marxian critical theory and ends with an outlook on the normativist stance of later theories.

This chapter examines Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, a theoretical discourse, or a collection of essays written over an extended period of time, on the relationship between authentic art and a critical theory of society. Adorno believed that the relationship between authentic art, truth and morality can lead to a form of praxis freed up from both the totalized and reified world. Addressing authentic arts’ truth potential, Adorno strives to understand and explain how a perspective on art can clarify how the world is and how we can conduct ourselves in it. His aesthetic critique, the chapter argues, is an allegorical and reconstructed view of politics (as theory) and the meaning of the political in a work (of art). For Adorno, critical theory, and praxis itself, should consider the relationship that exists between authentic art and the individual coming to terms with this relation. Adorno considered aesthetics and art in an historical context, arguing that to understand art and to seek the meaning of art is to answer the question of the authentic meaning of history.

This chapter examines the concept of aesthetic autonomy in the context of Adorno’s critical aesthetics and in relation to the writings on art and aesthetics of other members of the Frankfurt School such as Benjamin, Marcuse, Habermas and Wellmer. It does this against the background of the broader Kantian Enlightenment concept of the autonomy of the individual. The historical emergence of the concept and of its relation to art and the work concept in the West, together with its present problems, is outlined and a critique of ahistorical readings of “autonomous art” is offered, in particular the perennial problems in aesthetics to do with meaning and interpretation. The case is argued for “critique through form,” underlying which is a mediated relation to the excluded social other. It is also argued that this “critical” dimension of autonomous art survives even the disintegration of the work concept that has become historically inseparable from it.

Any ideological operation that proceeds by way of positing a more or less narrowly defined set of correspondences forecloses in advance any inquiry regarding the contingent, and therefore—in principle—changeable relation of the ideological content to the world in which it is formed and from which it also departs. That is to say, the kind of thinking that would break open the fossilized structures of an ideological formation must first center on an investigation of the ways in which the presupposition of a stable correspondence in actuality works to displace and even dissimulate its own contingency. What kind of judgment, then, would be required to approach this set of concerns? What type of judgment would thinking have to elicit when it wishes to posit such norms or to evaluate such ideas, phenomena, and behaviors? This chapter examines what it is, in Adorno’s thinking, that locates the core of such acts of judgment in works of art and, more generally, in the realm of the aesthetic.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (re-)introduced the concept of aesthetics into the philosophical discipline. Based on Baumgarten’s concept of aesthetics, inter alia, Immanuel Kant as well as Johann Gottfried von Herder continued to work on the further development of this field. Both reformulated Baumgarten’s relation between aesthetics and logic. According to Kant, the combination of logic and transcendental aesthetics makes a theory of human experience possible. For Herder, aesthetics is neither concept nor judgment of taste. Rather, the understanding of aesthetics serves to transform philosophy into anthropology. Based on Baumgarten’s work on aesthetics and Kant’s partition between transcendental and anthropological aspects of human sensibility, this chapter argues that Herder’s notion of aesthetic anthropology, relating feeling and history, can be seen as an interesting point combining aesthetics, art(work) and social theory.

If critical theory is to claim its place in philosophy as not merely an attitude or a set of alliances, but also as a coherent philosophy, then what is necessary most of all is to specify the nature of what it means to be critical in a manner that is both methodically concrete and original to this movement. This chapter proposes turning to the early and middle writings of Walter Benjamin in order to give such a formulation. The concept of critique or criticism (Kritik) points toward the inner core of early critical theory’s development because it cuts across two of the central concerns of the first generation of critical theory: art criticism and social critique. Walter Benjamin’s work has an especially strong significance in helping us understand the entwinement between these two dimensions of the concept of critique. This is because, the author argues, critique is ultimately for Benjamin an epistemological category that cuts across both the reception of art and the participation in political life.

In 1937, when Max Horkheimer tied critical theory to skepticism about the assumption that working-class consciousness would transcend reification and achieve revolutionary clarity, the working class itself was still a modest presence on the world stage. Now, that class is vastly larger and more diverse. Wage-paid labor has become the norm everywhere, not just or primarily in the Euro-Atlantic realm. Yet today, few of Horkheimer’s heirs occupy themselves with questions of class and social transformation. Why? Clues, this chapter argues, can be found in the early history of critical theory, which was divided on this question from the start. Working-class subjectivity appeared, from the standpoint of Horkheimer, to combine authority fetishism with commodity fetishism, and the mission of theory was redefined as critique, by means of inquiry anchored in research, with class and consciousness as focal themes. The early critical theorists, however, were unable to sustain this dialectic. Ultimately, this chapter argues, their rejection of blind optimism yielded to an equally blinkered pessimism, which vitiates most forms of “critique” today.

The chapter first examines Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s well-known critique of authority and the family. One aspect of this groundbreaking work is its exclusive focus on men and boys. In the 1970s, Jessica Benjamin wrote two seminal essays critiquing this focus, showing how it resulted in the idealization of the bourgeois father and a punitive superego. This critique is part of the chapter’s study, before it moves on to Marcuse’s dialectical transformation of Freudian psychoanalysis into a ground of utopia. Arguably, there is no more important work in Marcuse’s oeuvre than Eros and Civilization. It represents the utopian spirit in critical theory at its strongest, a spirit, the author argues, that has been lost in the next generation of critical theorists, particularly in the early work of Habermas in Knowledge and Human Interests.

This chapter suggests that, while not easily discerned and indeed denied, Marx did have an implicit notion of “human nature” and elements of an implied social psychology of (thwarted) desire that informed the 1844 manuscripts. Why was alienation onerous? People felt pain! More specifically, the class relationships of market society, based on private property, depended on alienated wage labor to produce surplus value, which, together with the dominant ideologies that sustained capitalism, frustrated the basic fundamental human. One of the fundamental innovations of the Frankfurt School (FS) following this was the incorporation of the newly emerging psychoanalytic depth psychology into a critical, emancipatory social psychology of domination. As this chapter explains, not only were such concerns absolutely central for the early FS, but also their perspectives continue to provide major insights into the contemporary world fraught with the dangers from unprecedented inequality fostering resurgent fascism and nihilistic terror.

The belief in the inevitability of proletarian revolution came undone in the aftermath of the First World War and set into motion currents of thought and practice that crystallized into what gets identified as “critical theory.” Where orthodoxy held that the workers of the world were destined to overthrow their oppressors, the war dispelled this myth and revealed that nationalism, racism, and charisma trumped progressive social and political movements. The famous Frankfurt School was decisive in mining the various strains of critique from the classical tradition and synthesizing them with elements of contemporary thought, especially from psychoanalysis. One of the most fruitful lines of inquiry centered on the sadomasochistic character and its manifestation in the domains of politics and society. Authoritarianism and the authoritarian personality are still vitally important problems at the heart of the critical theory project. This chapter maps out the development of the theory of authoritarianism, where it succeeded, and where it failed, and points the way for fresh analyses of authoritarianism in the era of imperialism and totalitarianism.

The Fromm–Marcuse debate in Dissent magazine published in 1955–56 was a defining moment in the intellectual careers of both theorists, and has helped define the reception of Freud for Frankfurt School scholars for over 50 years now. The literature on this debate about psychoanalytic theory and radical politics gave rise to numerous polemics between pro-Fromm and pro-Marcuse partisans, much of it now outdated as critical theorists have come to understand that they have more in common with each other than with mainstream social sciences. This chapter reviews the history of this theoretical debate on the status of Freudian theory in critical theory, and offers a synthetic reappraisal of the insights both theorists offer for a contemporary analysis of character and authoritarianism in light of contemporary debates within psychoanalysis and recent developments in Frankfurt School scholarship on the ideas and careers of both Fromm and Marcuse. The chapter discusses what a critical theory of authoritarianism offers social philosophy and social sciences in the contemporary context of capitalist crisis, cultural chaos, violence and impending environmental disaster.

Critical theories, from their beginning in Marx’s philosophy to the Frankfurt School with its different generations, have always been characterized by a certain ambivalence toward moral questions. They often conceive themselves as an alternative to traditional moral philosophy, which is criticized both for separating context-free normative justification and empirical descriptions too strictly and for its seeming commitment to moral and normative standards developed independently from historical and social contingency. The different generations of critical theory have all attempted to develop a theory of normative judgment which is appropriately critical but which nevertheless does not require any commitment to naive moral naturalism or context-free realism. In the chapter, the author traces this through the different stages of the development of critical theories, and argues that at least some of the answers we can find in this tradition do not fit into the usual division between realist and antirealist theories in contemporary metaethics.

In recent years, analytic philosophers have begun to pay increased attention to shared or “collective intentionality,” a term referring broadly to our human capacity to act in concert. From the deeply rooted individualistic perspective of contemporary cognitive science, this ability represents a real problem. However, from the perspective of critical theory, and of Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action in particular, the social has always been integral to how we think of agency and the self. Furthermore, there is a long tradition in critical theory of using empirical research in psychology and sociology to inform conceptions of self and agency. In this chapter, the author shows how subjectivity and intersubjectivity are inextricably intertwined in the Habermasian theoretical framework, and traces the ways in which Habermasian account parallels feminist conceptions of the self as relational.

This chapter argues that the critical project in social theory can revitalize its critical potential if it aligns with a theory of society and its institutions seen as social systems. The first generation of critical theory repelled the project of normativity as it had been pursued in Hegel’s The Philosophy of Right or in functionalist exponents of classical sociological theory. Yet, the recent turn toward the paradigm of recognition embraces a theory of justice fashioned after the ethical demands of the Hegelian project. This chapter discusses the subsumption of a theory of normative social institutions to the forces of reification and of one-dimensionality in the writings of Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse; Habermas’s critical reconstruction of systems theory that salvages the unnoticed normativity of social institutions in modernity and reexamines social systems as value-laden entities; and the project of fortifying the value of freedom in institutional arrangements in the work of Axel Honneth. The chapter concludes with some thoughts on the systemic anomalies that Honneth’s research program for critical theory seems to accommodate.

The term “recognition” has in the last two or three decades become the centre point of an extraordinary amount of theoretical activity among critical theorists and social and political philosophers. It is also at the centre of a great deal of conceptual ambivalence and often theoretical confusion as not all authors mean the same thing with the term and as there is often inadequate attention to the different concepts at stake. In this chapter, the author maps central parts of the conceptual and theoretical landscape around the term “recognition”, which is relevant for critical theory, and discuss some of the main contemporary authors on the theme: Axel Honneth, Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser and Judith Butler.

Having written uninterruptedly on several topics concerning political and social philosophy from the late 1970s to the present, Axel Honneth offers his readers a wide range of possibilities to engage with his work. The theoretical path traced in his almost 40 years of intellectual life, however, has not always followed a univocal line, advancing through conceptual shifts of varying scope, always in a committed debate with his peers, commentators and students. This chapter proposes an interpretation that allows understanding the theoretical shifts undertaken along this path, showing that Honneth moves between two critical models: one centered on the social actors’ experience of disrespect and injustice, and another focused on institutions and the functional imperatives of the social order. As a result, the second model runs the risk of falling prey to Honneth’s own objection of critical theory’s sociological deficit. A conceptual tool for avoiding such risk can be found, the author argues, in a dialogically interpreted notion of normative reconstruction, which could restore the latent, dialectical role of negativity, once crucial to Honneth’s theory.

This chapter develops a vision of critical theory as being engaged more concretely with forms of dissatisfaction arising directly from key facts about contemporary society. In particular, the author is interested in two fundamental kinds of dissatisfaction: (a) a loss of meaning due to the progressive evisceration of the past, and of tradition, as sources of orientation, and (b) an enhanced sense of transience as time is increasingly homogenized and made calculable independently of lifeworldly and narratively structured contexts of temporal awareness. The chapter starts by identifying some of the negative consequences for a critical theory of society seeking to identify and critique social pathology that arise as a result of Habermas’s turn from experience (which used to be the leitmotif of Adorno’s work) to validity. It then turns to the question of modernization, arguing for the centrality of the category of time. The chapter finishes by drawing up a research program based on a renewed conception of critical theory.

International human rights have become an important global norm that has increasingly been incorporated into international law and global conventions. Human rights are a key reference point of mobilizations by diverse groups and international nongovernmental organization (INGOs) in global publics and global civil society. And human rights are also often critically appropriated by domestic and transnational political struggles of political activists and dissidents. Yet human rights are also used and abused by regimes, global (legal, economic, and political) institutions, and powerful corporate interests stabilizing a profoundly injust global social order. Drawing from Frankfurt School theorizing and critically examining more recent discussions among theorists partly indebted to this tradition (Benhabib, Forst), this chapter reflects on contemporary human rights debates and their meaning for critical cosmopolitan theory and politics today. It is argued that contemporary critical theory offers an important lens to situate human rights in global and local social and material conditions while recognizing human rights as a tool in struggles for political freedom and global social justice.

The chapter departs from earlier discourses over the exhaustion of immanent critique, one-dimensionality, and the end of alternatives. The author addresses the current profound contradictions of capitalism and the environment, which have loomed earlier in capitalism’s growth imperative but have accelerated enormously with the latest phase of globalization and the consequent growth of the global economy relative to the biosphere (i.e., with massive increases in the production of waste and throughput of resources). This chapter addresses climate change and related ecological problems (e.g., biodiversity), and also focuses on their intersection with enormous class inequality. The core theme is the unsustainability of capitalism as we have known it, the role of critical theory, and the relation of critical theory to natural science.

This chapter explores recent research by critical theorists concerning theories of (under)development. Drawing from the research of Thomas McCarthy, Axel Honneth, Jurgen Habermas, Amy Allen, Nancy Fraser, and others, the author explores some of the divergent responses critical theorists have given toward the theory and practice of global developmental assistance. Some theorists defending a strong modernist approach to development (e.g., McCarthy, Habermas and Honneth) appear to endorse a logic of development that works within a domesticated model of capitalist markets and lending practices; others (Allen and Fraser) reject this approach. The chapter raises questions about how development that fits within the traditional emancipatory aim of critical theory must also be (democratically?) empowering. Finally, it raises deeper philosophical questions about whether such a critical theory of development must or should instantiate a concept of progress and whether progress so construed should be interpreted principally in terms of expanding freedom (emancipation and empowerment) or simply expanding social welfare opportunity.

Herbert Marcuse believed that the development of a society that is free of oppression, domination, and surplus repression required the development of a “new sensibility”. That is, he believed that the human instinctual structure would have to be radically modified. This is possible insofar as the human instinctual or drive structure often reflects the present organization of society. This chapter explores the possibility of developing this new sensibility by rethinking it through the lenses of intersectionality and democratic attunement. The theory of intersectionality discloses the ways in which multiple forms of oppression are intertwined and how they coexist in one and the same individual. Intersectionality opens up a space for the deconstruction of identities that have been formed within oppressive social structures. This deconstruction allows for the possibility of what the author calls democratic attunement. The chapter claims that Marcuse’s concept of the new sensibility can be developed by engaging the theory of intersectionality and democratic attunement.