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Critical Theory: Max Horkheimer
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Where has Critical Theory gone? Paris argues that in turning away from Horkheimer’s call for a theorizing and researching for liberation and a future free of suffering, theorists such as Habermas have ignored the past and future. For these new Critical Theorists, the future is “the ongoing mediation of cultural conflict; the engaged life of […]
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Critical theory has been defined as ‘theory which can provide the analytical and ethical foundation needed to uncover the structure of underlying social practices and to reveal the possible distortion of social life embodied in them’ (Shawn Rosenberg). As a body of theory, it is complex and multidisciplinary, seeking to explain the whole phenomenon of consciousness and to undermine the ways in which existing consciousness perpetuates existing societies. It is particularly associated with the ‘Frankfurt School’, founded in 1923. The most influential theorists of the first generation were Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), though Marcuse, who stayed in the United States when the Frankfurt School returned from exile in 1950, found a larger audience. More recent developments have been dominated by Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929).
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Critical theory began by putting Marxian political economy at the centre of analysis, and early critical theory was materialist and committed to socialism. One of the major features of this perspective was that social theory could not take the familiar and observed as given and unchanging. Rather, all of social life is a reflection of the economic system and the role of social theory was to investigate the ways in which this changed and affected people. Horkheimer argued that there needed to be a study of "how the categories of our consciousness were shaped and how they in turn constituted both the world we saw and what we took to be possible" (Calhoun, p. 440). However, this was not a crude materialism that might argue that consciousness is a direct r esult of economic position. Neither was it idealism, arguing that consciousness had no connection with material reality.
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Critical race theory is a school of sociological thought and legal studies that emphasizes the socially constructed nature of race, considers judicial conclusions to be the result of the workings of power, and opposes the continuation of racial subordination. The notions of the social construction of race and discrimination are present in the writings of such established critical race theorists as Derrick Bell, Mari Matsuda, Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Gloria Ladson-Billings, and William Tate; newly emerging CRT scholars Adrienne Dixson, Celia Rousseau, and Thandeka Chapman; and some pioneers in sociology, including W.E.B. DuBois and Max Weber.
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Agger develops a critical theory which confronts the challenges of feminism and postmodernism in order to address postmodernity adequately. Drawing on first-generation critical theory of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse and second-generation critical theory of Habermas, Agger argues for the priority of critical theory over the antitotality perspectives of postmodernism and feminism. Although Frankfurt critical theory, postmodernism, and feminism are often viewed as divergent, Agger develops an argument for synthesis, outlining what he calls the logic of feminist postmodern critical theory. He then applies the logic to particular social, political, textual, and cultural problems. Building especially on the feminist critique of the domination of women's reproductive activities by a male standard of value, this new theoretical logic connects social problems heretofore seen as separable, especially those which derive from the intellectual agenda of multiculturalism.
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This shift to “perspective taking” is already implicit in the reflexivity of practical forms of Critical Theory. Rather than look for the universal and necessary features of social scientific knowledge, Critical Theory has instead focused on the social relationships between inquirers and other actors in the social sciences. Such relationships can be specified epistemically in terms of the perspective taken by the inquirer on the actors who figure in their explanations or interpretations. Seen in this way, the two dominant and opposed approaches to social science adopt quite different perspectives. On the one hand, naturalism gives priority to the third-person or explanatory perspective; on the other hand, the anti-reductionism of interpretive social science argues for the priority of first- and second-person understanding and so for an essential methodological dualism. Critical Theory since Horkheimer has long attempted to offer an alternative to both views.
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Max Horkheimer