Critical theory

"For the Romantics and for speculative philosophy, ... to be critical meant to elevate thinking so far beyond all restrictive conditions that the knowledge of truth sprang forth magically, as it were, from insight into the falsehood of these restrictions."

"In high industrial civilization, ... the “inner” dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled down. The loss of this dimension, in which the power of negative thinking—the critical power of Reason—is at home, is the ideological counterpart to the very material process in which advanced industrial society silences and reconciles the opposition. The impact of progress turns Reason into submission to the facts of life, and to the dynamic capability of producing more and bigger facts of the same sort of life. The efficiency of the system blunts the individuals recognition that it contains no facts which do not communicate the repressive power of the whole. If the individuals find themselves in the things which shape their life, they do so, not by giving, but by accepting the law of things—not the law of physics but the law of their society."

"The idea of critical theory, in the context of the history of marxism, is usually associated with the Frankfurt School for Social Research. In terms of its reception, critical theory is often reduced to the cultural pessimism associated with works such as Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) and Marcuse’s One-dimensional Man (1964). The Frankfurt School achieved much else beside (Wiggershaus 1994), but its main theses did indeed include this idea of modernity as entrapment, Marx plus Weber, as it were in the early period spirit of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Critical theory can indeed be viewed as Marx plus Weber, commodification plus rationalization. Two earlier intellectual links helped to make this bond, well before Dialectic of Enlightenment, and long before critical theory became a kind of household word for radicals."

"If the progressing rationality of advanced industrial society tends to liquidate, as an “irrational rest,” the disturbing elements of Time and Memory, it also tends to liquidate the disturbing rationality contained in this irrational rest. Recognition and relation to the past as present counteracts the functionalization of thought by and in the established reality. It militates against the closing of the universe of discourse and behavior; it renders possible the development of concepts which destabilize and transcend the closed universe by comprehending it as historical universe. Confronted with the given society as object of its reflection, critical thought becomes historical consciousness as such, it is essentially judgment. Far from necessitating an indifferent relativism, it searches in the real history of man for the criteria of truth and falsehood, progress and regression."