## 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.


### 1.1 Origins and Generations



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 Lowenthal, 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
Lowenthal, 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: Jurgen 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
 SS4.1.1).


### 1.2 Influences



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 Lukacs'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, Lukacs 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 *Mundigkeit* (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.


### 1.3 Critical Theory versus Traditional Theory



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).


### 1.4 Studies on Authoritarianism and Mass Culture



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 Lowenthal 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).


### 1.5 The Dialectic of Enlightenment



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 (Muller-Doohm 2003, part IV; Demirovic 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.


### 1.6 The Communicative Turn



Jurgen 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).


### 1.7 A Continuing and Contested Tradition



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 Lowy 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
 SS4.1.1).



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
 (SS2.1)
 before tracing the various ways in which they have sought normative
foundations
 (SS2.2)
 in a more or less constructive or reconstructive
 (SS2.3)
 register, then turns to methods such as disclosive and genealogical
critique that are critical of those normative approaches
 (SS2.4),
 and concludes by outlining a set of methodological challenges that
shape contemporary debates
 (SS2.5).


### 2.1 Immanent Critique



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]).


### 2.2 Normative Foundations for Critique



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.


### 2.3 Reconstructive Critique



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).


### 2.4 Disclosive Critique, Genealogy, and the Critique of Normativity



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
 SS4.1.3
 below).


### 2.5 Current Challenges



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:


1. 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
 SS4.1.2
 and
 SS4.1.3
 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.
2. 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
 SS4.2.3
 below).
3. 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).
4. 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.


### 3.1 Alienation



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).


### 3.2 Reification



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 Lukacs's classic 1923 essay on reification heavily
influenced the Frankfurt School. Lukacs 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).


### 3.3 Ideology



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 techne
(Haslanger 2017a), and propaganda (Stanley 2015).


### 3.4 Emancipation



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.


#### 4.1.1 Gender



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 Kathe
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 (Ikaheimo 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,
Rossler 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).


#### 4.1.2 Race



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,
Bojadzijev 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).


#### 4.1.3 Colonialism and Post-colonialism



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, Aime Cesaire,
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 (Gruner 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
Vazquez-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.


#### 4.2.1 Economic Crises



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).


#### 4.2.2 Ecological Crises



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,
Cassegard 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).


#### 4.2.3 Political Crises



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.


### 4.3 Critical 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 Lukacs of
taking up residence in the "Grand Hotel Abyss"
(Lukacs 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.