Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

by Stephen Eric Bronner

Critical theory refuses to identify freedom with any institutional arrangement or fixed system of thought.

La Teoría Critica se negó a relacionar la libertad con una forma particular de pensamiento. Entiendo, sin embargo, que hay pensamientos que son imbatibles con cualquier noción de libertad.

Critical theory insists that thought must respond to the new problems and the new possibilities for liberation that arise from changing historical circumstances.

Critical theorists learned to interpret the particular with an eye on the totality.

Max Horkheimer.

They investigated the ways in which thinking was being reduced to mechanical notions of what is operative and profitable, ethical reflection was tending to vanish, and aesthetic enjoyment was becoming more standardized. Critical theorists noted with alarm how interpreting modern society was becoming ever more difficult. Alienation and reification were thus analyzed in terms of how they imperiled the exercise of subjectivity, robbed the world of meaning and purpose, and turned the individual into a cog in the machine.