sociology and critical thinking role of frankfurt school

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Critical Theory (Frankfurt School)

[ Editor’s Note: The following new entry by Robin Celikates and Jeffrey Flynn replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author. ]

“Critical theory” refers to a family of theories that aim at a critique and transformation of society by integrating normative perspectives with empirically informed analysis of society’s conflicts, contradictions, and tendencies. In a narrow sense, “Critical Theory” (often denoted with capital letters) refers to the work of several generations of philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School. Beginning in the 1930s at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, it is best known for interdisciplinary research that combines philosophy and social science with the practical aim of furthering emancipation. There are separate entries on influential figures of the first generation of the Frankfurt School – Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), and Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) – and the leading figure of the second generation, Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929).

In a broader sense, there are many different strands of critical theory that have emerged as forms of reflective engagement with the emancipatory goals of various social and political movements, such as feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory, and postcolonial/decolonial theory. In another, third sense, “critical theory” or sometimes just “Theory” is used to refer to work by theorists associated with psychoanalysis and post-structuralism, such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida (see these separate entries as well as the entry on postmodernism ).

This entry is primarily focused on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, but broadens outward at various points to discuss engagements by that tradition with a range of critical theories and social developments. The need for a broad approach to critical theory is prompted today by a range of contemporary social, political, economic, and ecological crises and struggles as well as the critique of Eurocentric forms of knowledge production.

1.1 Origins and Generations

1.2 influences, 1.3 critical theory versus traditional theory, 1.4 studies on authoritarianism and mass culture, 1.5 the dialectic of enlightenment, 1.6 the communicative turn, 1.7 a continuing and contested tradition, 2.1 immanent critique, 2.2 normative foundations for critique, 2.3 reconstructive critique, 2.4 disclosive critique, genealogy, and the critique of normativity, 2.5 current challenges, 3.1 alienation, 3.2 reification, 3.3 ideology, 3.4 emancipation, 4.1.1 gender, 4.1.3 colonialism and post-colonialism, 4.2.1 economic crises, 4.2.2 ecological crises, 4.2.3 political crises, 4.3 critical practices, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the frankfurt school: origins, influences, and development.

The “Frankfurt School” of critical theory is not really a school at all. It is a loosely held together tradition constituted by ongoing debates among adherents about how best to define and develop that tradition. This includes disagreements about methods, about how to interpret earlier figures and texts in the tradition, about whether past shifts in focus were advances or dead ends, and about how to respond to new challenges arising from other schools of thought and current social developments. This section tells a largely chronological story, focusing on the origins, influences, and key texts of the Frankfurt School, and concludes with reference to ongoing debates on how to inherit and continue the tradition.

In their attempt to combine philosophy and social science in a critical theory with emancipatory intent, the wide-ranging work of the first generation of the Frankfurt School was methodologically innovative. They revised and updated Marxism by integrating it with the work of Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, and Friedrich Nietzsche while developing a model of radical critique that is immanently anchored in social reality. They used this model to analyze a wide range of phenomena – from authoritarianism as a political formation and as it manifests in both the nuclear family and deep-seated psychological dispositions, to the effects of capitalism on psychological, social, cultural, and political formations as well as on the production of knowledge itself (for excellent guides, see Thompson 2017 and Gordon et al. 2019).

Max Horkheimer outlined the original research agenda for the Frankfurt School in his 1931 inaugural lecture upon becoming director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt (founded in 1923). He proposed an interdisciplinary research program combining philosophy and social theory with psychology, political economy, and cultural analysis (Horkheimer 1931). In that way, “social philosophy” aims at providing an encompassing interpretation of social reality as a whole – as “social totality,” to use a concept central to the Marxist tradition (Jay 1984).

Other key figures of the first generation include Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin, along with Erich Fromm, Friedrich Pollock, Leo Löwenthal, Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, and figures like Siegfried Kracauer, who belonged to the broader circle for a few years (for rich historical accounts, see Jay 1973, Buck-Morss 1977, Dubiel 1978, Wiggershaus 1986, Wheatland 2009). The work of the largely Jewish members of the first generation was deeply marked by the rise of National Socialism, the experience of exile, and, for some of its inner circle, their return to Germany after 1945. After the Nazis closed the Institute, Horkheimer, who had already moved it to Geneva, re-established it at Columbia University in 1934, where he was soon joined by Pollock, Marcuse, and Löwenthal, while Adorno did not emigrate to the US until 1938. Horkheimer, Adorno, and Pollock moved the Institute from New York to Los Angeles in 1941. Those three reestablished the Institute in Germany after the War, with Horkeimer as director from 1951 to 1958 and Adorno from 1958 to 1969. Key figures who worked with first generation figures during this period emerged as the second generation: Jürgen Habermas, Alfred Schmidt, Albrecht Wellmer, Oskar Negt, and Claus Offe.

Habermas was the leading figure of this second generation, taking up Horkheimer’s chair in Frankfurt in 1964 before moving to a research post in Starnberg in 1971. Habermas returned to Frankfurt in 1981, retiring from this position in 1994. Axel Honneth worked closely with Habermas in the 1980s and took over the chair in social philosophy in Frankfurt in 1996; Honneth was also director of, and largely responsible for the revival of, the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt from 2001 to 2018. He is considered a leading figure in the third generation, along with Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, and Christoph Menke (Anderson 2000, Allen 2010). Going beyond the second and third generations of the Frankfurt School, there are far too many figures to list; and the focal points for critical theory in this tradition have expanded, both geographically – with prominent figures in the United States and an active reception in Latin America – and thematically – for example, with a turn to feminism (see §4.1.1 ).

The first generation of the Frankfurt School took inspiration from an earlier generation of critical theorists: “Left Hegelians” in Germany who, after Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s death in 1831, applied his philosophy critically to social and political phenomena like religion and the state, maintaining that the progressive realization of freedom in history that was central to Hegel’s thought was not yet complete and required a fundamental transformation of the status quo. Karl Marx became the most influential of this group. In a materialist transformation of Hegel’s thought, Marx analyzed the concrete conditions for realizing autonomy for all and viewed philosophy itself as conditioned by socioeconomic developments. By developing a critique of political economy in order to analyze the nature of capitalism and the possibilities for revolutionary social transformation, Marx set the standard for future generations of critical theory by combining radical philosophy with a critique of the best available social science of the day in the pursuit of emancipation.

Marx’s early writings, in the 1840s, were written when capitalist modernization was only just beginning in Germany, but he already saw contradictory social relations as the objective condition of capitalist society and exploited workers as a nascent revolutionary force. By the time the Frankfurt School began working out a critical theory of society in the 1930s much had changed as Germany had emerged as a leading economic power in an industrialized, capitalist Europe. Frankfurt School theorists were committed to social transformation, but the vehicle for change Marx identified – workers in advanced capitalist states like Germany – not only lacked revolutionary consciousness, but would soon embrace fascist politics when faced with economic crisis and mass unemployment. Radical social theorists would need revised analytical tools.

To study the psychology of individuals and groups along with social and cultural influences on that psychology, they could not rely on the then-dominant dogmatic versions of scientific Marxism (Pensky 2019). To understand how social conflicts get denied or repressed, and why individuals and groups turn to authoritarian politics that seem not to align with their class interests, they turned to Freudian psychoanalysis. In contrast to orthodox Marxism, they analyzed individual and group psychology, changes in the modern family, and the cultural “superstructure” of society, not just the material “base,” in order to understand how the rise of “mass culture” and the decline of authority figures in the family led to the decline of critical capacities both in the individual psyche and in society generally. This effort to combine Marx and Freud is one of the distinctive features of the Frankfurt School; exactly how to integrate psychoanalytic theory into critical theory has been a long-standing debate (Marcuse 1955, Whitebook 1995, Honneth 2010, Part IV; Allen and O’Connor 2019, Allen 2021).

In addition to incorporating insights from Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, early critical theorists drew on Max Weber’s social theory to analyze contemporary society. Crucial here was Weber’s theory of rationalization, which stressed the growing dominance of instrumental rationality, or means-end reasoning, through the expanding bureaucratization of society. Weber posited a loss of freedom, due to the “iron cage” of modern bureaucracy, and a loss of meaning generated by the “disenchantment of the world” associated with secularization. Weber’s work was crucial for Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of instrumental reason (1947) as well as for Habermas’s later theory of communicative action (1981).

In synthesizing Marx and Weber, the first generation of critical theory was heavily influenced by Georg Lukács’s attempt to do the same in his ground-breaking 1923 essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” (see Brunkhorst 1983). Radically extending Marx’s analysis of commodities by analyzing how they transform the character of society as a whole, and drawing on Weber to describe a process of rationalization that extends to all aspects of life, Lukács used the term “reification” (see 3.2 below) to describe how the commodity form transforms the consciousness of those living in capitalist societies, who then see all social relations, even their relation to themselves, as taking on a “thing-like” character.

The classic philosophical influences on the Frankfurt School range widely, from Immanuel Kant and German Idealism to Nietzsche. In some form, Kant’s appeal to Mündigkeit (autonomy, maturity, responsibility) in his famous essay “What is Enlightenment?” – with its call for freely and publicly making use of reason – animates the ideal of emancipation throughout the work of the Frankfurt School, along with the Kantian conception of the critique of reason: the use of reason to reflect on the limits of reason. But its adherents follow Hegel and Marx in focusing on the social, cultural, and material conditions for achieving autonomy and insisting that reason is always socially and historically embedded. For first generation critical theorists, this entailed a critique of Kant’s own individualist and repressive understanding of autonomy as it arises within capitalist social conditions (Horkheimer 1933) and formalizes the domination of our own inner nature (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947, Excursus II, Adorno 1963a, Chs. 10–11). Some later critical theorists have engaged more positively with Kant, as in Habermas’s attempt to “detranscendentalize” core aspects of Kant’s transcendental philosophy (Habermas 2005, Ch. 2) and Rainer Forst’s Kantian constructivism in moral and political theory (Forst 2007, 2021a).

Hegel’s work has been a continual reference point for Frankfurt School philosophers, with key figures in the tradition – from Marcuse (1941) and Adorno (1963b) to Benhabib (1986, Part I) and Honneth (1992, 2001, 2011) – contributing both substantive studies and relying on Hegel’s methodology either for its holistic approach or as a paradigm of immanent critique while eschewing his metaphysical, teleological, and reconciliatory tendencies. Honneth first built on Hegel’s account of the struggle for recognition and the intersubjective conditions for living an autonomous life (Honneth 1992) before developing his own account of the practices and institutions of modern ethical life that realize freedom in a way that goes beyond its liberal and Kantian interpretations (Honneth 2011). Rahel Jaeggi builds on Hegel’s method of immanent critique in her account of progressive social change as learning processes in response to problems, contradictions, and crises that arise from within ethically thick forms of life (Jaeggi 2014).

In aiming to explain irrationality, the first generation extended the critique of reason, going beyond rationalist philosophers like Kant and Hegel to figures like Freud and Nietzsche. They turned to Nietzsche in particular as a critic of modern bourgeois culture and the violent formation of individual subjectivity. Engagement with Nietzsche’s thought extends from early essays by Horkheimer (1933, 1936a) through Horkheimer and Adorno’s shift toward doing critical theory in a more Nietzschean spirit with the genealogy of reason in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), and Habermas’s more critical take on Nietzsche’s supposed irrationalism (1985, Ch. 3–4), to contemporary authors such as Menke, who returns to Nietzsche as a positive reference point in the critique of the repressive dimensions of the modern ideal of equality (2000) and for a genealogical analysis of the modern subject who demands rights (2015).

One way of categorizing work by later generations of the Frankfurt School is to note how, even when drawing on a range of theoretical resources, they give pride of place to the legacy of a particular figure like Kant, Hegel, Marx, or Nietzsche (often via Foucault), or how they combine approaches. For instance, Honneth and Jaeggi are more Hegelian while Forst is more Kantian, and Benhabib is, like Habermas, a Hegelianized Kantian, and Fraser draws heavily on Marx in recent work while Amy Allen and Martin Saar are influenced by Foucauldian genealogy. The latter is part of a broader engagement between the Frankfurt School and post-structuralism, ranging from the more critical (Habermas 1985) through the more sympathetic (Honneth 1985, Menke 1988, 2000) to attempts to combine deconstructive and reconstructive approaches to critical theory (McCarthy 1991; see also Fraser 1989).

It is not easy to capture key features of an intellectual tradition shaped by such a variety of influences, including multiple figures whose own thinking changed over time, and a body of work addressing a vast range of topics spanning from the 1930s to the present. The rest of this section outlines some of the main arguments and focal points of key texts by key figures. It is not meant to be exhaustive, but to identify influential methodological approaches, arguments, and themes that are indicative of the work of the Frankfurt School and still provide important reference points for contemporary debates.

One largely undisputed reference for defining Frankfurt School critical theory is Horkheimer’s 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in which he defines critical theory by contrasting it with traditional theories that take the existing social order as given. Social sciences do this, for example, when they model themselves after the natural sciences in attempting to descriptively mirror a given set of facts or establish law-like generalizations. The point is not that empirical social research is invalid, but that traditional theories fail to analyze the broader social context in which they are embedded. This form of “positivism” views science as a purely theoretical undertaking divorced from practical interests even while it actually serves a particular social function in relying on established concepts and categories in a way that reinforces dominant ideologies and power structures. In that way, the forms of knowledge production that we rely on for insight into the social order become obstacles to social change.

Critical theory, by contrast, reflects on the context of its own origins and aims to be a transformative force within that context. It explicitly embraces an interdisciplinary methodology that aims to bridge the gap between empirical research and the kind of philosophical thinking needed to grasp the overall historical situation and mediate between specialized empirical disciplines. Critical theory aims not merely to describe social reality, but to generate insights into the forces of domination operating within society in a way that can inform practical action and stimulate change. It aims to unite theory and practice, so that the theorist forms “a dynamic unity with the oppressed class” (1937a [1972, 215]) that is guided by an emancipatory interest – defined negatively as an interest in the “abolition of social injustice” (ibid., 242) and positively as an interest in establishing “reasonable conditions of life” (ibid., 199). “The theory never aims simply at an increase of knowledge as such,” but at “emancipation from slavery” (1937b [1972, 246]) in the broadest sense of eliminating all forms of domination. The critique of traditional social science was further developed by Adorno and Habermas in the so-called positivism dispute in German sociology (Adorno et al. 1969, Wellmer 1969) and Horkheimer’s model of critical theory continues to inform discussions about how social critique might be carried out today in a variety of contexts (Outlaw 2005, Collins 2019, 57–65).

Nothing epitomizes the Frankfurt School’s interdisciplinary approach to analyzing irrational elements of modern society better than their studies of authoritarianism, beginning with studies of German society in the 1930s and continuing with studies of the U.S. in the 1940s. This work combined philosophy, social theory, and psychoanalytic theory with empirical research.

The first substantial foray was Studies in Authority and the Family (Horkheimer 1936b), the product of five years of research carried out by members of the Institute as part of the research agenda outlined by Horkheimer when he became director in 1930. In an essay articulating the study’s theoretical framework, Erich Fromm argued that the “drives underlying the authoritarian character” are “the pleasure of obedience, submission, and the surrender of one’s personality” along with “aggression against the defenseless and sympathy with the powerful” (Fromm 1936 [2020, 39, 41]). A main concern of the Studies was that the nuclear family had lost the power it once had to counter other socializing forces, which could now more directly influence the individual, and that individuals who view the world as governed by irrational forces submit to powerful leaders who ease their feelings of powerlessness.

The focus on authoritarianism continued into exile, with Neumann and Kirchheimer focusing more on distinctly political phenomena such as law, the state structure, and competing political groups under the Nazi regime (see Neumann 1944, Scheuerman 1996). Neumann and Kirchheimer were the main legal and political analysts of the first generation, but were outside the inner circle and less influential on the trajectory the Frankfurt School took in the 1940s (see Scheuerman 1994 and Buchstein 2020 for attempts to revive interest in their legal and political analysis).

The work on authoritarianism that the Institute is most well-known for came with the publication of The Authoritarian Personality (1950), the result of research conducted by Adorno in collaboration with a team of psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley. The aim was to identify personality types that might be susceptible to authoritarianism, based not on explicit commitments to fascist political movements but on psychological characteristics and social attitudes (measured on an “F-scale”). The researchers posited that individuals with an authoritarian personality tend to exhibit traits such as rigid conformity to conventional norms, a tendency toward stereotypical thinking, a preference for strong authority figures and disdain for perceived weakness, a preoccupation with power and status, and a propensity for prejudice and hostility towards minority groups. The book explored the link between authoritarianism and antisemitism, highlighting the role of scapegoating and the projection of repressed aggression onto targeted minority groups.

The text was published in a series edited by Horkheimer, titled Studies in Prejudice , along with other innovative studies such as Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1949), a psychoanalytic analysis of the rhetoric and tropes of American demagogues authored by Frankfurt School member Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman. If The Authoritarian Personality studied the kinds of people potentially receptive to the messages of authoritarian leaders, Prophets of Deceit studied the content of the messaging itself. Adorno would later follow up on all these themes – both the form and content of fascist agitation and the social and psychological conditions under which it can succeed (1951b, 1967a).

The Authoritarian Personality had a major impact on the field of political sociology, inspiring a wave of similar studies and commentary. The recent resurgence of authoritarian populism has inspired renewed interest in Frankfurt School analysis of authoritarianism (see Section 4.2 below) in conjunction with publication of new editions of some of the classic texts along with previously untranslated work by Kracauer on totalitarian propaganda dating from the late 1930s (Kracauer 2013 [2022]) and a 1967 lecture by Adorno on “Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism” (Adorno 1967a [2020]).

One point of continuity between the studies of authoritarianism and Frankfurt School cultural analysis more broadly was the idea that “mass culture” was one of the powerful forces playing an increasing role in the direct socialization of individuals, a role that led to the “disappearance of the inner life” of the individual (Horkheimer 1941) and an increasing loss of the ability to imagine a world any different than the existing one. In its various forms, this general thesis was common to Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse in their critiques of mass culture from the 1930s to the 1960s.

More generally, the Frankfurt School is known for its analysis of popular culture. By contrast to orthodox Marxist dismissal of cultural analysis for focusing on the less consequential “superstructure” of society, Frankfurt School theorists attentively analyzed the form and content of cultural objects along with the genres and modes of producing works of art and popular culture. In an early essay titled “Mass Ornament” (1927), Kracauer argued that analyzing the “inconspicuous surface-level expressions” of an epoch, by virtue of their “unconscious nature,” can disclose its “fundamental substance” and “unheeded impulses” (1927 [1975, 75]). Adorno would later maintain that “cultural criticism must become social physiognomy” (1951a [1967, 30]), a method he pursued in his interpretations of works of literature and music by interpreting the surface features and forms of various cultural artifacts in relation to underlying social conditions as a mode of disclosive critique.

The more pessimistic analysis of mass culture of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse can be distinguished from the more optimistic views developed by Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. Benjamin posited, in his famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility” (1936), that the rise of technologies for mechanical reproduction, such as photography and film, led to the decline of the “aura” surrounding traditional works of art – the “authenticity” associated with the unique presence of the original in space and time – in part because it makes no sense to talk about the “original” version of a photograph. The resulting changes in perception and modes of collective experience and participation in cultural production could, Benjamin hoped, also bring about political forms of art and a more general democratization of culture. He contrasted this emancipatory potential of mass culture, through a politicization of aesthetics, with the aestheticization of politics under fascism (Buck-Morss 1992). Adorno expressed his disagreement in an earlier letter to Benjamin and in published work (Adorno 1936, 1938). As Wellmer puts it, “in technologized mass culture, Benjamin sees elements of an antidote to the psychic destruction of society, whereas Adorno regards it above all as a medium of conformism and psychic manipulation” (1985/86 [1991, 32–33]). While Benjamin placed hope in mass culture, Adorno saw it lying in the kind of autonomous art that resists reconciling subjects to their social world, instead offering a kind of “promise of happiness” in a transfigured future that lies beyond that social world (Adorno 1970, Finlayson 2015, Gordon 2023).

The critique of mass culture took its most dramatic form in the chapter on the “culture industry” in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (first circulated in 1944 and published in 1947). They introduced the term “culture industry” to underline the fact that “mass culture” is not something “the masses” spontaneously generate (Adorno 1967b [1991, 98]), but is manufactured using the same standardized and profit-oriented methods as any industrial production method. In this sense, culture is no longer a relatively autonomous realm of meaning (that might aim, at its best, at beauty, freedom, and truth) or source of critical awareness, but is thoroughly commodified by the “distraction factories” of the culture industry. “Cultural entities typical of the culture industry are no longer also commodities, they are commodities through and through” (ibid., 129). Entertainment replaces experience, numbing the audience’s capacity for critical thought and reconciling them to the status quo in a form of domination far more subtle than direct tyranny.

In this way, Dialectic of Enlightenment , which is perhaps the most influential text by Frankfurt School philosophers, analyzes two forms of mass society, fascist Germany and the United States, focusing primarily on the latter. Co-authored by Horkheimer and Adorno between 1939 and 1944 at the height of Nazi rule and World War II, the text opens with these lines:

Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity (1947 [2002, 1]).

The book is a genealogy of reason that traces its self-destruction from the dawn of human history to the present. Reason was supposed to liberate human beings. Instead, in the dominant form it takes as instrumental rationality, it has become the primary instrument of their domination. With reason taking this form, humans lose their capacity for critical reflection as their thinking is increasingly oriented solely toward self-preservation within a system in which they are powerless. “Thought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process, aping the machine it has itself produced, so that it can finally be replaced by the machine” (ibid., 19).

The root of the catastrophic dynamic lies not just with modernity or capitalism, but goes back to humanity’s earliest attempts to dominate nature. A core thesis of the book is that myth and enlightenment are entwined. The process of enlightenment began with the earliest attempts to overcome “mythic fear” as a way of explaining the unknown and mitigating threats from nature. This anthropological claim about enlightenment is combined with a historical claim about the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science and technology. This is when instrumental rationality truly comes to dominate, as means-end calculation is the kind of reasoning required for capitalist production and efficient bureaucracy. “Enlightenment is totalitarian” (ibid., 50), Adorno and Horkheimer argue; it subsumes everything under its dissolvent rationality. In this way, enlightenment reverts back to myth.

The book represents a shift away from the critique of political economy, indebted to Marx, to the critique of instrumental reason, indebted to Weber (Benhabib 1986, 149–163). Although this shift is sometimes attributed to the growing pessimism of its authors during National Socialism, it was also motivated by Pollock’s analysis of the shift from nineteenth-century liberal capitalism to “state capitalism”: increased intervention by the state into the economy meant that the primacy of the economy posited by Marx had been replaced by the primacy of politics (1941). This claim supported the focus in Dialectic of Enlightenment on the administered control of society by the state apparatus. The book paints a bleak picture of a society in which people live “totally administered lives” under the sway of efficient and calculating institutions. For the sake of self-preservation, they adapt themselves entirely to this apparatus. All the while the culture industry, as an “organ of mass deception,” keeps them entertained at the price of numbing their critical capacities, producing conformity, and undermining any sense of individuality or capacity for autonomy. The book also represents a shift away from the earlier idea of critical theory as interdisciplinary social theory, which could marshal the findings of empirical social science toward the practical aim of emancipation, and more toward speculative history. In the story they tell, the effects of domination are so ubiquitous that every form of scientific knowledge is corrupted.

If Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment was supposed to provide the grounds for a positive concept of enlightenment – as they maintained in its preface (1947 [2002, xviii]) – many critics have wondered what that is supposed to be (Wellmer 1983). Habermas would later argue that the authors needed to leave “at least one rational criterion intact for their explanation of the corruption of all rational criteria” in order to “set the normative foundations of critical social theory;” but they failed to do so (1985 [1987, 127–9]; see also Benhabib 1986).

Reappraisals of the text in recent decades range from defending its approach as a form of world-disclosive critique (Kompridis 2006) that reveals our familiar social world as pathological by using techniques like “rhetorical condensation” (Honneth 1998), to reading it as developing a dialectical conception of progress – not simply a history of decline – aimed at making us more aware of the inevitable entanglement of reason with power (Allen 2014, 2016), and attempts to build on the chapter on antisemitism, which analyzes its social function in providing a “release valve” that allows rage to be “vented on those who are both conspicuous and unprotected” (1947 [2002, 140]), thereby stabilizing domination by channeling potential resistance to social suffering into hatred of a group (Rabinbach 2000, Rensmann 2017).

Herbert Marcuse’s influential book One-Dimensional Man (1964) – best summarized by its subtitle, Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society – can be read as an attempt to update Dialectic of Enlightenment in the form of a diagnosis of U.S. society and its perfected mechanisms of pacification and social control, ranging from art, sexuality, and politics to philosophy and the very act of thinking. Marcuse argues that all forms of critical thought and practice, having been wholly integrated into the wasteful, dehumanizing, profit-seeking, imperialist logic of advanced capitalism, are subsumed by one-dimensional ideology, a “flattening out of the antagonism between culture and social reality” (61).

Marcuse developed his influential concept of “repressive desublimation” to explain how the manipulated need for instant gratification has sanitized any transgressive forces within the domains of sexuality and art. Prior to the rise of the “affluent society,” art contained a transcendent capacity in the sense that it thought of, engaged with, and appropriated the idea of breaking out of the world in which one lived and embodied the hope for a better one to replace it. Within late capitalism, art has lost this critical aspect and dissolved into consumer culture and technological rationality, masking the “surplus repression” that shapes human instincts and needs in line with the functional requirements of social domination and the reproduction of the status quo.

Marcuse’s work has been criticized for its totalizing diagnosis of domination, his reliance on an objectivist account of human nature and needs, and the paternalistic or even authoritarian implications that possibly result from combining these two elements (Jaeggi 2014 [2018, 104–108]). Nonetheless, it has remained an important reference point for the critique of technology (Feenberg 2023a, 2023b, Fong 2016, Ch. 5) and of false needs, and of new right-wing forms of “repressive desublimation” that affirm the status quo in a transgressive mode (Brown 2019, 165–169). Regardless of how one today assesses Marcuse’s concrete analyses, his work exemplifies a tension that all critical theories have to address between the dominating forces of one-dimensionality and the possibility of breaking free of them.

First-generation critical theorists posited various responses to their own bleak diagnoses of society from the 1940s to the 1960s. Marcuse supported rebellious social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, in contrast to other leading representatives of critical theory who kept a conspicuous distance. In One-Dimensional Man , he placed hope for overcoming the repressive, one-dimensional society in a “Great Refusal” to abide by its norms, as carried out by the “substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable” (1964, 256). He later expressed solidarity with, and saw as examples of this refusal in, both the global student movement (1968, 119) and the feminist movement with its aim of overcoming dominant forms of aggressive masculinity (1974). He likewise praised counter-cultural movements for expressing sexual, moral, and political rebellion in a non-aggressive form of life that might generate a total change in values (1967). For Marcuse, emancipation involves a new morality that fulfills the vital needs for joy and happiness and encompasses an aesthetic-erotic dimension that is foreshadowed in alternative artistic tastes and new social and cultural practices. While Horkheimer and Adorno were less supportive of rebellious social movements, they did become important institutional figures and public intellectuals after their return to Germany (Müller-Doohm 2003, part IV; Demirović 2016). Adorno’s radio addresses in particular can be viewed as an attempt to educate the public for autonomy and so as a kind of response to their own bleak diagnoses of society.

But the core of Adorno’s response, from the early essay on the culture industry to his posthumously published Aesthetic Theory (1970), was to posit that “autonomous” or “authentic” art, by contrast to the products of the culture industry, maintains a utopian impulse insofar as it points beyond, and provides a moment of resistance to, the status quo. For example, atonal music by composers like Arnold Schoenberg generates dissonance in the listener by challenging the unity of the whole found in more harmonious music. Adorno maintained that such art, in challenging aesthetic norms and conventions, can provide aesthetic experiences that are resistant to the homogenizing forces of the culture industry. Critics of this turn to the aesthetic have wondered how this is supposed to provide a sound basis for a critical theory of society (Benhabib 1986, 222).

But one can argue that Adorno’s later work was an attempt to push against that kind of grounding for critical theory. The title of Adorno’s 1966 magnum opus, Negative Dialectics (1966a), refers to a methodology that takes from traditional Hegelian dialectics the emphasis on difference and mediation but abandons the attempt to overcome difference through a unifying synthesis. Instead, taking up an argument already developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment , Adorno argues that “identity thinking” and the “identity principle” have been at the basis of humanity’s destructive project of cognitive as well as practical domination of external as well as internal nature, thereby linking the philosophical to the social oppression of particularity. Adorno rejects “identity thinking” in favor of affirming the negative, namely “non-identity,” that is, the irreducible particularity of objects, experiences, and persons that cannot be subsumed under concepts.

This approach undermines the totalizing aspirations of theoretical systems in philosophy as traditionally understood. The struggle to recognize that which is nonidentical is not only an epistemological but also an ethical and political project that seeks to do justice to both the object and the subject of cognition in their irreducible individuality (Bernstein 2001). Linking epistemology and the philosophy of language to critical theory of society, this leads Adorno to reject not only Hegel’s affirmative synthesis but also Heideggerian ontology and Kantian dualism. Methodologically, Adorno explores alternative ways of thinking about how to use and develop philosophical concepts, taking up the Benjaminian notion of constellation and developing “critical models” in order to articulate the complexity of experience, and suffering, without reducing or constraining it. In Adorno’s view, negative dialectics is a form of immanent critique engaged in a dynamic and transformative process, as it “must transform the concepts which it brings, as it were, from outside into those which the object has of itself, into what the object, left to itself, seeks to be, and confront it with what it is” (Adorno 1957 [1976, 69]). In his cultural criticism and interventions in public debates, Adorno follows this paradigm by exploring how concrete experiences exemplify a form of social domination that is obscured by mass culture but also open up the possibility of transcending reified consciousness by articulating the internal contradictions within social reality.

Jürgen Habermas, who worked closely with Horkheimer and Adorno in the 1950s until he fell out of favor with Horkheimer for seeming too radical, inherited one of the central claims of the Dialectic of Enlightenment , namely that Enlightenment is inseparable from the self-critique of Enlightenment, while also insisting on the context-transcending force of reason embedded in everyday practice.

Two works from the 1960s established his status as a leading figure in the second generation: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) and Knowledge and Human Interests (1968b). In the former, Habermas provides a historical and conceptual reconstruction of the idea of the public sphere in which subjects recognize each other as equals, submit to the “force of the better argument,” and subject legislation to the public use of reason. Against the backdrop of its emergence in eighteenth-century European societies, Habermas identifies the internal contradictions of the public sphere under the conditions of capitalism and traces its decline under the combined pressure of mass culture and mass media that has gradually transformed a reasoning public into passive consumers – a claim consistent with the “culture industry” thesis.

Critics argued that Habermas’s historical narrative of decline presupposes highly idealized versions of public debate and a “reasoning” public – a public that has always in truth been fragmented by class, gender, and race-based domination – and neglects the political significance of a multiplicity of subaltern and non-official public spheres and counter-publics (Negt and Kluge 1972, Fraser 1990, Warner 2002, Allen 2012). Nevertheless, his critical analysis of a contemporary public of consumers as the objects of processes of de-politicization, commercialization, political manipulation, and refeudalization seems to have lost nothing of its relevance (Seeliger and Sevignani 2022). The claim that a robust and independent public sphere is crucial to a healthy democracy is central to Habermas’s later, systematic contribution to democratic theory in Between Facts and Norms (1992), and he continues to analyze recent transformations in the structures and modes of communication within the public sphere (Habermas 2006, 2021).

Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests (1968b) was an ambitious attempt to ground critical social theory as a form of inquiry aimed at fostering a distinct type of knowledge tied to a deep-seated human interest in emancipation. This was a return to Horkheimer’s methodological aims in “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937), but with a novel set of arguments, such as Habermas’s claim that the method of critical theory can be illuminated by way of an analogy with psychoanalysis – “the only tangible example of a science incorporating methodological self-reflection” (1968b [1971, 124]). Like Horkheimer, Habermas was critical of the positivist understanding of science for failing to see the connection between specific kinds of inquiry and fundamental human interests. Habermas posited that both the natural sciences and the “human sciences” (interpretive social sciences and humanities) are grounded in distinct practical interests. The natural sciences are a reflective extension of “labor” (instrumental action), which is tied to the practical interest in material reproduction. The human sciences are a reflective extension of “interaction” (linguistic communication), which is tied to the practical interest in symbolic reproduction. Habermas distinguished “critique” or “reflection” as a third practice organized around the interest in emancipation, understood in terms of overcoming various forms of heteronomy, domination, and dependency.

In the early 1970s, Habermas largely abandoned this framework, based in an anthropology of knowledge, though he did continue to pursue some of its themes, and epistemological questions have remained central to his work in at least two domains: first, in his “postmetaphysical” (non-foundationalist and fallibilistic) understanding of philosophy as a form of critical reflection at the intersection between science and society (Habermas 1983a, Ch. 1) and, second, in his critique of naturalism, especially neuroscience as a form of positivism or scientism that absolutizes the observer’s perspective, thereby negating the irreducibility of the participants’ perspective and occluding the normative structure of interpersonal communication (Habermas 2005, Ch. 6).

Habermas increasingly came to the view that critical theory needed more robust social-theoretical and normative foundations, since, in his eyes, the totalizing critique of the first generation had proven to be self-undermining (1985, Ch. 5) and his own approach in Knowledge and Human Interests had conflated the reconstruction of invariant structures of communication (formal pragmatics) with the critique of the false consciousness of particular persons and societies (1973a). Habermas’s alternative path, after abandoning that methodological framework, was to focus on communicative reason in a two-volume magnum opus titled The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). By contrast with an instrumentalist understanding of reason and action, Habermas’s “communicative turn” starts from a reconstruction of the rational and normative potential of everyday interactions.

This turn involves a multidimensional paradigm shift, illustrating the theoretical ambition of Habermas’ enterprise. He develops a theory of communicative action and rationality that is anchored in everyday practices of communication, in which we raise validity claims whose normative dynamic is context-transcendent and which allow for consensus-based coordination of action. He provides a historical reconstruction of modern rationalization processes, in which social integration via authority or shared tradition has been increasingly replaced by an expanded use of communicative reason in response to the pressure to cooperate. Finally, he constructs a two-level model of society based on the distinction between “system” and “lifeworld,” claiming that the regulation of coexistence in modern societies depends on both communication oriented towards mutual understanding (“lifeworld”) and on the anonymous systems of state bureaucracy and the capitalist market (“system”).

For the methodological renewal of critical theory, Habermas’s central claim is that within complex societies, social order always has a double form: It must simultaneously be viewed as lifeworld and as system. The lifeworld can only be understood from the hermeneutic perspective of its participants while the mechanisms of systemic integration only come into view from a system-theoretical or external perspective. Critical theory needs both perspectives in order to identify distorting effects of the system on the lifeworld. Habermas famously and controversially diagnoses a “colonization of the lifeworld” by the systemic media of money and power, which impose economic and administrative rationality – the main forms of “functionalist reason” – on areas of the lifeworld whose reproduction relies on communicative processes of cultural reproduction, social integration, and socialization that cannot be subsumed under the media of money and power without generating resistance. This provides a new foundation for critical theory by updating the critique of reification in the form of a critique of systematic distortions of communication. The “critique of functionalist reason” becomes a central task for critical theory, along with the aim of diagnosing the “selective pattern” of capitalist modernization that only partially realizes the actually available potential for rationality and learning within society.

In the ensuing discussion, Habermas was accused of reifying the “system” by conceptualizing the capitalist market and the bureaucratic state as functionally necessary and supposedly norm-free systems that lie beyond the theoretical reach of critical social theory and the political reach of emancipatory politics (Honneth and Joas 1991), of idealizing the lifeworld in ways that largely ignore the domination and exploitation of women and minorities (Fraser 1985), of subscribing to a progressivist theory of modernization and history that is Eurocentric and insensitive to the continuing effects of colonial domination (Allen 2016, Ch. 2), and of underestimating how deeply power penetrates into and distorts the very heart of communicative reason (Allen 2008, Chs. 5–6).

Habermas and his followers insist that while these phenomena are real, it is only the power of communicative reason – and the public discourses and deliberations in which it manifests itself and gets institutionalized – that allows us to detect, criticize, and ultimately overcome (if only partially and temporarily) those forms of domination. Whether one agrees or not that the communicative turn enables critical theory to analyze and bring to agents’ attention the distortions that block them from addressing and overcoming obstacles to emancipation, one important legacy of Habermas’s theory can be seen in opening up space for a methodologically pluralist critical theory in response to the fundamental need to capture the perspective of both participants and observers (Bohman 2003). Some Frankfurt School theorists have also built on Habermas’s system-lifeworld distinction in maintaining that social change must be viewed from the perspective of both “evolution” and “revolution” (Brunkhorst 2002, 2014).

One dominant story told about the Frankfurt School begins with Horkheimer’s original research program in the 1930s and views Horkheimer and Adorno’s radical departure from that vision in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) as an intellectual dead end from which Habermas rescued the tradition and returned it to its original methodology. From this perspective, the second generation, dominated by Habermas, superseded the first (see Kompridis 2006, 255–258, for a critique of this story). An alternative story would point out that Dialectic of Enlightenment was in many ways consistent with themes first articulated by Adorno in work from the 1930s – particularly his 1931 inaugural lecture, heavily inspired by Benjamin – that ultimately came to fruition in Negative Dialectics (1966a). To complicate matters in another way, while collaborating on Dialectic of Enlightenment in the 1940s Adorno also contributed to the interdisciplinary collaboration that culminated in The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a product of Horkheimer’s original vision for critical theory that combined social theory with empirical research.

Rather than viewing the second generation solely in terms of Habermas overcoming deficits in the first, this alternative story recognizes that there have always been multiple models and styles of critical theory operating simultaneously within the tradition ​​and that Adorno was heavily influenced by Benjamin prior to collaborating with Horkheimer (Buck-Morss 1977, Wolin 1994, 166, 265–274). Moreover, Adorno’s influence is evident in work by figures in the second generation such as Albrecht Wellmer (1933–2018), who used Adorno’s work as a basis for challenging Habermas’s approach (Wellmer 1985/86, 1993) and was far more sympathetic with post-structuralism than Habermas – also true of Wellmer’s students in the third generation, Christoph Menke (1988, 2000) and Martin Seel. Adorno scholars have defended his work directly against Habermas’s criticisms (Cook 2004, O’Connor 2004: 165–170), and critical theorists continue to defend Adorno’s approach to critical theory (Allen 2016, 2021, 175–183, Marasco 2015, Ch. 3).

To complicate the story further, Benjamin’s work has had an enormous influence on work by a variety of critical theorists, though his wider influence had to wait until Adorno collected Benjamin’s essays for a German audience in 1955 and Hannah Arendt edited them for English readers in 1968. There have been significant studies of Benjamin’s work by scholars working within the Frankfurt School tradition (see Buck-Morss 1989 and Pensky 1993), while many critical theorists beyond the Frankfurt School have engaged Benjamin’s critique of linear notions of progress, and the ways in which they fail to break with the catastrophic continuity of the present (Benjamin 1940, see Löwy 2001), as well as his analysis of the constitutive relation between law and violence (Benjamin 1920/21; see the recently published critical edition, 2021), to mention only Jacques Derrida’s “Force of Law” (1990), Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (1995), and Judith Butler’s Parting Ways (2012) (see also Loick 2012).

Methodological debates within the Frankfurt School focus not only on the legacy of first-generation theorists but also on Habermas’s earlier work, with some arguing that Knowledge and Human Interests is worth revisiting because it was more attuned than his subsequent work to the dynamics of power and domination, making it more apt for addressing oppression based on gender (Allen 2008) or race (McCarthy 2004), or for developing a more comprehensive critical theory of domination (Klein 2020). Honneth (2017) has recently taken Habermas’s text as a jumping off point for refocusing critical theory on the task of elaborating the relation between emancipatory interests and emancipatory knowledge. Honneth nonetheless maintains that Habermas’s use of the methodology of psychoanalysis as a model for emancipatory critique is not apt, while others argue that it is still in many ways productive (Celikates 2009 [2018, 137–157]; see Allen 2021, Ch. 5 for a critique of Habermas, Honneth, and Celikates).

The latter debate is part of the resurging interest in psychoanalysis by some theorists working in the Frankfurt School tradition. Habermas’s own engagement with Freud and psychoanalysis in Knowledge and Human Interests was largely methodological in contrast to the substantive use of Freudian ideas by the first generation (in their analysis of the entanglement of reason and repression and the concrete forces of fascism and antisemitism), and Habermas (1983a) subsequently abandoned psychoanalytic theory entirely in favor of engagement with developmental psychologists like Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg. In developing his theory of recognition, Honneth (1992, Ch. 5) returned to psychoanalysis in the form of object relations theory, primarily in the work of Donald Winnicott, arguing that the experience of fusion and symbiosis that characterizes the early infant-mother relationship is foundational in two ways: It serves as the template for the type of recognition Honneth calls “love” and explains why individuals and groups continue to experience existing relations of recognition – that necessarily fall short of fusion and symbiosis – as unsatisfactory and continue to struggle for recognition. While Honneth’s use of Winnicott is controversial (McAfee 2019, Ch. 2; Whitebook 2021, Deranty 2021), recent debates have more generally focused on how to take up object relations within critical theory (Allen and O’Connor 2019). As a result, the divide now seems to be primarily between those who focus on the pro-social implications of psychoanalytic theory (Honneth 2010, Part IV) and those who also stress asocial or antisocial forces of Freud’s drive theory in general and the death drive in particular in order to avoid what they see as the risk of over-idealization and romanticization built into Honneth’s way of integrating psychoanalysis into his theory of recognition (Allen 2021, Ch. 5). Those critics advocate returning to the more negativistic approaches familiar from first-generation critical theorists (Fong 2016, McAfee 2019, Allen 2021).

Honneth’s return to the question of struggles oriented by emancipatory interests (2017) hearkens back to a shift that began in the 1980s, when a significant strand of Frankfurt School critical theory, including Honneth’s early work (1985), aimed at recovering the connection between theory and practice by linking the development of theory itself to social conflicts and movements. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s Public Sphere and Experience (1972) is an early example of a critique of the bourgeois (i.e. hegemonic) public sphere that invokes proletarian or plebeian non-state forms of the public and the divergent critical experiences they articulate as alternative sources of normativity, while also identifying blockages they face in the form of the “consciousness industry” and the pacification of social conflicts through “pseudo-publics.”

In a more explicit vein, Nancy Fraser contributed to the feminist turn in Frankfurt School critical theory – for which the work of Seyla Benhabib, Jean Cohen, and Amy Allen has also been decisive – in echoing Marx by arguing that critical theory should frame its “research program and its conceptual framework with an eye to the aims and activities of those oppositional social movements with which it has a partisan, though not uncritical, identification” (Fraser 1985, 97), and that the Frankfurt School in general and Habermas in particular had failed to theorize one of the most significant struggles against domination: the feminist movement (see §4.1.1 ).

Honneth has also sought to systematically reconstruct the link between theory development and struggles by taking experiences of misrecognition that lead to social struggles for recognition as a pre-theoretical reference point (1992). Drawing on a wide range of philosophical work, psychological and psychoanalytic accounts of identity-formation, and sociological and historical accounts of social movements struggling for recognition, Honneth has developed a theory of recognition that is the most prominent alternative paradigm, within Habermasian critical theory broadly construed, to Habermas’s theory of communicative action (Honneth 2000, Zurn 2015). Honneth maintains Habermas’s focus on intersubjectivity, but instead of linguistic practice and the ideal of “undistorted communication,” he focuses on relations of mutual recognition and the ideal of “undistorted recognition,” which then serve as the basis for the critique of “social pathologies” that he considers central to the project of critical theory (Honneth 2004).

In short, the Frankfurt School of critical theory is today constituted by lively debates, discussed more below, about how to deploy various critical methods ( Section 2 ) and concepts ( Section 3 ) while remaining attuned to social struggles and crises ( Section 4 ) and positioning itself in relation to critical theories developed out of other traditions.

2. Critical Methods

Frankfurt School critical theory is best characterized by a set of methodological aspirations that set it apart from many other forms of social and political theorizing (both in philosophy and the social sciences): It aspires to be (1) self-reflexive , accounting for its own embeddedness in specific social and historical conditions, (2) interdisciplinary , integrating philosophical analysis with social theory and empirical social research, (3) materialist , grounding critical theorizing in social reality, and (4) emancipatory , orienting itself toward the goal of social emancipation. These commitments situate the Frankfurt School firmly in the Marxist tradition, and that tradition’s aim of overcoming the division between theory and practice without uncritically subsuming one under the other.

This has given rise to three interrelated methodological challenges: how to conceptualize (1) the relation of theory to social reality, (2) the role and standpoint of critical theorists, and (3) the normative foundations, content, or force of their critical theorizing. In light of historical developments in the first half of the twentieth century – the rise of fascism and Stalinism and the integration of the working class into the liberal welfare state – Frankfurt School theorists lost confidence in an identifiable direction of history or an identifiable collective subject like the proletariat to lead the way. It became increasingly unclear how to uphold a link between their theories and a pre-theoretical anchor within social reality – such as oppositional experiences, forms of consciousness, practices of resistance, or social struggles and movements – or even to see how the conditions for any of those things to emerge were present at all.

Against this backdrop, this section first sketches the common ground most Frankfurt School theorists find in the approach of immanent critique ( §2.1 ) before tracing the various ways in which they have sought normative foundations ( §2.2 ) in a more or less constructive or reconstructive ( §2.3 ) register, then turns to methods such as disclosive and genealogical critique that are critical of those normative approaches ( §2.4 ), and concludes by outlining a set of methodological challenges that shape contemporary debates ( §2.5 ).

In responding to the three-pronged methodological challenge of relating theory to social reality, reflecting on the standpoint of critique, and spelling out its normativity, Frankfurt School critical theory moves beyond the usual juxtaposition between internal and external critique. Frankfurt School theorists rely on a third model of critique, which builds on Hegel and Marx and is often understood as immanent or reconstructive. Critique proceeds immanently or reconstructively when it seeks to secure its normative resources and epistemic standpoint from the (often implicit) normative structures and epistemic possibilities of the practices and self‐understandings that are constitutive of the (type of) society in question. Immanent critique avoids the dichotomy between an internal critique that refers to standards and standpoints that are already recognized by those criticized and an external critique that refers to standards and standpoints that are not (or not yet) recognized and therefore have to be derived independently from the agents’ perspective and their social context (see Jaeggi 2005, 2014, Celikates 2009, Stahl 2013a). Critical theory understood in this way is both grounded in social reality as it exists and emancipatory in seeking to radically transform this reality.

The critique of ideology can both serve as a paradigmatic example of immanent critique in this sense and illustrate some of the challenges this model faces (Ng 2015). Ideology critique is immanent insofar as it starts from the contradictions of a social and ideological constellation and the experience of those affected, which is shaped by these contradictions. It does not criticize an ideological form of consciousness because it is immoral or unethical, but because of its epistemic, functional, and genetic features, i.e. for being false or distorted, for contributing to the reproduction of relations of domination, and for arising from within such relations in ways that are relatively immune to self-reflection. Consequently, the critique of ideology does not focus primarily on the injustice or domination found in society, but on the forms of consciousness, culture, practice, habit, and affect that make this injustice or domination seem natural or unavoidable (Jaeggi 2008). On this view, any critical theory that aims at emancipation must first aim at diagnosing and overcoming those obstacles that keep agents from fully experiencing, critically reflecting on, and collectively acting against the unjust and dominating conditions under which they live. The question is how critical theorists can do so without falling back into epistemologically and politically problematic distinctions between false and true consciousness, between ideology and scientific insight, and between true (“objective”) and false (“purely subjective”) interests and needs (Celikates 2006; see Section 3.3 below).

These challenges are among the many challenges critical theorists face in developing an immanent critique that is linked to social reality and practice, a link that comes out in two ways. First, theory is anchored in social reality in terms of its genesis, as it is shaped by the social context from which it emerges. Second, theory aims at a practice that transforms social reality. This dual commitment to linking theory and practice is spelled out in two rather different ways, both in the history of the Frankfurt School and in contemporary discussions. One way of anchoring theory in social reality – call it the crisis approach – starts with social contradictions, antagonisms, and crises, along with the practical challenges and conflicts that result, and maintains that identifying those conflicts requires socio-theoretical analysis and sociological research (Jaeggi 2017a, Fraser and Jaeggi 2018). A second way of anchoring theory in social reality – call it the struggles approach – takes social struggles and movements and the practices of critique and resistance of oppressed groups as its starting point. This approach incorporates alternative standpoints and counter-hegemonic epistemologies into its theorizing with the aim of countering the potentially disempowering and anti-emancipatory effects that arise when critical theorists view crises mainly in terms of structural contradictions while ignoring or underestimating the ways that social and political movements themselves can produce and intensify crises (Collins 2019, Celikates 2022).

While this distinction between crisis and struggle is useful for heuristic purposes, it should not be overstated. Most critical theorists share a commitment to the emancipatory role of theory as well as an immanent anchoring of theory in social reality, whether qua crises or struggles. The distinction is a matter of degree and starting points, and it is usually agreed that crises and struggles stand in need of mutual articulation (see Benhabib 1986, 123–133, and Section 4.1 and Section 4.2 below).

Horkheimer maintained that a critical theory should not have an external relation to, but must enter into a “dynamic unity” with, practice, so that it is “not merely an expression of the concrete historical situation but also a force within it to stimulate change” (1937a [1972: 215], see also Marcuse 1937, Horkheimer 1937b). But under social conditions that neutralize social struggles or turn them into regressive backlash movements, the “dynamic unity” envisaged by Horkheimer can appear foreclosed. Even for Adorno, whose diagnosis of the “totally administered world” is the most radical example of this foreclosure, however, it would be a mistake to conceptualize existing society as a perfectly closed, monolithic, and functionally integrated self-reproducing totality. Rather, even when society is viewed as a totality, it has to be understood not in terms of homogeneity or frozen stability but in terms of structural antagonisms (Adorno 1957 [1976, 77]), conflict, and process (Adorno 1966b), i.e. as riddled with contradictions that, at least in principle, allow for forms of oppositional experience, consciousness, or practice that a critical theory can build on. In one of his last texts written shortly before his death, Adorno concludes that “critical theory is not aiming at totality, but criticizes it. This also means, however, that it is, in its substance, anti-totalitarian, with the utmost political determination” (Adorno 1969a; our translation). Even – or especially – in the face of the closure of political space, the political significance of a critical theory can consist in safeguarding the link between theory and the possibility of a radically different practice. At the same time, this defense of the relation to practice needs to be complemented by a defense of theory in the face of what Adorno identified as an “actionist” and anti-theoretical ideology of “pseudo-activity” in arguing that “praxis without theory, lagging behind the most advanced state of cognition, cannot but fail, and praxis, in keeping with its own concept, would like to succeed” (Adorno 1969b [1998, 265]).

Despite this more nuanced reading of Adorno on the relation between theory and practice, the broader diagnosis – put forth in different guises by Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse – that social integration, the pacification of class conflict, and the internalization of conformist attitudes had robbed critical theory of any pre-theoretical anchor, provides an important background for Habermas’s break with the first generation. That break concerns not only their “pessimism,” but the basic methodological and substantial premises of their theories. In Habermas’s view, the first generation had navigated themselves into a dead end with their totalizing diagnosis of an all-encompassing state of delusion dominated by instrumental rationality. In response, and in order to provide firm normative foundations for critical theory, Habermas advocates a “communicative turn,” reformulating social critique in terms of a critique of the conditions of communication and grounding it in the normative content presupposed within the practice of linguistically mediated social interaction and argumentation.

This element of normative validity – as opposed to merely factual social validity that is forced, imposed, or presupposed – is elaborated in Habermas’s discourse theory, originally referred to as “discourse ethics” (Habermas 1983a, Ch. 4) but later evolving into a differentiated approach that distinguishes between ethical and moral norms (Habermas 1991) and a discourse theory of law and democracy (Habermas 1992). At the heart of discourse theory is a principle of discursive justification that Habermas refers to as the “discourse principle” or “D,” which states: “just those norms of action are valid if all persons affected could agree as participants in rational discourse” (Habermas 1992 [1996, 107]). He further specifies discourse theory with a universalization principle (“U”) that is operative when arguing about moral norms, and a democratic principle that is operative when attempting to justify legal norms within a democratic society. Habermas does not naively suggest that actually existing discourses correspond to these ideals, but maintains that in those discourses participants necessarily make idealizing presuppositions that can then be used to identify and criticize the shortcomings of actual discourse as distorted by interests, power relations, and ideologies.

As a response to the challenges of immanent critique outlined above, Habermas’s work can be understood in terms of a “dialectics of immanence and transcendence” (Cooke 2006, Ch. 3). Habermas maintains the need to situate reason historically and within social reality – the largely Hegelian, pragmatist, or reconstructive element of his thought. But the idealizations that are immanent in our linguistic practices point toward context-transcending validity claims that must be defended in a discursive procedure – the Kantian or constructivist element in his thought. Habermas now refers to his attempt to “de-transcendentalize Kant” as a form of “Kantian pragmatism” (Habermas 1999; see also Bernstein 2010, Ch. 8; Baynes 2016, Ch. 4; Flynn 2014b).

Some interpretations of Habermas stress that his theory of communicative action is still a form of immanent critique (Finlayson 2007, Stahl 2013b) while others object to his increasingly Kantian focus on moral norms (Heath 2014). To provide empirical confirmation of his rational reconstruction of the “moral point of view,” further situating it within social reality, Habermas drew on Kohlberg’s developmental moral psychology, itself decidedly Kantian in its defining the highest stage of moral development in terms of the ability to make universalizable moral judgements (Habermas 1983a, Ch. 4; for a critique, see Benhabib 1992, Chs. 5–6, which, drawing on Carol Gilligan’s critique of Kohlberg, distinguishes a “generalized other” from a “concrete other” whose experience cannot be accounted for by abstract conceptions of the moral standpoint).

Habermas’s shift toward a Kantian position is particularly evident in the Rawls-Habermas debate (Habermas 1995a, Rawls 1995, Habermas 1996), widely viewed as a “family quarrel” among two Kantian political philosophers. In his early work on discourse ethics, Habermas compared his own principle (U) to Rawls’s “original position,” arguing that his approach was the better way to “operationalize” the moral point of view as a form of moral constructivism that tests moral norms in a discursive procedure posited as a dialogical alternative to Kant’s categorical imperative (Habermas 1991). The debate shifted in the 1990s with their contributions to legal-political constructivism: Rawls’s Political Liberalism (1993) and Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms (1992), in which he provides a rational reconstruction of the institutions of constitutional democracy. In that context, Habermas argues that Rawls’s approach is not transcendent enough, since in Habermas’s view Rawls reduces normative validity to the notion of reasonableness immanent within liberal democratic societies (for the implications of their debate for multiple issues in moral and political philosophy, see Hedrick 2010, Baynes 2016, Chs. 6–7, and Finlayson 2019).

Habermas’s Kantian turn also came to the fore when extending his work in a cosmopolitan or “post-national” direction (beginning with Habermas 1995b), even if he has continued to combine a Kantian approach to justifying universal norms with a wide-ranging analysis of the empirical phenomena of globalization (1998). This combination of normative and empirical theorizing, a hallmark of the Frankfurt School, is present in a range of work by other critical theorists addressing global issues (Ingram 2019, Ibsen 2023), from the challenge of disaggregating citizenship from the nation-state (Benhabib 2004) to transnationalizing the public sphere (Fraser et al. 2014), and theorizing new forms of transnational democracy (Bohman 2007). Rather than simply defending abstract cosmopolitan norms, such approaches typically aim at some form of critical cosmopolitanism (Milstein 2015), with some stressing the crucial role of political contestation of allegedly universal norms “from below” (J. Ingram 2013) or of concrete struggles for rights as part of a broadly construed intercultural dialogue on human rights (Flynn 2014a).

In light of Habermas’s turn to Kant, a significant focus of debate among Habermasians and interpreters of Habermas has been the status of idealizing presuppositions and the ultimate status of the principles of justification within discourse theory. Defenders of discourse theory can be divided up into those who focus more on immanence – pointing in a Hegelian, pragmatist, contextualist, or reconstructive direction – and those who focus more on transcendence – pointing in a Kantian or constructivist direction. Among the former, some argue, echoing Hegel’s critique of Kant, that Habermas should situate reason more thoroughly within its social and historical context in order to avoid an overly rationalistic, abstract, or gendered approach (Benhabib 1986, 1992), while others have argued for Habermas to embrace a more pragmatist (McCarthy 1991, Bernstein 2010) or contextualist approach (Rorty 1985, Allen 2008, Ch. 6). Habermas’s most recent work (2019) attempts a kind of middle path, going in a decidedly historical direction by tracing the provincial, European origins of his “post-metaphysical” mode of theorizing as a preparatory stage to a fully inclusive, global intercultural dialogue as the way to establish its universal validity in a world characterized by “multiple modernities” (see Forst 2021b, Chambers 2022, and Flynn 2022 for critical assessments).

Those who have taken discourse theory in a more Kantian or transcendental direction include Habermas’s long-time interlocutor Karl Otto-Apel, who argued that the dynamic of universal validity claims in practices of argumentation transcendentally presupposes an ideal communication community from which universal normative foundations for the assessment of discourses can be derived (Apel 1985). Apel maintained that grounding reason, and thereby critique, requires a more transcendental justification (or “ultimate grounding”) than Habermas has provided (Apel 1989; see Habermas’s most recent reply to Apel in 2005, Ch. 3).

More recently, Rainer Forst has embraced Kantian constructivism in positing that every human being has a “right to justification,” a right to demand reciprocal and general reasons for the practices, institutions, and structures that affect them (Forst 2007). Forst views moral and political constructivism as distinct, but integrated stages. While the task of moral constructivism is to construct a list of basic moral rights that cannot be reasonably rejected, those abstract rights must be given concrete content by citizens in a process of political constructivism. He maintains that his approach is immanent insofar as the right to justification is “recursively grounded” by reconstructing the validity claims implicit in all morally justified claims, while maintaining a moment of transcendence since the right to justification can be justifiably claimed in any context. Forst views this as the normative core of a critical theory that understands society as an ensemble of practices of justification. In that sense, the concept of justification is both descriptive (referring to actual arguments given within a particular social order) and normative (referring to reasons that could or should be accepted), and Forst maintains both perspectives are needed for a critique of existing justification narratives and relations of justification (see the Introductions to Forst 2011 and 2021a).

Various critics of Habermas have argued that his normative turn and shift to Kant risks transforming critical theory into something that looks increasingly like a liberal theory of justice. They posit alternative approaches such as reconstructive, disclosive, and genealogical critique that also return to questions and arguments developed by the first generation.

Those who subscribe to the model of reconstructive critique emphasize the downsides of uncoupling normative argument from social analysis and social theory. In Axel Honneth’s work, this shift takes two forms. In his earlier work (1992), he argues that the relatively narrow rationalist focus on communicative reason occludes more fundamental and often prelinguistic experiences and intersubjective relations that give rise to struggles for recognition and that his Hegel-inspired theory is better able to articulate, thus reestablishing the link between theory and social reality in more substantial ways. Relatedly, Honneth insists that critical theory can be distinguished from other normative enterprises by its reference to “the pretheoretical resource in which its own critical viewpoint is anchored extra-theoretically as an empirical interest or moral experience” (Honneth 1994 [2007, 63–64]).

Expanding on this earlier commitment, in his later work Honneth argues against the division of theoretical labor in which (constructivist) philosophy engages in normative theorizing while empirical sociology investigates our social reality (2011). By contrast, he undertakes a “normative reconstruction” of how modern society – its legal, moral, political as well as social and economic practices and institutions – came to be centered around individual freedom as the highest value of this cultural formation. Honneth wants to show that we can only gain an adequate theoretical understanding of, and critical perspective on, modern society if we analyze its different social spheres as attempts to institutionalize the value of freedom. In contrast to both revolutionary and conservative approaches, he wants to show that the structure of this institutionalization allows for a progressive realization of the value of freedom as social actors appeal to the constitutive idea of freedom to challenge the concrete forms of unfreedom that remain characteristic of our social reality.

Similar to Honneth methodologically, Rahel Jaeggi argues, in her reconstructive approach to the critique of forms of life, that bracketing the question of how to rationally evaluate and criticize forms of life as a whole, as Rawlsians do in the name of liberal neutrality and Habermasians in the name of “ethical abstinence,” ends up hindering precisely the kind of experimental learning processes that are crucial for forms of life to remain dynamic and avoid stagnation and failure (2014 [2018, 9–24, 318–319]). But Jaeggi places a greater emphasis on contradictions, crises, and conflicts than the later Honneth (see also Schaub 2015).

The approaches of both Honneth and Jaeggi exemplify a conception of immanent critique that closely links analysis and critique, issuing in a critique that is neither a mere description of what exists nor a normative demand imposed on what exists from the outside. Accordingly, it does not proceed in a free-standing, normative way, but relies on a specific combination of philosophical reflection and social-theoretical as well as empirical research that is grounded in social developments and crises and actual social experiences and self-understandings. This methodological reorientation has also led to a more substantial engagement with questions of the economy and the sphere of work, both from a more Durkheim-inspired (Honneth 2022, 2023, Celikates, Honneth, and Jaeggi 2023) and a more Marx-inspired (Fraser 2022) position that has also resulted in a fundamental (non-reformist) critique of capitalism (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018).

While these approaches seek to develop a socially grounded form of normativity, critics argue that they are still too idealizing in their understanding of social reality and its historical genesis, as well as too normative in their methods from the point of view of yet another model of critique, which has been called disclosive or genealogical.

Disclosive critique typically takes its cue from Adorno (and sometimes other theoretical sources from Heidegger to contemporary aesthetics), moving beyond the dichotomy between literary world-disclosure and philosophical reason-giving or the quest for normative foundations. On this view, critique has the task of revealing the world in a new and different light, disclosing unrecognized suffering and intricate forms of domination that are not only occluded by dominant ideologies but also shape the norms that emanate from that order in ways that escape more strongly normative versions of immanent critique that build on them. Dialectic of Enlightenment can be read as an exercise in disclosive critique that seeks to defamiliarize the social world for its readers and thereby break open their unquestioned acceptance of how things appear to them (Honneth 1998).

This negative orientation of disclosive critique can be complemented by a more positive one, in which what is disclosed also involves potentialities and horizons that have no space or way to articulate themselves within the existing social and normative order. Walter Benjamin’s writings on the radical potential of mass culture or Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) can be seen as examples of disclosive critique that involve both the disruption of established and the experimental opening up of new experiences and schemas (Vogelmann 2016).

Some critical theorists attempt to integrate a more positive idea of disclosure into critical theory while maintaining that this is not at odds with expanded conceptions or normativity. Some draw on Heidegger to develop an account of world-disclosive critique that rethinks reason and agency, stressing receptivity and “self-decentering” as an alternative model to Habermas’s focus on procedural reason (Kompridis 2006). Others stress that while disclosure can and must be subject to intersubjective validation through argumentation, critical theory must have recourse to the disclosive power of imagination, which is revealed in the force of exemplarity (Ferrara 2008), in focusing attention on the aesthetic dimension of narratives that social movements use to imagine alternative possibilities (Lara 1998, 2021), or in the way that powerful representations of the good society function to disclose a transcendent object that cannot be fully known or represented but can nonetheless provide ethical orientation (Cooke 2006). In a variety of different ways, these approaches attempt to maintain the utopian dimension of critique (Marcuse 1937).

Genealogical critique, by contrast, can be seen as a form of disclosive critique that is more focused on problematizing, unmasking, and disrupting (Saar 2002, Koopman 2013). Given its association with Nietzsche and Foucault, it also has a distinct trajectory, set of methodological commitments, and theoretical implications. Taking aim at social practices, self-understandings, identities and normative commitments that are seen as natural or accepted as given, genealogical critique traces their historical emergence, highlighting their contingency and denaturalizing them with the aim of opening up the possibility of thinking and acting differently. From this perspective, the search for normative foundations is misguided as it both underestimates how normativity is shaped by unacknowledged histories and power relations and overestimates the transformative power of a normative critique that appeals to reason alone. Genealogical critique, by contrast, seeks to destabilize and decenter the subject and its fundamental commitments (Owen 2002, Hoy and McCarthy 1994; for a version of this claim that builds on psychoanalytic theory, see Allen 2021, Ch. 5).

While earlier engagements with genealogical critique, especially Foucault’s, were marked by criticisms of his supposed rejection of all normative and rational standards, lack of social theorizing, and relativism (Habermas 1985, Chs. IX–X, Fraser 1981, Dews 1987), more recently critical theorists have sought to emphasize the potential convergence and mutual illumination of genealogy and Frankfurt School critical theory in providing an analysis of the workings of contemporary forms of power and domination (Allen 2008, Koopman 2013, Ch. 7, Saar 2018). At the same time, a recent debate between Forst and Wendy Brown exemplifies how the earlier split between Habermas and Foucault is rearticulated today, with Forst taking a broadly Habermasian position in arguing that his “respect conception of tolerance” manages to safeguard the autonomy of individuals by grounding toleration in the right to justification, and Brown insisting, with Foucault, on the normalizing, disciplining, and depoliticizing effects of liberal discourses of toleration that ultimately obfuscate the complex operations of social power (Brown and Forst 2014, see also Vogelmann 2021).

A genealogical orientation also characterizes postcolonial critiques of Frankfurt School critical theory that point out the lack of explicit and sustained engagement with European colonialism and imperialism and its legacies, including contemporary forms of racism, and the ways in which these have enabled and shaped the processes of “modernization” and thus the formation of “modern”’ societies, subjects, and forms of knowledge and rationality, all of which critical theorists purport to investigate critically (see §4.1.3 below).

Exponents of genealogical critique and struggle-centered approaches problematize forms of immanent or reconstructive critique that take institutional achievements as their starting point, challenging them by excavating the histories of domination and repression, as well as struggles, that have constituted these institutions and continue to shape their functioning. This gives rise to numerous challenges that continue to animate methodological debates in critical theory: (1) how (or even whether) to defend the putative normative achievements of liberal democracies, and if those are to be defended as achievements, then (2) how to theorize about the relation between struggles, crises, and institutional achievements, in contexts that may involve either (3) an absence of struggles, or (4), the opposite problem, a proliferation and fragmentation of struggles:

From the perspective of genealogical and post-colonial critique, the commitment to the institutions of the modern liberal nation-state (Habermas 1992, Honneth 2011) relies on an idealizing view of the history and present of this political formation that ignores, or treats as historically contingent and philosophically inconsequential, the forms of domination and exclusion that have accompanied it. At a time when the putative institutional achievements of liberal democracies – such as the separation of powers, the independence of the judiciary, the integrity of elections, or the protection of fundamental rights, especially for minorities – have come under attack from right-wing and neo-authoritarian movements and governments, the question is how critical theorists can defend the normative achievements of the existing order despite its systemic shortcomings. Offering a more radical challenge, some critical race theorists and post-colonial critics argue that those shortcomings reveal that what were thought to be normative achievements were historically premised on, and continue to functionally presuppose, domination and exclusion both at a societal and global level (see §4.1.2 and §4.1.3 below). On a methodological level, this involves the challenge of revising or going beyond the normative and sociological categories of critical theory that seem, at least in part, to be tied to a specifically Western experience.

Many critical theorists who accept the claim that these are normative achievements insist that a more complex view of the relation between institutions, struggles, and crises is necessary. As mentioned above, an alternative strand within critical theory that reaches from Negt and Kluge’s recovery of proletarian counterpublics through Fraser’s theorization of feminist movements to current attempts to reconnect critical theory with the struggles of our age, has insisted that abstracting from collective movements and struggles and relocating the emancipatory potential in the normative achievements of the existing institutional order risks underestimating how institutional dynamics, the inherent crisis tendencies of (more or less) liberal democracies, and social struggles are inextricably intertwined. Beyond a merely historical and social-theoretical point, how this question is answered will also affect how to conceptualize the role of emancipatory as opposed to regressive struggles in the face of the new authoritarianism (see §4.2.3 below).

More abstractly, critical theorists must account for situations in which there seem to be no struggles or forms of critical consciousness to latch onto, or only highly constrained forms of them. How can a critical theory respond to a situation in which domination is more or less total and has managed to suppress any critical consciousness and practice? Some of Marcuse’s descriptions of contemporary society come closest to this scenario. One might respond that “a society of happy slaves, genuinely content with their chains,” a society in which domination is experienced not as domination but as freedom, might be the critical theorists’ nightmare, but it “is a nightmare, not a realistic view of a state of society which is at present possible” (Geuss 1981, 83–84). Nevertheless, the challenge points to a dilemma critical theorists need to navigate. On the one hand, a critical theory requires a starting point in the forms of consciousness, experience, and practice of its addressees, but, on the other hand, critical theory should respond to and address distortions and blockages of precisely these forms of consciousness, experience, and practice. While these distortions and blockages will in most cases turn out to be partial rather than total and thus allow for some form of problematization to emerge (Celikates 2009, Part III), it seems equally important to not simply tie a critical theory to already existing social movements and thus to “goals that have already been publicly articulated” since this “neglects the everyday, still unthematized, but no less pressing embryonic form of social misery and moral injustice” (Honneth 2003, 114; see also Renault 2004, 2008).

The opposite problem can arise when critical theorists diagnose a proliferation of social struggles and lines of conflict beyond the classic antagonism of labor and capital. After the demise of the kind of philosophy of history that identified the proletariat as the revolutionary subject and the workers’ movement as the emancipatory force to which critical theory could and should attach itself, it has become unclear how critical theorists can determine with which of the different emancipatory movements of their day to enter into the kind of alliance envisaged by Marx and Horkheimer and which “forms of existing social critique” or “experiences of injustice” to pick up on. This difficulty is not only due to the plurality – or intersectionality – of movements, practices of critique, and experiences of injustice, but also due to the fact that struggles are often far from perfectly aligned and can operate at cross-purposes, with regard to both their aims and their methods. In answering this challenge, critical theorists can neither simply deduce the “correct” struggle from some overarching laws of historical development (the pole of determinism), nor claim that theorists simply have to decide which struggle or movement to link their theory to (the pole of voluntarism).

Insofar as critical theory is committed to immanent critique, focusing on the internal contradictions and crises of a specific social order and the struggles and movements that arise from within it, these challenges cannot be easily resolved. Rather than seeking to resolve them at an abstract level, they could instead be viewed as opening up a field of tensions that critical theorists need to navigate within the specific constellation they find themselves in. While critical theory needs to be anchored in actually existing forms of theoretical as well as practical critique, in the social struggles that people actually engage in, it also has the task of articulating the experiences of those who are blocked from engaging in struggles of their own and of contributing to the further theoretical articulation of existing struggles. At times, critical theory may need “to push beyond the ‘subjective’ elements of struggle and languages of claims-making to the more ‘objective’ dimensions of contradictions and crises, which turn more on the dynamics of systemic elements operating independently of whether or not people actually thematize them via struggle” (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018, 11), without losing sight of the epistemic and political risks this involves.

In addressing these risks, one way forward has been to embrace methodological pluralism and to understand critical theory less as a comprehensive social theory and more as a critical practice, as something critics do (Bohman 2003, Kompridis 2006, Celikates 2019a). This approach can more systematically incorporate alternative standpoints and epistemologies and the practices of epistemic resistance they are tied to, and more easily build on other traditions and paradigms of critical theory, such as feminist, anti-colonial, and anti-racist struggles and theorizing (Mills 1988, Collins 1990, 2019, Medina 2013, Loick 2021, Celikates 2022; see Section 4.1 below). Anchoring the perspective of critical theory within the social struggles and epistemic standpoints of the oppressed can serve as a counterweight – in the sense of “reflexive accountability” (Collins 2019) – to the tendency of actually existing critical theories to set in motion a disempowering spiral of epistemic asymmetries that denies the existence of theoretically sophisticated practices of critique and resistance on the ground and thereby reproduces existing obstacles to equal participation in knowledge production and to radical social transformation. On this view, critical theorizing is itself a social practice that recognizes its addressees as equal partners in a dialogical struggle for appropriate interpretations and realization of transformative potentials that is informed by social theory and sociological research. As such, it can make use of a variety of critical methods – reconstructive, constructive, disclosive, or genealogical (Freyenhagen 2018) – that are not easily subsumed under one unified metatheoretical framework, even if they can be seen as various attempts to spell out the idea of a critical theory as self-reflexive, interdisciplinary, materialist, and emancipatory.

3. Critical Concepts

The basic concepts of Frankfurt School critical theory – such as alienation, reification, ideology, but also emancipation – are expressive of the specific methodology, or set of methodologies, that critical theorists in this tradition employ. As explained in the previous section, critical theory in this tradition proceeds in an immanent way, and this implies that its concepts are both developed from within a certain social constellation and seek to go beyond the self-understanding characteristic of this constellation, they are both descriptive and evaluative, and they exemplify the unity of analysis and critique inherited from Marx. While some concepts are primarily “anticipatory-utopian” (like emancipation) and others primarily “explanatory-diagnostic” (like alienation, reification, and ideology, as obstacles to emancipation) (Benhabib 1986), they are all “thick concepts” whose descriptive content is irreducibly social-theoretically as well as evaluatively loaded.

In addition, some of the critical concepts developed by Frankfurt School authors – again alienation, reification and ideology are the clearest examples – point to second-order phenomena. In contrast to substantial first-order injustices, these concepts seek to critically diagnose what happens when unjust (or exploitative or oppressive) social relations are not experienced as unjust (or exploitative or oppressive) but are accepted as legitimate or natural, or if they are intuitively experienced but not explicitly recognized as such, or recognized but not adequately interpreted and articulated. These concepts pick out social phenomena that are often ignored by more mainstream approaches in moral and political philosophy that focus on the moral status of the individual and their actions, or the legitimacy of institutional arrangements, to the neglect of the domain of the social, with its distinct structure, dynamics, and challenges (see, e.g., Honneth 2000, Ch. 1, Zurn 2011, Neuhouser 2022, Ch. 1). The following subsections introduce four key concepts that exemplify both the critical methodologies discussed in the previous section and the substantial social-theoretical and diagnostic contributions to our understanding of contemporary society that Frankfurt School critical theory aspires to. There are of course other concepts used by critical theorists – from normativity, justice, and autonomy to power, domination, and oppression – but the focus here is on concepts less widely discussed in other traditions or to which Frankfurt School theorists have made distinctive contributions.

The concept of alienation has a long history within critical theory. The basic concept refers to the idea of humans being separated, estranged, or distanced from something crucial to their freedom or capacity to flourish. One is alienated when one has a distorted or deficient relation to oneself or to the natural or social world. Critical theorists face a number of challenges in developing a critique of alienation. Classic critiques of alienation, Rousseau and the early Marx for example, relied on substantive conceptions of human nature or self-realization to ground their diagnoses and provide standards for critique. Thick accounts of human nature are less compelling today, which means contemporary critics of alienation have pursued alternative approaches. Since a critique of alienation attempts to diagnose a social pathology, not a problem with particular individuals, critical theorists must also provide a social theory that can convincingly diagnose the social causes of, and possible paths for overcoming, alienation.

Rousseau can be credited with inaugurating “social philosophy” as a domain of inquiry while developing a critique of alienation (Honneth 2000, Ch. 1). Although he does not refer to alienation in his “Second Discourse” (1755), the term captures his argument that living in society leaves human beings disconnected from their true desires and passions, which he explored by speculating about what humans would have been like in a state of nature. Within Hegelian and Marxist social criticism, the concept of alienation has been used to capture the idea that something produced by humans is wrongly taken by them as something given or outside their conscious control (Jaeggi 2005 [2014, 13–14]). In his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel first develops a concept of alienation to describe the relation of the human mind to reality when the products of human reason are not recognized as our own creation but are instead experienced as alien forces. In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), Marx analyzed how wage labor within capitalist societies causes alienation. Workers produce a world of objects, but the products of their labor as well as their own productive activity are commodities over which they have no control; the world they create becomes an alien power with increasing control over them. They are alienated from the kind of spontaneous and creative productive activity that Marx, in his early work, posits as the essence of human nature.

The concept of alienation was influential among first-generation Frankfurt School theorists, particularly in the work of Marcuse and the later work of Erich Fromm (1961). In Dialectic of Enlightenment , Horkheimer and Adorno echo Rousseau in telling a story of alienation going back to the dawn of civilization. They maintain that human beings, in their quest to dominate the natural world (external nature) and to acquire mastery over themselves (inner nature), become estranged from both aspects of nature, failing to see what Enlightenment denies: that we are fundamentally natural beings (Vogel 1996, 69).

Contemporary critical theorists have attempted to rejuvenate the concept of alienation without relying on overly substantive accounts of human nature and without the totalizing diagnosis of Dialectic of Enlightenment . Rahel Jaeggi formalizes key elements of the Hegelian-Marxist approach in developing a philosophical account of alienation focused on how failure to adequately appropriate oneself or the world results in a “relation of relationlessnes” (2005). In this way, the non-alienated self is not defined by a substantive conception of human nature but by the quality of one’s relation to the world: whether this relation is sustained by successful processes of appropriation. Hartmut Rosa also defines alienation as a distorted relation to the world but with a more substantive approach to the quality of non-alienated relations to the world. For this, he has developed a multifaceted concept of “resonance” to capture a kind of vibrant or responsive relation to the world by contrast with the alienated experience of the world as ossified, mute, or hostile (2016). In contrast to these approaches, which are largely framed in terms of necessary conditions for living a good life, Rainer Forst has argued that deontological aspects of the critique of alienation have been neglected, and that there is a kind of “noumenal alienation” that results from not being recognized, or failing to recognize oneself, as an agent of justification (2017).

Reification is a concept with close ties to alienation. If alienation is viewed as diagnosing a distorted relation to the world, reification can be understood as one way of articulating the form that distortion can take. In the broadest sense, reification is a term used to critique cases in which some entity that should not be viewed as an object – oneself, other people, or some segment of the social or natural world – is treated as a thing-like object. It is instrumentalized, objectified, or quantified in a way that is inappropriate according to some critical standard. One challenge for critical theorists is articulating the standard or perspective – a non-reified relation or perspective – according to which the reified stance is not appropriate.

Georg Lukács’s classic 1923 essay on reification heavily influenced the Frankfurt School. Lukács combined Marx’s analysis of the “fetishism of commodities” – which causes social relations between human beings to appear as quantifiable and thing-like – with Weber’s analysis of bureaucracy – which extends this instrumentalizing attitude to all social domains. Reification becomes “the necessary, immediate reality of every person living in capitalist society” (1923 [1971, 197]), which can refer to an instrumentalizing attitude taken toward objects (whose qualitative feature are reduced to quantitative terms), other people, and features of one’s own personality when viewed solely from the perspective of their marketability.

Different critical theorists have appealed to the concept of reification to capture similar but not identical phenomena, with differing definitions corresponding to differences in the larger theoretical framework in which they deploy the concept. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the concept captures the dominance of instrumental reason and the totally administered world that results (1947). Habermas reinterpreted the concept to describe the ways in which systems such as the economy and the bureaucratic state, which function properly as spheres in which instrumental rationality dominates, extend too far into spheres of everyday life that he refers to as the lifeword (1981). This “colonization” of the lifeworld by the system results in the communicative structures of the lifeworld becoming reified. Honneth, by contrast, takes up the concept of reification in relation to his theory of recognition, arguing that reification involves a kind of forgetting of a primary relation of mutual recognition that he calls “empathetic engagement” (2005). Within Rosa’s theory of resonance, in which he attempts to capture one side of the history of modernity as a “catastrophe of resonance,” reification can be viewed as a “forgetfulness of resonance” (2016 [2019, 325]). The revival of this concept has been extended in other ways by using reification as a guiding concept for analyzing the relation between economics and subject formation within a “political economy of the senses” (Chari 2015) or pairing reification with a suitably modified notion of reconciliation to assess experiences of exclusion and integration within modern social orders (Hedrick 2019).

Ideology is similar to alienation and reification in being both a concept critical theory inherits from the Marxist tradition and one that is used to identify a distorted relationship to the world and one’s own place in it (Eagleton 1991). In the Marxist tradition, it has played a prominent role in answering questions such as why people accept social and political conditions that seem to be contrary to their own interests, or how it is possible that subjects feel free although they are dominated. When people experience and describe relations of exploitation and domination as natural and without alternative or even as just, this seems to be an effect of ideology. Ideology, on this critical understanding, usually denotes a more or less coherent system of action-guiding beliefs, such as liberal individualism, that is said to obscure social reality – especially power relations, crisis tendencies, and social conflicts. As Marx (1844, 1846, 1867) and subsequent critical theorists argue, by obscuring these, ideology contributes to the reproduction of the prevailing order (Rosen 1996). Accordingly, any radically transformative and emancipatory practice presupposes that this ideological obfuscation must be recognized as such, criticized, and overcome. The challenge to such critical reflection is particularly acute when the possibility of even asking questions about how we might want to live, if we could transform society, is occluded by a technocratic ideology that reframes such practical questions as technical problems with narrow solutions (Habermas 1963, 1968a).

Ideology differs from mere deception, propaganda, or conspiracy theories. Because it is structurally anchored in social reality and plays a functional role for its reproduction, it cannot be explained with reference to the individual psyche or manipulation by others alone. Even if false consciousness is an element of ideology, critical theorists from Adorno to Jaeggi emphasize the practical nature of ideology as it shapes identities, is embedded in social practice, and functions via affects and habitus.

According to one influential interpretation, the critical notion of ideology developed in the Frankfurt School is characterized by three dimensions (Geuss 1981, Jaeggi 2008). In the first, epistemic dimension, ideologies always encompass epistemically deficient beliefs and attitudes that can range from substantially false beliefs to the confusion of particular and universal interests and inadequate concepts (such as “illegal alien” to refer to undocumented immigrants). In the second, functional dimension, ideologies are seen as playing a necessary, or at least supporting, role for the stabilization and legitimation of social relations of domination, i.e. for their more or less smooth reproduction. In the third, genetic dimension, ideologies are shaped, in ways that are not transparent to the agents themselves, by the social conditions under which they emerge, so that it is not an accident that people end up with the specific sets of beliefs they end up with in a specific type of society.

Radicalizing the Marxist notion of ideology as “necessarily false consciousness,” i.e. consciousness that is false (and not simply morally problematic) for structural reasons (and not just accidentally), Adorno and Marcuse often seem to argue that ideology reaches into the innermost core of subjects, who are shaped all the way down to their psychological and physical impulses, leading them to affirm the existing order and thereby preempting any resistance to domination. While this might help explain the resilience of ideology and its continued effectiveness, it also poses the challenge for critical theorists to find an anchor for their critique in the forms of consciousness, experience, and practice of its addressees (Celikates 2006, and Section 2.5 above).

Due to its emancipatory orientation, the critique of ideology must connect up with the self-understanding of those affected by trying to initiate learning processes, which in turn are supposed to lead to a transformation of those social conditions that are hidden behind ideologies. At the same time, without recourse to critical theories agents themselves will often continue to face obstacles to identifying, diagnosing, and explaining the effects of ideology on their critical capacities and practices. Arguably, showing that a contradiction is inscribed in the existing social order and can only be “dissolved” if this order itself is fundamentally transformed is also a task for a critical theory.

Although for most critical theorists ideology is not merely false consciousness but embedded in social practices and identities, ideology critique has been criticized for being overly cognitivist and underestimating the role of habitualized attitudes and cultural practices, for relying on an overly strong distinction between true and distorted consciousness, and for presupposing an idealized notion of the subject. Critics such as Foucault and Bourdieu speak instead of power-knowledge (Foucault 1973, 15) or of symbolic power and its embodiment (Bourdieu 1980, Ch. 8). The epistemological and political challenges the notion of ideology gives rise to continue to animate discussions (Celikates, Haslanger, and Stanley (eds.) forthcoming), including, more recently, on the relation between ideology and epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007, Mills 2017), cultural technē (Haslanger 2017a), and propaganda (Stanley 2015).

Frankfurt School critical theory inherits its emancipatory orientation from Marx, in the sense that it aims not only to understand, but also to contribute to a radical transformation of the social world that is already under way, and the commitment to real emancipation as requiring a radical, irreducibly social and political transformation that overcomes the fundamental contradictions of modern society instead of partial or local reforms aimed at surface-level symptoms. Emancipation is thus understood as liberation, including self-liberation, from domination by social, political, and economic powers, both personal and structural. Against this background, however, critical theorists have given different accounts of what emancipation is, what it requires, and how much can be said about it as a process and as an aim or state. While some (Horkheimer 1937a, Habermas 1968b) have thought of emancipation as a process of enlightenment and self-reflection that would allow for the realization of a rational organization of society, others thought of emancipation as sensual liberation (Marcuse 1969), or as emancipation from the (internalized) destructive imperatives of capitalism towards a state “of lying on water and looking peacefully at the sky” (Adorno 1951c [2005, 157]).

At the same time, and insofar as the working class has been integrated, fragmented, or at least reconstituted, it has become increasingly less clear who is to be emancipated (or self-emancipated) from which forms of domination and how. The challenges to the possibility of emancipation include reflections on the potentially overblown ideals of autonomy, sovereignty, and transparency that seem to underlie it (Laclau 1992), the limits of active self-transformation under conditions in which subjects have been shaped by power-ridden forms of subjectivation (Allen 2015), and the prospects of overcoming capitalism given the apparent lack of any clear and viable alternative. Today, critical theorists also face the challenge of reorienting the emancipatory project in the face of a catastrophic climate crisis that seems to privilege adaptation, mitigation, and sheer survival over utopian visions of emancipation that have also served historically as a pretext for an extractive and dominating relation to nature (Brown 2022).

In light of these challenges, a critical theory that wishes to hold on to its emancipatory orientation will need to articulate emancipation as an immanent possibility that is enabled and in some ways required by unprecedented historical developments. Whether in doing so it can build on the presumption of an emancipatory interest of the oppressed that theorists from Marx and Horkheimer to Habermas and Honneth (2017) have sought to identify remains contested. But thinking of emancipation as a second-order process that aims at enabling collective practices of self-determination over and against the obstacles picked out by concepts such as alienation, reification, and ideology, rather than as a substantial ideal or positive utopian vision of emancipation to be attained, might provide a starting point. Insofar as critical theory continues to see the existing social order as one of structurally entrenched domination, exploitation, and alienation, it will also continue to rely on some notion of an emancipatory process that points beyond those structures, even if this process is invariably plural, non-teleological, open-ended, and negative in orientation.

4. Critical Theories Today

Marx defined critical theory as the “self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age” (Marx 1843). The vitality of this approach to critical theory depends on continually taking up this task in new social contexts, as the first generation of the Frankfurt School did. Contemporary critical theorists continue this legacy by engaging with and theorizing in relation to contemporary struggles, crises, and practices. This has meant engaging a much wider range of emancipatory social movements than earlier generations of the Frankfurt School, who focused more on class struggle and capitalism (and the ways these were entangled with antisemitism and fascism) while largely neglecting issues like colonialism, racism, and the subordination of women. Contemporary critical theorists have expanded and enriched the Frankfurt School tradition by engaging with, and in some cases making contributions to, feminist theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial and decolonial theory (4.1), enlarging their analyses of crises beyond capitalism and its contradictions (4.2), and exploring a variety of critical practices ranging from civil disobedience to prefigurative, abolitionist, and revolutionary practices (4.3).

4.1 Theorizing Struggles and Movements

As emphasized above, Frankfurt School critical theory is methodologically interdisciplinary and defined by its aim of contributing to the emancipatory transformation of society by critically reflecting on the ways in which thinking itself can be distorted by structures of domination. This is also true of the various forms of critical theorizing that have emerged from and in relation to struggles against gendered oppression, racism, and colonialism and its legacies. Indeed, those critical theories bring to light structures of domination and modes of thinking (patriarchy, white supremacy, neocolonialism and Eurocentrism) that have until recently been neglected by the Frankfurt School and must be taken into account by any theory that aims to be critical and emancipatory.

More than one feminist theorist has argued that engaging feminism has been, and still is, crucial to renewing Frankfurt School critical theory both methodologically and in order to live up to its emancipatory aims (Fraser 1985, Ferrarese 2018). But analyzing the intersection between feminist theory and the Frankfurt School is complicated by the diverse array of theorists on both sides of that intersection. Some of the debates among feminist critical theorists mirror debates already discussed, for instance between those who draw on first generation versus Habermas or those who embrace Habermasian versus poststructuralist critical theory.

In most accounts, the first generation of the Frankfurt School is portrayed as not including any women and, with the exception of Marcuse in the 1970s (Marcuse 1974), its main protagonists largely failed to theorize about gender-based oppression or engage with feminist movements or the feminist theory of their time (there is, however, a new research project at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt that aims to challenge the dominant historiography by highlighting contributions of female researchers such as Käthe Weil and Else Frenkel-Brunswik and feminist work within the Frankfurt School). While fully acknowledging why feminists might find little of value in the first generation, some feminist theorists have highlighted important methodological affinities between, and potential for productive engagement with, that body of work (Brown 2006, Heberle 2006, Marasco 2006). In spite of the first generation’s nostalgia for the authority of the patriarchal family, their studies of authoritarianism were groundbreaking in analyzing the family as a political institution and breeding ground for fascism (Marasco 2018). Recent interest in Adorno’s work in particular builds on his theory of the nonidentical as support for the feminist critique of essentialist identities as well as affinities between feminist aims and his deconstruction of dualisms like nature and history or reason and desire, and his appeal to lived experience as crucial to philosophy and critique (Heberle 2006, 5–6). Attempts at synthesis include using his theory of the nonidentical, in dialogue with Lacan and Marx, to theorize a new approach to feminist political subjectivity (Leeb 2017), and combining Adorno’s insights into “bourgeois coldness” with the feminist ethics of care to rethink the fragility of our concern for others within a capitalist form of life that fosters “generalized indifference” while also producing a gendered form of attention to others (Ferrarese 2018).

Turning to the second generation, the critique of Habermas’s failure to adequately theorize gender in his Theory of Communicative Action (1981) was a turning point. In a now-classic essay, Nancy Fraser (1985) took a cue from the Marx quote about critical theory reflecting on the struggles of the age to criticize the Frankfurt School, and Habermas in particular, for failing to theorize one of the most significant struggles against domination. Seyla Benhabib raised similar concerns about whether the theory of communicative action could adequately theorize the feminist movement (1986, 252), and in Situating the Self (1992) aimed to make Habermasian discourse theory more cognizant of the self as gendered (see also the essays collected in Meehan 1995). In his later discourse theory of democracy, Habermas does engage the feminist theory and politics of equality to illuminate his core thesis about how private and public autonomy mutually presuppose each other (1992 [1996, 418–427]). But feminist critical theorists maintain that his rationalist approach fails to adequately capture the way power operates (Allen 2008, Ch. 5; McNay 2022, Ch. 1) or to incorporate forms of communication like narrative that have been crucial to feminism (Lara 1998, 2021; Young 2000).

The third generation of the Frankfurt School represents a crucial shift, with prominent feminist theorists like Fraser and Benhabib attempting to make critical theory more amenable to feminism from within the tradition, while also engaging in debates with leading figures in the poststructuralist strand of feminist critical theory like Judith Butler (Benhabib et. al. 1995). A core issue in these debates has been between Habermasian feminists who stress autonomy and poststructuralists who stress the idea of subjection – the ways in which power is central to the formation of subjects and their desires (Butler 1997). Amy Allen critically engages and synthesizes insights from both sides of this debate in viewing subjects as both constituted through relations of power and able to exercise autonomy in the form of critical reflection (Allen 2008). Axel Honneth, another key figure in the third generation, has engaged with feminist theory (Honneth 2000) and the feminist movement (2011 [2014, 154–176]), and in debates with feminist critical theorists including Fraser (Fraser and Honneth 2003) and Butler (Ikäheimo et al. 2021), but his work has also been the subject of sustained feminist critique of his conception of love, the family, and caring labor (Young 2007, Rössler 2007, Wimbauer 2023).

Fraser has, over several decades, developed a systematic defense of socialist feminism while charting various shifts in the feminist movement (see the essays collected in Fraser 2013), recently making the case that the contemporary crisis in care work must be understood as part of a larger general crisis in capitalist society (Fraser 2016, 2022, Ch. 3). Other feminist critical theorists also argue for a return to the critique of capitalism as crucial to feminist theorizing (Leeb 2017). From a different perspective, Lois McNay argues that recent Frankfurt School theorists, not only Honneth and Forst but also Fraser and Jaeggi, have failed to adequately incorporate the experience of gendered oppression into critical theory (McNay 2022). Another set of challenges arises from the need to develop an intersectional analysis of power and domination while engaging with a broader range of work in feminist and gender theory including queer and trans* theory as well as transnational and postcolonial feminism (Allen 2019, 537–538).

Apart from the influential studies on antisemitism and fascism by the first generation, Frankfurt School theorists have until recently shown little interest in issues of race and racism despite the prominence of anti-racist struggles and theorizing throughout the twentieth century and the present. The silence is of course not total. Early analyses point to prejudice toward Jews and other minority groups as an important part of the authoritarian personality and a key mechanism of providing “pseudo-orientation in an estranged world” (Adorno et al. 1950, 622), diagnose a culturalist transformation of the earlier biological racism at the center of fascism in post-war Europe that serves to maintain white supremacy (Adorno 1955, 148–9), and identify the phantasmatic dimension of racism and its fictions of homogeneity, purity, and essential difference (Adorno 1967a). Arguably, there are also broader methodological lessons from the relational and materialist theory of antisemitism developed by Adorno and Horkheimer that also hold for the study of racism (even if their relation remains contested, see Catlin 2023), namely the rejection of psychologizing and individualizing approaches, the insistence that the pathology always lies in the antisemitic or racist subjects and not in their victims, and the emphasis on structural factors that include the functional role of racism in the context of the crisis of capitalism and democracy (see Postone 1980 for an early attempt to explain modern antisemitism in relation to the nature of capitalism and the anti-capitalism of National Socialism).

Despite these openings, there has not been any sustained engagement with the phenomena of race and racism or with anti-racist struggles and theorizing, an eminently emancipatory form of knowledge production that, from W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon to Black feminism (Collins 1990, 2019, Mills 2017), has been engaged in crossing the theory-practice divide and articulating dominated standpoints in ways that should have been of significant interest to Frankfurt School theorists (Outlaw 2005; for a relatively early exception see McCarthy 2009).

This missed opportunity is all the more astonishing as the intersection of class and race, of racism and capitalism has been at the center of theorists that share a Marxist orientation, and even some closeness to the Frankfurt School, most notably Angela Davis – who had studied with Marcuse in the US and with Adorno in Frankfurt, and, following Marcuse, insists on the need to bridge the gap between theory and practice and to combine the critique of racism as well as gender-based domination with a critique of capitalism (Davis 1983, 2004) – and Stuart Hall, who, building on Marxist and post-Marxist approaches, theorizes racism as a historically variable response to crisis and as a mechanism that allows capital to divide the working class (Hall 2021).

In contrast to the first generation’s focus on the “dark side” of modernity, later theorists, from Habermas to Honneth, developed a stronger commitment not only to Enlightenment values, but to the belief that these have been, more or less successfully, institutionalized in Western societies. As a result, their views clash with a core aim of Critical Race Theory (Crenshaw et al. 1995) – itself influenced by Marxist theories of the state and the law – namely, the aim of debunking the idea that the law and the state are neutral institutions that secure the common good and the rights of all as an ideology masking their character as instruments of racial (and class) oppression, as evidenced by massive and persistent inequalities that systematically disadvantage Blacks in the US in particular and racialized populations on a global scale, in various areas of life, from access to education, health, jobs, and housing to the risk of becoming a victim of police violence. According to this view, the forms of freedom and solidarity realized in liberal-democratic societies are not just contingently accompanied by exclusions of racialized groups, as if these values had only been insufficiently realized up to now and only need to be extended to those hitherto excluded. Rather, the thesis is that these exclusions have played a constitutive role in the history of these societies and their value systems and continue to shape them to this day, and that radical emancipation would therefore require developing entirely different visions of living together in freedom and solidarity (Kelley 2002).

More recently, Nancy Fraser (2022, Ch. 2) has picked up on Black Marxist discussions of racial capitalism (prominently Du Bois 1935) by arguing that capitalism provides a structural basis for racial oppression and thus exhibits an inherent (even if historically variable) tendency to racialize populations in order to more effectively expropriate and exploit them. Others have elaborated a relational and materialist understanding of racism that builds on how antisemitism was theorized in the early Frankfurt School, and how racism was rearticulated in a culturalist register in reaction to anticolonial and antiracist struggles (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991, Bojadžijev 2020). What these approaches share, and what might be a distinctive contribution of a critical theory of race and racism, is a commitment to understanding racism as a comprehensive social relation that needs to be understood in relation to broader (capitalist) social formations, “race” as an ideological effect rather than an unquestioned category for social analysis, and anti-racist struggles as a starting point for critical theorizing about race – commitments that are at least partially shared with important contributions in the critical philosophy of race (Mills 2003, Shelby 2003, Haslanger 2017b).

For all its focus on modes of domination in modern society, Frankfurt School critical theory has largely failed to address European colonialism and imperialism (Said 1993, 278) and their continuing effects in a world structured by massive inequalities and asymmetries between the Global North and the Global South. With a few recent exceptions to be discussed here, critical theorists in this tradition have not engaged much with the large body of postcolonial and decolonial theory, even if in recent years debates about the universal validity of human rights and cosmopolitanism, globalization and multiple modernities, religious pluralism and postsecularism, have provided ample occasion to go beyond still operative Eurocentric limitations and become more globally relevant (Mendieta 2007, Butler et al. 2011, Baum 2015, Ingram 2019, Kerner 2018; on some early Frankfurt School engagement with Chinese thought, specifically in Benjamin’s work, see Ng 2023).

The main target of postcolonial critique is the idea of a universal history in which the central engine of progress is located in modern Europe while non-Europeans are viewed as always lagging behind. The story has taken many forms, from narratives of progress in Enlightenment thinkers and their critics, such as Hegel (Buck-Morss 2009), to nineteenth-century theories of racial hierarchy and twentieth-century theories of development that have been shaped by, and in turn, rationalized, racism, slavery, and imperialism (McCarthy 2009, Bhambra and Holmwood 2021). Both anticolonial struggles and theorizing (in the work of Mahatma Gandhi, Aimé Césaire, Fanon and others) have insisted that the history and present of capitalism and of modern European and North American societies are constitutively entangled with colonialism, imperialism, and their afterlives, and that taking their trajectory as paradigmatically modern ends up representing a specific and heterogeneous trajectory and experience as universal and self-contained (Grüner 2010). While some aspects of postcolonial critique can be seen as overlapping with the critique of conceptions of the subject, reason, and universal history in the early Frankfurt School, the former also goes beyond the latter by understanding these as the effects of specifically colonial forms of domination and by tracing a different genealogy of fascism through its roots in the colonialism of the nineteenth century (Bardawil 2018).

Recent decades have seen attempts to bring postcolonial theory into dialogue with the Frankfurt School. From the side of decolonial theory, Enrique Dussel has been one of the most prominent decolonial philosophers to engage with Frankfurt School philosophers, developing a global ethics of liberation in critical dialogue with the discourse ethics of Apel and Habermas (Dussel 1998; see also Dusell 2011 and Allen and Mendieta 2021).

From the side of Frankfurt School critical theory, postcolonial critique has been taken up in a variety of ways (see also Vázquez-Arroyo 2018). In the same spirit of Horkheimer and Adorno’s attempt to critique enlightenment in the name of an alternative conception of enlightenment, both Susan Buck-Morss (2009) and Thomas McCarthy (2009) attempt to salvage something of the core idea that is the target of their critique: “universal history” for Buck-Morss, and “development” for McCarthy.

Amy Allen (2016), on the other hand, is more decidedly critical of the role of the discourse of “progress” and the role of such concepts in grounding normativity and shaping assumptions about historical development, modernization, and reason in the work of Habermas, Honneth, and Forst. She regards the latter approaches as deeply Eurocentric and contrasts them with a contextualist form of critique, inspired by Foucault and Adorno, that takes the form of a critical history of the present that uncovers the deep entanglement between reason and domination. Calling for an even more thorough revision of historical narratives, conceptual frameworks, and normative criteria, Gurminder Bhambra (2021) argues that the prevalent understanding of modernity as an endogenous European achievement obscures the fact that colonization and slavery were integral to and constitutive of the Enlightenment project of modernity in both its epistemic and institutional dimensions, a task for which historical and theoretical resources beyond Adorno and Foucault would be required. Fundamental questions about modernity, the human subject, and freedom also emerge from an encounter between critical theory in the Frankfurt School tradition and Caribbean thought (Sealey and Davis forthcoming). In a similar vein, contemporary critics of the persistence of colonial structures point to how a denial of the colonial past reaffirms a violent global color line (Mbembe 2016) that affects how societies treat Indigenous peoples (Coulthard 2014) and racialized and migrant populations (Celikates 2022).

4.2 Diagnosing Crises

Diagnosing crises, and the social contradictions that give rise to them, is a hallmark of Hegelian-Marxist critical theory. Marx famously diagnosed capitalism as a crisis-ridden social system, and the early work of the first generation of the Frankfurt School was a response to the economic, social, and political crises of their time. Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947) can be understood as addressing the crisis of reason that was experienced with the rise of National Socialism, but the critique of instrumental reason was disconnected from more concrete crises and struggles. Habermas aimed to restore the link between critique and crisis beginning with his 1973 book Legitimation Crisis (Benhabib 1986, 252–3, Cordero 2017, Ch. 3). Writing in the context of state-managed capitalism, Habermas diagnosed the distinctively political contradictions and potential for political crises within a social system that aims to steer the economy and manage economic crises (a point influentially elaborated by Offe 1984).

In subsequent decades, crisis critique, along with the critique of capitalism, was largely abandoned by Frankfurt School theorists (for a notable exception see Postone 1993). Renewed theoretical interest has coincided with rising public concern about social, political, and economic systems currently in, or always seemingly on the brink of, crisis, all against the backdrop of the unfolding effects of the ongoing climate catastrophe.

Nancy Fraser was one of the first critical theorists to revive crisis critique and to do so as part of a comprehensive critique of capitalism that renews the link between analytical diagnosis and critique (Fraser 2011, 2014; see Wellmer 2014 for a critique of the Frankfurt School’s earlier neglect). What distinguishes Fraser’s approach is that it posits capitalism as the unifying causal link among seemingly distinct crises – in relation to care work, the environment, and political institutions – by viewing capitalism as an institutionalized social order in which the economic system “cannibalizes” the very conditions that make it possible within the spheres of social reproduction, the natural environment, and the political system (Fraser 2022). Fraser combines analysis of “objective” social conditions – contradictions and crises – with an orientation toward social movements by analyzing the “boundary struggles” that arise at the seams between the economic system and other domains, making the case for these struggles to unite around an anti-capitalist agenda.

In a similar way, Rahel Jaeggi has developed a crisis-oriented theory of immanent critique (2014, Ch. 6) that is not limited to diagnosing systemic dysfunction but includes the normative expectations and self-understandings of social agents (Jaeggi 2017a; see Fraser and Jaeggi 2018), but at a more abstract theoretical level than Fraser’s immanent analysis of capitalism as a social order. Like Fraser and Jaeggi, Albena Azmanova argues for renewed attention to the critique of capitalism but is skeptical about how helpful “crisis” talk is (2014) and maintains that radical social change is possible without crisis, revolution, or utopia through a united struggle against forms of precarity that are endemic to contemporary capitalism (2020). More generally, the turn to economic crisis dynamics has also led to a renewed interest in work – its general significance, pathologies, and emancipatory potential (Jaeggi 2017b, Dejours et al. 2018, Honneth 2023).

Turning specifically to the ecological crisis, Frankfurt School theorists have only recently begun taking seriously the task of rethinking their approach to critical theory in the current context of an ongoing ecological disaster on a global scale (for an early exception, see Vogel 1996). Some critical theorists argue that this situation calls for a new paradigm of “Critical Naturalism” (Gregoratto et al., 2022); others argue for a fundamental rethinking of Western conceptions of human freedom and a radical shift in conceptions of the ethically good life as a precondition for the kind of radical social change required by the current crisis (Cooke 2020, 2023). Fraser focuses on the role of capitalism in the climate catastrophe and the need for eco-politics to be anti-capitalist so that we can reassert control over, and begin to reinvent from the ground up, our relation to nature (Fraser 2021, 2022; see Bernstein 2022 for a recent approach to such rethinking).

In rethinking our conception of nature, given the lack of serious attention to theorizing about nature in the second and, until quite recently, third generation of the Frankfurt School, it is not surprising that many critical theorists have looked more to the first generation (see the collected essays in Biro 2011), with Adorno’s work viewed as a promising starting point for rethinking humans’ relation to nature (Cook 2011, Cassegård 2021, Ch. 3). Cook argues that the “project of showing that human history is always also natural history and that non-human nature is entwined with history… informs all Adorno’s work” and that there are important affinities between his work and proponents of radical ecology (Cook 2011, 1, 5–6). On the other hand, the view of nature as having a kind of otherness that is beyond and not fully graspable by humans – a view expressed at times by Adorno and Horkeimer as well as Marcuse – has been criticized in favor of a more Hegelian-Marxist approach that sees “nature” as a product of human activity (Vogel 1996, 2011). Others argue for reviving critical engagement with Marcuse’s work as a resource for addressing the ecological crisis, with its combination of a critique of science and technology (most radically, as a call for a “new science”) with the idea that social transformation must include a changed, aesthetic relation to nature (Feenberg 2023a, 2023b). At this point, it is clear that there must be more engagement between Frankfurt School theorists and the many “critical ecologies” being developed today, e.g., deep ecology, eco-feminism, eco-socialism, ecological Marxism, environmental justice, indigenous and decolonial ecologies, and new materialism (on the recent dialogue between Frankfurt School theorists and new materialism, see Rosa et al., 2021).

Finally, Frankfurt School theorists have turned their attention to political crises and the rise of right-wing populist, authoritarian, and neo-fascist movements, parties, and governments (Brown, Gordon, and Pensky 2018, Gordon 2017, Abromeit 2016). This crisis is particularly important because adequately addressing the economic and ecological crises of our time requires political solutions, which will be hindered by political systems that are themselves in crisis, thereby contributing to a regressive dynamic (Jaeggi 2022, Forst 2023).

From the perspective of critical theorists, there seem to be two aspects of the political crisis that are often missing from mainstream liberal accounts. The first pertains to the genesis and the causes of the crisis (Brown 2019, Gambetti 2020). Against accounts that see authoritarianism only in terms of a rupture with and as entirely foreign to liberal democracy, they argue that we need to examine the continuities and enabling conditions that allow authoritarian tendencies to arise from within liberal-democratic capitalist societies. Without analyzing the neoliberal restructuring of social relations and the ways in which populist and authoritarian movements exploit electoral strategies, fragmented public spheres, and liberal ideological frameworks such as “freedom of speech,” the critique of and resistance to them will necessarily remain truncated.

The second aspect pertains to the dynamic of authoritarianism and the political crisis it engenders. Beyond focusing on its political dimension (e.g. political aims and values), critical theorists have sought to analyze the socio-cultural, affective, and psycho-social dynamics of authoritarianism and its attractiveness to populations that seem to have little to gain from the election of populist leaders (Marasco 2018, Brown 2019, McAfee 2019, Redecker 2020, Zaretsky 2022). These approaches can draw on and are supported by Adorno’s analysis (1967a) of core features of authoritarian right-wing populism. First, it is not so much actual abandonment but a feared, anticipated, or imagined abandonment, along with a perceived loss of privileges that had come to seem natural, that are the driving force of the rise of a reactionary authoritarianism that then gets misdescribed as a revolt of the oppressed and exploited. Second, the proponents of authoritarianism, following an antisemitic and/or racist logic, personalize the blame for their fears and feelings of abandonment by projecting it onto groups they classify as alien, rather than attributing it to structural features of society.

In responding to all the crises discussed here – economic, ecological, and political – critical theorists must grapple with a number of challenges. Purely at the level of theory, there is the question of whether positing unity or convergence among crises is diagnostically accurate. At a practical level, it remains to be seen whether a unity thesis will be politically motivating and whether a convergence of social struggles is indeed on the horizon. The issue of practice also bears on the question of whether and to what extent the objective conditions of crisis and contradiction diagnosed by critical theorists actually affect people’s everyday lived experience and become motivating factors for political movements (see Section 2.5 ). Such questions about the relation between theory and practice have long been a focus of critical theorists and have recently gained attention in theorizing about a range of critical and political practices.

While overcoming the gap between theory and practice has been a central methodological and political concern for critical theorists, critics have pointed out the prominent turn away from practice to theory in the first generation – accused by Lukács of taking up residence in the “Grand Hotel Abyss” (Lukács 1963, 22) – and the continued marginalization of critical praxis in later generations (Harcourt 2020). There are multiple grounds for challenging this assessment. Frankfurt School theorists had arguments all along about how to assess and relate to radical movements, such as the student movement of 1968 (Adorno and Marcuse 1969, Freyenhagen 2014, Pickford 2023), and there has always been a strand that continuously engaged with struggles and movements, from Marcuse to Negt and Kluge and Fraser. Some critical theorists have focused on deliberative democracy, the public sphere, and civil society (Habermas 1962, 1992, 2021, Cohen and Arato 1992, Benhabib 2004, Lafont 2019) as core fora for critical practice, while others have argued for critical theory itself to be democratized and understood as a critical practice (Bohman 2003, Celikates 2009).

Still, many of these approaches have been criticized for prioritizing institutional achievements over struggles and critical practices, and reform over revolution. Given the challenges outlined above (4.2), it is not surprising that some recent work tries to reverse this tendency by exploring more radical responses to such crises. These attempts notably push beyond the dichotomy between reform and revolution – for example, by promoting non-reformist reforms that could “alter the terrain on which future struggles will be waged, thus expanding the set of feasible options for future reforms” (Fraser, in Fraser and Honneth 2003, 79) – and mine the rich history and present of radical struggles outside traditional forms of political organizing such as the party or reimagine the party in radical ways (Dean 2016).

The range of critical practices engaged with by critical theorists past and present is extensive (for an inventory, see Harcourt 2020, Ch. 15). Frankfurt School theorists of earlier generations covered various forms of resistance, from the “Great Refusal” of the 1960s (Marcuse) and the potential for resistance in independent thinking and critical analysis in the face of universal reification (Adorno) to civil disobedience as a sign of a dynamic public sphere and civil society (Habermas 1983b, Cohen and Arato 1992, Ch. 11). More recently, critical theorists within various traditions have analyzed forms of disobedience (direct, digital, migrant etc.) as political practices of contestation and struggles for democratization “from below” (Young 2001, Smith 2013, Scheuerman 2018, Celikates 2019b). Other practices of resistance that do not directly engage with state institutions or appeal to the broader public include forms of sabotage (Malm 2020), fleeing, withdrawal, or defection. These turn away from what are seen as state-oriented struggles for visibility, recognition, or representation (Virno 2004, Roberts 2015) and towards subaltern forms of sociality (Moten and Harney 2013) and counter-communities that prefigure fundamental alternatives for living together (Loick 2021). Emphasizing the revolutionary dimension of critical practices, theorists have drawn on the abolitionist tradition of struggles against slavery and colonialism, and its revitalization in movements like Black Lives Matter, to call for a fundamental critique of racial capitalism and its entanglement with the punitive state, and a correspondingly radical transformation of all social relations and institutions (Davis 2005, Gilmore 2022). Critical theorists have also explored political practices of assembling (Butler 2015), occupying, striking, and reorganizing processes of social reproduction (Gago 2019), linking these to the need to rethink revolution beyond the model of a single break or event and more as an interstitial process (Redecker 2018, Saar 2020).

Whether the new revolutionary subjects and struggles that emerge in these critical practices will indeed converge to fundamentally challenge the existing order, open up new pathways to emancipation, and develop emancipated – more just, democratic, and sustainable – modes of living together remains to be seen. Horkheimer’s quip still holds: “if the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the eating here is still in the future” (1937a [1972, 220–1]). Against this background, theoretical explorations of critical practices – in the multiplicity of their forms, terrains, and actors – can be seen as part of the ongoing attempt to bring theory and practice together with an emancipatory orientation in light of the crises and struggles of the age. This approach has characterized the Frankfurt School from its very beginnings and has been a driving force in its continual (self-)transformation, making it into one of the most influential paradigms in social philosophy today.

• Abromeit, John, 2016, “Critical Theory and the Persistence of Right-Wing Populism”, Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture , 15(2) [ Abromeit 2016 available online ].
• Adorno, Theodor W., 1931 [year this lecture was given], “Die Aktualität der Philosophie”, in Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften I: Philosophische Frühschriften , Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973, pp. 325–344; translated as “The Actuality of Philosophy”, Benjamin Snow (trans.), Telos , 31 (1977): 120–133.
• –––, 1936 “Wiesengrund-Adorno an Benjamin, 18. März 1936”, in Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Briefwechsel 1928–1940 , Henri Lonitz (ed.), Frankfurt am Main, 1994, pp. 168–177; translated as March 18, 1936, “Wiesengrund-Adorno to Benjamin, March 18, 1936”, Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin , The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940 ,, Nicholas Walker (trans.), Henri Lonitz (ed.), Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999, pp. 127–133.
• –––, 1938, “Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 7(3), 321–356; translated as “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening”, Susan L. Gillespie (trans.), in Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music , Richard Leppert (ed.), Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, pp. 288–317.
• –––, 1951a, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft”, in Karl Gustav Specht (ed.), Soziologische Forschung unserer Zeit , Köln and Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1951, pp. 228–240, republished in Theodor W. Adorno, Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1955, pp. 7–31; translated as “Cultural Criticism and Society”, in Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms , Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981, pp. 17–34.
• –––, 1951b, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda”, in Géza Roheim (ed.), Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences Vol. 3 , New York: International Universities Press, 279–300. Reprinted in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture , Jay Bernstein (ed.), New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 132–157.
• –––, 1951c, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life , Edmund Jephcott (trans.), London: Verso, 2005.
• –––, 1955, “Schuld und Abwehr”, in Friedrich Pollock (ed.), Gruppenexperiment: Ein Studienbericht , Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 278–428; translated as Guilt and Defense: On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar Germany , Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin (eds./trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
• –––, 1957, “Soziologie und empirische Forschung”, in K . Ziegler (ed.), Wesen und Wirklichkeit des Menschen: Festschrift für Helmuth Plessner , Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, pp. 245–260; translated as “Sociology and Empirical Research”, Glyn Adey and David Frisby (trans.), in Theodor W. Adorno et al. (eds.), The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology , London: Heinemann, 1976, pp. 68–86.
• –––, 1963a [year this transcribed lecture course was given], Probleme der Moralphilosophie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996; translated as Problems of Moral Philosophy , Rodney Livingstone (trans.), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
• –––, 1963b, Drei Studien zu Hegel , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Hegel: Three Studies , Shierry Weber Nicholsen (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.
• –––, 1966a, Negative Dialektik , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Negative Dialectics , E. B. Ashton (trans.), New York: Seabury Press, 1973.
• –––, 1966b, “Gesellschaft”, in Hermann Kunst and Siegfried Grundmann (eds.), Evangelisches Staatslexikon , Stuttgart: Kreuz Verlag, pp. 636–643; translated as “Society”, Fredric R. Jameson (trans.), Salmagundi , 10–11 (1969): 144–153.
• –––, 1969a, “Zur Spezifikation der kritischen Theorie”, in Theodor W. Adorno Archiv (ed.), Adorno. Eine Bildmonographie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 292.
• –––, 1969b, “Marginalien zu Theorie und Praxis”, Die Zeit , No. 33 (1969); translated as “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis”, Henry W. Pickford (trans.), in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords , New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, pp. 259–278.
• –––, 1967a [year this transcribed lecture was given], Aspekte des neuen Rechtsradikalismus , Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1999; translated as Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism , Wieland Hoban (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2020.
• –––, 1967b, “Résumé über Kulturindustrie”, in Theodor W. Adorno, Ohne Leitbild: Parva Aesthetica , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 60–70; translated as “The Culture Industry Reconsidered”, Anson G. Rabinbach (trans.), in Jay Bernstein, (ed.), The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture , New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 98–106.
• –––, 1970, Ästhetische Theorie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Aesthetic Theory , Robert Hullot-Kentor (trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977.
• Adorno, Theodor W., Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, 1950, The Authoritarian Personality , with a new Introduction by Peter E. Gordon, New York: Verso, 2019.
• Adorno, Theodor W., Hans Albert, Ralf Dahrendorf, Jürgen Habermas, Harald Pilot, and Karl R. Popper, 1969, Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie , Neuwied/Berlin: Luchterhand; translated as The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology , Glyn Adey and David Frisby (trans.), London: Heinemann, 1976.
• Adorno, Theodor W. and Herbert Marcuse, 1969, “Correspondence on the German Student Movement”, New Left Review , 233 (1999), 123–136.
• Agamben, Giorgio, 1995, Homo Sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita , Turin: Einaudi; translated as Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life , Daniel Heller-Roazen (trans.), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
• Allen, Amy, 2008, The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory , New York: Columbia University Press.
• –––, 2010, “Third Generation Critical Theory: Benhabib, Fraser, and Honneth”, in Rosi Braidotti (ed.), After Poststructuralism: Transitions and Transformations , Durham: Acumen, pp. 129–48.
• –––, 2012, “The Public Sphere: Ideology and/or Ideal?”, Political Theory , 40(6): 822–829. doi:10.1177/0090591712457664
• –––, 2014, “Reason, Power and History: Re-reading the Dialectic of Enlightenment ”, Thesis Eleven , 120(1): 10–25. doi:10.1177/0725513613519588
• –––, 2015, “Emancipation without Utopia: Subjection, Modernity, and the Normative Claims of Feminist Critical Theory”, Hypatia , 30(3): 513–29. doi:10.1111/hypa.12160
• –––, 2016, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory , New York: Columbia University Press.
• –––, 2019, “Critical Theory and Feminism”, in Gordon, Peter, Espen Hammer, and Axel Honneth (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School , London: Routledge, pp. 528–541.
• –––, 2021, Critique on the Couch: Why Critical Theory Needs Psychoanalysis , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Allen, Amy, and Eduardo Mendieta, (eds.), 2021, Decolonizing Ethics: The Critical Theory of Enrique Dussel , University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
• Allen, Amy, and Brian O’Connor (eds.), 2019, Transitional Subjects: Critical Theory and Object Relations , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Anderson, Joel, 2000, “The ‘Third Generation’ of the Frankfurt School”, Intellectual History Newsletter 22, 49–61.
• Apel, Karl-Otto, 1985, “Ist die Ethik der idealen Kommunikationsgemeinschaft eine Utopie? Zum Verhältnis von Ethik, Utopie und Utopiekritik”, in Wilhelm Vosskamp (ed.), Utopieforschung , Frankfurt: Suhrkamp; translated as “Is the Ideal Communication Community a Utopia? On the Relationship between Ethics, Utopia, and the Critique of Utopia”, David Frisby (trans.), in Seyla Benhabib and Fred Dallmayr (eds.), The Communicative Ethics Controversy , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990, pp. 23–59.
• –––, 1989, “Normative Begründung der ‘Kritischen Theorie’” durch Rekurs auf lebensweltliche Sittlichkeit? Ein transzendentalpragmatisch orientierter Versuch, mit Habermas gegen Habermas zu denken”, in Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer (eds.), Zwischenbetrachtungen im Prozess der Aufklärung: Jürgen Habermas zum 60. Geburtstag , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 15–65; translated as “Normatively Grounding ‘Critical Theory’ through Recourse to Lifeworld? A Transcendental-Pragmatic Attempt to Think With Habermas Against Habermas”, William Rehg (trans.), in Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer (eds.), Philosophical Interventions Into the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992, pp. 125–70.
• Azmanova, Albena, 2014, “Crisis? Capitalism is Doing Very Well. How is Critical Theory?”, Constellations , 21(3): 351–365. doi:10.1215/00382876-7165857
• –––, 2020, Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Balibar, Etienne, and Immanuel Wallerstein, 1988, Race, nation, classe: les identités ambiguës , Paris: La Découverte; translated as Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities , Chris Turner (trans.), New York: Verso, 1991.
• Bardawil, Fadi, 2018, “Césaire with Adorno: Critical Theory and the Colonial Problem”, South Atlantic Quarterly , 117(4): 773–789. doi:10.1215/00382876-7165857
• Baum, Bruce, 2015, “Decolonizing Critical Theory”, Constellations , 22(3): 420–434. doi:10.1111/1467-8675.12169
• Baynes, Kenneth, 2016, Habermas , New York: Routledge.
• Benhabib, Seyla, 1986, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory , New York: Columbia University Press.
• –––, 1992, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2004, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Benhabib, Seyla, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, 1995, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange , New York: Routledge.
• Benjamin, Walter, 1920/21, “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”, in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik , 47(3): 809–832; translated as “Toward the Critique of Violence”, Julia Ng (trans.), in Peter Fenves and Julia Ng (eds.), Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition , Stanford University Press, 2021, pp. 39–60.
• –––, 1936, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”, originally published as “L’œuvre d’art à l’époque de sa réproduction mécanisée”, Pierre Klossowski (trans.), Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 5(1), 40–68, all textual variants can be found in Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Walter Benjamin Werke und Nachlaß: Kritische Gesamtausgabe vol. 16), Burkhardt Lindner (ed.), Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012, the essay was translated as “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility”, Michael W. Jennings (trans.), Grey Room , 39 (2010): 11–37. doi:10.1162/grey.2010.1.39.11
• –––, 1940, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte”, in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften I , Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (eds.), Frankfurt am Main, 1974, pp. 691–706; translated as “On the Concept of History”, Harry Zohn (trans.) in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds.) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings (Volume 4), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, pp. 389–400.
• –––, 1955, Schriften , 2 vols., Theodor W. Adorno and Gretel Adorno (eds.), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated in parts as Illuminations , Harry Zohn (trans.), Hannah Arendt (ed.), New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.
• Bernstein, Jay, 2001, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bernstein, Richard, 2010, The Pragmatic Turn , Malden, MA: Polity.
• –––, 2022, The Vicissitudes of Nature: From Spinoza to Freud , Malden, MA: Polity.
• Bhambra, Gurminder K., 2021, “Decolonizing Critical Theory?: Epistemological Justice, Progress, Reparations”, Critical Times , 4(1): 73–89. doi:10.1215/26410478-8855227
• Bhambra, Gurminder K., and John Holmwood, 2021, Colonialism and Modern Social Theory , Malden, MA: Polity.
• Biro, Andrew, 2011, Critical Ecologies: The Frankfurt School and Contemporary Environmental Crises , Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Bohman, James, 2003, “Critical Theory as Practical Knowledge: Participants, Observers, and Critics”, in S. P. Turner and P. A. Roth (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences , Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 91–109.
• –––, 2007, Democracy Across Borders: From Dêmos to Dêmoi, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Bojadžijev, Manuela, 2020, “Anti-Racism as Method”, in John Solomos (ed.), The Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Racisms , London: Routledge 2020, pp. 193–204.
• Bourdieu, Pierre, 1980, Le sens pratique , Paris: Minuit; translated as The Logic of Practic e, Richard Nice (trans.), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992.
• Brown, Wendy (ed.), 2006, “Feminist Theory and the Frankfurt School”: a Special Issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies , 17(1).
• –––, 2019, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West , New York: Columbia University Press.
• –––, 2022, “Rethinking Politics and Freedom in the Anthropocene”, Crisis and Critique , 9(2): 24–44 [ Brown 2022 available online ].
• Brown, Wendy, and Rainer Forst, 2014, The Power of Tolerance: A Debate , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Brown, Wendy, Peter Gordon, and Max Pensky, 2018, Authoritarianism. Three Inquiries in Critical Theory , Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
• Brunkhorst, Hauke, 1983, “Paradigmenkern und Theoriedynamik der Kritischen Theorie der Gesellschaft”, Soziale Welt , 34: 22–36; translated as “Paradigm-core and theory-dynamics in critical social theory: people and programs”, Peter Krockenberger (trans.), Philosophy & Social Criticism , 24(6) (1998): 67–110.
• –––, 2002, Solidarität: Von der Bürgerfreundschaft zur globalen Rechtsgenossenschaft , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community , Jeffrey Flynn (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
• –––, 2014, Critical Theory of Legal Revolutions: Evolutionary Perspectives , New York: Bloomsbury.
• Buchstein, Hubertus, 2020, “Otto Kirchheimer and the Frankfurt School: Failed Collaborations in the Search for a Critical Theory of Politics”, New German Critique , 47(2): 81–106.
• Buck-Morss, Susan, 1977, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute , New York: The Free Press.
• –––, 1989, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• –––, 1992, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered”, October , 62: 3–41. doi:10.2307/778700
• –––, 2009, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History , Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
• Butler, Judith, 1990, Gender Trouble , London: Routledge.
• –––, 1997, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• –––, 2012, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism , New York: Columbia University Press.
• –––, 2015, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Butler, Judith, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West, 2011, The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Cassegård, Carl, 2021, Toward a Critical Theory of Nature: Capital, Ecology, and Dialectics , New York: Bloomsbury.
• Catlin, Jonathon, 2023, “Antisemitism and Racism ‘After Auschwitz’: Adorno on the ‘Hellish Unity’ of ‘Permanent Catastrophe’ ”, in Marcel Stoetzler (ed.), Critical Theory and the Critique of Antisemitism , New York: Bloomsbury, pp. 203–230.
• Celikates, Robin, 2006, “From Critical Social Theory to a Social Theory of Critique: On the Critique of Ideology after the Pragmatic Turn”, Constellations , 13(1): 21–40. doi:10.1111/j.1351-0487.2006.00438.x
• –––, 2009, Kritik als soziale Praxis: Gesellschaftliche Selbstverständigung und kritische Theorie , Frankfurt am Main: Campus; translated as Critique as Social Practice: Critical Theory and Social Self-Understanding , Naomi van Steenbergen (trans.), London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.
• –––, 2019a, “Critical Theory and the Unfinished Project of Mediating Theory and Practice”, in Peter Gordon, Espen Hammer, and Axel Honneth (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School , London: Routledge, pp. 206–220.
• –––, 2019b, “Constituent Power Beyond Exceptionalism: Irregular Migration, Disobedience, and (Re-)Constitution”, Journal of International Political Theory , 15(1): 67–81. doi:10.1177/1755088218808311
• –––, 2022, “Remaking the Demos ‘from Below’? Critical Theory, Migrant Struggles, and Epistemic Resistance”, in Didier Fassin and Axel Honneth (eds.), Crisis Under Critique: How People Assess, Transform, and Respond to Critical Situations , New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 97–120.
• Celikates, Robin, Sally Haslanger, and Jason Stanley (eds.), forthcoming, Analyzing Ideology , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Celikates, Robin, Axel Honneth, and Rahel Jaeggi, 2023, “The Working Sovereign: A conversation with Axel Honneth”, Journal of Classical Sociology , 23(3): 318–338. doi:10.1177/1468795X231170980
• Chambers, Simone, 2022, “Can Postmetaphysical Reason Escape its Provincial Roots?”, in Tom Bailey (ed.), Deprovincializing Habermas: Global Perspectives , Second Edition , New York: Routledge, pp. 229–248.
• Chari, Anita, 2015, A Political Economy of the Senses: Neoliberalism, Reification, Critique , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Cohen, Jean L., and Andrew Arato, 1992, Civil Society and Political Theory , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Collins, Patricia Hill, 1990, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment , London: Routledge. Second edition published in 2000.
• –––, 2019, Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory , Durham and London: Duke University Press. doi:10.1515/9781478007098
• Cook, Deborah, 2004, Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society , London and New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2011, Adorno on Nature , Durham: Acumen.
• Cooke, Maeve, 2006, Re-Presenting the Good Society , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• –––, 2020, “Ethics and Politics in the Anthropocene”, Philosophy & Social Criticism , 46(10): 1167–1181. doi:10.1177/0191453720903491
• –––, 2023, “Reenvisioning Freedom: Human Agency in Times of Ecological Disaster”, Constellations , 30: 119–127. doi:10.1111/1467-8675.12681
• Cordero, Rodrigo, 2017, Crisis and Critique: On the Fragile Foundations of Social Life , New York: Routledge.
• Coulthard, Glen Sean, 2014, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, 1995, “Introduction”, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement , New York: The New Press, pp. viii–xxxii.
• Davis, Angela Y., 1983, Women, Race and Class , New York: Vintage.
• –––, 2004, “Marcuse’s Legacies”, in John Abromeit and W. Mark Cobb (eds.), Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader . New York, Routledge, pp. 43–50.
• –––, 2005, Abolition Democracy , New York: Seven Stories Press.
• Dean, Jodi, 2016, Crowds and Party , London: Verso.
• Dejours, Christophe, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Emmanuel Renault, and Nicholas H. Smith, 2018, The Return of Work in Critical Theory: Self, Society, Politics , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Demirović, Alex, 2016, “The Frankfurt School, Critical Theory, and Sociology at the Institute for Social Research (1950 to 1960)”, in Gabriel R. Ricci (ed.), The Persistence of Critical Theory , London: Routledge, pp. 25–40.
• Deranty, Jean-Philippe, 2021, “Negativity in Recognition: Post-Freudian Legacies in Contemporary Critical Theory”, in Ikäheimo, Heikki, Kristina Lepold and Titus Stahl (eds.), Recognition and Ambivalence , New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 223–255.
• Derrida, Jacques, 1990 [year the lecture was given], Force de loi , Paris: Galilée, 1994; translated as “The Force of Law”, Mary Quaintance (trans.), in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David G. Carlson (eds.), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice , New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 3–67.
• Dews, Peter, 1987, Logics of Disintegration: Poststructuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory , London: Verso.
• Dubiel, Helmut, 1978, Wissenschaftsorganisation und politische Erfahrung: Studien zur frühen Kritischen Theorie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory , Benjamin Gregg (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985.
• Du Bois, W. E. B., 1935, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 , New York: The Free Press, 1998.
• Dussel, Enrique, 1998, Ética de la Liberación en la edad de globalización y de la exclusión ; translated as Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion , Eduardo Mendieta, Camilo Pérez Bustillo, Yolanda Angulo, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres (trans.), Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.
• –––, 2011, “From Critical Theory to the Philosophy of Liberation: Some Themes for Dialogue”, Transmodernity , 1(2): 16–43. doi.org:10.5070/T412011806
• Eagleton, Terry, 1991, Ideology: An Introduction , London, Verso.
• Feenberg, Andrew, 2023a, “Marcuse’s Critique of Technology Today”, Philosophy & Social Criticism 49(6): 672–685. doi:10.1177/01914537231164657
• –––, 2023b, The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing: Nature and Revolution in Marcuse’s Philosophy of Praxis , London: Verso.
• Ferrara, Alessandro, 2008, The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Ferrarese, Estelle, 2018, La fragilité du souci des autres: Adorno et le care , Lyon: ENS Éditions; translated as The Fragility of Concern for Others: Adorno and the Ethics of Care , Steven Corcoran (trans.), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
• Finlayson, James Gordon, 2007, “Political, Moral and Critical Theory: On the Practical Philosophy of the Frankfurt School”, in Michael Rosen and B. Leiter (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 626–670.
• –––, 2015, “The Artwork and the Promesse du Bonheur in Adorno”, European Journal of Philosophy , 23(3): 392–419. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0378.2012.00542.x
• –––, 2019, The Habermas-Rawls Debate , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Flynn, Jeffrey, 2014a, Reframing the Intercultural Dialogue on Human Rights: A Philosophical Approach , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2014b, “Truth, Objectivity, and Experience after the Pragmatic Turn: Bernstein on Habermas’s ‘Kantian Pragmatism’ ”, in Judith M. Green (ed.), Richard J Bernstein and the Pragmatist Turn in Contemporary Philosophy , Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 190–209.
• –––, 2022, “Decentering Eurocentrism through Dialogue”, in Tom Bailey (ed.), Deprovincializing Habermas: Global Perspectives , Second Edition , New York: Routledge, pp. 249–270.
• Fong, Benjamin Y., 2016, Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Forst, Rainer, 2007, Das Recht auf Rechtfertigung: Elemente einer konstruktivistischen Theorie der Gerechtigkeit , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translated as The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice , Jeffrey Flynn (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
• –––, 2011, Kritik der Rechtfertigungsverhältnisse , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translated as Justification and Critique: Towards a Critical Theory of Politics , Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2014.
• –––, 2017, “Noumenal Alienation: Rousseau, Kant and Marx on the Dialectics of Self-Determination”, Kantian Review , 22(4): 523–551. doi:10.1017/S1369415417000267
• –––, 2021a, Die noumenale Republik: Kritischer Konstruktivismus nach Kant , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translation, The Noumenal Republic: Critical Constructivism after Kant , Ciaran Cronin (trans.), forthcoming.
• –––, (ed)., 2021b, “Symposium on Jürgen Habermas, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie ”, Constellations , 28(1): 1–147.
• –––, 2023, “The rule of unreason: Analyzing (Anti-)Democratic Regression”, Constellations , 30(3): 217–224. doi:10.1111/1467-8675.12671
• Foucault, Michel, 1973 [year this lecture was given], “La vérités et les formes juridiques”, Chimères , 10 (1990): 8–28; translated as “Truth and Juridical Forms”, in Michel Foucault, Power , ed. James D. Faubion, New York: New Press, 2000, pp. 31–45.
• Fraser, Nancy, 1981, “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions”, PRAXIS International , 3: 272–287.
• –––, 1985, “What’s Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender”, New German Critique , 35: 97–131. doi:10.2307/488202
• –––, 1989, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• –––, 1990, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text , 25/26: 56–80.
• –––, 2011, “Marketization, Social Protection, Emancipation: Toward a Neo-Polanyian Conception of Capitalist Crisis”, in Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derlugian (eds.), Business as Usual: The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown , New York University Press, pp. 137–58.
• –––, 2013, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis , London: Verso.
• –––, 2014, “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode”, New Left Review , 86: 55–72.
• –––, 2016, “Contradictions of Capital and Care”, New Left Review , 100: 99–117.
• –––, 2021, “Climates of Capital”, New Left Review , 127: 94–127.
• –––, 2022, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – And What We Can Do about It , New York: Verso.
• Fraser, Nancy, et al., 2014, Transnationalizing the Public Sphere , Kate Nash (ed.), Cambridge: Polity.
• Fraser, Nancy, and Axel Honneth, 2003, Redistribution or Recognition? A Philosophical-Political Exchange , New York: Verso.
• Fraser, Nancy and Rahel Jaeggi, 2018, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory , Brian Milstein (ed.), Cambridge: Polity.
• Freyenhagen, Fabian, 2014, “Adorno’s Politics: Theory and Praxis in Germany’s 1960s”, Philosophy & Social Criticism , 40: 867–893. doi:10.1177/0191453714545198
• –––, 2018, “Critical Theory: Self-Reflexive Theorizing and Struggles for Emancipation”, in: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics [ Freyenhagen 2018 available online ].
• Fricker, Miranda, 2007, Epistemic Injustice , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Fromm, Erich, 1936, “Studien über Autorität und Familie. Sozialpsychologischer Teil”, in Max Horkheimer (ed.), Schriften des Instituts für Sozialforschung, Vol. V: Studien über Autorität und Familie , Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan; translated as “Studies on Authority and the Family. Socio-psychological Dimensions”, Fromm Forum , 24 (2020): 8–58.
• –––, 1961, Marx’s Concept of Man , New York: Continuum.
• Gago, Verónica, 2019, La potencia feminista: O el deseo de cambiarlo todo , Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón; translated as Feminist International: How to Change Everything , Liz Mason-Deese (trans.), London: Verso, 2020.
• Gambetti, Zeynep, 2020, “Exploratory Notes on the Origins of New Fascisms”, Critical Times , 3(1): 1–32. doi:10.1215/26410478-8189841
• Geuss, Raymond, 1981, The Idea of a Critical Theory , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, 2022, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation , London: Verso.
• Gordon, Peter, 2017, “The Authoritarian Personality Revisited”, boundary 2 , 44(2): 31–56. doi:10.1215/01903659-3826618
• –––, 2023, A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity , Chicago: University of Chicago Press. doi:10.4324/9780429443374
• Gordon, Peter, Espen Hammer, and Axel Honneth (eds.), 2019, The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School , London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780429443374
• Gregoratto, Federica, Heikki Ikäheimo, Emmanuel Renault, Arvi Särkelä, and Italo Testa, 2022, “Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto”, Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy , 42(1): 108–24. doi:10.21827/krisis.42.1.38637
• Grüner, Eduardo, 2010, La oscuridad y las luces , Buenos Aires: Edhasa; translated as The Haitian Revolution: Capitalism, Slavery and Counter-Modernity , Ramsey McGlazer (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2019.
• Habermas, Jürgen, 1962, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft , Neuwied, Berlin: Luchterhand; translated as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society , Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.
• –––, 1963, Theorie und Praxis: Sozialphilosophische Studien , Neuwied am Rhein and Berlin: Luchterhand. New and extended edition Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971; translated as Theory and Practice , John Viertel (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press, 1973.
• –––, 1968a, Technik und Wissenschaft als ‘Ideologie’ , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Chapters 4–6 of Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics , Jeremy J. Shapiro (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press, 1970.
• –––, 1968b, Erkenntnis und Interesse , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Knowledge and Human Interests , Jeremy J. Shapiro (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press, 1971.
• –––, 1973a, “Nachwort”, in Jürgen Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse, Mit einem neuen Nachwort , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 367–417; translated as “A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests ”, Christian Lenhardt (trans.), Philosophy of the Social Sciences , 3: 157–189.
• –––, 1973b, Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Legitimation Crisis , Thomas McCarthy (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press, 1975.
• –––, 1981, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns , 2 vols., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as The Theory of Communicative Action , 2 vols., Thomas A. McCarthy (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press, 1984.
• –––, 1983a, Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, translated as Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action , Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.
• –––, 1983b, “Ziviler Ungehorsam: Testfall für den demokratischen Rechtsstaat”, in Peter Glotz (ed.), Ziviler Ungehorsam im Rechtsstaat , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 29–53; translated as “Civil Disobedience: Litmus Test for the Democratic Constitutional State”, Berkeley Journal of Sociology , 30: 95–116.
• –––, 1985, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures , Frederick Lawrence (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.
• –––, 1991, Erläuterungen zur Diskursethik , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics , Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.
• –––, 1992, Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy , William Rehg (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
• –––, 1995a, “Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s Political Liberalism”, The Journal of Philosophy , 92(3): 109–131. doi:10.5840/jphil199592335
• –––, 1995b, “Kants Idee des ewigen Friedens aus dem historischen Abstand von 200 Jahren”, Kritische Jusitiz , 3: 293–319; translated as “Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the Benefit of Two Hundred Years’ Hindsight”, in James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (eds.), Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997, pp. 113–153.
• –––, 1996, “Vernünftig versus Wahr oder die Moral der Weltbilder”, in Die Einbeziehung des Anderen: Studien zur politischen Theorie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as “‘Reasonable’ versus ‘True,’ or the Morality of Worldviews”, Ciaran Cronin (trans.), in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory , Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff (eds.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998, pp. 75-105.
• –––, 1998, Die postnationale Konstellation: politische Essays , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays , Max Pensky (ed./trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
• –––, 1999, Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung: philosophische Aufsätze , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Truth and Justification , Barbara Fultner (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
• –––, 2005, Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion. Philosophische Aufsätze , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Between Naturalism and Religion , Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Malden, MA: Polity, 2008.
• –––, 2006, “Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research”, Communication Theory , 16(4): 411–426. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2006.00280.x
• –––, 2019, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie , 2 vols., Berlin: Suhrkamp; part of volume 1 translated as Also a History of Philosophy, Volume 1: The Project of a Genealogy of Postmetaphysical Thinking , Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2023.
• –––, 2021, “Überlegungen und Hypothesen zu einem erneuten Strukturwandel der politischen Öffentlichkeit”, in: Martin Seeliger and Sebastian Sevignani (eds.), Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit? , Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag, 470–500; translated as “Reflections and Hypotheses on a Further Structural Transformation of the Political Public Sphere”, Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Theory, Culture & Society , 39(4) (2022): 145–171. doi:10.1177/02632764221112341
• Hall, Stuart, 2021, Selected Writings on Race and Difference , Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Harcourt, Bernard E., 2020, Critique and Praxis , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Haslanger, Sally, 2017a, “Culture and Critique”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Supplementary Volume), 91: 149–173. doi:10.1093/arisup/akx001
• –––, 2017b, “Racism, Ideology, and Social Movements”, Res Philosophica , 94(1): 1–22. doi:10.11612/RESPHIL.1547
• Heath, Joseph, 2014, “Rebooting Discourse Ethics”, Philosophy & Social Criticism , 40(9): 829–866. doi:10.1177/0191453714545340
• Hedrick, Todd, 2010, Rawls and Habermas: Reason, Pluralism, and the Claims of Political Philosophy , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• –––, 2019, Reconciliation and Reification: Freedom’s Semblance and Actuality from Hegel to Contemporary Critical Theory , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Heberle, Renée (ed.), 2006, Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno , University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania University Press.
• Honneth, Axel, 1985, Kritik der Macht: Reflexionsstufen einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory , Kenneth Baynes (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
• –––, 1992, Kampf um Anerkennung: Zur moralischen Grammatik sozialer Konflikte , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts , Joel Anderson (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 1995.
• –––, 1994, “Die soziale Dynamik von Mißachtung: Zur Ortsbestimmung einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie”, Leviathan , 22(1): 78–93; translated as “The Social Dynamics of Disrespect: On the Location of Critical Theory Today”, John Farrell (trans.), Constellations , 1(2): 255–69, reprinted in in Axel Honneth, Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory , Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007, pp. 63–79.
• –––, 1998, “Über die Möglichkeit einer erschließenden Kritik. Die Dialektik der Aufklärung im Horizont gegenwärtiger Debatten über Sozialkritik”, Paradigmi. Rivista di critica filosofica , 16(48): 501–514; translated as “The Possibility of a Disclosing Critique of Society: The Dialectic of Enlightenment in Light of Current Debates in Social Criticism”, Constellations , 7(1) (2000): 116–127. doi:10.1111/1467-8675.00173
• –––, 2000, Das Andere der Gerechtigkeit ; translated as Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory , Joseph Ganahl (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2007.
• –––, 2001, Leiden an Unbestimmtheit: Eine Reaktualisierung der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie , Stuttgart: Reclam; translated as The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel’s Social Theory , Ladislaus Löb (trans.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
• –––, 2003, “Redistribution as Recognition”, in N. Fraser and A. Honneth (eds.), Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange , London: Verso, pp. 110–197.
• –––, 2004, “Eine soziale Pathologie der Vernunft. Zur intellektuellen Erbschaft der Kritischen Theorie”, in Christoph Halbig and Michael Quante (eds.), Axel Honneth: Sozialphilosophie zwischen Kritik und Anerkennung , Münster: LIT-Verlag, pp. 9-32; translated as “A Social Pathology of Reason: On the Intellectual Legacy of Critical Theory”, in A. Honneth , Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory , New York: Columbia University Press, 2009, pp. 19-42.
• –––, 2005, Verdinglichung: Eine anerkennungstheoretische Studie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Reification , Martin Jay (ed.), New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• –––, 2010, Das Ich im Wir: Studien zur Anerkennungstheorie , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translated as The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition , Joseph Ganahl (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2012.
• –––, 2011, Das Recht der Freiheit: Grundriß einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translated as Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life , Joseph Ganahl (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
• –––, 2017, “Is There an Emancipatory Interest? An Attempt to Answer Critical Theory’s Most Fundamental Question”, European Journal of Philosophy , 25: 908–920. doi:10.1111/ejop.12321
• –––, 2022, “‘Labour’, A Brief History of a Modern Concept”, Philosophy , 97(2), 149–167. doi:10.1017/S003181912100036X
• –––, 2023, Der arbeitende Souverän , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translation, The Working Sovereign , Cambridge: Polity, forthcoming.
• Honneth, Axel, and Hans Joas (eds.), 1986, Kommunikatives Handeln: Beiträge zu Jürgen Habermas ‘Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action, Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
• Horkheimer, Max, 1931, “Die gegenwärtige Lage der Sozialphilosophie und die Aufgaben eines Instituts für Sozialforschung”, Frankfurter Universitätsreden , XXXVII: 3–16; translated as “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research”, John Torpey (trans.), in Max Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993, pp. 1–14. Retranslated as “The State of Contemporary Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research”, Journal for Cultural Research , Peter Wagner (trans.), 22(2) (2018): 113–121. doi:10.1080/14797585.2018.1461354
• –––, 1933, “Materialismus und Moral”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 2(2): 162–197; translated as “Materialism and Morality”, G. Frederick Hunter (trans.), in Max Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings , Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993, pp. 15–47.
• –––, 1936a, “Egoismus und Freiheitsbewegung: Zur Anthropologie des bürgerlichen Zeitalters”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 5(2): 161–234; translated as “Egoism and Freedom Movements: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Era”, G. Frederick Hunter (trans.), in Max Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings , Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993, pp. 49–110.
• ––– (ed.), 1936b, Studien über Autorität und Familie: Forschungsberichte aus dem Institut für Sozialforschung , Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan.
• –––, 1937a, “Traditionelle und kritische Theorie”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 6(2): 245–294; translated as “Traditional and Critical Theory”, Matthew J. O’Connell (trans.), in Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays , New York: Continuum, 1972, pp. 188–243.
• –––, 1937b, “Nachtrag”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 6(3): 625–631; translated as “Postscript”, Matthew J. O’Connell (trans.), in Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays , New York: Continuum, 1972, pp. 244–252.
• –––, 1941, “Art and Mass Culture”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 9(2), 290–304, republished in Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays , New York: Continuum, 1972, pp. 273–290.
• Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno, 1947, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente , Amsterdam: Querido; translated as Dialectic of Enlightenment , Edmund Jephcott (trans.), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
• Hoy, David Couzens and Thomas McCarthy, 1994, Critical Theory , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Ibsen, Malte Froslee, 2023, A Critical Theory of Global Justice: The Frankfurt School and World Society , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Ikäheimo, Heikki, Kristina Lepold and Titus Stahl (eds.), 2021, Recognition and Ambivalence , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Ingram, David, 2018, World Crisis and Underdevelopment: A Critical Theory of Poverty, Agency, and Coercion , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Ingram, James, 2013, Radical Cosmopolitics: The Ethics and Politics of Democratic Universalism , New York: Columbia University Press.
• –––, 2019, “Critical Theory and Postcolonialism”, in Gordon, Peter, Espen Hammer, and Axel Honneth (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School , London: Routledge, pp. 500–513.
• Jaeggi, Rahel, 2005, Entfremdung: Zur Aktualität eines sozialphilosophischen Problems , Campus; translated as Alienation , Frederick Neuhouser and Alan E. Smith (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
• –––, 2008, “Re-Thinking Ideology”, in Christopher Zurn, Boujdewijn de Bruijn (eds.), New Waves in Political Philosophy , Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
• –––, 2014, Kritik von Lebensformen , Berlin.: Suhrkamp; translated as Critique of Forms of Life , Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.
• –––, 2017a, “Crisis, Contradiction, and the Task of a Critical Theory”, in Banu Bargu und Chiara Bottici (eds.), Feminism, Capitalism, and Critique. Essays in Honor of Nancy Fraser , Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 209–224.
• –––, 2017b, “Pathologies of Work”, Women’s Studies Quarterly , 45(3/4): 59–76. doi:10.1353/wsq.2017.0044
• –––, 2022, “Modes of Regression: The Case of Ressentiment”, Critical Times , 5(3): 501–537. doi:10.1215/26410478-10030204
• Jay, Martin, 1973, The Dialectical Imagination , Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown.
• –––, 1984, Marxism and Totality , Cambridge: Polity.
• Kelley, Robin D. G., 2002, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination , Boston: Beacon Press. Revised and expanded edition published in 2022.
• Kerner, Ina, 2018, “Postcolonial Theories as Global Critical Theories”, Constellations , 25(4): 614– 628. doi:10.1111/1467-8675.12346
• Klein, Steven, 2020, The Work of Politics: Making a Democratic Welfare State , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Kompridis, Nikolas, 2006, Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Koopman, Colin, 2013, Genealogy as Critique , Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Kracauer, Siegfried, 1927, “Das Ornament der Masse”, Frankfurter Zeitung , July 9–10, 1927; translated as “Mass Ornament”, Barbara Correll and Jack Zipes (trans.) New German Critique , 5 (1975): 67–76.
• –––, 2013, Totalitäre Propaganda , Bernd Stiegler (ed.), Berlin: Suhrkamp. Selections are translated as part of “Studies of Totalitarianism, Propaganda, and the Masses (1936–1940)” in Siegfried Kracauer, Selected Writings on Media, Propaganda, and Political Communication , Jaeho Kang, Graeme Gilloch, and John Abromeit (eds.), New York: Columbia University Press, 2022.
• Laclau, Ernesto, 1992, “Beyond Emancipation”, in Emancipation(s) , London: Verso, 1996, pp. 1–19.
• Lafont, Cristina, 2019, Democracy without Shortcuts : A Participatory Conception of Deliberative Democracy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Lara, Maria Pia, 1998, Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere , Cambridge: Polity.
• –––, 2021, Beyond the Public Sphere: Film and the Feminist Imaginary , Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
• Leeb, Claudia, 2017, Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism: Toward a New Theory of the Political Subject , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Löwenthal, Leo, and Norbert Guterman, 1949, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (Studies in Prejudice: Volume 5), with a new Introduction by Alberto Toscano, London: Verso, 2021.
• Löwy, Michael, 2001, Walter Benjamin: Avertissement d’incendie , Paris: Presses Universitaires de France; translated as Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ , Chris Turner (trans.), London: Verso, 2016.
• Loick, Daniel, 2012, Kritik der Souveränität , Frankfurt: Campus; translated as A Critique of Sovereignty , Amanda DeMarco (trans.) London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.
• –––, 2021, “The Ethical Life of Counter-Communities”, Critical Times , 4(1): 1–28. doi:10.1215/26410478-8855203
• Lukács, Georg, 1923, “Verdinglichung und das Bewußtsein des Proletariats”, in Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein , Berlin: Malik; translated as “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”, in History and Class Consciousness , Rodney Livingstone (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971, pp. 83–222.
• –––, 1963, “Vorwort” to Die Theorie des Romans , Berlin: Luchterhand; translated as The Theory of the Novel , Anna Bostock (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974.
• Malm, Andreas, 2020, How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire , London: Verso.
• Marasco, Robyn, 2006, “‘Already the Effect of the Whip’: Critical Theory and the Feminine Ideal”, differences , 17(1): 88–115. doi:10.1215/10407391-2005-005
• –––, 2015, The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory After Hegel , New York: Columbia University Press.
• –––, 2018, “There’s a Fascist in the Family: Critical Theory and Antiauthoritarianism”, South Atlantic Quarterly , 117(4): 791–813. doi:10.1215/00382876-7165871
• Marcuse, Herbert, 1937, “Philosophie und kritische Theorie”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 6(3): 625–647; translated as “Philosophy and Critical Theory”, in H. Marcuse (ed.), Negations , Jeremy J. Shapiro (trans), London: MayFlyBooks, 1968, pp. 99–117.
• –––, 1941, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 1955, Eros and Civilization , Boston: Beacon Press.
• –––, 1964, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society , Boston: Beacon Press.
• –––, 1967, “Liberation from the Affluent Society” in Douglas Kellner (ed.), The New Left and the 1960s: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume 3 , New York: Routledge, 2004.
• –––, 1968, “Beyond One-Dimensional Man”, in Douglas Kellner (ed.), Towards a Critical Theory of Society , Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume 2 , New York: Routledge, 2001.
• –––, 1969, An Essay on Liberation , Boston: Beacon Press.
• –––, 1974, “Marxism and Feminism”, Women’s Studies , 2: 279–288.
• Marx, Karl, 1843, “Brief an Ruge, September 1843”, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Briefwechsel bis April 1846 (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels Gesamtausgabe, vol. III.1), Berlin: Dietz: 1975, pp. 54–57; translated as “Letter to Ruge, September 1843”, in Karl Marx: Early Writings (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels Collected Works, vol. 1), Rodney Livingstone (trans.), London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975, pp. 209–211.
• –––, 1844, “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie: Einleitung”, in Karl Marx: Werke, Artikel, Entwürfe: März 1843 – August 1944 (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels Gesamtausgabe, vol. I.2), Berlin: Dietz, 1975, pp. 170–184; translated as “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law”, Martin Milligan and Barbara Ruhemann (trans.), in Karl Marx March 1843 – August 1944 (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels Collected Works, vol. 3), London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975, pp. 3–127.
• –––, 1846, Die deutsche Ideologie: Manuskripte und Drucke (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels Gesamtausgabe, vol. I.5), Berlin: De Gruyter/Akademie, 2017; translated as The German Ideology (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels Collected Works, vol. 5), Clemens Dutt, W. Lough, and C. P. Magill (trans.), London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976.
• –––, 1867, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Erster Band (Hamburg 1867) (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels Gesamtausgabe, vol. II.5), Berlin: Dietz, 1983; translated as Capital, Volume I (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels Collected Works, vol. 35), London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1996.
• Mbembe, Achille, 2016, Politiques de l’inimitié ; translated as Necropolitics , Steven Corcoran (trans.), Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.
• McAfee, Noëlle, 2019, Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis , New York: Columbia University Press.
• McCarthy, Thomas, 1991, Ideals and Illusions : On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• –––, 2004, “Political Philosophy and Racial Injustice: From Normative to Critical Theory” in Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser (eds.), Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment: Essays for Richard J. Bernstein , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 147–168.
• –––, 2009, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• McNay, Lois, 2022, The Gender of Critical Theory: On the Experiential Grounds of Critique , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Medina, José, 2013, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Meehan, Johanna (ed.), 1995, Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse , New York: Routledge.
• Mendieta, Eduardo, 2007, Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory , New York: SUNY Press.
• Menke, Christoph, 1988, Die Souveränität der Kunst: Ästhetische Erfahrung nach Adorno und Derrida ; translated as The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida , Neil Solomon (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.
• –––, 2000, Spiegelungen der Gleichheit , Berlin: Akademie; translated as Reflections of Equality , Howard Rouse and Andrei Denejkine (trans.), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.
• –––, 2015, Kritik der Rechte , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translated as Critique of Rights , Christopher Turner (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2020.
• Mills, Charles, 1988, “Alternative Epistemologies”, Social Theory and Practice , 14(3): 237–63.
• –––, 2003, From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism , New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
• –––, 2017, “Criticizing Critical Theory”, in Critical Theory in Critical Times: Transforming the Global Political and Economic Order , Penelope Deutscher and Cristina Lafont (eds.), New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 233–250.
• Milstein, Brian, 2015, Commercium: Critical Theory from a Cosmopolitan Point of View , New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Moten, Fred, and Stefano Harney, 2013, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study , London: Minor Compositions/Autonomedia.
• Müller-Doohm, Stefan, 2003, Adorno: Eine Biographie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Adorno: A Biography , Rodney Livingstone (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2005.
• Negt, Oskar, and Alexander Kluge, 1972, Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung: Zur Organisationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit , Frankfurt: Suhrkamp; translated as Public Sphere and Experience: Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere , Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (trans.), London: Verso, 2016.
• Neuhouser, Frederick, 2022, Diagnosing Social Pathology: Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Durkheim , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Neumann, Franz L., 1944, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944 , New York: Oxford University Press.
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• O’Connor, Brian, 2004, Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of a Critical Rationality , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Offe, Claus, 1984, Contradictions of the Welfare State , John Keane (ed.), Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
• Outlaw, Lucius T., Jr., 2005, Critical Social Theory in the Interests of Black Folks , London: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Owen, David, 2002, “Criticism and Captivity: On Genealogy and Critical Theory”, European Journal of Philosophy , 10: 216–230. doi:10.1111/1468-0378.00158
• Pensky, Max, 1993, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning , Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
• –––, 2019, “Western Marxism: Revolutions in Theory”, in Peter Gordon and Warren Breckman (eds.), The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought, Volume 2: The Twentieth Century , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 259–288.
• Pickford, Henry, 2023, “Adorno and the Categories of Resistance”, Constellations . doi:10.1111/1467-8675.12652
• Pollock, Friedrich, 1941, “State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations”, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science , 9: 200–225.
• Postone, Moishe, 1980, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the German Reaction to ‘Holocaust’ ”, New German Critique , 19: 97–115. doi:10.2307/487974
• –––, 1993, Time, Labor, and Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Rabinbach, Anson, 2000, “Why Were the Jews Sacrificed? The Place of Anti-Semitism in Dialectic of Enlightenment” , New German Critiqu e, 81: 49–64. doi:10.2307/488545
• Rawls, John, 1993, Political Liberalism , New York: Columbia University Press.
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• Schaub, Jörg, 2015, “Misdevelopments, Pathologies, and Normative Revolutions: Normative Reconstruction as Method of Critical Theory”, Critical Horizons , 16(2): 107–130. doi:10.1179/1440991715Z.00000000043
• Scheuerman, William, 1994, Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• –––, (ed.), 1996, The Rule of Law under Siege: Selected Essays of Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer , Berkeley: University of California Press.
• –––, 2018, Civil Disobedience , Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Sealey, Kris F. and Benjamin P. Davis (eds.), forthcoming, Creolizing Critical Theory: New Voices in Caribbean Philosophy , New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Seeliger, Martin and Sebastian Sevignani (eds.), 2022, Special Issue: A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere? , Theory, Culture & Society , 39(4).
• Shelby, Tommie, 2003, “Ideology, Racism, and Critical Social Theory”, Philosophical Forum , 34(2): 153–188. doi:10.1111/1467-9191.00132
• Smith, William, 2013, Civil Disobedience and Deliberative Democracy , London: Routledge.
• Stahl, Titus, 2013a, Immanente Kritik: Elemente einer Theorie sozialer Praktiken , Frankfurt: Campus; translated as Immanent Critique , John-Baptiste Oduor (trans.), London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022.
• –––, 2013b, “Habermas and the Project of Immanent Critique”, Constellations , 20(4): 533–552. doi:10.1111/1467-8675.12057
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• Vogel, Steven, 1996, Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory , New York: SUNY Press.
• –––, 2011, “On Nature and Alienation”, in Andrew Biro (ed.), Critical Ecologies: The Frankfurt School and Contemporary Environmental Crises , Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
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• –––, 1983, “Reason, Utopia, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment”, Praxis International , 3(2): 83–107.
• –––, 1985/86, Zur Dialektik von Moderne und Postmoderne , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985, and Ethik und Dialog , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. Portions of both books are translated in The Persistence of Modernity: Aesthetics, Ethics and Postmodernism , David Midgley (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
• –––, 1993, Endspiele: Die unversöhnliche Moderne , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Endgames: The Irreconcilable Nature of Modernity , David Midgley (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1998.
• –––, 2014, “On Critical Theory”, Social Research , 81(3): 705–733. doi:10.1353/sor.2014.0045
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• Zaretsky, Eli, 2022, “Donald Trump and the Paranoid Position”, Critical Historical Studies , 9(1): 133–157. doi:10.1086/719127
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• –––, 2015, Axel Honneth: A Critical Theory of the Social , Cambridge: Polity.

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• Bohman, James, “Critical Theory”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/critical-theory/ >. [This was the previous entry on this topic in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – see the version history .]

Adorno, Theodor W. | alienation | Benjamin, Walter | colonialism | critical philosophy of race | disability: critical disability theory | feminist philosophy, interventions: epistemology and philosophy of science | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on power | Foucault, Michel | Habermas, Jürgen | Horkheimer, Max | Lukács, Georg [György] | Marcuse, Herbert | postmodernism | recognition

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Amy Allen, Axel Honneth, Noëlle McAfee, and Martin Saar for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts and Christian Meyer for judicious editorial assistance.

Copyright © 2023 by Robin Celikates < robin . celikates @ fu-berlin . de > Jeffrey Flynn < jeflynn @ fordham . edu >

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The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory

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The Frankfurt School was a group of scholars known for developing critical theory  and popularizing the dialectical method of learning by interrogating society's contradictions. It is most closely associated with the work of Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. It was not a school, in the physical sense, but rather a school of thought associated with scholars at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in Germany.

In 1923, Marxist scholar Carl Grünberg founded the Institute, initially financed by another such scholar, Felix Weil. The Frankfurt School scholars are known for their brand of culturally focused neo-Marxist theory—a rethinking of classical Marxism updated to their socio-historical period. This proved seminal for the fields of sociology, cultural studies, and media studies.

Origins of the Frankfurt School

In 1930 Max Horkheimer became the director of the Institute and recruited many of the scholars who came to be known collectively as the Frankfurt School. In the aftermath of Marx's failed prediction of revolution, these individuals were dismayed by the rise of Orthodox Party Marxism and a dictatorial form of communism. They turned their attention to the problem of rule through ideology , or rule carried out in the realm of culture . They believed that technological advancements in communications and the reproduction of ideas enabled this form of rule.

Their ideas overlapped with Italian scholar Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony . Other early members of the Frankfurt School included Friedrich Pollock, Otto Kirchheimer, Leo Löwenthal, and Franz Leopold Neumann. Walter Benjamin was also associated with it during its peak in the mid-20th century.

One of the core concerns of the scholars of the Frankfurt School, especially Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse, was the rise of "mass culture." This phrase refers to the technological developments that allowed for the distribution of cultural products—music, film, and art—on a mass scale. (Consider that when these scholars began crafting their critiques, radio and cinema were still new phenomena, and television didn't exist.) They objected to how technology led to a sameness in production and cultural experience. Technology allowed the public to sit passively before cultural content rather than actively engage with one another for entertainment, as they had in the past. The scholars theorized that this experience made people intellectually inactive and politically passive, as they allowed mass-produced ideologies and values to wash over them and infiltrate their consciousness.

The Frankfurt School also argued that this process was one of the missing links in Marx's theory of the domination of capitalism and explained why revolution never came. Marcuse took this framework and applied it to consumer goods and the new consumer lifestyle that had just become the norm in Western countries in the mid-1900s. He argued that consumerism functions in much the same way, for it maintains itself through a creation of false needs that only the products of capitalism can satisfy.

Moving the Institute for Social Research

Given the state of pre-WWII Germany, Horkheimer relocated the Institute for its members' safety. In 1933, it moved to Geneva, and two years later, it moved to New York in affiliation with Columbia University. In 1953, well after the war, the Institute was re-established in Frankfurt. Theorists Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth would become active in the Frankfurt School during its later years.

Key works by members of the Frankfurt School include but are not limited to:

• Traditional and Critical Theory , Max Horkheimer
• Dialectic of Enlightenment , Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno
• Critique of Instrumental Reason , Max Horkheimer
• The Authoritarian Personality , Theodor W. Adorno
• Aesthetic Theory , Theodor W. Adorno
• Culture Industry Reconsidered , Theodor W. Adorno
• One-Dimensional Man , Herbert Marcuse
• The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics , Herbert Marcuse
• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction , Walter Benjamin
• Structural Transformation and the Public Sphere , Jürgen Habermas
• Towards a Rational Society , Jürgen Habermas
• Understanding Critical Theory
• All About Marxist Sociology
• Understanding Conflict Theory
• Juergen Habermas
• Theories of Ideology
• What Mills' "Power Elite" Can Teach Us
• Definition of Cultural Materialism
• What Is Critical Race Theory? Definition, Principles, and Applications
• What Is Cultural Hegemony?
• Biography of Antonio Gramsci
• Understanding Culture Jamming and How it Can Create Social Change
• Max Weber's Three Biggest Contributions to Sociology
• The Major Theoretical Perspectives of Sociology
• Understanding Private and Public Spheres
• Conversationalization: Definition and Examples
• Definition of Base and Superstructure

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12.4: The Frankfurt School

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Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Identify the main goal of critical theory as developed by the Frankfurt School.
• Describe the Frankfurt School’s revision of Enlightenment and Marxist ideas.
• Evaluate communicative action as a tool for liberation.
• Explain how critical theory is messianic.

What we know as critical theory emerged from the work of a group of early 20th-century Marxist German philosophers and social theorists at the Institute for Social Research at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany—a group that came to be known as the Frankfurt School . It arose within the turbulent political environment of the socialist revolutions of the early 20th century and the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany.

Following World War I, the socialist 1918–19 November Revolution dethroned the existing monarchy in Germany, replacing it with a parliamentary system that was later known as the Weimar Republic. Felix Weil (1898–1975), who would go on to provide the financial backing for what would become the Frankfurt School, was on the front lines of the revolution, serving in the Frankfurt Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council. The son of a wealthy entrepreneur, Weil aligned himself with philosophers, artists, and others who had been shifted to the left by the experiences of WWI and by other socialists. In 1923, Weil helped establish what was known as “Marxist Study Week,” a gathering of left-leaning thinkers, many of whom would later be affiliated with the Institute for Social Research. Although the Institute for Social Research was founded in 1924, it was under the leadership of Max Horkheimer, who became director in 1930, that the institute began to focus on practical responses to social oppression (Horkheimer [1972] 1992).

In 1933, in response to the rise of the Nazi regime, the institute moved from Frankfurt to Geneva, Switzerland (Löwenthal 1981). From Geneva, the institute relocated to New York City, where it was made a part of Columbia University. It was while the institute was part of Columbia that the Frankfurt School gained notice and prestige, with its research methods gaining acceptance among other academics. After the end of World War II, some of the Frankfurt School intellectuals returned to West Germany while others remained in the United States. A full return of the institute to Frankfurt occurred in the 1950s (Held 1980).

The Formation of a Critical Theory

Although the Frankfurt School did not articulate one singular view, one identifying mark of its critical theory was a push toward emancipating humanity from the multitude of forces viewed as enslaving it. Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) argued that a plausible critical theory must do several things: explain the ills of society, identify the means by which change can occur, provide a rubric for critique, and articulate reasonable goals (Horkheimer [1972] 1992). The Frankfurt School not only sought to free those oppressed through cultural, economic, and political structures but also sought to free philosophical theory from the chains of oppressive ideologies. The members of the Frankfurt School critiqued Enlightenment thought, revised key Marxist concepts, and proposed new strategies pertaining to how social change can be accomplished.

Critique of the Enlightenment Concept of Knowledge

The Frankfurt School was critical of the Enlightenment view of true knowledge as conceptual, hence separate from the world. Drawing on the work of other branches of philosophy that had arisen in continental Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries—in particular, phenomenology and hermeneutics—the school focused on how the context within which we experience a phenomenon or observe an object can change our interpretation of its meaning. The Frankfurt School rejected the Enlightenment’s faith in the ability of reason to lay bare the secrets of the universe. For these thinkers, knowledge did not consist of absolute “facts” but instead an awareness of the structures of our social world that shape what we believe to be facts (Corradetti 2021).

While many philosophical systems revolved around abstract ideas made popular by the Enlightenment, the critical theory developed at the Frankfurt School attempted to engage the world as it was and not as philosophical frameworks painted it to be. The theorists of the Frankfurt School asserted that philosophical ideas are not abstract concepts. Rather, the ideas that structure the world as we live in it are the result of social, political, cultural, and religious forces and are therefore lived issues. Moreover, to the degree that these forces are oppressive, so are the accepted beliefs or knowledge generated by these forces. The purpose of true knowledge is thus to inform us on how the social world can be liberated from marginalizing and oppressive concepts (Corradetti 2021).

Horkheimer’s Rejection of the Primacy of Reason

The Enlightenment had established a hierarchical relationship between philosophy—and by extension reason—and science. Kant had positioned reason itself as the key to understanding science and to making sense of how scientific discoveries fit into the overall framework of knowledge. According to the Kantian view, proper philosophical reflection was based in reason. Horkheimer rejected this prioritization of reason. He asserted that the objects of scientific reflection were shaped and determined through context (Horkheimer [1972] 1992). Horkheimer and others criticized Kant and Enlightenment philosophy as abstract, irrelevant, or in the worst case, enabling the oppression that occurred since Kant’s time. Instead, the Frankfurt School offered a focus on how philosophy could be used to make a practical difference within that world.

Benjamin’s Disruption of the Status Quo

A common denominator among the multiplicity of ideas within the Frankfurt School could arguably be what German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) called the “messianic.” By this, he meant a disruption within the status quo that eventually responds in various ways to the oppression occurring in a society (Horkheimer [1972] 1992). Jewish and Judeo-Christian theology prophesies a messianic redeemer who will eventually bring peace to an unstable world. Benjamin adapted the term to indicate a conceptual resistance to hegemonic systems (another term for the power structures of the status quo). This resistance is not part of and does not flow from linear history but rather interrupts it. Benjamin understood systems such as capitalism to be linear pathways of history that the messianic impulse interrupts, thus bringing forth a reality that does not flow from past to present but always is. Benjamin held that such a disruption of linear time disrupts systems of power by creating a classless moment (Khatib 2013).

One example of Benjamin’s idea of the messianic would be the eradication of the socially constructed hierarchy of race. Disrupting this concept would presumably result in a society devoid of the stratification that is connected to notions of race. The difficulty with this idea is that messianic moments within human societies don’t seem to last. With the messianic deconstruction of one status quo (such as race) arises another construction that eventually takes the place of the former as the status quo (such as class).

The Revision of the Marxist Dialectic

The Frankfurt School amended the dialectical method to address what they saw as the shortcomings of Marx’s belief that the progression of the world from capitalism to socialism was inevitable. As we can see now, a socialist future has yet to be the inevitable end point of all capitalist societies. In the hands of Frankfurt School theorists, the dialectical method became not a forecast for humanity’s future, but a “down and dirty” understanding of the arbitrariness of the social situation in any given era (Horkheimer [1972] 1992). This understanding indicated that what is to come must be shaped in a real way by intentional action, as opposed to theoretical reflection. While utilizing elements of Marxist philosophies, many Frankfurt School thinkers held that social transformation was not inevitable but needed to be worked toward in conscious ways.

Jürgen Habermas’s Communicative Action

The Frankfurt School sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) is the most prolific figure associated with the Frankfurt School, producing work touching on a variety of topics in social life (Bronner 2011). Habermas took Max Horkheimer’s place as the chair in sociology and philosophy at the Institute for Social Research in 1964.

A prized possession of many societies is a democratic right to free speech; this right was championed by Habermas. As articulated by Habermas, the emancipation of a society is fueled by more than the mere act of people saying what they feel. Rather, people must say what they feel in a public forum in which their ideas can be challenged—in a forum through which people debate freely and thus sharpen their ideas. Habermas viewed this sort of open discussion as having the potential to shape and transform how political systems are run. Habermas calls this sort of pressure by dialogue communicative action .

The foundation upon which communicative action rests is the ground of language. Communicative action views language not as an unchanging system that will always produce certain conclusions but as a process of discovery that is most effective when the ideas we hold most dear are put to intense scrutiny. Language becomes the process by which humans create and agree upon the norms that are most important to them (Bronner 2011).

Habermas viewed communicative action as taking place in the public sphere. The public sphere refers both to the spaces in which people discuss the issues of the day and the collective conceptual realm of people involved in such discussions. The public sphere is a realm outside of nation and state politics where people can be persuaded to engage in some sort of political action (Asen 1999). Habermas contrasts the public sphere with the private sphere, which is the realm where the mechanisms that perpetuate society reside, such as the organizations and enterprises responsible for the production of commodities within an economy (Habermas 1989, 30).

Modern-day examples of the public sphere might be social media platforms or coffeehouses. The hip-hop element of rap is another type of public sphere, with rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy famously stating that rap is the “CNN” of Black America. Public sphere theory asserts that the best governments are the ones that take heed of the communicative action that takes place in the public sphere (Benhabib 1992).

Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy

Inspired by Frankfurt School thinkers, Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire (1921–1997) made key contributions to a school of thought known as the critical pedagogy movement. Freire asserted that the education provided to people living in the postcolonized world wasn’t adequate for emancipation. Freire argued that the type of education needed would move toward a deconstruction of the means by which knowledge production is structured and disseminated in a colonial society. Similar to Habermas’s communicative action, Freire affirmed that authentic communication must occur between teacher and student for true education to take place. True education involves asking “why” questions of the most foundational aspects of the society. This challenging of assumptions prompts the student to consider whether the foundational aspects of a society are actually beneficial or are simply accepted as normal and natural since things have “always” been this way. For Freire, you are only authentically human when you live a life that practices free critical reflection, which leads to emancipation (Freire [2000] 2012). In other words, emancipated humans not only think for themselves but also question the very ways in which society says we should think.

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1 (page 7) p. 7 The Frankfurt School

• Published: October 2017
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‘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.

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Article contents

Critical theory: international relations’ engagement with the frankfurt school and marxism.

• Faruk Yalvaç Faruk Yalvaç Department of International Relations, Middle East Technical University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.109
• Published in print: 01 December 2015
• Published online: 20 November 2017
• This version: 22 November 2023
• Previous version

Critical International Relations theory (CIRT) is not only an academic approach but also an emancipatory project committed to the formation of a more equal and just world. It seeks to explain the reasons why the realization of this goal is difficult to achieve. What is crucial is not only the social explanation, but also politically motivated action to achieve an alternative set of social relations based on justice and equality. Critical theory in International Relations (IR) is part of the post-positivist turn or the so-called “fourth debate,” which followed the inter-paradigm debate of the 1970s. The post-positivist period in IR consists of a plurality of theoretical and epistemological positions that opened up wide-ranging critique of the neorealist “orthodoxy” that has dominated the discipline since the beginning of the 1980s. Critical theory has challenged the mainstream understanding of IR, spurred the development of alternative forms of analysis and approaches, and emergedas the main alternative to mainstream IR. Two traditions of critical thought in IRtrace back to or are based on the views of Karl Marx. The first is the normative Critical Theory (CT) of the Frankfurt School. The second one is a structural critical tradition based on a critique and analysis of the political economy of capitalism. It is argued in the paper that the normative aspects of the critique of International Relations has to be integrated with the structural and historically specific critique of capitalism to make them politically relevant and adequate for a social critique of international relations.

• critical theory
• critical international relations theory
• Frankfurt School
• structural critical theory
• normative critical theory
• capitalism,

Updated in this version

Updated and expanded.

Introduction

This article presents an analysis and evaluation of critical international relations theory (CIRT). Critical theory has challenged the mainstream understanding of International Relations (IR) and analyzes the alternative forms of analysis/approaches that have developed under the banner of critical theory. Since the beginning of the 1980s, different types of CIRT have been the main alternative to mainstream IR. After reviewing Critical International Relations Theory after 25 Years , Rengger and Thirkell-White concluded that “various forms of ‘critical theory’ . . . constitute the main theoretical alternatives within the discipline” ( Rengger & Thirkell-White, 2007b , pp. 4–5). They argued that even “a robust, analytical and still heavily ‘scientific’ U.S. academy now has strong elements of critical theory of various sorts lodged within it” (p. 9).

Critical International Relations theory is not only an academic approach but also an emancipatory political project committed to the formation of a more equal and just world. Critical theorists seek to explain the reasons why the realization of this goal is difficult to achieve. Therefore, what is crucial is not only the social explanation but also politically motivated action to achieve an alternative set of social relations based on justice and equality. The general aim of CIRT can be summed up by Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach that “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” ( Marx, 1977b , p. 158). In the words of one of its founders, Horkheimer, “theory never aims simply at an increase of knowledge as such. Its goal is man’s emancipation from slavery” ( Horkheimer, 2002 , p. 246). Following this argument, Horkheimer describes the aims of critical theory as “to strive for a state of affairs in which there will be no exploitation or oppression, in which an all-embracing subject, namely, self-aware mankind, exists” ( Horkheimer, 2002 , p. 241). One of the most well-known definitions of critical theory (CT) in IR belongs to Robert Cox (1981) who defined critical theory in the context of his famous landmark distinction between problem-solving theory and critical theory. According to Cox, problem-solving theories are preoccupied with maintaining social power relationships and the reproduction of the existing system, attempting to ensure that “existing relationships and institutions work smoothly” (p. 129). Unlike ahistorical problem-solving theories, which serve the existing social arrangements and support the interests of the hegemonic social forces, critical theory, according to Cox, is self-reflexive, criticizes the existing system of domination, and identifies processes and forces that will create an alternative world order ( Cox, 1981 , pp. 129–130). Linklater (2001) , another key critical theorist in international relations, defined critical theory as a post-Marxist theory that “continues to evolve beyond the paradigm of production to a commitment to dialogic communities that are deeply sensitive about all forms of inclusion and exclusion—domestic, transnational and international” (p. 25). Similar definitions of critical theory emphasize one or more of its aspects. For instance, Steans et al. (2010) stressed that “the express purpose of Critical Theory is to further the self-understanding of groups committed to transforming society” (p. 106). Alway (1995) defined critical theory as a “theory with practical intent” oriented to the emancipatory transformation of society. According to Neufeld, the defining feature of critical theory is its “negation of positivism” and “technical reason” dominant in mainstream IR ( Neufeld, 1995 , pp. 129–130). For Hutchings (2007) ,

although critical theory takes many different forms, it always distinguishes itself from other forms of theorising in terms of its orientation towards change and the possibility of futures that do not reproduce the patterns of hegemonic power of the present. (p. 72)

Levine (2012) , who focused on a more methodological reevaluation of critical theory, proposed the concept of sustainable critique, which he defined as “a practice, tied to a philosophical-normative sensibility” (p. 231) aimed at an “entente between positive theory building and critique” (p. 230), and a “practical and reflexive theory” (p. 211).

In line with these different definitions, a heterogeneous group of theories has been labeled as critical in International Relations, including feminism, poststructuralism, critical geopolitics, critical security studies, critical international political economy, postcolonialism, and international historical sociology. This article focuses on two specific traditions of critical thought in IR derived from or based on the views of Karl Marx: the normative critical theory (CT) of the Frankfurt School and a structural critical tradition based on a critique and analysis of the political economy of capitalism.

Accordingly, the article contains six sections. The first briefly locates critical theory in the context of the development of International Relations and provides an overview of the main strands of CIRT. The following two sections discuss the origins of Critical Theory in the Frankfurt School of Sociology and then present the contribution of Habermas, whose work has been the most influential in IR theory. The fourth section outlines the main contributions from IR scholars to the development of a normative CIRT in accordance with Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality. This section particularly focuses on the contributions of Richard Ashley and Andrew Linklater to CIRT. The fifth section discusses some of the key strands of structural critical theory incorporating neo-Gramscianism and Marxist historical sociology counterposed with the idealist normative critical theory originating from the Frankfurt School. The article concludes with an overview of the efforts to integrate critical theory into IR and directions for future development. It is argued that the normative aspects of the critique of International Relations has to be integrated with the structural and historically specific critique of capitalism to make it politically relevant and adequate for a social critique of IR.

The Critical Tradition and the Meaning of Critique

The idea of critique is a product of the heritage of Enlightenment. Basically, it involves the use of reason and critical insight in relation to the liberation of human beings. It expresses the opposition between reason and dogma, the rational and the revealed. As Shapcott (2008) summarized, “in the language of Kant, this is termed Enlightenment, in the language of Hegel, it is spirit or history (Geist) and in the language of Marx, it is emancipation” (p. 327). Kant claimed in 1781 in his Preface to his Critique of Pure Reason that his era was the age of critique. Kant’s critique involved a reflection on the conditions and limits of knowledge in order to overcome the subjective constraints imposed by one’s perceptions ( Connerton, 1976 , p. 18). Later, Hegel, in The Phenomenology of Mind (2003) , reflected on the constraints on human autonomy and how humans can liberate themselves from these constraints. Marx’s critical inquiry was based on an examination of the contradictions of capitalism, which will ultimately cause its demise, and the formation of a just global order. In his Preface to the Critique of Political Economy , Marx developed a critique of the social conditions for thinking about social reality. He argued that the categories used by classical political economists were in fact propositions that led to the legitimation of existing power structures within the liberal capitalist economy ( Connerton, 1976 , pp. 23–24). This Enlightenment heritage later produced different forms of critical theory under changed historical circumstances, revising and reinterpreting the insights of these key critical philosophers, adapting its categories to a new historical reality. The meaning of critique itself, therefore, has altered as the historical conditions that informed its categories.

Critical theory in International Relations (IR) (see Davies, 2014 ; Devetak, 2013 ; Ferreira, 2018 ; Roach, 2013 ; Shapcott, 2008 ) is part of the post-positivist turn ( Lapid, 1989 ) or the “fourth debate,” which followed the interparadigm debate ( Banks, 1985 ) of the 1970s. The postpositivist period consists of a plurality of theoretical and epistemological positions that opened wide-ranging criticisms of the neorealist “orthodoxy” that has dominated international relations theorizing since the beginning of the 1980s ( Ashley, 1986 ; Smith, 1996 ). In particular, the idea of a structurally determined, immutable anarchical system adopted by the neorealists was heavily criticized. Neorealism reified and naturalized the existing structure of the international system, taking it as given and immutable. This inevitably gave neorealism a problem-solving quality that sustained the existing asymmetries of power and equality in the international system ( George, 1989 ; Lapid, 1989 ).

The first task of a critical theory of International Relations was to expose the assumptions that formed the basis of mainstream theoretical and empirical inquiry. Thus, the development of critical theory enabled those who were “exiled” or “excluded” from IR to start speaking their own language ( Ashley & Walker, 1990 , p. 259). Instead of trying to explain social reality in terms of transhistorical regularities and making predictions on that basis, these scholars instead emphasized the reflexive nature of theorizing, underscoring the social, historical, and contingent nature of knowledge claims, posing both an epistemological and an ontological challenge to positivist social science. Critical theorists reject the objectivist conception of truth as a correspondence to the real world. Objects of knowledge are not given as the positivists assume but are constituted by different powers and interests. This is summarized in Cox’s famous comment that “theories are for someone and for some purpose” ( Cox, 1981 ). As Cox later argued

there is no such thing as theory in itself, divorced from a standpoint in time and space. When any theory so represents itself, it is the more important to examine it as ideology, and to lay bare its concealed perspective. ( Cox, 1986 , p. 207)

Critical theorists also indicate how objects of knowledge are intimately linked to theoretical practice itself. Theoretical activity is not only a methodological pursuit but also closely associated with the construction of political reality ( Eckersley, 2008 , pp. 347–348; Neufeld, 2001 , p. 138). Truth for critical theorists is, therefore, more “normative rather than objective and scientific” ( Fluck, 2010 , p. 266) than the positivists assume, and the commitment to normative progressive change is an essential part of critical theory.

However, a distinction needs to be made between different forms of critical theory in IR. Critical Theory (CT) with capital letters refers more directly to the critical theory originating from the Frankfurt School and mainly from the work of Jürgen Habermas (1972 , 1979 , 1984) , which is elaborated on in the third section of this article. Critical theory in lowercase letters refers to postpositivist theories such as feminism, historical sociology, poststructuralism, constructivism, and postcolonialism, which are united in their critique of the mainstream and, particularly, of neorealism. The latter group of theories is influenced both by Marx and poststructuralist French philosophers such as Foucault and Derrida, who are themselves linked to Marxism in various ways. Although most critical theories draw their insights from Marxism (particularly their focus on change and justice), the neglect of classical Marxist works to explicitly deal with the impact of the state system on emancipatory politics has relegated Marxist critical theory in IR to a more isolated position compared with the more normative forms of critical theory originating from the Frankfurt School. However, since the turn of the 21st century , more structural forms of critical theory based on historical materialism have developed, first in Neo-Gramscianism and later in international historical sociology, especially through the theory of uneven and combined development (UCD) and political Marxism. Thus, there is a rich variety of critical scholarship and theorizing today that alters the framework and substance of mainstream International Relations.

In short, critical theory has been very productive in developing alternative approaches and new areas of research in IR. One of the most important theoretical starting points and sources of inspiration for this whole development has emanated from the views of the Frankfurt School adopted by IR scholars.

Origins of Critical Theory: The Frankfurt School

Critical Theory is generally traced back to the Frankfurt School, whose origins lay in the establishment of the Institute for Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) at the University of Frankfurt in 1923 ( Alway, 1995 ; Held, 1980 ; Jay, 1973 ; Rothe & Ronge, 2016 ). The members of the school were exiled to the United States during the Nazi Period and World War II but reestablished themselves in Germany in 1950 . The Frankfurt School was part of the regeneration of critical thinking in social sciences due to the rise of fascism, the development of world economic crises, the New Deal, and the degeneration of the Russian Revolution into Stalinism. The most well-known thinkers of the Frankfurt School include philosophers such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm, second-generation theorists such as Jürgen Habermas, and a third-generation scholar, Axel Honneth.

The Frankfurt School theorists were concerned with “the dark side” of modernity and set themselves the task of understanding “why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition” is sinking into a “new kind of barbarism” ( Horkheimer & Adorno, 1972 ). Reason, in which Enlightenment had placed all its hope for progress and emancipation, had become an instrument for dominating and destroying nature instead of liberating man. Critical theorists investigated how the conditions that produce injustice and the social pathologies of modernity could be exposed and transformed.

The Frankfurt School philosophers were particularly concerned with the proletariat’s declining and inhibited revolutionary consciousness and its support for right-wing movements in Germany. In different degrees, although still committed to Enlightenment ideals of emancipation, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas questioned the capacity of the proletariat to be the agent of revolution and placed the human species as the historical subject of emancipation. Reason had become an instrument of domination rather than critique and reflexivity, a situation that Horkheimer(1947) described as the “eclipse of reason” Horkheimer and Adorno emphasized how the instrumental rationality of positivism interested in the technical control of nature had been more successful than practical reason that was interested in the achievement of a good life. Their later work was tainted by a “politics of despair” and a “negativistic” social philosophy concerning emancipation with the Dialectic of Enlightenment “heralding the end of the emancipatory vision that had previously animated the [Frankfurt School]” ( Brincat, 2011 , p. 232). Thus, an immanent critique was necessary to understand the underlying social relations and the inner contradictions of society to explain why the proletariat consciousness was “limited and corrupted by ideology” ( Horkheimer, 1972 , p. 242). Therefore, the “real social function of philosophy” was to develop a critique of itself and the prevailing social conditions not by a priori moral principles but by focusing on concrete relationships and contradictions in society for a “better order of things” ( Horkheimer, 1972 , p. 212). Max Horkheimer ( 1895–1973 ) in his seminal 1937 essay, “Traditional and Critical Theory” ( Horkheimer & Adorno, 1972 ), outlined the main premises of critical theory. Horkheimer’s starting point was the inhibition of critical and independent thinking in contemporary society for which he blamed traditional Western thought and an instrumental understanding of reason inherent in the dominant positivist understanding of science and society. In his essay, Horkheimer contrasted traditional theory with critical theory. Traditional theory adopts the model of natural sciences and sees knowledge as an instrument of control rather than the basis for human happiness. Facts are separated from the activity of theorizing; science is separated from the world it studies. Traditional theory is not self-reflexive, as it does not question the social context of the activity of theorizing nor the social conditions with which it deals. By contrast, according to critical theory, theories and theoretical activity are socially conditioned. Therefore, inquiry into emancipation requires an immanent critique of social life to provide insight into existing social contradictions and act as a guide for the social conditions necessary for an emancipated future. Horkheimer emphasized that critical theory “never aims simply at an increase of knowledge as such. Its goal is man’s emancipation from slavery” ( Horkheimer, 2002 , p. 246).

Cox did not mention Horkheimer when he made a distinction between problem-solving theory and critical theory ( Cox, 1981 ). However, Cox also disputed the notion that problem-solving theory is value free, claiming that it is conservative ( Cox, 1981 , p. 129). In other words, for both Horkheimer and Cox, what is important is the political consequences of this distinction. This is reflected in Cox’s famous sentence “theory is always for someone and some purpose”: It is critical because it criticizes social arrangements. It demonstrates that problem solving is not value free but serves the status quo. Critical theory, by contrast, “does not take institutions and social and power relations for granted but calls them into question by concerning itself with their origins and how and whether they might be in the process of changing” ( Cox, 1981 , p. 129). The aims of critical theory

are just as practical as those of problem-solving theory, but it approaches practice from a perspective which transcends that of the existing order . . . Critical theory allows for a normative choice in favour of a social and political order different from the prevailing order, but it limits the range of choice to alternative orders which are feasible transformations of the existing world. ( Cox, 1981 , p. 130)

Habermas and Critical Theory

Habermas (1972 , 1979 , 1984 , 1987) , who started the communicative turn of critical theory, is the most well-known of the second-generation critical theorists, and his views have been the most influential in International Relations (IR). Amy Allen (2016) argued that it is even possible to make a distinction between a pre-Habermasian and post-Habermasian critical theory.

Habermas continued the critique of reason and rationality initiated by the Frankfurt School, developing and remolding it into new dimensions. His theory of communicative action, discourse ethics, and analysis of the relation between knowledge and human interests have proved to be very productive in understanding and evolving alternative critical positions within IR.

The ideas of Habermas center on the radical democratization of society. In line with his ultimate belief in the ideals of Enlightenment, he believes that universal moral principles can be the basis of the resolution of conflicting claims concerning social and political life ( Griffiths et al., 2008 , p. 61). Unlike the negativistic philosophy of Horkheimer and Adorno, Habermas treats modernity as an unfinished project and wishes to find a way that the promises of modernity can once again be realized. According to Habermas, although modernity has achieved technological progress, it has not yet brought freedom, solidarity, and human emancipation. Therefore, he seeks a path whereby freedom and progress can once again be united under modern conditions. He believes that historical materialism should also be reconstructed in a way that emphasizes the potential for social communication and expansion of mutual understanding rather than labor as the rational guiding element of social and political organization. Classical Marxism elevated the importance of labor but ignored the significance of the symbolic reproduction of capitalism through communication. Habermas therefore criticized the “production paradigm” of the early Frankfurt School for ignoring the “normative structures” of society, which “do not simply follow the path of development of reproductive processes” ( Habermas, 1979 , p. 117).

Accordingly, Habermas makes an ontological distinction between the system and the lifeworld , which are “two opposed principles of societal integration” ( Habermas, 1987 , p. 345) and “differently structured domains of social reality” ( Habermas, 1991 , p. 255). The system has objective features and consists of the economic, the political, and the sociopolitical spheres run by an instrumental / strategic rationality. Lifeworld on the other hand is the symbolic and normative space of moral development and emancipatory communication, which is the main focus of Habermas. It has interpretative and intersubjective features and is based on communicative rationality. The cognitive-instrumental rationality that is dominant in the system has, according to Habermas, “colonized” the lifeworld in modern society ( Habermas, 1987 ). Therefore, it is necessary to “erect a democratic dam against the colonializing encroachment of system imperatives on areas of the life world” ( Habermas, 1992 , p. 444). However, the relation between the system and the lifeworld is not one of a dialectical relation where the normative is linked to the social. It is more like a relation of functionality whereby the normative level serves to resolve the problems that emerge at the system level, which is itself accepted as given.

One of the most significant contributions of Habermas in terms of developing his theory of communicative rationality was the move he made from a philosophy of consciousness to a philosophy of language, thus changing the focus of Western philosophy for the first time since Descartes ( Fluck, 2012 ; Habermas, 1984 , 1987 ). This implies a shift of emphasis from the subject, the main agent of Enlightenment philosophy, to intersubjectivity in which the communication between language users is the fundamental cognitive form ( Alway, 1995 , p. 107; Fluck, 2012 , p. 7). Therefore, in Habermas’s theory of communicative action, it is not the “relation of a solitary subject” to an objective world but the subject-subject relation that is primariy. The subject in this conceptualization is no longer concerned only with pursuing his own private interests but also interacts with other subjects in an intersubjective setting to further common interests. Thus, communication itself becomes “a source of praxis , and therefore a means of emancipation” ( Fluck, 2012 , p. 1) and rational progress. Since it allows for the communication and understanding of diverse identities and interests, this conception also facilitates a pluralist understanding of social reality, therefore rendering Habermas’s position compatible with some of the ideas of postmodern thinkers without sacrificing reason as the basis of social organization.

Habermas based his analysis on what he called a “pure communicative sociation,” defined as an Ideal Speech Situation, in which the actors can freely and truthfully communicate ( Habermas, 1984 , 1987 ). In this situation, the “force of the better argument” prevails. “The only regulations and ways of acting that can claim legitimacy are those to which all who are possibly affected could assent as participants in rational discourses” ( Habermas, 1996 , p. 458). Thus, rationality is formulated so that it does not solely imply a universality of norms but a discursive but nevertheless formal and procedural context of an ideal speech situation. History itself is reconceptualized as a collective learning process whereby the species not only acquires technical knowledge oriented to the instrumental domination of nature but also develops new norms of communication in the moral-practical sphere, avoiding the “asocial universalism of more traditional accounts of reason and progress” ( Fluck, 2012 , pp. 6–7; Habermas, 1987 , p. 148).

Habermas links his views on communicative rationality to what he calls knowledge constitutive interests ( Habermas, 1972 ), which pertains to the role of knowledge in achieving different forms of social arrangements. He argues that knowledge generated by positivism is not the only type of knowledge oriented to fulfill the needs of social life. Positivism conceives of social problems as technical problems that require technical solutions. However, knowledge of the social world should be based not only on social control but also on communication and human emancipation. Recognizing this problem, Habermas (1972) makes a distinction between different technical cognitive interests in which knowledge interests are the basis for controlling one’s environment, practical cognitive interests that seek to further intersubjective communication between different subjects, and emancipatory cognitive interests, a guiding communication that deals with the conditions of distorted communication and the conditions necessary to achieve autonomy and freedom.

Due to the limitation on the length of this work, a thorough critique of Habermas’s complex arguments cannot be presented here; however, some of the criticisms from IR scholars concerning the application of Habermas’s theory can be summarised as follows. . The first criticism relates to his idea of communicative reason and intersubjectivity. If human reason is only communicative, then a detachment from the objective and the particular inevitably occurs (for discussion, see Knafo, 2010 ). Therefore, the problem with most accounts of intersubjective formulation of emancipation is that although they adopt a critical outlook, it is not sufficiently critical because they take for granted the objective structures that impose limits on human action. As Joseph argued, “We must move beyond intersubjective practices to look at how these themselves are grounded in deeper structural relations” ( Joseph, 2008 , p. 128).

Another objection to Habermasian accounts of International Relations is whether his interpretation of Marx and historical materialism is a correct starting point from which to develop a critical theory of IR ( Anievas, 2005 , 2010 ). Anievas, for instance, has argued that Habermas’s philosophy “reconceptualizes production relations as a dimension of consensual, norm-governed social interaction” and subsumes relations of production under the concept of communicative action ( Anievas, 2010 , p. 151). However, capitalist relations of production refer to underlying structures of inequality and irreconcilable social struggles that cannot be conceptualized as part of consensual relations ( Anievas, 2010 , p. 151; also see Callinicos, 1989 , pp. 114–115). Indeed, other scholars have also joined this criticism in arguing that without altering the objective conditions underlying capitalism, it would be futile to expect changes in social reality as a result of intersubjective consensus or what Habermas would later call discourse ethics ( Fluck, 2010 , p. 264). It is also argued that the separation of the economic from the political, or the normative and symbolic reproduction of society from the material sociopolitical structures, has the effect of naturalizing and legitimizing the system rather than developing a critical analysis of structures. Similarly, Anita Chari in criticizing Habermas’s theory has argued that in taking the system as an autonomized and denormativized structure, Habermas’s theory implicitly takes the existing forms of economy and state as necessary, and therefore cannot put forth a transformative politics ( Chari, 2010 , p. 600).

Normative Critical International Relations Theory: From Ashley to Linklater

Habermas’s theory of communicative action and his description of knowledge constitutive interests have been very influential in developing a normative/critical theory of International Relations (IR; Diez & Steans, 2005 ). In one of the first attempts to formulate a Habermasian inspired IR scholarship, Ashley in his Political Realism and Human Interests ( Ashley, 1981 ) used Habermas’s concept of knowledge constitutive interests to understand different traditions of IR. Following Habermas, Ashley started with the assumption that “knowledge is always constituted in reflection of interests” ( Ashley, 1981 , p. 207). Then he made a distinction between technical realism, practical realism, and what he called a dialectical competence model as reflecting different interests embedded within different traditions. According to Ashley, technical realism is represented in IR by neorealism, and it is oriented to the control of the international system by the most powerful. Practical realism is associated with an interest in communication and cooperation and is best represented by classical realism and the arguments of the English School. Ashley argued that although practical realism is an advance over structural realism, it still shares many of the assumptions of the realist understanding of IR. The dialectical competence model, however, incorporates both technical and practical realism but goes beyond them in favor of a more emancipated form of International Relations. As Brincat argued, this initial attempt to develop Habermasian categories in the context of International Relations did make a very important contribution to IR critical theory by “offer(ing) a number of advances on the sociology of the early [Frankfurt School], which was problematically confined to the examination of Euro- and state centric possibilities for emancipation” ( Brincat, 2011 , p. 218). “Ashley’s dialectical competence model,” Brincat argued,

overcame the tendency of the [Frankfurt School] towards an endogeneous, state focused and Euro-centric form of critical theorizing and offered a way for CT to revitalize the project of emancipation by taking into account global forces in the dialectic of oppression and emancipation. ( Brincat, 2011 , p. 237)

The most developed form of critical theory in international relations is the normative theory of Andrew Linklater (1990 , 1998 , 2001 , 2007) . The importance of critical theory for Linklater is to “facilitate the extension of moral and political community in international affairs” beyond the state and to “institutionalize cosmopolitan principles of morality” ( Griffiths, 2007 , p. 61). The existing international system according to Linklater is based on ethical particularism and intersocietal estrangement ; therefore, it is necessary to form a more inclusive and just system based on new moral principles that advance the civilizing process in IR. Based on, but extending Habermas’s concept of an ideal communication community, Linklater attempted to outline the conditions for the criticism that Marxism overemphasizes production; he wanted to develop a theory that is “beyond the paradigm of production,” one that is “deeply sensitive about all forms of inclusion and unjustified exclusion—domestic, transnational, and international” ( Linklater, 2001 , p. 25). For the realization of this project, Linklater envisaged a “triple transformation” of the political community that is more universal, less unequal, and more sensitive to differences ( Linklater, 2001 , p. 25) and to human beings’ fears about injury, vulnerability, and suffering ( Linklater, 2006 ; Linklater & Suganami, 2006 , p. 277). The realization of such a political community implies questioning the moral significance of national boundaries and developing post-national and post-sovereign or post-Westphalian forms of life ( Linklater, 2001 ). According to Linklater, “the highest stages of moral-practical learning should promote a post-conventional ethic which defines the prima facie moral responsibility of engaging the whole of humanity in open dialogue about matters of common interest” ( Linklater, 1998 , p. 121).

Linklater considered that globalization has significantly intensified the instances and possibilities of “transnational harm,” rendering nation-states incapable of providing citizens with their basic needs of justice, social welfare, and physical security. Hence, there is an immanent possibility for the creation of a post- Westphalian community as represented by the European Union ( Linklater, 1998 ).

Linklater’s critical project presented difficulties both at the theoretical and practical level, which are equally problematic in relation to the perspective taken by Habermas. One difficulty is the commitment to a form of rationality that assumes a universal subject committed to universal values. A central objection to this assumption is the totalizing nature of this reasoning bringing together diverse identities under one universal totality ( Diez & Steans, 2005 , pp. 134–136). This raises the issue of whether it is possible to conceive of a form of intersubjectivity that is sensitive to different voices leading to a common understanding.

A more crucial critique relates to the idealist conception of social change in Linklater’s normative project. The transformation of the political community toward more cosmopolitan forms of association is made possible through a learning process that has results that are inevitably indeterminate ( Linklater, 1998 , p. 86). As Anievas indicated,

The material conditions necessary for any functioning dialogic community within and between political communities would necessitate some form of social struggle forcibly translating the existing social order. A forceless ‘force of the better argument’ is not much help achieving universal human emancipation. ( Anievas, 2010 , p. 154)

Shilliam (2002 , p. 3) also suggested that Linklater takes an “essentially metaphysical” conception of social struggle and resistance where the primary force for the resolution of conflicts is attributed to “moral capital.” These observations can be linked to an overall lack of sociological sensitivity in analyzing historical change in Linklater’s work. According to Anievas, Linklater’s arguments fail to specifically address the “material prerequisites” (e.g., the substantive levels of political, economic, racial, and gender equality) for “the force of the better argument” to be effective in a dialogic community and “detaches” emancipatory practices from the “material and social” relations of capitalism ( Anievas, 2010 , p. 154). In a similar vein, in discussing critical theory, Norman Geras argued that social structures of capitalism do not make the participation of all classes possible in the discursive construction of norms ( Geras, 1999 , p. 163). Linklater’s analysis is thus similar to Habermas’s theory of communicative and discourse ethics, separating the concept of emancipation and moral learning from a structural critique of social domination in capitalism ( Chari, 2010 , p. 591).

An unresolved tension exists between universality and difference in the foundation of the claims of discourse ethics. Theoretically, the arguments for communicative rationality aim to discover the universal conditions of communication to avoid the morally relativist posture of the postpositivist approaches. Poststructuralists have been particularly critical of attempts to reach consensus because they see this diversity as the basis of freedom and emancipation. Linklater has also been quite attentive to the way in which the standpoint of the “others” should be considered, arguing thus for a “historically self-conscious universalism” sensitive to differences ( Diez & Steans, 2005 , p. 135). However, as Shapcott argued, “The notion of emancipation is too culturally specific, reflecting only the values of the European enlightenment” and this leads “to a problematic universalism that threatens to assimilate and legislate out of existence all significant differences” ( Shapcott, 2008 , p. 336).

Another issue is the way different cultures or communities come to interact with each other to arrive at a common ground or consensus and how this interaction is to be conceptualized. Historical sociologists have for some time argued that this interaction is not between equal social circumstances but takes the form of an uneven and combined development. Furthermore, it is not possible to imagine a dialogue that does not take this structural unevenness as its initial premise. Therefore, as Anievas argues, there is a Eurocentric bias in Linklater’s arguments, which “merely states a Euro-centric ‘inside-out’ bias by attributing the West’s development of higher levels of rationalization and morality to its own unique ability to learn and borrow from other cultures” ( Anievas, 2010 , p. 153)and does not take the uneven, multilinear, and interactive nature of social development into account. This results in a “rather ‘uncritical’ political project, often difficult to distinguish from ‘liberal’ IR analyses” ( Anievas, 2010 , p. 155). Thus Habermas’s and Linklater’s ideas are influenced by the notion of moral regulation and advancement at the global level, making them susceptible to Amy Allen’s (2016) criticisms of the Frankfurt School for its Eurocentrism and the need for decolonization.

Eckersley, in contrast, offered a critique on the Habermasian applications of critical theory from the perspective of green theory. Arguing that Habermas’s critical theory is “ultimately based on respect for the relative autonomy of the human subject,” she maintained that “the treatment of the other as moral subjects should be extended to nature, regardless of its level of communicative competence” ( Eckersley, 1999 , pp. 44–45).

At the practical level, the most obvious related difficulty is the various power differential in international society that makes negotiation and consensus difficult to achieve. In addition, the type of political activity required for the formation of a universal communication community is abstract and vague. Therefore, as Eckersley commented, it is not clear whether “the discourse ethic” is “always the best, or only, means for achieving transformation, or emancipation in general” ( Eckersley, 2008 , p. 353).

Structural Critical Theory : Gramscianism, Uneven and Combined Development and Political Marxism

Structural critical theory is the other well-known line of critical thinking in IR that provides a more materialist and social-structural understanding of critical theory compared to those approaches influenced by the normative idealism of Habermasian critical theory. It focuses on the political economy of capitalism and corrects the “Frankfurt School’s problematic tendency to abandon a rigorous critique of capitalism” ( Leeb, 2018 , p. 777). It is also different from other forms of critical IR approaches that define the social in intersubjective terms (such as constructivism). Here the problematique of international relations is formulated not as a normative, epistemological or philosophical issue but as a problem of social theory ( Nichols, 2018 ). What here is called structural critical theory in IR is generally associated with different forms of neo-Gramscian analysis ( Bieler, 2005 ; Bieler & Morton, 2003 , 2004 ; Burnham, 1991 ; Cox, 1983 ; Gill, 1993 ; Morton, 2007b , 2013 ), Marxist historical sociology of IR (HSIR) represented by political Marxism ( Knafo & Teschke, 2021 ; Teschke, 2003 ), and neo-Trotskyist theory of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD) ( Matin, 2013 ; Rosenberg, 1994 , 2006 , 2010 ) as well as with some recent historical sociological approaches that adopt different forms of Marxian historical materialism emphasizing the importance of transnational production processes and relations of production ( Morton, 2013 ; van der Pijl, 1984 ; Van Apeldoorn, 2002 , 2004 ).

The following two sections first outline neo-Gramscian theory and then consider the main issues involved in Marxist international historical sociology. Viewed from the perspective of IR theory, the most important aspect of neo-Gramscianism is its understanding of state and hegemony. The way neo-Gramscians see these concepts provides alternative starting points for developing a CIRT ( Cox, 1981 , 1983 , 1986 ; Joseph, 2000 , 2008 ). In contrast to the mainstream, which has an abstract and ahistorical understanding of the state, the state is understood as a form of social (class) relation. In the mainstream, an ontological exteriority ( Morton, 2013 ) is assumed in terms of its analysis of the relation of the state to the society ignoring the internal relation between the two. However, in the historical materialist analysis, the separation of the public from the private or the state from civil society is a structural aspect of the capitalist mode of production. Therefore, the state is not taken only in its institutional aspect but also in terms of its relations with other social forces in society and the way they influence the functioning of the state ( Gramsci, 1971 , p. 261). Thus, the class nature of the state can be understood from the way that the state maintains and supports the conditions necessary for the reproduction of the capitalist relations of production. Gramsci labeled this unity of the political and civil society as the integral state “through which ruling classes organize their hegemony and moral superiority” ( Gramsci, 1971 , pp. 258, 271).

The Gramscian understanding of hegemony is also different from its use in the mainstream. In contrast to the accounts proffered by (neo) realists, which define hegemony as the concentration of material power in one dominant state, hegemony is defined with reference to the social relations of production and the way dominant social classes organize their domination. Furthermore, hegemony is conceived not only in terms of force but also as consenting to the legitimacy of existing institutions with respect to the reproduction of the existing social relations of production (see Joseph, 2000 , 2008 ).

Neo-Gramscian thought entered International Relations primarily through the work of Robert Cox (1981 , 1983 , 1986) , who extended the Gramscian categories of analysis especially the concept of hegemony to IR to develop an emancipatory approach to world politics. As opposed to the “deterministic and ahistorical” analysis of the mainstream, the concern of Cox is to “provide . . . a non-deterministic yet structurally grounded explanation of change” ( Germain & Kenny, 1998 , p. 5). Cox also shared the concerns of the CT held by the Frankfurt School theorists about the way knowledge has been conditioned by the social, political, and historical context. Knowledge of IR, Cox argued, had become instrumental to furthering the interests of the dominant states that reflect the interests of their hegemonic classes. Cox generalized the Gramscian concept of hegemony to cover not only systems of domination in domestic societies but also those in the international. Similar to Gramsci, he was more interested in the “social basis of hegemony” and “its inherent points or moments of contradiction” ( Germain & Kenny, 1998 , p. 6). According to Cox, world hegemonies are based on the universalization of the state-society complexes of a hegemonic state. Hegemony at the international level links the dominant mode of production within the world economy with “subordinate modes of production,” thus connecting “the social classes of different countries.” Like the domestic hegemony of a social class, world hegemony of a state is based not only on force but also on consent and its acceptance as legitimate by those participating in the system. Hegemony within a world order is consequently “based on a coherent conjunction or fit between a configuration of material power, the prevalent collective image of world order (including certain norms) and a set of institutions which administer the order with a certain semblance of universality” ( Cox, 1981 , p. 139).

Cox developed what he called a world structures approach to analyze different world orders ( Cox, 1981 , 1989 ). To overcome the limitations of a state-centric approach, he applied this method to the following three levels or spheres of activity: (a) organization of production, more particularly with regard to the social forces engendered by the production process; (b) forms of states, which are derived from the study of different state/society complexes; and (c) world orders, that is, the particular configurations of forces. According to Cox, the dialectical relation between these three levels of activity constitutes different historical structures. Each of these structures, in turn, is affected by a configuration between dominant ideas, institutions, and material capabilities. These elements are irreducible and dialectically related and concretized in each of the elements of the historical structures (social forces, forms of states, and world orders) forming different world hegemonies.

At the core of these different world hegemonies is a dominant structure of accumulation ( Cox, 1989 ), which is then projected outside state boundaries by a hegemonic class with the help of an increasingly internationalizing state apparatus. The hegemonic class disseminates and consolidates its ideology through different international organizations (e.g., the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, G8, and United Nations), leading to the formation of a nascent global civil society (also see Gill, 1993 ; Gill & Law, 1988 ; van der Pijl, 1984 ). Together, these transnational forces exert pressure on other states to adopt the accumulation strategies of the hegemonic state. These states become “transmission belts” ( Cox, 1981 , 1989 ) between the hegemon and their domestic societies and become part of the hegemonic structure of the world system. Modern world history is then periodized with respect to different hegemonies such as Pax Britannica and Pax Americana. The internationalization of production has led to the formation of a new class of transnational labor, thus creating new forces for antihegemonic struggles. However, according to Cox, as the working classes are still nationally organized, antihegemonic struggles are bound to begin within national societies.

Cox’s approach has attracted a variety of criticism. For example, Teschke (2008 , p. 174) argued that there is a problem with Cox’s concept of structures of accumulation, which he used instead of Marx’s concept of mode of production. These structures of accumulation, the starting point of Cox’s analysis, are actually “historical variations” within the capitalist mode of production, but these are taken as a given by Cox and not properly theorized. Teschke, therefore, criticized Cox for taking the development of capitalism in a pre-constituted state system without questioning its formation. Cox is also criticized for emphasizing inter-ruling class relations and ideology formation rather than class conflict as the primary contradiction of capitalism leading to a lack of understanding of its main dynamics ( Teschke, 2008 , pp. 173–175). Another criticism is related to the presence of an inherent Eurocentrism in Cox’s approach in his explanation of the geographical expansion of capitalism from the West to the East ( Hobson, 2007 ).

The 1980s and 1990s witnessed the rise of different forms of Weberian ( Hobden & Hobson, 2002 ) and Marxist historical sociology ( Rosenberg, 1994 ; Teschke, 2008 , 2014 ). However, it was particularly the Marxist historical sociology that contributed most to theoretical discussions within IR. Marxist international historical sociology has revised some of the unfinished themes in Marx’s work and incorporated the dynamics of the interstate system in the analysis of the reproduction and contradictions of capitalism ( Lacher, 2002 , 2006 ; Teschke & Lacher, 2007 ; Wallerstein, 1974 ). Indeed, the relation between capitalism, the state, and the state system has been a key topic of discussion in Marxist historical sociology ( Callinicos, 2007 ; Morton, 2007a ; Pozo-Martin, 2007 ). This topic contains an echo of some of the controversies of the 1970s concerning the connection between the economic and the political—Althusserian totality. The focus of the current discussions is, however, an expanded understanding of the concept of totality, which now covers the whole world system rather than one nation-state or society. Inevitably, this raised the relative autonomy versus determinism discussion that had previously been analyzed in the context of one state or society and elevated this discussion to a new context of an internationalized capitalism and its relation with geographical multiplicity.

In his early work, Justin Rosenberg (1994) developed an alternative Marxist analysis that argues for a structural correspondence between different geopolitical systems and different modes of production and/or social structures. According to Rosenberg, despite the presence of anarchy in most geopolitical systems, there is a “structural discontinuity” between pre- and modern capitalist systems. Both sovereignty and anarchy are “social forms arising out of the distinctive configuration of capitalist social relations” ( Rosenberg, 1994 , p. 172). Following Wood’s arguments, Rosenberg argued that, whereas precapitalist modes of production are based on personalized domination, the capitalist mode of production is characterized by an impersonal form of sovereignty resulting from the separation between the economic and the political in capitalism. It is this generalized differentiation between these two spheres within capitalism that creates an abstract understanding of the state and a realist discourse and makes independent power politics possible.

In his later work, rather than a structural analysis of the development of different state systems, Rosenberg (2006 , 2009 , 2010 , 2012 ) altered his focus, attempting to integrate the international into social theory by developing Leon Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development (UCD). UCD is a critical materialist framework for analyzing the “international.” Rosenberg’s aim was to develop an international dimension of social theorizing while at the same time advancing a social theory of the international ( Rosenberg, 2006 , p. 312, 313). He utilized UCD as a general transhistorical abstraction to explain the development of world history through the interactive dynamics of a multiplicity of political units and their uneven and combined development across time and space ( Rosenberg, 2006 , p. 312). Rosenberg criticized the “ontological singular” ( Rosenberg, 2009 , 2010 ) conception of society and limited conception of social change dominant in traditional social theory, which is based on the idea that societies develop in a linear fashion either through catching up or emulating the social structures of the West. Instead, he develops a neo-Trotskyist approach in demonstrating the constitutive and causal nature of the “international” or “inter-societal” relations in understanding development, replacing the methodological nationalism of social theory with the methodological internationalism of UCD. The emphasis on “interactive multiplicity” allegedly avoids the universalist and essential assumptions of stadial conceptions of international development. Other scholars have joined Rosenberg in outlining different aspects of international development through the concept of UCD. For instance, Kamran Matin applied this concept to the process of state formation in premodern Iran ( Matin, 2007 ), arguing that UCD provides “a deeper theoretical foundation for a non-Eurocentric international historical materialism . . . highlighting the constitutiveness of the international both to the emergence and the expansion of capitalism” ( Matin, 2013 , p. 370).

Political Marxists, in their effort to avoid accusations of developing transhistorical abstractions in their explanations of international relations, have advanced more historicist accounts of international development that focus on class and particularly on social property relations and the conflicts they create ( Teschke, 2002 , 2003 , 2014 ). The key representatives of the Political Marxist tradition are Robert Brenner (1977) and Ellen Meiksins Wood (1981) . Their views also form the background to the political Marxist thinkers in IR. The key thinker of political Marxism in IR is Benno Teschke ( Teschke, 2002 , 2003 , 2014 ). Unlike the claimed transhistorical arguments of UCD, Teschke presented an agency-centered historicist account of Marxism ( Knafo & Teschke, 2021 ). In developing his views, Teschke started from a philosophical divide within Marxist discussions between critical Marxism and scientific Marxism ( Teschke, 2002 , 2003 , 2014 ). The scientific Marxists believe that Marxism is a science, and their paradigm is the mature political economy of Capital ( Marx, 1977a ). They look for objective and structural determinations, stable ontologies, and theoretical generalizations, and they seek to formulate transhistorical laws ( Teschke, 2014 , p. 2). Critical Marxists (Hegelianizers), however, “conceive of Marxism as critique rather than science” and they are more “historicist, looking for the historicisation of ontologies and study contextualised rationalities and intersubjectivities” ( Teschke, 2014 , pp. 46–47). According to Teschke, when considered in the context of International Relations theorizing, neorealism, rationalist neo-Weberian historical sociology, and the UCD share a structuralist and positivist meta-theoretical orientation, whereas political Marxism, hermeneutic forms of Weberianism, and constructivism abide by non-positivist meta-theoretical premises.

The backbone of the argument of political Marxism has been the way the development of capitalism affects the dynamics of the international system ( Lacher, 2002 , 2006 ; Teschke, 2002 , 2003 ; Teschke & Lacher, 2007 ). For instance, unlike the world systems perspective ( Wallerstein, 1974 ), in their analysis of the link between geopolitical dynamics and the development of capitalism, Teschke and Lacher avoided any direct association between political multiplicity and the development of capitalism. According to them, capitalism developed in the context of a preexisting state system, which then remolded and internalized it to its own dynamics. The diachronic process of development between capitalism and the interstate system shows that the 17th-century Westphalian international system did not represent the beginning of modern international relations because it was based on the dynamics of “geopolitical accumulation” between dynastic states. Only after the formation of fully developed capitalist states and “after the European wide spread of capitalism” ( Teschke, 2002 , p. 37) was the dynamics of geopolitical accumulation replaced by the dynamics of capital accumulation linking the global process of capitalist development with imperialism and colonialism. Therefore, according to Teschke, the idea that the Westphalian system of states was the beginning of the modern international system is one of the most persistent myths of international relations ( Teschke, 2003 ).

There are important challenges within the Marxist historical sociology. One important issue concerns the Eurocentric nature of both the UCD theory and political Marxism and to what extent their arguments can be framed in a non-Eurocentric problematique ( Bhambra, 2010 ; Hobson, 2011a ; Matin, 2013 ). With reference to UCD, one of the main axes of discussion is whether UCD has a limited historical application relevant only to the capitalist development or whether it is “transhistorical” beyond the confines of any specific mode of production (Rosenberg’s and Matin’s position Allinson & Avienas, 2010 ). According to Hobson , the “failure to historically generalize the concept—at least to a certain extent—leads ultimately into a Eurocentric cul-de-sac” ( Hobson, 2011b , p. 147) and “to fetishizing Europe with the unintended consequence of naturalizing, if not eternalizing, Western capitalist domination, while simultaneously denying agency to the East” ( Hobson, 2011b , p. 165). Therefore according to Hobson, if UCD is to be a non-Eurocentric theory of IR, it should be considered a transhistorical generalizable approach.

Political Marxism has also been charged with being Eurocentric for focusing on the exceptional and unique nature of Europe in the development of capitalism. There are, however, attempts to reconcile the arguments of political Marxism with postcolonial and decolonial arguments to remedy the charges of Eurocentrism. Knafo and Teschke (2021) , as indicated, advocates “an agency-centered historicist Marxism” that is compatible with and advances the arguments of postcolonial theory by focusing on the struggles and resistance of the subaltern classes. According to Knafo and Teschke (2021 , p. 55), this makes it possible to “account (for) historical specificities in the differential trajectories of historical capitalism without subsuming these under one common explanatory denominator.” Salgado (2021 , p. 17) argued that the Marxist historicism of Knafo and Teschke make it possible “reinvigorat(ing) the potential of historical materialism for an anti-Eurocentric critique beyond the traditional accusations of structuralism and economic determinism” and decolonial historicism. These recent interventions relating to the concept of UCD and political Marxism both demonstrate the potential of historical materialism for developing an anti-Eurocentric critique HSIR.

Criticisms and Prospects

This article charts the development of critical theory in International Relations (IR) since the 1980s, highlighting the intellectual roots of critical International Relations theory (CIRT) and its expansion into different strands in IR. CIRT has been very successful at directing criticism at the rationalist, structuralist, and positivist forms of IR theorizing and in demonstrating how dominant discourses serve the interests of the powerful. Indeed, CIRT has made it possible to “rethink” International Relations ( George, 1989 ) by making it possible to develop alternative conceptions of the international that are sensitive to history and to a sociological understanding of the international.

However, critical theory is still very dynamic and developing in new directions. The legacy of the Frankfurt School critical theory has been revived in recent years by philosophers such as Rahel Jaeggi (2014 , 2018) , Axel Honneth (1995 , 2007 , 2008 , 2012) , Asgar Sørensen (2019) , Amy Allen (2016 , 2018) , and Anita Chari (2010 , 2015) . Although second-generation thinkers such as Habermas had a much greater influence on IR, the views of the third-generation Frankfurt School theorists such as Axel Honneth (1995 , 2012) have also inspired new discussions on Habermasian CIRT ( Brincat, 2010 , 2013 ). In Honneth’s theory of the struggle for recognition, the moral conflicts, which the lack of recognition may create and which have an effect on the process of uncoerced dialogue, have led to discussions on the effectiveness of the functioning of global institutions ( Haacke, 2005 ). The methodological achievements of the first-generation Frankfurt School philosophers as well as the earlier views of Adorno and Horkheimer are also subject to new interpretations in relation to the development of CIRT. Based on Adorno’s methodological contributions, Levine (2012) , for instance, has developed the concept of sustainable critique attempting to operationalize Adorno’s thoughts on identitarian thinking, negative dialectical critique, and nonidentity for the development of CIRT.

Nevertheless, CIRT is not without its problems, raising questions as to whether the “promise of critical theory” is only “partially kept” ( Murphy, 2007 ). Critical theory has been criticized for failing as a project, lacking political and practical relevance for the problems of this age, losing its original radicalism and emancipatory appeal, abandoning its intention of critique and transforming capitalist society, and adopting a reformist attitude based on existing norms and practices, and its insights have been appropriated by the New Right for non-progressive purposes ( Davies, 2014 ; Kim, 2014 ; Koddenbrock, 2015 ; Zambrana, 2013 , 2018 ; also see Drolet & Williams, 2022 ; Ibsen, 2022 ; Jahn, 2021a , 2021b ; Michelsen, 2021 ; Schmid, 2018 ; Sørensen, 2019 ).

One of the significant criticisms raised in recent years has been the inherently Euro/Western-centric nature of CIRT ( Hobson, 2004 , 2007 , 2011a , 2011b ). In The End of Progress , Amy Allen (2016) argues that because of its Eurocentrism, critical theory needs to be decolonized. For Allen, the normative perspectives of critical theorists like Habermas and Honneth are based on a Eurocentric notion of “historical progress and development” ( Allen, 2018 , p. 781). She argues that their arguments are “deeply wedded to the idea that European Enlightenment modernity represents a developmental advance over premodern, nonmodern, or traditional forms of life, and, crucially this idea plays an important role in grounding the normativity of critical theory for each thinker” ( Allen, 2016 , p. 3). Seen in this light, the ideas of Habermas, Honneth and Linklater informed by the idea of moral regulation and progress on a global scale are susceptible to Allen’s critique of Eurocentrism and the need for decolonization. Habermas’s, Honneth’s, and Linklater’s ideas shaped by the notion of moral regulation and advancement at the global level make them susceptible to Allen’s criticisms of Eurocentrism and the need for decolonization. For Allen, the normative principles of modernity need to be disentangled from the backward-looking idea of progress, allowing a new normative orientation toward other subjects. This is possible, she argues, if we “adopt a stance of modesty or humility, not one of superiority toward our own moral certainties” ( Allen, 2016 , p. 33). This will “suspend the assumption that my form of life is superior to those of the cultural Others with whom I am in dialogue” ( Allen, 2016 , p. 76).

In an exchange on Allen’s arguments, Nichols (2018 , p. 782) pointed out that there is an underlying “idealism” in Allen’s work in that the idea of progress Allen criticized in Frankfurt School theorists “is formulated from the standpoint of epistemology and /or moral philosophy” rather than “as a problem of social theory ,” that is, “a mode of thinking about imperialism as a complex set of social processes.” The Marxist tradition, however, analyzes imperialism as a “set of social processes that are not reducible to the normative or epistemic claims held by the individuals within them” ( Nicols, 2018 , p. 783). As Leeb also argues commenting on Allen’s arguments, “a turn away from Marx might not serve critical theory’s opening to postcolonial theory, insofar as post and de-colonial theory has itself found central resources in Marx to theorize colonial domination and the possibility to counter such domination” ( Leeb, 2018 , pp. 777–778).

This exchange of views between Allen and Nichols demonstrates that to reanimate the radical potential of critical theory, it is necessary to synthesize the normative aspects of the critique of capitalism with its political economy to make it politically relevant for emancipatory struggles. Sørensenlikewise argues that critical theory must “seek to reintegrate the perspective of political economy” if it is to “offer an appropriate diagnosis of” capitalism’s injustices ( Ibsen, 2022 , p. 156). Finally, “The central challenge that critical theory faces today “comments Anita Chari,” is to formulate a politically relevant and historically specific critique of capitalism” ( Chari, 2010 , p. 588).

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The critique of domination in the Frankfurt School

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The role of philosophy in ‘critical thinking’ is found in its social function. That social function is to be critical of prevailing modes of thought and patterns of life. Horkheimer said it well in one of his early essays:

Today… the whole historic dynamic has placed philosophy in the center of social actuality, and social actuality in the center of philosophy…. By criticism, we mean that intellectual, and eventually practical, effort which is not satisfied to accept the prevailing ideas, actions, and social conditions unthinkingly and from mere habit; effort which aims to coordinate the individual sides of social life with each other and with the general ideas and aims of the epoch, to deduce them genetically, to distinguish the appearance from the essence, to examine the foundations of things, in short, really to know them. 1 .

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Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), pp. 168, 270.

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Yuri Krasin, Sociology of Revolution: A Marxist View ( Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972 ), pp. 20–21.

Albrecht Wellmer, Critical Theory of Society ( New York: Herder and Herder, 1971 ), p. 14.

W. Tatarkiewitz, Twentieth Century Philosophy (Belmont: Wadsworth Press, 1973), p. 190. Commenting on the criticism of sociology by Marxists Tatarkiewitz states: ‘Marxists criticized the first group [ the idealists ] for not seeing the unity between nature and society and the second [ the naturalists ] for not seeing the difference between them. They themselves posited the unity of society with nature but stressed the qualitative difference between them. They explained the development of society as due not to universal laws of nature but to laws peculiar to society. A more fundamental objection of the Marxist concerned the generalization of results by the majority of non-Marxist sociologists. The Marxists denied that there are sociological laws valid for all time and in all societies; they showed that each law is tied to a certain form of society and this form is tied to a definite form of production.‘But a new element comes into the picture with Horkheimer and Wellmer, on the one hand, and Krasin, on the other: namely, not only epochal development but historical development as a whole. This throws the ‘absolute’ into the relative picture, as in the case of Lukacs’ move from Marxist sociology to a social ontology. One should recall Lukacs one-time attachments to the Frankfurt School and Theodor Adorno’s impact on his thinking. Sociological relativism was an arch foe of such theorizers. One has the feeling that ‘dialectical reason’ is supposed to cure this relativism and scepticism once and for all but, as we have seen, it does not. It merely puts the issue of relativism on a higher plane, the plane of totalizing reason, which is also subject to relativism, all over again.

Trent Schroyer, The Critique of Domination ( New York: George Braziller, 1973 ), p. 130.

M.G. Plattel, Utopian and Critical Thinking (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1972), p. 86. The author continues: ‘Several dialecticians speak only about progress without including any transcendence, while others strive too much for transcendence without progress. In either case the dialectical equilibrium is disturbed. The first group gets stuck in negation, and the second in transcending negation. According to the French dialectician, L. Goldmann, this situation is rather characteristic of the entire ‘School of Frankfurt’. Its representatives make too sharp a distinction between the positive and the negative aspects of dialectics: thus they face the choice of either directing themselves negatively to the existing situation of assuming a positive Utopian position outside this situation’.

Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), particularly the chapter on ‘Facts and Ideals.’ The concept of reified self- transcendence is brought out strongly in chapter 4 on ‘The Human World of Space and Time.’

T.W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1972 ), pp. 405–406.

William Horosz, ‘The Self-Transcending Totalizations of Sartre,’ Philosophy Today (December, 1975 ).

Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man ( Boston: Beacon Press, 1966 ), p. 142.

Herbert Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt ( Boston: Beacon Press, 1972 ), pp. 122–123.

Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation ( Boston: Beacon Press, 1969 ), p. 48.

J.J. Kockelmans, Phenomenology ( New York: Doubleday, 1967 ), p. 375.

Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984 ), p. 258.

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Horosz, W. (1987). The critique of domination in the Frankfurt School. In: Search Without Idols. Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Library, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3493-1_8

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The Frankfurt School

                  The "Frankfurt School" refers to a group of German-American theorists who developed powerful analyses of the changes in Western capitalist societies that occurred since the classical theory of Marx. Working at the Institut fur Sozialforschung in Frankfurt, Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s, theorists such as Max Horkheimer, T.W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, and Erich Fromm produced some of the first accounts within critical social theory of the importance of mass culture and communication in social reproduction and domination. The Frankfurt School also generated one of the first models of a critical cultural studies that analyzes the processes of cultural production and political economy, the politics of cultural texts, and audience reception and use of cultural artifacts (Kellner 1989 and 1995).

Moving from Nazi Germany to the United States, the Frankfurt School experienced at first hand the rise of a media culture involving film, popular music, radio, television, and other forms of mass culture (Wiggershaus 1994). In the United States, where they found themselves in exile, media production was by and large a form of commercial entertainment controlled by big corporations. Two of its key theorists Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno developed an account of the "culture industry" to call attention to the industrialization and commercialization of culture under capitalist relations of production (1972). This situation was most marked in the United States that had little state support of film or television industries, and where a highly commercial mass culture emerged that came to be a distinctive feature of capitalist societies and a focus of critical cultural studies.

                  During the 1930s, the Frankfurt school developed a critical and transdisciplinary approach to cultural and communications studies, combining political economy, textual analysis, and analysis of social and ideological effects of. They coined the term "culture industry" to signify the process of the industrialization of mass-produced culture and the commercial imperatives that drove the system. The critical theorists analyzed all mass-mediated cultural artifacts within the context of industrial production, in which the commodities of the culture industries exhibited the same features as other products of mass production: commodification, standardization, and massification. The culture industries had the specific function, however, of providing ideological legitimation of the existing capitalist societies and of integrating individuals into its way of life.

                  Adorno's analyses of popular music, television, and other phenomena ranging from astrology columns to fascist speeches (1991, 1994), Lowenthal's studies of popular literature and magazines (1961), Herzog's studies of radio soap operas (1941), and the perspectives and critiques of mass culture developed in Horkheimer and Adorno's famous study of the culture industries (1972 and Adorno 1991) provide many examples of the Frankfurt school approach. Moreover, in their theories of the culture industries and critiques of mass culture, they were among the first social theorists its importance in the reproduction of contemporary societies. In their view, mass culture and communications stand in the center of leisure activity, are important agents of socialization, mediators of political reality, and should thus be seen as major institutions of contemporary societies with a variety of economic, political, cultural and social effects.

                  Furthermore, the critical theorists investigated the cultural industries in a political context as a form of the integration of the working class into capitalist societies. The Frankfurt school theorists were among the first neo-Marxian groups to examine the effects of mass culture and the rise of the consumer society on the working classes which were to be the instrument of revolution in the classical Marxian scenario. They also analyzed the ways that the culture industries and consumer society were stabilizing contemporary capitalism and accordingly sought new strategies for political change, agencies of political transformation, and models for political emancipation that could serve as norms of social critique and goals for political struggle. This project required rethinking Marxian theory and produced many important contributions -- as well as some problematical positions.

                  The Frankfurt school focused intently on technology and culture, indicating how technology was becoming both a major force of production and formative mode of social organization and control. In a 1941 article, "Some Social Implications of Modern Technology," Herbert Marcuse argued that technology in the contemporary era constitutes an entire "mode of organizing and perpetuating (or changing) social relationships, a manifestation of prevalent thought and behavior patterns, an instrument for control and domination" (414). In the realm of culture, technology produced mass culture that habituated individuals to conform to the dominant patterns of thought and behavior, and thus provided powerful instruments of social control and domination.

                  Victims of European fascism, the Frankfurt school experienced first hand the ways that the Nazis used the instruments of mass culture to produce submission to fascist culture and society. While in exile in the United States, the members of the Frankfurt school came to believe that American "popular culture" was also highly ideological and worked to promote the interests of American capitalism. Controlled by giant corporations, the culture industries were organized according to the strictures of mass production, churning out mass-produced products that generated a highly commercial system of culture which in turn sold the values, life-styles, and institutions of "the American way of life."

The work of the Frankfurt School provided what Paul Lazarsfeld (1942), one of the originators of modern communications studies, called a critical approach, which he distinguished from the "administrative research." The positions of Adorno, Lowenthal, and other members of the inner circle of the Institute for Social Research were contested by Walter Benjamin, an idiosyncratic theorist loosely affiliated with the Institute. Benjamin, writing in Paris during the 1930s, discerned progressive aspects in new technologies of cultural production such as photography, film, and radio. In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1969), Benjamin noted how new mass media were supplanting older forms of culture whereby the mass reproduction of photography, film, recordings, and publications replaced the emphasis on the originality and "aura" of the work of art in an earlier era. Freed from the mystification of high culture, Benjamin believed that media culture could cultivate more critical individuals able to judge and analyze their culture, just as sports fans could dissect and evaluate athletic activities. In addition, processing the rush of images of cinema created, Benjamin believed, subjectivities better able to parry and comprehend the flux and turbulence of experience in industrialized, urbanized societies.

                  Himself a collaborator of the prolific German artist Bertolt Brecht, Benjamin worked with Brecht on films, created radio plays, and attempted to utilize the media as organs of social progress. In the essay "The Artist as Producer" (1999 [1934]), Benjamin argued that progressive cultural creators should "refunction" the apparatus of cultural production, turning theater and film, for instance, into a forum of political enlightenment and discussion rather than a medium of "culinary" audience pleasure. Both Brecht and Benjamin wrote radio plays and were interested in film as an instrument of progressive social change. In an essay on radio theory, Brecht anticipated the Internet in his call for reconstructing the apparatus of broadcasting from one-way transmission to a more interactive form of two-way, or multiple, communication (in Silberman 2000: 41ff.)-- a form first realized in CB radio and then electronically-mediated computer communication.

                  Moreover, Benjamin wished to promote a radical cultural and media politics concerned with the creation of alternative oppositional cultures. Yet he recognized that media such as film could have conservative effects. While he thought it was progressive that mass-produced works were losing their "aura," their magical force, and were opening cultural artifacts for more critical and political discussion, he recognized that film could create a new kind of ideological magic through the cult of celebrity and techniques like the close-up that fetishized certain stars or images via the technology of the cinema. Benjamin was thus one of the first radical cultural critics to look carefully at the form and technology of media culture in appraising its complex nature and effects. Moreover, he developed a unique approach to cultural history that is one of his most enduring legacies, constituting a micrological history of Paris in the 18th century, an uncompleted project that contains a wealth of material for study and reflection (see Benjamin 2000 and the study in Buck-Morss 1989).

                  Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno answered Benjamin's optimism in a highly influential analysis of the culture industry published in their book Dialectic of Enlightenment , which first appeared in 1948 and was translated into English in 1972. They argued that the system of cultural production dominated by film, radio broadcasting, newspapers, and magazines, was controlled by advertising and commercial imperatives, and served to create subservience to the system of consumer capitalism. While later critics pronounced their approach too manipulative, reductive, and elitist, it provides an important corrective to more populist approaches to media culture that downplay the way the media industries exert power over audiences and help produce thought and behavior that conforms to the existing society.

                  The Frankfurt School also provide useful historical perspectives on the transition from traditional culture and modernism in the arts to a mass-produced media and consumer society. In his path-breaking book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere , Jurgen Habermas further historicizes Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis of the culture industry. Providing historical background to the triumph of the culture industry, Habermas notes how bourgeois society in the late 18 th and 19 th century was distinguished by the rise of a public sphere that stood between civil society and the state and which mediated between public and private interests. For the first time in history, individuals and groups could shape public opinion, giving direct expression to their needs and interests while influencing political practice. The bourgeois public sphere made it possible to form a realm of public opinion that opposed state power and the powerful interests that were coming to shape bourgeois society.

Habermas notes a transition from the liberal public sphere which originated in the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolution to a media-dominated public sphere in the current stage of what he calls "welfare state capitalism and mass democracy." This historical transformation is grounded in Horkheimer and Adorno's analysis of the culture industry, in which giant corporations have taken over the public sphere and transformed it from a site of rational debate into one of manipulative consumption and passivity. In this transformation, "public opinion" shifts from rational consensus emerging from debate, discussion, and reflection to the manufactured opinion of polls or media experts. For Habermas, the interconnection between the sphere of public debate and individual participation has thus been fractured and transmuted into that of a realm of political manipulation and spectacle, in which citizen-consumers ingest and absorb passively entertainment and information. "Citizens" thus become spectators of media presentations and discourse which arbitrate public discussion and reduce its audiences to objects of news, information, and public affairs. In Habermas's words: "Inasmuch as the mass media today strip away the literary husks from the kind of bourgeois self-interpretation and utilize them as marketable forms for the public services provided in a culture of consumers, the original meaning is reversed" (1989: 171).

                  Habermas's critics, however, contend that he idealizes the earlier bourgeois public sphere by presenting it as a forum of rational discussion and debate when in fact many social groups and most women were excluded. Critics also contend that Habermas neglects various oppositional working class, plebeian, and women's public spheres developed alongside of the bourgeois public sphere to represent voices and interests excluded in this forum (see the studies in Calhoun 1992). Yet Habermas is right that in the period of the democratic revolutions a public sphere emerged in which for the first time in history ordinary citizens could participate in political discussion and debate, organize, and struggle against unjust authority. Habermas's account also points to the increasingly important role of the media in politics and everyday life and the ways that corporate interests have colonized this sphere, using the media and culture to promote their own interests.

The culture industry thesis described both the production of massified cultural products and homogenized subjectivities. Mass culture for the Frankfurt School produced desires, dreams, hopes, fears, and longings, as well as unending desire for consumer products. The culture industry produced cultural consumers who would consume its products and conform to the dictates and the behaviors of the existing society. And yet, as Walter Benjamin pointed out (1969), the culture industry also produces rational and critical consumers able to dissect and discriminate among cultural texts and performances, much as sports fans learn to analyze and criticize sports events.

                  In retrospect, one can see the Frankfurt school work as articulation of a theory of the stage of state and monopoly capitalism that became dominant during the 1930s. This was an era of large organizations, theorized earlier by Austro-Marxist Rudolf Hilferding as "organized capitalism" (1980 [1910]), in which the state and giant corporations managed the economy and in which individuals submitted to state and corporate control. This period is often described as "Fordism" to designate the system of mass production and the homogenizing regime of capital which wanted to produce mass desires, tastes, and behavior. It was thus an era of mass production and consumption characterized by uniformity and homogeneity of needs, thought, and behavior producing a mass society and what the Frankfurt school described as "the end of the individual." No longer was individual thought and action the motor of social and cultural progress; instead giant organizations and institutions overpowered individuals. The era corresponds to the staid, conformist, and conservative world of corporate capitalism that was dominant in the 1950s with its organization men and women, its mass consumption, and its mass culture.

                  During this period, mass culture and communication were instrumental in generating the modes of thought and behavior appropriate to a highly organized and massified social order. Thus, the Frankfurt school theory of the culture industry articulates a major historical shift to an era in which mass consumption and culture was indispensable to producing a consumer society based on homogeneous needs and desires for mass-produced products and a mass society based on social organization and homogeneity. It is culturally the era of highly controlled network radio and television, insipid top forty pop music, glossy Hollywood films, national magazines, and other mass-produced cultural artifacts

                  Of course, media culture was never as massified and homogeneous as in the Frankfurt school model and one could argue that the model was flawed even during its time of origin and influence and that other models were preferable, such as those of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Bloch, and others of the Weimar generation and, later, British cultural studies. Yet the original Frankfurt school model of the culture industry did articulate the important social roles of media culture during a specific regime of capital and provided a model, still of use, of a highly commercial and technologically advanced culture that serves the needs of dominant corporate interests, plays a major role in ideological reproduction, and in enculturating individuals into the dominant system of needs, thought, and behavior.

Douglas Kellner

References and Further Readings

Adorno, T.W. (1991) The Culture Industry . London: Routledge.

__________ (1994) The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture . London: Routledge.

Benjamin, Walter (1969) Illuminations . New York: Shocken.

_______________ (1999) "The Artist as Producer," in Walter Benjamin, Collected Writings , Volume II. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

_______________ (2000) The Arcades Project . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Buck-Morss, Susan (1989) The Dialectics of Seeing . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Calhoun, Craig (1992), ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere . Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Habermas, Jurgen (1989a) Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere . Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Hertog, Herta (1941), "On Borrowed Experience. An Analysis of Listening to Daytime Sketches," Studies in Philosophy and Social Science , Vol. IX, No. 1: 65-95.

Hilferding, Rudolf (1981 [1910]) Finance Capital . London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Horkheimer, Max and T.W. Adorno (1972) Dialectic of Enlightenment . New York: Herder and Herder.

Kellner, Douglas (1989) Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity . Cambridge and Baltimore: Polity and John Hopkins University Press.

______________ (1995) Media Culture. Cultural Studies, Identity, and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern . London and New York: Routledge.

____________ (2000) "Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: A Critical Intervention," in Perspectives on Habermas , edited by Lewis Hahn. Open Court Press.

Lazarsfeld, Paul (1941) "Administrative and Critical Comunications Research," Studies in Philosophy and Social Science , Vol. IX, No. 1: 2-16.

Lowenthal, Leo (1961) Literature, Popular Culture and Society . Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.

Marcuse, Herbert (1941) Studies in Philosophy and Social Science , Vol. IX, No. 1: 414-439.

Silberman, Marc (2000) Bertolt Brecht on Film and Radio . London: Metheun.

Wiggershaus, Rolf (1994), The Frankfurt School . Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

See also British cultural studies; Hollywood film; popular music; television; political economy;

Douglas Kellner Graduate School of Education Moore Hall Mailbox 951521 UCLA Los Angeles, CA 90095 [email protected] http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/kellner.html Fax: 310 206-6293 Phone: 310 825-0977

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Frankfurt School by John D. Abromeit LAST REVIEWED: 28 November 2016 LAST MODIFIED: 28 November 2016 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756384-0189

Although it has gained widespread currency, the “Frankfurt School” is a somewhat misleading term that refers primarily to a group of scholars and intellectuals who worked with the Institute for Social Research under the directorship of Max Horkheimer. Founded with private funds in 1923, the Institute was based in Frankfurt, Germany, and affiliated with the J. W. Goethe University. Originally dedicated to research on the history of the European labor movement, when Horkheimer became the director of the Institute in 1931 the emphasis of its research shifted to interdisciplinary studies of contemporary society. Horkheimer did continue the original, non-dogmatic Marxist orientation of the Institute, but his new interdisciplinary model of materialist Critical Theory also drew upon psychoanalysis and advanced empirical social research methods. With the triumph of National Socialism in 1933, the Institute was forced to relocate to New York City, where it was loosely affiliated with the Columbia University Sociology Department. The Institute continued to publish its journal, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Journal for Social Research) through 1941, and it continued to carry out empirical research projects throughout its period of exile in the United States, which came to end in 1949–1950 when the Institute was reestablished in Frankfurt. Horkheimer continued to serve as the director of the Institute until 1959, when Theodor W. Adorno took over the position, which he held until his death in 1969. The collective and individual work of the scholars affiliated with the Institute for Social Research had a tremendous impact on 20th-century intellectual life in a wide variety of areas, including philosophy, sociology, psychology, social psychology, sociology of literature, musicology, aesthetics, history, political and legal theory, cultural studies, economics, communication, and media studies. The influence of the Institute also extended beyond the academy, most notably perhaps in the impact of its writings on the protest movements of the 1960s in Western Europe and the United States. The purpose of the following bibliography is to provide the newcomer with an overview of the most important primary works of the central figures of the Frankfurt School, as well as a small sampling of the voluminous secondary literature. Primary and secondary works have been chosen based mainly on their significance, but a number of works have also been selected because they provide ideal points of entry for those unfamiliar with Critical Theory or any of its individual practitioners. The question of which individual theorists should be included in the “Frankfurt School” is open to debate. The emphasis here will be on the so-called “first generation” of scholars who were directly affiliated with the Institute under Horkheimer’s direction. These include core members, such as Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, Friedrich Pollock, and Erich Fromm, as well as more peripheral members, such as Walter Benjamin, Franz Neumann, and Otto Kirchheimer. The one indisputed member of the “second generation” of the Frankfurt School, Jürgen Habermas, has also been included, in large part because of the substantial impact of his work and his direct ties to the first generation of Critical Theorists. I cannot address here the legitimate questions of whether or not the concept of multiple generations of the “Frankfurt School” overemphasizes continuities and effaces significant breaks that occurred between Habermas and the “first generation,” or whether Axel Honneth—the current director of the Institute for Social Research—and other theorists represent a “third generation” of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Due to space limitations, this bibliography will also include only works written in or translated into English.

Those seeking a broad overview of the history of the Frankfurt School should begin with Jay 1973 and Wiggershaus 1994 . Jay 1973 was the first comprehensive study and it remains the best introduction, although it does not cover the period after 1950. Wiggershaus 1994 extends into the 1950s and 1960s. Those seeking an introductory conceptual and/or thematic introduction to Critical Theory, should consult Held 1980 , Kellner 1989 , and Bronner 2011 . The latter is the briefest and most accessible.

Bronner, Steven Eric. 2011. Critical theory: A very short introduction . Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

DOI: 10.1093/actrade/9780199730070.001.0001

Written by one of the foremost scholars of Critical Theory and Western Marxism, this is probably the best place to begin for anyone who knows nothing about the Frankfurt School. Bronner succeeds in portraying clearly and succinctly the most important ideas of Critical Theory as well as the historical, social, political, and biographical force fields out of which it emerged. He also reflects astutely on how the tradition should be rethought in order to remain relevant today.

Held, David. 1980. Introduction to critical theory: Horkheimer to Habermas . Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press.

This study provides a generally reliable thematic overview of the most important theoretical concerns of the central figures of the Frankfurt School—with a particular emphasis on Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas—from the 1920s until the 1970s. Held attempts to refute some of the common criticisms of the Critical Theorists, such as, they abandoned Marx, fell back into an idealist position, were too distant from working-class politics, and focused too much on questions of aesthetics and cultural criticism.

Jay, Martin. 1973. The dialectical imagination: A history of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Reseach, 1923–1950 . Boston: Little, Brown.

Based on extensive interviews with original members of the Institute, this was the first comprehensive scholarly study of the history of the Frankfurt School and remains the standard introductory work. Jay provides a balanced and richly detailed overview of the origins and development of the Institute for Social Research through 1950. He discusses its collective empirical projects, as well as the writings of its principal protagonists on a wide variety of subjects, including fascism, culture, aesthetics, and the philosophy of history. He also introduces the reader to a broad cast of supporting characters who worked with the Institute from the early 1920s until 1950.

Kellner, Douglas. 1989. Critical Theory, Marxism and modernity . Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press.

Kellner provides a clear, introductory overview of the main ideas and debates that shaped the Frankfurt School from the 1920s to the 1980s. He also attempts to move beyond a purely intellectual historical or philosophical approach, by examining how it is still relevant to critical social theory and radical politics. The latter discussion of Critical Theory and its relationship to postmodernism are dated, but the earlier historical sections of the book are still helpful.

Wiggershaus, Rolf. 1994. The Frankfurt School: Its history, theories and political significance . Translated by Michael Robertson. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

The first half of this study covers much of the same ground as Martin Jay, although Wiggershaus does provide more detail in certain places by drawing on published and archival materials that had become available between 1973 and 1985. The second half represents the first comprehensive history of the Institute for Social Research after its reestablishment in Frankfurt in 1950. Like Jay, Wiggershaus discusses both collective Institute research projects as well as the main works of its members, but he demonstrates a certain partiality for Adorno’s aesthetics and cultural criticism over Horkheimer and the Institute’s empirical work.

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12.4 The Frankfurt School

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Identify the main goal of critical theory as developed by the Frankfurt School.
• Describe the Frankfurt School’s revision of Enlightenment and Marxist ideas.
• Evaluate communicative action as a tool for liberation.
• Explain how critical theory is messianic.

What we know as critical theory emerged from the work of a group of early 20th-century Marxist German philosophers and social theorists at the Institute for Social Research at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany—a group that came to be known as the Frankfurt School . It arose within the turbulent political environment of the socialist revolutions of the early 20th century and the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany.

Following World War I, the socialist 1918–19 November Revolution dethroned the existing monarchy in Germany, replacing it with a parliamentary system that was later known as the Weimar Republic. Felix Weil (1898–1975), who would go on to provide the financial backing for what would become the Frankfurt School, was on the front lines of the revolution, serving in the Frankfurt Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council. The son of a wealthy entrepreneur, Weil aligned himself with philosophers, artists, and others who had been shifted to the left by the experiences of WWI and by other socialists. In 1923, Weil helped establish what was known as “Marxist Study Week,” a gathering of left-leaning thinkers, many of whom would later be affiliated with the Institute for Social Research. Although the Institute for Social Research was founded in 1924, it was under the leadership of Max Horkheimer , who became director in 1930, that the institute began to focus on practical responses to social oppression (Horkheimer [1972] 1992).

In 1933, in response to the rise of the Nazi regime, the institute moved from Frankfurt to Geneva, Switzerland (Löwenthal 1981). From Geneva, the institute relocated to New York City, where it was made a part of Columbia University. It was while the institute was part of Columbia that the Frankfurt School gained notice and prestige, with its research methods gaining acceptance among other academics. After the end of World War II, some of the Frankfurt School intellectuals returned to West Germany while others remained in the United States. A full return of the institute to Frankfurt occurred in the 1950s (Held 1980).

The Formation of a Critical Theory

Although the Frankfurt School did not articulate one singular view, one identifying mark of its critical theory was a push toward emancipating humanity from the multitude of forces viewed as enslaving it. Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) argued that a plausible critical theory must do several things: explain the ills of society, identify the means by which change can occur, provide a rubric for critique, and articulate reasonable goals (Horkheimer [1972] 1992). The Frankfurt School not only sought to free those oppressed through cultural, economic, and political structures but also sought to free philosophical theory from the chains of oppressive ideologies. The members of the Frankfurt School critiqued Enlightenment thought, revised key Marxist concepts, and proposed new strategies pertaining to how social change can be accomplished.

Critique of the Enlightenment Concept of Knowledge

The Frankfurt School was critical of the Enlightenment view of true knowledge as conceptual, hence separate from the world. Drawing on the work of other branches of philosophy that had arisen in continental Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries—in particular, phenomenology and hermeneutics—the school focused on how the context within which we experience a phenomenon or observe an object can change our interpretation of its meaning. The Frankfurt School rejected the Enlightenment’s faith in the ability of reason to lay bare the secrets of the universe. For these thinkers, knowledge did not consist of absolute “facts” but instead an awareness of the structures of our social world that shape what we believe to be facts (Corradetti 2021).

While many philosophical systems revolved around abstract ideas made popular by the Enlightenment, the critical theory developed at the Frankfurt School attempted to engage the world as it was and not as philosophical frameworks painted it to be. The theorists of the Frankfurt School asserted that philosophical ideas are not abstract concepts. Rather, the ideas that structure the world as we live in it are the result of social, political, cultural, and religious forces and are therefore lived issues. Moreover, to the degree that these forces are oppressive, so are the accepted beliefs or knowledge generated by these forces. The purpose of true knowledge is thus to inform us on how the social world can be liberated from marginalizing and oppressive concepts (Corradetti 2021).

Horkheimer’s Rejection of the Primacy of Reason

The Enlightenment had established a hierarchical relationship between philosophy—and by extension reason—and science. Kant had positioned reason itself as the key to understanding science and to making sense of how scientific discoveries fit into the overall framework of knowledge. According to the Kantian view, proper philosophical reflection was based in reason. Horkheimer rejected this prioritization of reason. He asserted that the objects of scientific reflection were shaped and determined through context (Horkheimer [1972] 1992). Horkheimer and others criticized Kant and Enlightenment philosophy as abstract, irrelevant, or in the worst case, enabling the oppression that occurred since Kant’s time. Instead, the Frankfurt School offered a focus on how philosophy could be used to make a practical difference within that world.

Benjamin’s Disruption of the Status Quo

A common denominator among the multiplicity of ideas within the Frankfurt School could arguably be what German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) called the “messianic.” By this, he meant a disruption within the status quo that eventually responds in various ways to the oppression occurring in a society (Horkheimer [1972] 1992). Jewish and Judeo-Christian theology prophesies a messianic redeemer who will eventually bring peace to an unstable world. Benjamin adapted the term to indicate a conceptual resistance to hegemonic systems (another term for the power structures of the status quo). This resistance is not part of and does not flow from linear history but rather interrupts it. Benjamin understood systems such as capitalism to be linear pathways of history that the messianic impulse interrupts, thus bringing forth a reality that does not flow from past to present but always is. Benjamin held that such a disruption of linear time disrupts systems of power by creating a classless moment (Khatib 2013).

One example of Benjamin’s idea of the messianic would be the eradication of the socially constructed hierarchy of race. Disrupting this concept would presumably result in a society devoid of the stratification that is connected to notions of race. The difficulty with this idea is that messianic moments within human societies don’t seem to last. With the messianic deconstruction of one status quo (such as race) arises another construction that eventually takes the place of the former as the status quo (such as class).

The Revision of the Marxist Dialectic

The Frankfurt School amended the dialectical method to address what they saw as the shortcomings of Marx’s belief that the progression of the world from capitalism to socialism was inevitable. As we can see now, a socialist future has yet to be the inevitable end point of all capitalist societies. In the hands of Frankfurt School theorists, the dialectical method became not a forecast for humanity’s future, but a “down and dirty” understanding of the arbitrariness of the social situation in any given era (Horkheimer [1972] 1992). This understanding indicated that what is to come must be shaped in a real way by intentional action, as opposed to theoretical reflection. While utilizing elements of Marxist philosophies, many Frankfurt School thinkers held that social transformation was not inevitable but needed to be worked toward in conscious ways.

Jürgen Habermas’s Communicative Action

The Frankfurt School sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) is the most prolific figure associated with the Frankfurt School, producing work touching on a variety of topics in social life (Bronner 2011). Habermas took Max Horkheimer’s place as the chair in sociology and philosophy at the Institute for Social Research in 1964.

A prized possession of many societies is a democratic right to free speech; this right was championed by Habermas. As articulated by Habermas , the emancipation of a society is fueled by more than the mere act of people saying what they feel. Rather, people must say what they feel in a public forum in which their ideas can be challenged—in a forum through which people debate freely and thus sharpen their ideas. Habermas viewed this sort of open discussion as having the potential to shape and transform how political systems are run. Habermas calls this sort of pressure by dialogue communicative action .

The foundation upon which communicative action rests is the ground of language. Communicative action views language not as an unchanging system that will always produce certain conclusions but as a process of discovery that is most effective when the ideas we hold most dear are put to intense scrutiny. Language becomes the process by which humans create and agree upon the norms that are most important to them (Bronner 2011).

Habermas viewed communicative action as taking place in the public sphere . The public sphere refers both to the spaces in which people discuss the issues of the day and the collective conceptual realm of people involved in such discussions. The public sphere is a realm outside of nation and state politics where people can be persuaded to engage in some sort of political action (Asen 1999). Habermas contrasts the public sphere with the private sphere, which is the realm where the mechanisms that perpetuate society reside, such as the organizations and enterprises responsible for the production of commodities within an economy (Habermas 1989, 30).

Modern-day examples of the public sphere might be social media platforms or coffeehouses. The hip-hop element of rap is another type of public sphere, with rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy famously stating that rap is the “CNN” of Black America. Public sphere theory asserts that the best governments are the ones that take heed of the communicative action that takes place in the public sphere (Benhabib 1992).

Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy

Inspired by Frankfurt School thinkers, Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire (1921–1997) made key contributions to a school of thought known as the critical pedagogy movement. Freire asserted that the education provided to people living in the postcolonized world wasn’t adequate for emancipation. Freire argued that the type of education needed would move toward a deconstruction of the means by which knowledge production is structured and disseminated in a colonial society. Similar to Habermas’s communicative action, Freire affirmed that authentic communication must occur between teacher and student for true education to take place. True education involves asking “why” questions of the most foundational aspects of the society. This challenging of assumptions prompts the student to consider whether the foundational aspects of a society are actually beneficial or are simply accepted as normal and natural since things have “always” been this way. For Freire, you are only authentically human when you live a life that practices free critical reflection, which leads to emancipation (Freire [2000] 2012). In other words, emancipated humans not only think for themselves but also question the very ways in which society says we should think.

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• Authors: Nathan Smith
• Publisher/website: OpenStax
• Book title: Introduction to Philosophy
• Publication date: Jun 15, 2022
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• Book URL: https://openstax.org/books/introduction-philosophy/pages/1-introduction
• Section URL: https://openstax.org/books/introduction-philosophy/pages/12-4-the-frankfurt-school

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