CRITICAL THEORY: CHARACTERISTICS, REPRESENTATIVES AND THEIR IDEAS - PHILOSOPHY - 2025

The critical theory is a school of thought that, based on the humanities and social sciences, evaluates and judges the social and cultural events. It was born from the philosophers who were part of the Frankfurt School, also known as the Institute for Social Research.

These philosophers are confronted with the traditional theory, which is guided by the ideals of the natural sciences. Instead, critical theory lays the normative and descriptive foundations for social inquiry with the goal of increasing freedom and diminishing the domination of human beings.

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno

This theory is part of a materialistic philosophy of history, as well as an analysis carried out through specialized sciences to generate an interdisciplinary investigation. For this reason, at first he was related to sociological and philosophical research, and later he focused on communicative action and literary criticism.

However, it should be noted that over time this theory has expanded to other social sciences, such as education, linguistics, psychology, sociology, semiotics, ecology, among others.

Origin

Critical theory originates from the Frankfurt School in 1920. Its ideologue is Max Horkheimer, who argues that this theory must seek human emancipation from slavery. In addition, he must work and influence to create a world where man has his needs satisfied.

This position is framed in a neo-Marxist analysis of the capitalist situation in West Germany, since this country had entered a period in which the government intervened in the economy although there was a marked dominance of expanding monopolies.

Hence the Frankfurt school has looked at the experience of the Soviet Union. However, except in Russian agrarian contexts, in the rest of the industrialized countries the proletariat had not promoted any revolution, as Marx had argued.

This is the reason why left-wing intellectuals found themselves at a crossroads: either they maintained an objective, autonomous and free of compromise thinking, or they gave answers to a political and social commitment without committing themselves to any party.

The pessimism of exile

In 1933, when Hitler and National Socialism came to power in Germany, the school moved to Columbia University in New York. From there began a shift toward what Frankenberg developed as a "pessimistic philosophy of history."

In this appears the theme of the alienation of the human species and its reification. It is from there that the research focus is shifted from German to American society and culture.

However, critical theory as a school seemed to be coming to an end. Both Adorno and Horkheimer returned to Germany, specifically to the University of Frankfurt, while other members such as Herbert Marcuse stayed in the United States.

It is Jünger Habermas who, through the philosophy of language, managed to give a different direction to critical theory.

characteristics

To know the characteristics of critical theory, it is necessary to frame it in the two stages of the Frankfurt School and its investigations.

First stage: critical social theory

Horkheimer formulated his critical theory for the first time in 1937. His position regarding the search for coherent solutions to social problems - from the sociological and philosophical point of view - rests on heterodox Marxism.

This is why adequate critical theory must meet three criteria at the same time: explanation, practicality, and normativity.

This implies that what is wrong in social reality must be identified and then changed. This is achieved by facilitating norms for criticism and, in turn, devising achievable goals for social transformation. Until the mid-1930s the Frankfurt School prioritized three areas:

Development of the individual

The research focused on the causes that produce the submission of individuals and the workforce to centralized domination.

Eric Fromm is the one who gave the answer by linking psychoanalysis with Marxist sociological ideologies. In addition, his studies on authority and the family help to resolve the authoritarian personality theory.

Political economy

It was Friedrich Pollock who analyzed the economics of post-liberal capitalism. This led him to develop the notion of state capitalism, based on studies of Soviet Communism and National Socialism.

Culture

This analysis was based on empirically investigating the lifestyles and moral customs of the various social groups. The basic Marxist scheme was revised, relying on the relative autonomy that culture has as a superstructure.

Second stage: theoretical crisis

At this stage the school was forced into exile and developed a pessimistic historical point of view. This is because, through the experience of fascism, its members took a skeptical view of progress and lost confidence in the revolutionary potential of the proletariat.

Because of this, the fundamental themes of this period were based on the alienation and reification of the human species. Another characteristic is that they avoided the use of terms like "socialism" or "communism", words that are replaced by "materialist theory of society" or "dialectical materialism".

This caused that the school was not unified, as well as it avoided that it did not have a theory that supports it and that it mediates between an empirical investigation and a philosophical thought.

Third stage: philosophy of language

The person in charge of taking critical theory towards pragmatism, hermeneutics and discourse analysis was Jürger Habermas.

Habermas placed the achievement of understanding in language. In his latest research, he added the need to convert language into the basic element to reproduce social life, since it serves to renew and transmit what refers to cultural knowledge through a procedure whose purpose is mutual understanding.

Representatives and their ideas

Among the main ideologues and representatives of critical theory are the following:

Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)

German philosopher and psychologist. In his work The Traditional Theory and Critical Theory, dating from 1937, he takes a tour of the approach of traditional theories with respect to social problems.

This helps him take the perspective of what a critical theory should be, focusing it on the transformation of the world rather than its interpretation.

In his book Critique of Instrumental Reason, published in 1946, Max Horkheimer criticizes Western reason because he considers it to be traversed by a logic of dominance. For him, this is the cause that has determined his radical instrumentalization.

Its verification occurs in the amount of material, technical and even human means that are put at the service of irrational objectives.

Another fundamental issue is that of the relationship between man and nature. Horkheimer believes that nature is taken as an instrument of men, and since it has no purpose in reason, it has no limit.

For this reason, he argues that damaging it implies damaging ourselves, in addition to considering that the global ecological crisis is the way in which nature has rebelled. The only way out is the reconciliation between subjective and objective reason, and between reason and nature.

Theodor Adorno (1903-1969)

German philosopher and psychologist. He criticizes capitalism for considering it responsible for cultural and social degradation; said degradation is caused by the forces that return to culture and social relations as a commercial object.

It recognizes that cultural production is related to the current social order. Likewise, he conceives the irrational in human thought, using works of art as an example.

In this sense, for Adorno the work of art represents the antithesis of society. It is a reflection of the real world, expressed from an artistic language. This language, in turn, is capable of answering the contradictions that conceptual language cannot answer; this is because it is trying to find the exact match between object and word.

These concepts lead him to refer to the cultural industry, which is the one that is controlled by media corporations.

This industry exploits goods considered cultural for the sole purpose of making a profit, and it does so through a vertical relationship with consumers, adapting its products to the taste of the masses to generate the desire for consumption.

Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979)

Herbert Marcuse was a German philosopher and psychologist who argued that capitalism has brought a certain well-being and improvement in the standard of living of the working class.

Although this improvement is miniscule from reality, its effects are final, since in this way the proletariat has disappeared, and every movement against the system has been absorbed by society until it is considered valid.

The cause of this absorption is due to the fact that the content of human consciousness has been "fetishized", using Marxist concepts. Furthermore, the needs recognized by man are fictitious. For Marcuse there are two types of needs:

-Real, which come from the nature of man.

-Fictitious, which come from an alienated conscience, are produced by industrial society and are oriented to the current model.

Only the human being himself can distinguish them, because only he knows which ones are real within him, but since consciousness is considered alienated, the human being cannot make such a difference.

For Marcuse, alienation focuses on the consciousness of the modern human being, and this implies that you cannot escape from compulsion.

Jürgen Habermas (1929-)

A German national, he studied philosophy, psychology, German literature and economics. Her greatest contribution has been her theory of communicative action. In this he argues that the media colonize the worlds of life, and this occurs when:

-The dreams and expectations of individuals result from the state channeling of culture and well-being.

-The traditional ways of life are disarmed.

-The social roles are well differentiated.

-Alienated work is adequately rewarded with leisure and money.

He adds that these systems are institutionalized through global jurisprudence systems. Based on this, he defines communicative rationality as a communication that is oriented to achieve, sustain and review consensus, defining consensus as that which is based on criticizable validity statements that are recognized intersubjectively.

This concept of communicative rationality allows you to differentiate different types of discourses, such as argumentative, aesthetic, explanatory and therapeutic.

Other important representatives of critical theory in different areas are: Erich Fromm in psychoanalysis, Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamín in philosophy and literary criticism, Friedrich Pollock and Carl Grünberg in economics, Otto Kirchheimer in law and politics, among others.

References

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