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Critical Theory: Max Horkheimer
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Critical theory is usually more closely associated with a group of theorists called the Frankfurt school. It was German theorists such as Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno, Fromm, Marcuse and, more recently, Habermas and Offe, who are usually identified as establishing and developing a critical theory of modern society. Others such as the Hungarian Marxist Lukacs, and some contemporary North Americans, most notably Calhoun and Kellner, are ... considered to be critical theorists. It will be primarily this tradition that will be examined in this class.
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Alway examines the works of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas to argue the relevance of Critical Theory to contemporary efforts to reconceptualize radical politics. Indeed Alway argues that these theorists anticipate and point to new models of emancipatory politics. Unpacking the complexities of the critical theorists' writings and outlining them in a straightforward manner, Alway identifies the assumptions about human actors and history that inform their analyses of contemporary conditions. The explication of how these background assumptions inform their analyses then allows the author to clarify and assess the critical theorists' positions concerning the possibilities for radical social change, as well as their views on the issues and agents of such change.
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Interestingly, while Adorno and Horkheimer were transforming critical theory into a philosophical critique of modernity, Franz Neuman and Herbert Marcuse were working to politicize critical theory. Research in the Herbert Marcuse archive in Frankfurt uncovered some manuscripts by Marcuse and Neumann on "Theories of Social Change" (see Kellner, 1992: 301ff.). In the early 1940s when Horkheimer and Adorno were working on Dialectic of Enlightenment, Marcuse and Neumann were engaged in a historical study of theories of social change within Western thought that could help produce a theory of social change for the present age. This project is extremely interesting within the history of critical theory since it shows that in the 1940s there were two tendencies within critical theory: 1) the philosophical-cultural analysis of the trends of Western civilization being developed by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment; and 2) the more practical-political development of critical theory as a theory of social change anticipated by Marcuse and Neumann. For Marcuse and Neumann, critical theory was conceptualized as a theory of social change that would connect philosophy, social theory, and radical politics -- precisely the project of 1930s critical theory that Horkheimer and Adorno were abandoning in the early 1940s in their turn toward philosophical and cultural criticism divorced from social theory and radical politics. Marcuse and Neumann by contrast were focusing precisely on the issue that Horkheimer and Adorno had neglected: the theory of social change.
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The term “critical theory†has traditionally been identified with the critiques of modernity offered by Frankfurt School theorists, especially Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, but ... Walter Benjamin. More recently the term has been widened to encompass the ideas of a broad range of theorists who have exploded the boundaries between various established academic disciplines to produce a supradisciplinary discourse to approach the contemporary moment’s central social, political, cultural, and aesthetic questions. Combining philosophy, social theory, cultural critique, and political commitment, this body of thought has at once arisen out of the conditions of modernity (and, for some, postmodernity) while providing a critique of its central concepts and a revisioning of its assumptions about truth, progress, representation, subjectivity, identity, rationality, meaning, language, and power. Courses in this concentration, while differing topically, forefront theory and its historical, cultural, and intellectual context. They familiarize students with the assumptions, history, and methods of several strands of contemporary critical thought, including structuralist, semiotic, poststructuralist, postmodern, postcolonial, and feminist theory.
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Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) was the leading figure of the Frankfurt school of critical theory. He authored more than twenty volumes, including Negative Dialectics (1982), Philosophy of Modern Music (1980), Kierkegaard (Minnesota, 1989), and (with Max Horkheimer) Dialectic of Enlightenment (1975).
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Max Horkheimer