Summary |
Critical Theory refers to a form of self-reflexive social
critique as well as a particular tradition associated with the Institute for
Social Research (Institut für
Sozialforschung), a.k.a. the Frankfurt School. Early Frankfurt School theorists combined
a Hegelian Marxist social criticism with other emancipatory approaches, such as
psychoanalysis and cultural critique, taking a genuinely anti-positivist and
interdisciplinary approach. Critical theory was intended to contribute to the “intensification of the struggle with which the theory is connected,” wrote Horkheimer, becoming a material force in
the “transformation of society as a whole” (219). Theorists
associated with the early Frankfurt School include Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer,
Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin, while contemporary figures such as Jürgen
Habermas, Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser, and Seyla Benhabib continue the tradition
with non-Marxist forms of critique grounded in, for example, communicative reason and
social recognition. Today, Critical
Theory refers to a broader spectrum of social theorists in poststructuralist, feminist,
queer, critical race, disability, and postcolonial theory, such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler,
Angela Davis, Paulo Freire,
Frantz Fanon, Enrique Dussel, Gayatri
Spivak,
Giorgio Agamben, Jacque Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek.
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