This lecture notes discusses the topic "critical theory" the Frankfurt School tradition. The term critical theory can be used quite loosely, as in the present dictionary, to refer to a whole range of theories which take a critical view of society and the human sciences or which seek to explain the ...
The term critical theory can be used quite loosely, as in the present dictionary, to refer
to a whole range of theories which take a critical view of society and the human
sciences or which seek to explain the emergence of their objects of knowledge. Much
more specifically, it also refers to the major strand in the work of the Frankfurt School,
and particularly to the writings of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse,
and lately Axel Honneth and Jürgen Habermas.
Horkheimer’s inaugural address to the Institut for Sozialforschung (Institute for Social
Research) broadly defines critical theory as a human activity that takes society as its
object, and that attempts to transcend the tensions between individual spontaneity and
the work-process relationships on which society is based. In very general terms, the
critical theory of the Frankfurt school can be described as a theory that seeks to give
social agents a critical purchase on what is normally taken for granted and that
promotes the development of a free and self-determining society by dispelling the
illusions of ideology.
Critical theory takes as its starting-point the work of Marx, Hegel, and Freud, and an
analogy is often drawn between the Marxist theory of ideology as illusion and the
individual delusions analysed by Freud in The Future of an Illusion, where he speaks of
the middle-class Viennese girl’s delusion that a prince will come and marry her. Critical
theory would seek to dispel her delusion by giving her a critical and self-critical
awareness of why such a marriage is improbable in the extreme, but also showing her
why she clings to that delusion.
In a very useful survey of the work of Habermas and the Frankfurt School, Raymond
Geuss describes critical theory as a theory that provides a guide for human action, is
inherently emancipatory, has a cognitive content and, unlike a scientific theory, is self-
conscious, self-critical and non-objectifying. Critical theory often takes the form of a
“critique of ideology” (Ideologiekritik) that seeks to explain why social agents accept or
consent to systems of collective representations that do not serve their objective
interests but legitimate the existing power structure, and expose the falsity of non-
cognitive beliefs (such as value-judgements) that are presented as cognitive structures.
Ideologiekritik is not merely a moralistic denunciation of false perceptions but a
cognitive undertaking that seeks to analyze how and why they arise in specific situations
or contexts. The object of a critical theory such as Marxism is to supply the knowledge
of the necessity of transforming the present social order into a classless society. It does
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