Critical Theory (Frankfurt School)
비판 이론 (프랑크푸르트학파)
Critical Theory is the social theory of the Frankfurt School, named by Max Horkheimer in his 1937 essay 'Traditional and Critical Theory'. Where 'traditional theory' takes social facts as given and describes them, Critical Theory asks how those facts were socially made, in order to expose structures of domination and oppression, and it aims at 'a state without exploitation and oppression'. It joined Marx's critique of political economy with Freud's psychoanalysis and Weber's theory of rationalisation, and it continued in Habermas's theory of communication and Honneth's theory of recognition. In a broader sense the phrase covers any critical theory with an emancipatory aim, such as feminist or postcolonial theory.
In depth
Why the name 'Critical Theory'?
The institute's theory was first called 'materialism'. The name 'Critical Theory' was first used in 'Traditional and Critical Theory', the essay Horkheimer published in exile in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in 1937. After it appeared, almost all the institute's members adopted the name.
'Critique' here does not mean finding fault. In philosophy it means examining under what conditions something holds and how far it is valid. In a footnote Horkheimer made clear that the word pointed less to Kant's three Critiques than to Marx's critique of political economy, the subtitle of Capital. German Wikipedia sums up three things the name did. It set the theory against positivist 'traditional' theory, it let the circle avoid the party-political label 'Marxism', and it tied the theory to the tradition of Kant's critical philosophy.
Herbert Marcuse later recalled that the term was used 'to examine traditional Marxist theory critically'. Leo Löwenthal called Critical Theory 'an advanced form of Marxism' that no longer took over Marx's categories mechanically, though its basic Marxist motives were never given up.
What did 'Traditional and Critical Theory' contrast?
By 'traditional theory' Horkheimer meant modern science since Descartes and the social sciences modelled on it. Positivism is the attitude that only observable facts count as knowledge, and social science of this kind takes social facts as given and stops at describing and explaining them. For Horkheimer those facts are not given by nature but made by society, and the injustice of domination hides in them. A science that refuses to reflect on how they were made ends up serving to entrench that injustice, whatever its claim to be value-free.
| Aspect | Traditional theory | Critical theory |
|---|---|---|
| View of facts | Takes social facts as given | Examines how facts were made historically and socially |
| Place of the researcher | Thinks of itself as a neutral observer outside society | Reflects that it is itself part of that society |
| Scope of reason | Stays with finding means to given ends | Also asks whether the ends are rational |
| Aim | Explanation and prediction within the existing order | Social change that widens people's self-determination |
| Model | Modern natural science and positivist disciplines | Marx's critique of political economy |
The critical theorist also uses categories such as labour, value and productivity. Horkheimer granted that these hold in the present order, but wrote that simply accepting their validity was 'the grossest untruth': to recognise the ruling categories critically is at the same time to condemn them.
The theory's goal was explicit. Horkheimer named as its highest political and moral aim:
the striving for a state without exploitation and oppression
He held that the commodity economy, having once enlarged human powers and freed the individual, finally blocks further development and drives humanity towards 'a new barbarism'.
How does it relate to Marxism?
Horkheimer held that the doctrine of Marx and Engels, though 'still indispensable for understanding social dynamics', was 'no longer sufficient' to explain the internal development and external relations of nations. Critical Theory was meant to refound and extend Marxism.
The sharpest problem was the agent of change. At first the theory looked to the labour movement. After the failed revolutions and the victory of fascism in 1933, that assumption collapsed. In 1937 Horkheimer wrote:
The situation of the proletariat is, in this society, no guarantee of correct knowledge.
Theory increasingly became the business of isolated intellectuals. The authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment likened their work to a 'message in a bottle' that someone might one day pick up. Leszek Kołakowski remarked drily that the proletariat had lost its role as the infallible subject of history, though Critical Theory went on fighting for its liberation.
From Marx's method Critical Theory took dialectics and the critique of ideology, that is, showing how a society's ideas and values serve to justify domination. It added two things. One was Freud's psychoanalysis, to explain why people turn to authoritarian politics against their class interests. The other was Max Weber's theory of rationalisation, according to which modern society is organised for calculability and efficiency.
How did it change over time?
| Stage | Period | Central question and work |
|---|---|---|
| Interdisciplinary materialism | 1930s | Philosophy and empirical science combined to trace links between economy, psyche and culture; Studies on Authority and the Family (1936) |
| Critique of enlightenment | 1940s | The weight shifts from the critique of political economy to the critique of instrumental reason; Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/1947) |
| Negative diagnosis | 1950s–1960s | Adorno's Negative Dialectics, Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man; the administered society and the culture industry at the centre |
| Communicative turn | 1960s– | Habermas drops the scepticism about reason and grounds norms in 'communicative reason' and a democratic public sphere |
| Recognition and after | 1990s– | Honneth revives Hegel's 'struggle for recognition'; Fraser asks about redistribution and recognition together |
In the turn of the 1940s the critique of political economy lost weight and the critique of an 'instrumental reason' that dominates nature came to the front. German Wikipedia describes this 'classical' Critical Theory as sliding into a negative philosophy of history without hope of transformation in the foreseeable future. The 'younger' Critical Theory opened by Habermas kept the motive of social criticism but rejected the radical scepticism about reason and the pessimistic view of history.
In how many senses is 'critical theory' used?
How wide the phrase reaches depends on who uses it. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy distinguishes three senses.
| Sense | What it covers | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Narrow | The work of several generations of the Frankfurt School, often capitalised as Critical Theory | Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas, Honneth |
| Broad | Critical theories tied to the emancipatory aims of social movements | Feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory |
| Third | A collective name for theory in the psychoanalytic and post-structuralist line, sometimes just 'Theory' | Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida |
There are also fields that put 'critical' in front of a discipline, such as critical geography or critical criminology. This entry covers the narrow sense. Where another text uses the phrase broadly, as in 'postcolonial critical theory', the context has to decide.
Who criticised it, and how?
| Critic | Point |
|---|---|
| György Lukács | Theory cut off from political practice and revolutionary movement; watching the world's misery from the terrace of the 'Grand Hotel Abyss' |
| Leszek Kołakowski | The Critical Theory of the 1930s is an inconsistent attempt to save Marxism, 'Lukács's Marxism without the proletariat' |
| Leo Kofler | Intellectual distance and a shapeless principle of refusal quietly displaced the aim of changing society; he still credited them with analysing massification, reification, alienation and conformity |
| Günter Rohrmoser, Hermann Lübbe | Conservative critics: Adorno shared in the destruction of reason, and the school's theory of ideology was out of touch with reality |
| Jürgen Habermas | Critique from within: Dialectic of Enlightenment doubted even the rational standard it needed to explain the corruption of reason |
Habermas said the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment had 'abandoned themselves to an unrestrained scepticism about reason instead of weighing the grounds that cast doubt on that scepticism itself'. Among the rational gains of the Enlightenment he listed the differentiation of law, morality and science and the institutionalisation of democracy. Much of later Critical Theory accepted this criticism and made the normative grounds of critique its central problem.