Critical theory

Short description: Approach to social philosophy

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Not to be confused with Critical philosophy or Critical thinking.

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Critical theory is a social, historical, and political school of thought and philosophical perspective which centers on analyzing and challenging systemic power relations in society, arguing that knowledge, truth, and social structures are fundamentally shaped by power dynamics between dominant and oppressed groups.[1] Beyond just understanding and critiquing these dynamics, it explicitly aims to transform society through praxis and collective action with an explicit sociopolitical purpose.[2][3][4]

Critical theory's main tenets center on analyzing systemic power relations in society, focusing on the dynamics between groups with different levels of social, economic, and institutional power.[5][6] Unlike traditional social theories that aim primarily to describe and understand society, critical theory explicitly seeks to critique and transform it. Thus, it positions itself as both an analytical framework and a movement for social change.[7][8][9][3] Critical theory examines how dominant groups and structures influence what society considers objective truth, challenging the very notion of pure objectivity and rationality by arguing that knowledge is shaped by power relations and social context.[10][11][7][12] Key principles of critical theory include examining intersecting forms of oppression, emphasizing historical contexts in social analysis, and critiquing capitalist structures. The framework emphasizes praxis (combining theory with action) and claims to highlight how lived experience, collective action, ideology, and educational systems play crucial roles in maintaining or challenging existing power structures.[13][14][15][16]

## Contents

* 1 Overview
* 2 History
* 2.1 Marx
* 2.2 Adorno and Horkheimer
* 2.3 Habermas
* 2.4 Contemporary critical theorists
* 3 Fields
* 3.1 Postmodern critical social theory
* 3.1.1 Communication studies
* 3.2 Critical disability theory
* 3.3 Critical legal studies
* 3.3.1 Immigration studies
* 3.4 Critical finance studies
* 3.5 Critical management studies
* 3.6 Critical international relations theory
* 3.7 Critical race theory
* 3.8 Critical pedagogy
* 3.8.1 Critical consciousness
* 3.8.2 Critical university studies
* 3.9 Critical psychology
* 3.10 Critical criminology
* 3.11 Critical animal studies
* 3.12 Critical social work
* 3.13 Critical ethnography
* 3.14 Critical data studies
* 3.15 Critical environmental justice
* 4 Criticism
* 4.1 Marxist Criticism
* 4.2 Liberal Criticism
* 5 See also
* 5.1 Lists
* 5.2 Journals
* 6 References
* 6.1 Footnotes
* 6.2 Works cited
* 6.3 Bibliography
* 7 External links
* 7.1 Archival collections

## Overview

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Critical theorist Nancy Fraser summarises the difference between a critical and uncritical theory as follows:[17]

> A critical social theory frames 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. The questions it asks and the models it designs are informed by that identification and interest. Thus, for example, if struggles contesting the subordination of women figured among the most significant of a given age, then a critical social theory for that time would aim, among other things, to shed light on the character and bases of such subordination. It would employ categories and explanatory models which revealed rather than occluded relations of male dominance and female subordination. And it would demystify as ideological rival approaches which obfuscated or rationalized those relations. In this situation, then, one of the standards for assessing a critical theory, once it had been subjected to all the usual tests of empirical adequacy, would be: How well does it theorize the situation and prospects of the feminist movement? To what extent does it serve the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of contemporary women?

The historical evolution of critical theory traces back to the first generation of the Frankfurt School in the 1920s. Figures like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and others sought to expand traditional Marxist analysis by incorporating insights from psychology, culture, and philosophy, moving beyond pure economic determinism.[18][14][19][20][3][21][7][8][22] Their work was significantly influenced by Freud's psychoanalytic theories, particularly how subjective experience shaped human consciousness, behavior, and social reality.[3][19][23][24] Freud's concept that an individual's lived experience could differ dramatically from objective reality aligned with critical theory's critique of positivism, science, and pure rationality.[19][23][24]

Critical theory continued to evolve beyond the first generation of the Frankfurt School. Jürgen Habermas, often identified with the second generation, shifted the focus toward communication and the role of language in social emancipation.[3] Around the same time, post-structuralist and postmodern thinkers, including Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, were reshaping academic discourse with critiques of knowledge, meaning, power, institutions, and social control with deconstructive approaches that further challenged assumptions about objectivity and truth. Though neither Foucault nor Derrida belonged formally to the Frankfurt School tradition, their works profoundly influenced later formulations of critical theory.[18][25] Collectively, the post-structuralist and postmodern insights expanded the scope of critical theory, weaving cultural and linguistic critiques into its Marxian roots.[3][14][18][26][27][28]

With the emigration of Herbert Marcuse, contemporary critical theory has expanded to the United States and today it covers a wide range of social critique within economics, ethics, history, law, politics, psychology, and sociology, with a diverse list of subjects including critical animal studies, critical criminology, dependency theory and imperialism studies, critical environmental justice, feminist theory and gender studies, critical historiography, intersectionality, critical legal studies, critical pedagogy, postcolonialism, critical race theory, queer theory, and critical terrorism studies.[3][29][30][31][32][33] Modern critical theory represents a movement away from Marxism's purely economic analysis to a broader examination of social and cultural power structures with the incorporation and transformation of Freudian concepts and postmodernism, while retaining Marxism's emphasis on analyzing how dominant groups and systems shape and control society through exploitation and oppression[34] along with social and political praxis, the adaptation and reformulation of multiple Marxian conceptual frameworks (including alienation, reification, ideology, emancipation, base and superstructure), and a general skepticism towards and critique of capitalism.[19][20][3][21]

Criticism of critical theory have come from various intellectual perspectives. Critics have raised concerns about critical theory's reliance on Marxist revisionism[35][36][37] and its frequent emphasis on subjective narratives, which can sometimes be at odds with empirical methodologies.[38][39][40] They also point to issues of circular reasoning and a lack of falsifiability in some critical theory arguments, as well as an epistemological and methodological stance that challenges or conflicts with traditional scientific methods and ideals of rationality and objectivity.[41][42][43][44][45][46][47]

## History

Max Horkheimer first defined critical theory (German: kritische Theorie) in his 1937 essay "Traditional and Critical Theory", as a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only toward understanding or explaining it. Wanting to distinguish critical theory as a radical, emancipatory form of Marxist philosophy, Horkheimer critiqued both the model of science put forward by logical positivism, and what he and his colleagues saw as the covert positivism and authoritarianism of orthodox Marxism and Communism. He described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them".[48] Critical theory involves a normative dimension, either by criticizing society in terms of some general theory of values or norms (oughts), or by criticizing society in terms of its own espoused values (i.e. immanent critique).[49] Significantly, critical theory not only conceptualizes and critiques societal power structures, but also establishes an empirically grounded model to link society to the human subject.[50] It defends the universalist ambitions of the tradition, but does so within a specific context of social-scientific and historical research.[50]

The core concepts of critical theory are that it should:

* be directed at the totality of society in its historical specificity (i.e., how it came to be configured at a specific point in time)
* improve understanding of society by integrating all the major social sciences, including geography, economics, sociology, history, political science, anthropology, and psychology

Postmodern critical theory is another major product of critical theory. It analyzes the fragmentation of cultural identities in order to challenge modernist-era constructs such as metanarratives, rationality, and universal truths, while politicizing social problems "by situating them in historical and cultural contexts, to implicate themselves in the process of collecting and analyzing data, and to relativize their findings".[51]

### Marx

Marx explicitly developed the notion of critique into the critique of ideology, linking it with the practice of social revolution, as stated in the 11th section of his Theses on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."[52] In early works, including The German Ideology, Marx developed his concepts of false consciousness and of ideology as the interests of one section of society masquerading as the interests of society as a whole.

### Adorno and Horkheimer

One of the distinguishing characteristics of critical theory, as Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer elaborated in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), is an ambivalence about the ultimate source or foundation of social domination, an ambivalence that gave rise to the "pessimism" of the new critical theory about the possibility of human emancipation and freedom.[53] This ambivalence was rooted in the historical circumstances in which the work was originally produced, particularly the rise of Nazism, state capitalism, and culture industry as entirely new forms of social domination that could not be adequately explained in the terms of traditional Marxist sociology.[54][55]

For Adorno and Horkheimer, state intervention in the economy had effectively abolished the traditional tension between Marxism's "relations of production" and "material productive forces" of society. The market (as an "unconscious" mechanism for the distribution of goods) had been replaced by centralized planning.[56]

Contrary to Marx's prediction in the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, this shift did not lead to "an era of social revolution" but to fascism and totalitarianism. As a result, critical theory was left, in Habermas's words, without "anything in reserve to which it might appeal, and when the forces of production enter into a baneful symbiosis with the relations of production that they were supposed to blow wide open, there is no longer any dynamism upon which critique could base its hope".[57] For Adorno and Horkheimer, this posed the problem of how to account for the apparent persistence of domination in the absence of the very contradiction that, according to traditional critical theory, was the source of domination itself.

### Habermas

In the 1960s, Habermas, a proponent of critical social theory,[58] raised the epistemological discussion to a new level in his Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), by identifying critical knowledge as based on principles that differentiated it either from the natural sciences or the humanities, through its orientation to self-reflection and emancipation.[59] Although unsatisfied with Adorno and Horkheimer's thought in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Habermas shares the view that, in the form of instrumental rationality, the era of modernity marks a move away from the liberation of enlightenment and toward a new form of enslavement.[21]: 6 In Habermas's work, critical theory transcended its theoretical roots in German idealism, and progressed closer to American pragmatism.

Habermas's ideas about the relationship between modernity and rationalization are in this sense strongly influenced by Max Weber. He further dissolved the elements of critical theory derived from Hegelian German idealism, though his epistemology remains broadly Marxist. Perhaps his two most influential ideas are the concepts of the public sphere and communicative action, the latter arriving partly as a reaction to new post-structural or so-called "postmodern" challenges to the discourse of modernity. Habermas engaged in regular correspondence with Richard Rorty, and a strong sense of philosophical pragmatism may be felt in his thought, which frequently traverses the boundaries between sociology and philosophy.

### Contemporary critical theorists

Contemporary philosophers and researchers who have focused on understanding and critiquing critical theory include Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth, Judith Butler, and Rahel Jaeggi. Honneth is known for his works Pathology of Reason and The Legacy of Critical Theory, in which he attempts to explain critical theory's purpose in a modern context.[60][61] Jaeggi focuses on both critical theory's original intent and a more modern understanding that some argue has created a new foundation for modern usage of critical theory.[60] Butler contextualizes critical theory as a way to rhetorically challenge oppression and inequality, specifically concepts of gender.[62]

Honneth established a theory that many use to understand critical theory, the theory of recognition.[63] In this theory, he asserts that in order for someone to be responsible for themselves and their own identity they must be also recognized by those around them: without recognition in this sense from peers and society, individuals can never become wholly responsible for themselves and others, nor experience true freedom and emancipation—i.e., without recognition, the individual cannot achieve self-actualization.

Like many others who put stock in critical theory, Jaeggi is vocal about capitalism's cost to society. Throughout her writings, she has remained doubtful about the necessity and use of capitalism in regard to critical theory.[64] Most of Jaeggi's interpretations of critical theory seem to work against the foundations of Habermas and follow more along the lines of Honneth in terms of how to look at the economy through the theory's lens.[65] She shares many of Honneth's beliefs, and many of her works try to defend them against criticism Honneth has received.[60]

To provide a dialectical opposite to Jaeggi's conception of alienation as 'a relation of relationlessness', Hartmut Rosa has proposed the concept of resonance.[66][67] Rosa uses this term to refer to moments when late modern subjects experience momentary feelings of self-efficacy in society, bringing them into a temporary moment of relatedness with some aspect of the world.[67] Rosa describes himself as working within the critical theory tradition of the Frankfurt School, providing an extensive critique of late modernity through his concept of social acceleration.[68] However his resonance theory has been questioned for moving too far beyond the Adornoian tradition of "looking coldly at society".[69]

## Fields

### Postmodern critical social theory

Focusing on language, symbolism, communication, and social construction, critical theory has been applied in the social sciences as a critique of social construction and postmodern society.[27]

While modernist critical theory (as described above) concerns itself with "forms of authority and injustice that accompanied the evolution of industrial and corporate capitalism as a political-economic system", postmodern critical theory politicizes social problems "by situating them in historical and cultural contexts, to implicate themselves in the process of collecting and analyzing data, and to relativize their findings".[51] Meaning itself is seen as unstable due to social structures' rapid transformation. As a result, research focuses on local manifestations rather than broad generalizations.

Postmodern critical research is also characterized by the crisis of representation, which rejects the idea that a researcher's work is an "objective depiction of a stable other". Instead, many postmodern scholars have adopted "alternatives that encourage reflection about the 'politics and poetics' of their work. In these accounts, the embodied, collaborative, dialogic, and improvisational aspects of qualitative research are clarified."[70]

The term critical theory is often appropriated when an author works in sociological terms, yet attacks the social or human sciences, thus attempting to remain "outside" those frames of inquiry. Michel Foucault has been described as one such author.[71] Jean Baudrillard has also been described as a critical theorist to the extent that he was an unconventional and critical sociologist;[72] this appropriation is similarly casual, holding little or no relation to the Frankfurt School.[73] In contrast, Habermas is one of the key critics of postmodernism.[74]

#### Communication studies

### Critical disability theory

This section is an excerpt from Disability studies#Critical disability theory[ edit ]

### Critical legal studies

This section is an excerpt from Critical legal studies[ edit ]

#### Immigration studies

Critical theory can be used to interpret the right of asylum[75] and immigration law.[76]

### Critical finance studies

Critical finance studies apply critical theory to financial markets and central banks.[77]

### Critical management studies

This section is an excerpt from Critical management studies[ edit ]

### Critical international relations theory

This section is an excerpt from Critical international relations theory[ edit ]

### Critical race theory

This section is an excerpt from Critical race theory[ edit ]

### Critical pedagogy

Main article: Philosophy:Critical pedagogy

Critical theorists have widely credited Paulo Freire for the first applications of critical theory to education/pedagogy, considering his best-known work to be Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a seminal text in what is now known as the philosophy and social movement of critical pedagogy.[78][79] Dedicated to the oppressed and based on his own experience helping Brazilian adults learn to read and write, Freire includes a detailed class analysis in his exploration of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. In the book, he calls traditional pedagogy the "banking model of education", because it treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge. He argues that pedagogy should instead treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge.

In contrast to the banking model, the teacher in the critical-theory model is not the dispenser of all knowledge, but a participant who learns with and from the students—in conversation with them, even as they learn from the teacher. The goal is to liberate the learner from an oppressive construct of teacher versus student, a dichotomy analogous to colonizer and colonized. It is not enough for the student to analyze societal power structures and hierarchies, to merely recognize imbalance and inequity; critical theory pedagogy must also empower the learner to reflect and act on that reflection to challenge an oppressive status quo.[78][80]

#### Critical consciousness

This section is an excerpt from Critical consciousness[ edit ]

#### Critical university studies

This section is an excerpt from Critical university studies[ edit ]

### Critical psychology

This section is an excerpt from Critical psychology[ edit ]

### Critical criminology

This section is an excerpt from Critical criminology[ edit ]

### Critical animal studies

This section is an excerpt from Critical animal studies[ edit ]

### Critical social work

This section is an excerpt from Critical social work[ edit ]

### Critical ethnography

This section is an excerpt from Critical ethnography[ edit ]

### Critical data studies

This section is an excerpt from Critical data studies[ edit ]

Critical data studies is the exploration of and engagement with social, cultural, and ethical challenges that arise when working with big data. It is through various unique perspectives and taking a critical approach that this form of study can be practiced.[81] As its name implies, critical data studies draws heavily on the influence of critical theory, which has a strong focus on addressing the organization of power structures. This idea is then applied to the study of data.

### Critical environmental justice

Critical environmental justice applies critical theory to environmental justice.[82]

## Criticism

### Marxist Criticism

While critical theorists have often been called Marxist intellectuals, owing to its geneological descent from a Gramscian analysis of the superstructure, many critical theorists have abandoned key Marxist concepts, such as dialectical materialism, class conflict and the base and superstructure; and rejected Marxist empiricist, positivist and post-positivist analytical traditions. Critical theory also combined Marxian analysis with other sociological and philosophical traditions, such as Post-Structuralism in the vein of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, which has resulted in accusations of revisionism by Orthodox Marxist and by Marxist–Leninist philosophers. In particular, critical theory's antipositivist merging of analysis with praxis reifies the analysis of identity and ontologizes it; as in order to act on the premise of identity requires that identity is not treated as a social construct but as a real essence. Furthermore, whilst class position is a social relation that can be abolished by revising economic relations, critical theory's focus on identity cannot be meaningfully transcended in a similar way, especially if one treats identity as a real category to be operationalized on[83]. Thus Marxists find Critical Theory to be a profoundly particularist and anti-universalist set of theories, with a moral conflict defined on identity, in contrast to the universalist nature of Marxism[84]. This has led to criticism that Critical Theory functions as a "left-wing" manifestation of Carl Schmitt's ontological friend-enemy distinction[83]

### Liberal Criticism

Martin Jay has said that the first generation of critical theory is best understood not as promoting a specific philosophical agenda or ideology, but as "a gadfly of other systems".[85]

Critical theory has been criticized for not offering any clear road map to political action (praxis), often explicitly repudiating any solutions.[86] Those objections mostly apply to first-generation Frankfurt School, while the issue of politics is addressed in a much more assertive way in contemporary theory.[87]

Another criticism of critical theory "is that it fails to provide rational standards by which it can show that it is superior to other theories of knowledge, science, or practice." Rex Gibson argues that critical theory suffers from being cliquish, conformist, elitist, immodest, anti-individualist, naive, too critical, and contradictory. Hughes and Hughes argue that Habermas' theory of ideal public discourse "says much about rational talkers talking, but very little about actors acting: Felt, perceptive, imaginative, bodily experience does not fit these theories".[88][89]

Some feminists argue that critical theory "can be as narrow and oppressive as the rationalization, bureaucratization, and cultures they seek to unmask and change.[88][89]

Critical theory's language has been criticized as being too dense to understand, although "Counter arguments to these issues of language include claims that a call for clearer and more accessible language is anti-intellectual, a new 'language of possibility' is needed, and oppressed peoples can understand and contribute to new languages."[89]

Bruce Pardy, writing for the National Post, argues that critical theory often falls into the mistake of Circular reasoning, because any challenges to the "legitimacy [of critical theory] can be interpreted as a demonstration of the [critical theorists'] thesis: the assertion of reason, logic and evidence is a manifestation of privilege and power. Thus, any challenger risks the stigma of a bigoted oppressor."[90]

Robert Danisch, writing for The Conversation, argued that critical theory, and the modern humanities more broadly, focus too much on criticizing the current world rather than trying to make a better world.[91]

## See also

* Modernism
* Antipositivism
* Critical military studies
* Cultural studies
* Grievance studies affair
* Information criticism
* Marxist cultural analysis
* Outline of critical theory
* Popular culture studies
* Outline of organizational theory
* Postcritique
* Quare theory
* Standpoint epistemology

### Lists

* List of critical theorists
* List of works in critical theory

### Journals

* Constellations
* Representations
* Critical Inquiry
* Telos
* Law and Critique

## References

### Footnotes

1. ↑ "Critical theory" (in en). https://www.britannica.com/topic/critical-theory. ""Marxist-inspired movement in social and political philosophy originally associated with the work of the Frankfurt School. Drawing particularly on the thought of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, critical theorists maintain that a primary goal of philosophy is to understand and to help overcome the social structures through which people are dominated and oppressed.""
2. ↑ Ludovisi, S.G. ed., 2015. Critical theory and the challenge of praxis: Beyond reification. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 Bohman; Flynn, Jeffrey; Celikates, Robin. "Critical Theory". in Zalta, Edward N.. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2016 ed.). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/.
4. ↑ Elizabeth, Depoy (2016). Naturalistic Designs. ""Critical theory represents a complex set of strategies that are united by the commonality of sociopolitical purpose. Critical theorists seek to understand human experience as a means to change the world.""
5. ↑ Horkheimer, M., Adorno, T.W. and Noeri, G., 2002. Dialectic of enlightenment. Stanford University Press.
6. ↑ Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum, 1970.
7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Horkheimer, M., 1972. Traditional and critical theory. Critical theory: Selected essays, 188(243), pp.1-11.
8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Marcuse, H., 2013. One-dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. Routledge.
9. ↑ How, A., 2017. Critical theory. Bloomsbury Publishing.
10. ↑ Naturalistic Designs (2016). ""Critical theory is a response to post-Enlightenment philosophies and positivism in particular. Critical theorists 'deconstruct' the notion that there is a unitary truth that can be known by using one way or method.""
11. ↑ Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory. "Horkheimer and his followers rejected the notion of objectivity in knowledge by pointing, among other things, to the fact that the object of knowledge is itself embedded into a historical and social process: 'The facts which our senses present to us are socially preformed in two ways: through the historical character of the object perceived and through the historical character of the perceiving organ' (Horkheimer [1937] in Ingram and Simon-Ingram 1992, p. 242). Further, with a rather Marxist twist, Horkheimer noticed also that phenomenological objectivity is a myth because it is dependent upon 'technological conditions' and the latter are sensitive to the material conditions of production. Critical Theory aims thus to abandon naïve conceptions of knowledge-impartiality. Since intellectuals themselves are not disembodied entities observing from a God's viewpoint, knowledge can be obtained only from a societal embedded perspective of interdependent individuals."
12. ↑ Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Pantheon Books, 1977.
13. ↑ McKerrow, R.E., 1989. Critical rhetoric: Theory and praxis. Communications Monographs, 56(2), pp.91-111.
14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 Bronner, S.E., 2017. Critical theory: A very short introduction (Vol. 263). Oxford University Press.
15. ↑ Steffy, B., & Grimes, A., 1986. A Critical Theory of Organization Science. Academy of Management Review, 11, pp. 322-336.
16. ↑ Masschelein, J., 2004. How to Conceive of Critical Educational Theory Today. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 38, pp. 351-367
17. ↑ Nancy Fraser (1985, p. 97). What's critical about critical theory? The case of Habermas and gender. New German Critique, 35, 97-131.
18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 18.2 Rush, F.L. and Rush, F. eds., 2004. The Cambridge companion to critical theory. Cambridge University Press.
19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 19.2 19.3 "The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory". https://iep.utm.edu/critical-theory-frankfurt-school/.
20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 Kellner, D., 1989. Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity. Polity.
21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 21.2 Outhwaite, William (2009). Habermas: Key Contemporary Thinkers (2nd ed.). Polity. pp. 5–8. ISBN 978-0-7456-4328-1.
22. ↑ Adorno, T.W., 1990. Negative dialectics. Routledge.
23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 Genel, K., 2016. The Frankfurt School and Freudo-Marxism: On the Plurality of Articulations between Psychoanalysis and Social Theory. Actuel Marx, pp. 10-25.
24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 Whitebook J. The marriage of Marx and Freud: Critical Theory and psychoanalysis. In: Rush F, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory. Cambridge Companions to Philosophy. Cambridge University Press; 2004:74-102.
25. ↑ Landry, L.Y., 2000. Beyond the 'French Fries and the Frankfurter' An agenda for critical theory. Philosophy & social criticism, 26(2), pp.99-129.
26. ↑ Ritzer, George (2008). "Sociological Theory". From Modern to Postmodern Social Theory (and Beyond). New York, New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education. pp. 567–568.
27. ↑ 27.0 27.1 Agger, Ben (2012), "Ben Agger", North American Critical Theory After Postmodernism, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 128–154, doi:10.1057/9781137262868_7, ISBN 978-1-349-35039-1 .
28. ↑ Critical Theory and Society: A Reader. Routledge. 1990.
29. ↑ Abromeit, J. and Cobb, W.M. eds., 2014. Herbert Marcuse: A critical reader. Routledge.
30. ↑ Jay, M., 1996. The dialectical imagination: A history of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (No. 10). Univ of California Press.
31. ↑ Wiggershaus, R. (1995). The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (M. Robertson, Trans.). MIT Press
32. ↑ "The Left Hemisphere" (in en). https://www.versobooks.com/products/2321-the-left-hemisphere.
33. ↑ "Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide" (in en). https://www.routledge.com/Critical-Theory-Today-A-User-Friendly-Guide/Tyson/p/book/9780367709426.
34. ↑ Fuchs, Christian (2021). "What is Critical Theory?". Foundations of Critical Theory. Routledge. pp. 17–51. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139196598.007.
35. ↑ Disco, Cornelis. "Critical theory as ideology of the new class: Rereading Jürgen Habermas." Theory and Society (1979): 159-214.
36. ↑ Anderson, P. (1976). Considerations on Western Marxism.
37. ↑ Kolakowski, L., 1978. Main currents of Marxism: its rise, growth, and dissolution. Philosophy, 54(210).
38. ↑ Morrow, R.A., Morrow, R.A. and Brown, D.D., 1994. Critical theory and methodology (Vol. 3). Sage.
39. ↑ Thompson, M.J., 2016. The domestication of critical theory. Rowman & Littlefield.
40. ↑ Oliveira, G.C., 2018. Reconstructive methodology and critical international relations theory. Contexto Internacional, 40(01), pp.09-32.
41. ↑ Latour, B., 2004. Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical inquiry, 30(2), pp.225-248.
42. ↑ Crews, F. 1986, Skeptical engagements, Oxford University Press, New York.
43. ↑ Gross, P.R. and Levitt, N., 1997. Higher superstition. JHU Press.
44. ↑ Sokal, A.D. and Bricmont, J., 1999. Fashionable nonsense. Macmillan.
45. ↑ Otto, S., 2016. The war on science.
46. ↑ Fuller, S. (2017). Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game
47. ↑ "Bruce Pardy, "How Canada's secular religion of cultural self-hate took hold"". https://nationalpost.com/opinion/bruce-pardy-how-canadas-secular-religion-of-cultural-self-hate-took-hold.
48. ↑ Horkheimer 1982, p. 244.
49. ↑ Bohman, James (8 March 2005). "Critical Theory". in Zalta, Edward N.. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2016 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/critical-theory/.
50. ↑ 50.0 50.1 Bohman, James; Flynn, Jeffrey; Celikates, Robin (2021), Zalta, Edward N., ed., Critical Theory (Spring 2021 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/critical-theory/, retrieved 2022-06-10
51. ↑ 51.0 51.1 Lindlof & Taylor 2002, p. 49: "forms of authority and injustice that accompanied the evolution of industrial and corporate capitalism as a political-economic system.
52. ↑ "Theses on Feuerbach". Marxists Internet Archive. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm.
53. ↑ Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. [1947] 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by E. Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press. p. 242.
54. ↑ Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. "The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Horkheimer and Adorno". In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, translated by F. Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. p. 116: "Critical Theory was initially developed in Horkheimer's circle to think through political disappointments at the absence of revolution in the West, the development of Stalinism in Soviet Russia, and the victory of fascism in Germany. It was supposed to explain mistaken Marxist prognoses, but without breaking Marxist intentions."
55. ↑ Dubiel, Helmut. 1985. Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory, translated by B. Gregg. Cambridge, MA.
56. ↑ Dialectic of Enlightenment. p. 38: "[G]one are the objective laws of the market which ruled in the actions of the entrepreneurs and tended toward catastrophe. Instead the conscious decision of the managing directors executes as results (which are more obligatory than the blindest price-mechanisms) the old law of value and hence the destiny of capitalism."
57. ↑ "The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment", p. 118.
58. ↑ Katsiaficas, George N., Robert George Kirkpatrick, and Mary Lou Emery. 1987. Introduction to Critical Sociology. Irvington Publishers. p. 26.
59. ↑ Laurie, Timothy, Hannah Stark, and Briohny Walker. 2019. "Critical Approaches to Continental Philosophy: Intellectual Community, Disciplinary Identity, and the Politics of Inclusion". . Parrhesia 30:1–17. doi:10.1007/s10691-011-9167-4. (Discusses critical social theory as a form of self-reflection.)
60. ↑ 60.0 60.1 60.2 Fazio, Giorgio (21 May 2021). "Situating Rahel Jaeggi in the Contemporary Frankfurt Critical Theory". Critical Horizons 22 (2): 116. doi:10.1080/14409917.2019.1676943.
61. ↑ Nancy Fraser (1985). What's critical about critical theory? The case of Habermas and gender. New German Critique, 35, 97-131.
62. ↑ Gessen, Masha (9 February 2020). "Judith Butler Wants Us to Reshape Our Rage". The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/judith-butler-wants-us-to-reshape-our-rage.
63. ↑ Boston, Timothy (May 2018). "New Directions for a Critical Theory of Work: Reading Honneth Through Deranty.". Critical Horizons 19 (2): 111. doi:10.1080/14409917.2018.1453287.
64. ↑ Condon, Roderick (April 2021). "Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory.". Irish Journal of Sociology 29 (1): 129. doi:10.1177/0791603520930989.
65. ↑ Marco, Marco; Testa, Italo (May 2021). "Immanent Critique of Capitalism as a Form of Life: On Rahel Jaeggi's Critical Theory". Critical Horizons 22 (2): 111. doi:10.1080/14409917.2020.1719630.
66. ↑ Jaeggi, Rahel; Neuhouser, Frederick (2014). Alienation. New directions in critical theory. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-15198-6.
67. ↑ 67.0 67.1 Rosa, Hartmut (2016). Resonanz: eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung (3. Aufl ed.). Berlin: Suhrkamp. ISBN 978-3-518-58626-6.
68. ↑ Rosa, Hartmut (2013-12-31). Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. Columbia University Press. doi:10.7312/rosa14834. ISBN 978-0-231-51988-5. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7312/rosa14834/html.
69. ↑ Brumlik, Micha (2016) (in de). Resonanz oder: Das Ende der kritischen Theorie.. pp. 120–123.
70. ↑ Lindlof & Taylor 2002, p. 53.
71. ↑ Rivera Vicencio, E. (2012). "Foucault: His influence over accounting and management research. Building of a map of Foucault's approach". International Journal of Critical Accounting 4 (5/6): 728–756. doi:10.1504/IJCA.2012.051466. http://www.inderscience.com/info/inarticle.php?artid=51466. Retrieved 4 July 2015.
72. ↑ "Introduction to Jean Baudrillard, Module on Postmodernity". https://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/postmodernism/modules/baudrillardpostmodernity.html.
73. ↑ Kellner, Douglas (22 April 2005). "Jean Baudrillard". in Zalta, Edward N.. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2015 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2015/entries/baudrillard/.
74. ↑ Aylesworth, Gary. "Postmodernism". in Zalta, Edward N.. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2015 ed.). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/.
75. ↑ Ingram, David (2021). "What an Ethics of Discourse and Recognition Can Contribute to a Critical Theory of Refugee Claim Adjudication: Reclaiming Epistemic Justice for Gender-Based Asylum Seekers". Migration, Recognition and Critical Theory. Studies in Global Justice. 21. pp. 19–46. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-72732-1_2. ISBN 978-3-030-72731-4. https://ecommons.luc.edu/context/philosophy_facpubs/article/1073/viewcontent/auto_convert.pdf.
76. ↑ Pulitano, Elvira (2013). "In liberty's shadow: The discourse of refugees and asylum seekers in critical race theory and immigration law/Politics". Identities 20 (2): 172–189. doi:10.1080/1070289X.2012.763168.
77. ↑ Borch, Christian; Wosnitzer, Robert (2020). The Routledge Handbook of Critical Finance Studies. Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315114255. ISBN 978-1-315-11425-5.
78. ↑ 78.0 78.1 "Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Book Summary" (in en-US). 2014-07-09. http://www.theeducationist.info/paulo-freires-pedagogy-oppressed-book-summary/.
79. ↑ For a history of the emergence of critical theory in the field of education, see Gottesman, Isaac (2016). The Critical Turn in Education: From Marxist Critique to Postructuralist Feminism to Critical Theories of Race. New York: Routledge.
80. ↑ See, e.g., Kołakowski, Leszek. [1976] 1979. Main Currents of Marxism 3\. W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0393329437. ch. 10.
81. ↑ Cite error: Invalid `<ref>` tag; no text was provided for refs named `Dalton-2014`
82. ↑ Vermeylen, Saskia (2019). "Special issue: environmental justice and epistemic violence". Local Environment 24 (2): 89–93. doi:10.1080/13549839.2018.1561658. ISSN 1354-9839. Bibcode: 2019LoEnv..24...89V.
83. ↑ 83.0 83.1 Busk, Larry. The Right-Wing Mirror of Critical Theory.
84. ↑ Reed, Adolph. "Paths to Critical Theory". Social Text.
85. ↑ Jay, Martin (1996). The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950. University of California Press. p. 41. ISBN 978-0-520-20423-2. https://books.google.com/books?id=nwkzVdaaB2sC&pg=PA41. Retrieved 7 May 2020.
86. ↑ Corradetti, Claudio. "The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory". . Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
87. ↑ Bohmann, Ulf; Sörensen, Paul (2022-06-20). "Exploring a Critical Theory of politics". Civitas - Revista de Ciências Sociais 22. doi:10.15448/1984-7289.2022.1.42204. ISSN 1984-7289. https://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/index.php/civitas/article/view/42204.
88. ↑ 88.0 88.1 "Understanding Critical Theory" (in en-US). 2022-11-03. https://www.simplypsychology.org/critical-theory.html.
89. ↑ 89.0 89.1 89.2 "9.8 PROBLEMS WITH CRITICAL THEORIES OF EDUCATION". https://members.aect.org/edtech/ed1/09/09-08.html.
90. ↑ Pardy, Bruce (June 24, 2023). "How Canada's secular religion of cultural self-hate took hold". National Post. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/bruce-pardy-how-canadas-secular-religion-of-cultural-self-hate-took-hold.
91. ↑ Danisch, Robert (2023-01-10). "The humanities should teach about how to make a better world, not just criticize the existing one" (in en). http://theconversation.com/the-humanities-should-teach-about-how-to-make-a-better-world-not-just-criticize-the-existing-one-190634.

### Works cited

* Bell, Christopher, ed (2011). Blackness and Disability: Critical Examinations and Cultural Interventions. Forecaast Series. LIT Verlag Münster. ISBN 978-3-643-10126-6. OCLC 1147991080. https://books.google.com/books?id=2N8uMz6g02gC.
* Connolly, William E. (2013). "The 'New Materialism' and the Fragility of Things". Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41 (3): 399–412. doi:10.1177/0305829813486849. ISSN 1477-9021.
* Coole, Diana; Frost, Samantha, eds (2010). New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-4753-8.
* Hobden, Stephen; Hobson, John M., eds (2002). Historical Sociology of International Relations. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-80870-5.
* Lindlof, Thomas R.; Taylor, Bryan C. (2002) (in en). Qualitative Communication Research Methods. SAGE Publications. ISBN 978-0-7619-2494-4. https://archive.org/details/qualitativecommu00lind.
* Van der Tuin, Iris; Dolphijn, Rick (2012). New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Open Humanities Press. doi:10.3998/ohp.11515701.0001.001. ISBN 978-1-60785-281-0.

### Bibliography

* "Problematizing Global Knowledge." Theory, Culture & Society 23(2–3). 2006. ISSN 0263-2764.
* Calhoun, Craig. 1995. Critical Social Theory: Culture, History, and the Challenge of Difference. Blackwell. ISBN 1557862885 – A survey of and introduction to the current state of critical social theory.
* Charmaz, K. 1995. "Between positivism and postmodernism: Implications for methods." Studies in Symbolic Interaction 17:43–72.
* Conquergood, D. 1991. "Rethinking ethnography: Towards a critical cultural politics." Communication Monographs 58(2):179–94. doi:10.1080/03637759109376222.
* Corchia, Luca. 2010. La logica dei processi culturali. Jürgen Habermas tra filosofia e sociologia. Genova: Edizioni ECIG. ISBN 978-8875441951.
* Dahms, Harry, ed. 2008. No Social Science Without Critical Theory, (Current Perspectives in Social Theory 25). Emerald/JAI.
* Gandler, Stefan. 2009. Fragmentos de Frankfurt. Ensayos sobre la Teoría crítica. México: 21st Century Publishers/Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro. ISBN 978-6070300707.
* Geuss, Raymond. 1981. The Idea of a Critical Theory. Habermas and the Frankfurt School. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521284228.
* Honneth, Axel. 2006. La société du mépris. Vers une nouvelle Théorie critique, La Découverte. ISBN 978-2707147721.
* Horkheimer, Max. 1982. Critical Theory Selected Essays. New York: Continuum Publishing.
* Morgan, Marcia. 2012. Kierkegaard and Critical Theory. New York: Lexington Books.
* Rolling, James H. 2008. "Secular blasphemy: Utter(ed) transgressions against names and fathers in the postmodern era." Qualitative Inquiry 14(6):926–48. – An example of critical postmodern work.
* Sim, Stuart, and Borin Van Loon. 2001. Introducing Critical Theory. ISBN 1840462647. – A short introductory volume with illustrations.
* Thomas, Jim. 1993. Doing Critical Ethnography. London: Sage. pp. 1–5 & 17–25.
* Tracy, S. J. 2000. "Becoming a character for commerce: Emotion labor, self subordination and discursive construction of identity in a total institution." Management Communication Quarterly 14(1):90–128. – An example of critical qualitative research.
* Willard, Charles Arthur. 1982. Argumentation and the Social Grounds of Knowledge. University of Alabama Press.
* — 1989. A Theory of Argumentation. University of Alabama Press.
* — 1996. Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge: A New Rhetoric for Modern Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
* Chapter 9. Critical Theory Solomon, Robert C., ed (2007). The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy.. David L. Sherman. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-4051-4304-2. OCLC 437147422.

## External links

* "The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/frankfur.
* Gerhardt, Christina. "Frankfurt School". The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest. Ness, Immanuel (ed). Blackwell Publishing, 2009. Blackwell Reference Online.
* "Theory: Death Is Not the End" N+1 magazine's short history of academic Critical Theory.
* Critical Legal Thinking A Critical Legal Studies website which uses Critical Theory in an analysis of law and politics.
* L. Corchia, Jürgen Habermas. A Bibliography: works and studies (1952–2013), Pisa, Edizioni Il Campano – Arnus University Books, 2013, 606 pages.
* Sim, S.; Van Loon, B. (2009). Introducing Critical Theory: A Graphic Guide. Icon Books Ltd.

### Archival collections

* Guide to the Critical Theory Offprint Collection. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, Cali Guide to the Critical Theory Institute Audio and Video Recordings, University of California, Irvine. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.
* University of California, Irvine, Critical Theory Institute Manuscript Materials. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.

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* Fredric Jameson
* Karl Jaspers
* Walter Kaufmann
* Søren Kierkegaard
* Ludwig Klages
* Pierre Klossowski
* Alexandre Kojève
* Alexandre Koyré
* Leszek Kołakowski
* Julia Kristeva
* Jacques Lacan
* Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
* François Laruelle
* Bruno Latour
* Henri Lefebvre
* Claude Lévi-Strauss
* Emmanuel Levinas
* Niklas Luhmann
* György Lukács
* Jean-François Lyotard
* Gabriel Marcel
* Herbert Marcuse
* Karl Marx
* Quentin Meillassoux
* Maurice Merleau-Ponty
* Jean-Luc Nancy
* Antonio Negri
* Friedrich Nietzsche
* José Ortega y Gasset
* Jacques Rancière
* Paul Ricœur
* Edward Said
* Jean-Paul Sartre
* F. W. J. Schelling
* Carl Schmitt
* Arthur Schopenhauer
* Michel Serres
* Gilbert Simondon
* Peter Sloterdijk
* Edith Stein
* Leo Strauss
* Raymond Williams
* Slavoj Žižek

Theories|

* Absurdism
* Critical theory
* Deconstruction
* Existentialism
* Frankfurt School
* German idealism
* Hegelianism
* Hermeneutics
* Marxism
* Neo-Kantianism
* New Philosophers
* Non-philosophy
* Phenomenology
* Postmodernism
* Post-structuralism
* Psychoanalytic theory
* Romanticism
* Social constructionism
* Speculative realism
* Structuralism
* Western Marxism

Concepts|

* Alterity
* Angst
* Apollonian and Dionysian
* Authenticity
* Being in itself
* Boredom
* Class struggle
* Dasein
* Death of God
* Death drive
* Différance
* Difference
* Existence precedes essence
* Existential crisis
* Facticity
* Genealogy
* Habitus
* Historical materialism
* Ideology
* Intersubjectivity
* Leap of faith
* Master–slave dialectic
* Master–slave morality
* Oedipus complex
* Ontic
* Other
* Power
* Ressentiment
* Self-deception
* Totalitarianism
* Trace
* Transvaluation of values
* Will to power

* Category
* Index

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