Stephen Eric Bronner - Critical Theory and Society: A Reader

There are a number of people to whom we would like to express our gratitude for their encouragement, comments, and support. They include Bob Antonio, Steve Best, Judith Burton, Mark Ritter, Ann Sweeny, and Marianne Stewart. Special thanks are also due to Diana Owen and Victoria Irmiere, as well as to our translators, Micheline Ishay, Mark Ritter, and Peter Wagner. Renee Gibson, Liz Hiles, Patricia Gehle, Kristy Bartlett, Susan Tims, and Lori DeRick provided invaluable help in producing the manuscript. Rainer Funk, the literary executor of the Erich Fromm Archives, provided permission to include some untranslated essays, and Suhrkamp Verlag, Fischer Verlag, Transaction Press, Beacon Press, Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, Holt Rinehart and Winston, and W. W. Norton were cooperative in providing permission to reprint the texts for this reader. Thanks are also due to Arguments, New German Critique, Salmagundi, Canadian Journal of Social and Political Theory, and Telos, all of which have sought to develop the legacy of critical theory. Finally, without the support and aid of our editor, Maureen MacGrogan, this book would not have been possible.

StephenEricBronner and DouglasMacKayKellner

Critical Theory and Society: A Reader provides a selection of particularly important essays by members of the Institute for Social Research. Founded in 1923 in Frankfurt, Germany, it became the first formally unaffiliated Marxist-oriented institute in Europe. Under its most influential director, Max Horkheimer, its members attempted to revise both the Marxian critique of capitalism and the theory of revolution in order to confront those new social and political conditions which had evolved since Marx's death. In the process a "critical theory" of society emerged to deal with those aspects of social reality which Marx and his orthodox followers neglected or downplayed.

The term critical theory itself was only coined in 1937, after the majority of the Institute's members had already emigrated to the United States following the triumph of Hitler. The concept was initially a type of code which, while differentiating its adherents from prevailing forms of orthodoxy, also tended to veil their radical commitments in an environment that was hostile to anything remotely associated with Marxism. But the term stuck and soon was used to encompass and define the general theory of contemporary society associated with Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, T. W. Adorno, Leo Lowenthal, and Frederick Pollockas well as with Jrgen Habermas and others who later undertook to continue the tradition.

We have assembled this reader in the belief that critical theory can promote important developments in social theory today. Growing dissatisfaction with the academic division of labor and the dominant views in the various disciplines have led to increased interest in both theoretical and political alternatives. Critical theory offers a multidisciplinary approach to society which combines perspectives drawn from political economy, sociology, cultural theory, philosophy, anthropology, and history. It thus overcomes the fragmentation endemic to established academic disciplines in order to address issues of broader interest.

An antidote to the frequently noncritical quantitative approaches within contemporary social science, critical theory also provides a potentially more useful and politically relevant alternative than currently fashionable approaches like existentialism and phenomenology, poststructuralism and postmodernism, as well as the various versions of humanist idealism which are periodically recycled and repackaged. By contrast, critical theory maintains a nondogmatic perspective which is sustained by an interest in emancipation from all forms of oppression, as well as by a commitment to freedom, happiness, and a rational ordering of society. Eschewing divisions between the humanities and the social sciences, it thus sets forth a normative social theory that seeks a connection with empirical analyses of the contemporary world.

Fundamentally inspired by the dialectical tradition of Hegel and Marx, critical theory is intrinsically open to development and revision. Inherently self-critical, it offers a well-articulated standpoint for thematizing social realityunlike the current postmodern theories which attack all forms of thought in an undifferentiated manner. Against all relativistic and nihilistic excesses, critical theory seeks an emancipatory alternative to the existing order.

The diversity of interests and insights among critical theorists made the choice of texts for this book particularly difficult. Our selection was guided by an attempt to emphasize the most characteristic theorists and themes within the tradition. We also sought to balance the historical importance of any given text with its contemporary relevance. Finally, without sacrificing intellectual quality, we tried to choose texts which were somewhat less esoteric than some for which the critical theorists are infamous.

This reader focuses, for the most part, on the "inner circle" of the first generation of critical theorists, which consisted of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Lowenthal, Pollock, and Erich Fromm. Yet we have also included texts by Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin, who were to varying degrees associated with critical theory, as well as selections from Jrgen Habermas, who is clearly the most significant member of the second generation. Unfortunately, space constraints forced us to omit texts by contemporary critical theorists such as Oskar Negt, Alfred Schmidt, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer. We also could not include works by such significant members of the Institute as Karl Wittfogel, Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, Franz Borkenau, and Henryk Grossmann, as well as related theorists like Karl Korsch and Ernst Bloch, who were occasionally supported by the Institute orin Korsch's casepublished by its journal.