Rethinking Critique and Theory
Aus der Einleitung:
A distance of exactly 100 years separates our present from the intellectual and institutional context in which talking of “critical” theory, as distinct from “traditional” theory, began to play the identity-forming role to which today’s discussion owes its topic. Reflecting not only on the possible continuity but also on this factual distance can be helpful for gaining a clearer perspective of what it can mean to connect to this program today. For, first, it is only in a long history of the impact of certain texts, themes, and a certain style of theory that the impression of unity or coherence of this tradition has emerged, of which there was hardly a trace in the first decades. Neither the objectives of the Institute for Social Research in its founding phase nor the personal composition of the circle of (exclusively male) scholars around Max Horkheimer had made such a unity likely beyond a shared commitment to a heterodox, non-party Marxism. […]
