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Critical theory is a social, historical, and political school of thought and Philosophy perspective which centers on analyzing and challenging systemic power relations in society, arguing that knowledge, truth, and are fundamentally shaped by power dynamics between dominant and oppressed groups. Beyond just understanding and critiquing these dynamics, it explicitly aims to transform society through praxis and collective action with an explicit sociopolitical purpose.Ludovisi, S.G. ed., 2015. Critical theory and the challenge of praxis: Beyond reification. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Critical theory's main tenets center on analyzing systemic power relations in society, focusing on the dynamics between groups with different levels of social, economic, and institutional power.Horkheimer, M., Adorno, T.W. and Noeri, G., 2002. Dialectic of enlightenment. Stanford University Press.Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum, 1970. Unlike traditional social theories that aim primarily to describe and understand society, critical theory explicitly seeks to critique and transform it. Thus, it positions itself as both an analytical framework and a social movement for social change.Horkheimer, M., 1972. Traditional and critical theory. Critical theory: Selected essays, 188(243), pp.1-11.Marcuse, H., 2013. One-dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. Routledge.How, A., 2017. Critical theory. Bloomsbury Publishing. Critical theory examines how dominant groups and structures influence what society considers objective truth, challenging the very notion of Antipositivism and rationality by arguing that knowledge is shaped by power relations and social context.Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory. "Horkheimer and his followers rejected the notion of objectivity in knowledge by pointing, among other things, to the fact that the object of knowledge is itself embedded into a historical and social process: 'The facts which our senses present to us are socially preformed in two ways: through the historical character of the object perceived and through the historical character of the perceiving organ' (Horkheimer 1937 in Ingram and Simon-Ingram 1992, p. 242). Further, with a rather Marxist twist, Horkheimer noticed also that phenomenological objectivity is a myth because it is dependent upon 'technological conditions' and the latter are sensitive to the material conditions of production. Critical Theory aims thus to abandon naïve conceptions of knowledge-impartiality. Since intellectuals themselves are not disembodied entities observing from a God's viewpoint, knowledge can be obtained only from a societal embedded perspective of interdependent individuals."Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Pantheon Books, 1977. Key principles of critical theory include examining intersecting forms of oppression, emphasizing historical contexts in social analysis, and critiquing Capitalism structures. The framework emphasizes praxis (combining theory with action) and highlights how lived experience, collective action, ideology, and educational systems play crucial roles in maintaining or challenging existing .McKerrow, R.E., 1989. Critical rhetoric: Theory and praxis. Communications Monographs, 56(2), pp.91-111.Bronner, S.E., 2017. Critical theory: A very short introduction (Vol. 263). Oxford University Press.Steffy, B., & Grimes, A., 1986. A Critical Theory of Organization Science. Academy of Management Review, 11, pp. 322-336.Masschelein, J., 2004. How to Conceive of Critical Educational Theory Today. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 38, pp. 351-367
A critical social theory frames its research program and its conceptual framework with an eye to the aims and activities of those oppositional social movements with which it has a partisan though not uncritical identification. The questions it asks and the models it designs are informed by that identification and interest. Thus, for example, if struggles contesting the subordination of women figured among the most significant of a given age, then a critical social theory for that time would aim, among other things, to shed light on the character and bases of such subordination. It would employ categories and explanatory models which revealed rather than occluded relations of male dominance and female subordination. And it would demystify as ideological rival approaches which obfuscated or rationalized those relations. In this situation, then, one of the standards for assessing a critical theory, once it had been subjected to all the usual tests of empirical adequacy, would be: How well does it theorize the situation and prospects of the feminist movement? To what extent does it serve the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of contemporary women?
The historical evolution of critical theory traces back to the first generation of the Frankfurt School in the 1920s. Figures like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and others sought to expand traditional Marxism analysis by incorporating insights from psychology, culture, and philosophy, moving beyond pure economic determinism.Rush, F.L. and Rush, F. eds., 2004. The Cambridge companion to critical theory. Cambridge University Press.Kellner, D., 1989. Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity. Polity.Adorno, T.W., 1990. Negative dialectics. Routledge. Their work was significantly influenced by Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis theories, particularly how subjective experience shaped human consciousness, behavior, and social reality.Genel, K., 2016. The Frankfurt School and Freudo-Marxism: On the Plurality of Articulations between Psychoanalysis and Social Theory. Actuel Marx, pp. 10-25.Whitebook J. The marriage of Marx and Freud: Critical Theory and psychoanalysis. In: Rush F, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory. Cambridge Companions to Philosophy. Cambridge University Press; 2004:74-102. Freud's concept that an individual's lived experience could differ dramatically from objective reality aligned with critical theory's critique of positivism, science, and pure rationality.
Critical theory continued to evolve beyond the first generation of the Frankfurt School. Jürgen Habermas, often identified with the second generation, shifted the focus toward communication and the role of language in social emancipation. Around the same time, post-structuralist and postmodern thinkers, including Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, were reshaping academic discourse with critiques of knowledge, meaning, power, institutions, and social control with Deconstruction approaches that further challenged assumptions about objectivity and truth. Though neither Foucault nor Derrida belonged formally to the Frankfurt School tradition, their works profoundly influenced later formulations of critical theory.Landry, L.Y., 2000. Beyond the 'French Fries and the Frankfurter' An agenda for critical theory. Philosophy & social criticism, 26(2), pp.99-129. Collectively, the post-structuralist and postmodern insights expanded the scope of critical theory, weaving cultural and linguistic critiques into its Marxian roots.
With the emigration of Herbert Marcuse, contemporary critical theory has expanded to the United States and today it covers a wide range of social critique within economics, ethics, history, law, politics, psychology, and sociology, with a diverse list of subjects including critical animal studies, critical criminology, dependency theory and imperialism studies, critical environmental justice, feminist theory and gender studies, critical historiography, intersectionality, critical legal studies, critical pedagogy, postcolonialism, critical race theory, queer theory, and critical terrorism studies.Abromeit, J. and Cobb, W.M. eds., 2014. Herbert Marcuse: A critical reader. Routledge.Jay, M., 1996. The dialectical imagination: A history of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (No. 10). Univ of California Press.Wiggershaus, R. (1995). The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (M. Robertson, Trans.). MIT Press Modern critical theory represents a movement away from Marxism's purely economic analysis to a broader examination of social and cultural power structures with the incorporation and transformation of Freudian concepts and postmodernism, while retaining Marxism's emphasis on analyzing how dominant groups and systems shape and control society through exploitation and oppression along with social and political praxis, the adaptation and reformulation of multiple Marxian conceptual frameworks (including alienation, reification, ideology, emancipation, base and superstructure), and a general skepticism towards and critique of capitalism.
Criticism of critical theory have come from various intellectual perspectives. Critics have raised concerns about critical theory's reliance on Marxist revisionismDisco, Cornelis. "Critical theory as ideology of the new class: Rereading Jürgen Habermas." Theory and Society (1979): 159-214.Anderson, P. (1976). Considerations on Western Marxism.Kolakowski, L., 1978. Main currents of Marxism: its rise, growth, and dissolution. Philosophy, 54(210). and its frequent emphasis on subjective narratives, which can sometimes be at odds with Empiricism methodology.Morrow, R.A., Morrow, R.A. and Brown, D.D., 1994. Critical theory and methodology (Vol. 3). Sage.Thompson, M.J., 2016. The domestication of critical theory. Rowman & Littlefield.Oliveira, G.C., 2018. Reconstructive methodology and critical international relations theory. Contexto Internacional, 40(01), pp.09-32. They also point to issues of circular reasoning and a lack of falsifiability in some critical theory arguments, as well as an epistemological and methodological stance that challenges or conflicts with traditional scientific methods and ideals of rationality and objectivity.Latour, B., 2004. Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical inquiry, 30(2), pp.225-248.Crews, F. 1986, Skeptical engagements, Oxford University Press, New York.Gross, P.R. and Levitt, N., 1997. Higher superstition. JHU Press.Sokal, A.D. and Bricmont, J., 1999. Fashionable nonsense. Macmillan.Otto, S., 2016. The war on science.Fuller, S. (2017). Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game
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 order to challenge Modernism constructs such as , 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".
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. Dialectic of Enlightenment. p. 38: "Gone are the objective laws of the market which ruled in the actions of the entrepreneurs and tended toward catastrophe. Instead the conscious decision of the managing directors executes as results (which are more obligatory than the blindest price-mechanisms) the old law of value and hence the destiny of capitalism."
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 a result, 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"."The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment", p. 118. For Adorno and Horkheimer, this posed the problem of how to account for the apparent persistence of domination in the absence of the very contradiction that, according to traditional critical theory, was the source of domination itself.
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 remains 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 so-called "Postmodernism" challenges to the discourse of modernity. Habermas engaged in regular correspondence 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.
Honneth established a theory that many use to understand critical theory, the theory of recognition. In this theory, he asserts that in order for someone to be responsible for themselves and their own identity they must be also recognized by those around them: without recognition in this sense from peers and society, individuals can never become wholly responsible for themselves and others, nor experience true freedom and emancipation—i.e., without recognition, the individual cannot achieve self-actualization.
Like many others who put stock in critical theory, Jaeggi is vocal about capitalism's cost to society. Throughout her writings, she has remained doubtful about the necessity and use of capitalism in regard to critical theory. Most of Jaeggi's interpretations of critical theory seem to work against the foundations of Habermas and follow 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.
To provide a dialectical opposite to Jaeggi's conception of alienation as 'a relation of relationlessness', Hartmut Rosa has proposed the concept of resonance. (2025). 9780231151986, Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780231151986 Rosa uses this term to refer to moments when late modern subjects experience momentary feelings of self-efficacy in society, bringing them into a temporary moment of relatedness with some aspect of the world. Rosa describes himself as working within the critical theory tradition of the Frankfurt School, providing an extensive critique of late modernity through his concept of social acceleration. However his resonance theory has been questioned for moving too far beyond the Adornoian tradition of "looking coldly at society".
While modernist critical theory (as described above) concerns itself with "forms of authority and injustice that accompanied the evolution of industrial and corporate capitalism as a political-economic system", postmodern critical theory politicizes 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". Meaning itself is seen as unstable due to social structures' rapid transformation. As a result, research focuses on local manifestations rather than broad generalizations.
Postmodern critical research is also characterized by the crisis of representation, which rejects the idea that a researcher's work is an "objective depiction of a stable other". Instead, many postmodern scholars have adopted "alternatives that encourage reflection about the 'politics and poetics' of their work. In these accounts, the embodied, collaborative, dialogic, and improvisational aspects of qualitative research are clarified."
The term critical theory is often appropriated when an author works in Sociology terms, yet attacks the social or human sciences, thus attempting to remain "outside" those frames of inquiry. Michel Foucault has been described as one such author. Jean Baudrillard has also been described as a critical theorist to the extent that he was an unconventional and critical sociologist; this appropriation is similarly casual, holding little or no relation to the Frankfurt School. In contrast, Habermas is one of the key critics of postmodernism.
In contrast to the banking model, the teacher in the critical-theory model is not the dispenser of all knowledge, but a participant who learns with and from the students—in conversation with them, even as they learn from the teacher. The goal is to liberate the learner from an oppressive construct of teacher versus student, a dichotomy analogous to colonizer and colonized. It is not enough for the student to analyze societal power structures and hierarchies, to merely recognize imbalance and inequity; critical theory pedagogy must also empower the learner to reflect and act on that reflection to challenge an oppressive status quo.See, e.g., Kołakowski, Leszek. 1976 1979. Main Currents of Marxism 3. W.W. Norton & Company. . ch. 10.
Critical theory has been criticized for not offering any clear road map to political action (praxis), often explicitly repudiating any solutions.Corradetti, Claudio. " The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory". . Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Those objections mostly apply to first-generation Frankfurt School, while the issue of politics is addressed in a much more assertive way in contemporary theory.
Another criticism of critical theory "is that it fails to provide rational standards by which it can show that it is superior to other theories of knowledge, science, or practice." Rex Gibson argues that critical theory suffers from being cliquish, conformist, elitist, immodest, anti-individualist, naive, too critical, and contradictory. Hughes and Hughes argue that Habermas' theory of ideal public discourse "says much about rational talkers talking, but very little about actors acting: Felt, perceptive, imaginative, bodily experience does not fit these theories".
Some feminists argue that critical theory "can be as narrow and oppressive as the rationalization, bureaucratization, and cultures they seek to unmask and change.
Critical theory's language has been criticized as being too dense to understand, although "Counter arguments to these issues of language include claims that a call for clearer and more accessible language is anti-intellectual, a new 'language of possibility' is needed, and oppressed peoples can understand and contribute to new languages."
Bruce Pardy, writing for the National Post, argued that any challenges to the "legitimacy of can be interpreted as a demonstration of their critical thesis: the assertion of reason, logic and evidence is a manifestation of privilege and power. Thus, any challenger risks the stigma of a bigoted oppressor."
Robert Danisch, writing for The Conversation, argued that critical theory, and the modern humanities more broadly, focus too much on criticizing the current world rather than trying to make a better world.
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