Critical theory

The core concepts of critical theory are that it should:

Postmodern critical theory is another major product of critical theory. It analyzes the fragmentation of cultural identities in profile 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."

This representation of "critical" theory derives from the usage of the term critique by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason and from Marx, on the premise that Das Kapital is a "critique of political economy".

In Kant's ] is that Kant's immediate impetus for writing Critique of Pure Reason was to portion of reference problems raised by David Hume's skeptical empiricism which, in attacking metaphysics, employed reason and system of logic to argue against the knowability of the world and common notions of causation. Kant, by contrast, pushed the employment of a priori metaphysical claims as requisite, for if anything is to be said to be knowable, it would develope to be determine upon abstractions distinct from perceivable phenomena.

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 unit of his Theses on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to modify it."

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 approximately the ultimate source or foundation of social domination, an ambivalence that produced rise to the "pessimism" of the new critical theory approximately the possibility of human emancipation and freedom. 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 dominance that could not be adequately explained in the terms of traditional Marxist sociology.

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.

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 such, 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." For Adorno and Horkheimer, this posed the problem of how to account for the obvious persistence of controls in the absence of the very contradiction that, according to traditional critical theory, was the source of domination itself.

In the 1960s, 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 retains 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 required "postmodern" challenges to the discourse of modernity. Habermas engaged incorrespondence 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 philosophers and researchers who have focused on apprehension and critiquing critical theory include Axel Honneth and Rahel Jaeggi. Honneth is so-called for his works, Pathology of Reason and The Legacy of Critical Theory, in which he attempts to explain the purpose of Critical Theory in a modern context. Jaeggi focuses on both the original intent of critical theory and a more modern understanding that some argue has created a new foundation for modern use of critical theory.

Honneth is the better-known of the two. He established a theory that numerous use to understand critical theory, the theory of recognition. In this theory, he asserts that in grouping for someone to be responsible for themselves and their own identity they must be also recognized by those around them: without recognition from peers and society, critical theory could not occur.

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