The essays in this volume reflect on and expand Frankfurt School critical theory as reformulated after World War II by Karl-Otto Apel, Jurgen Habermas, and others. Frankfurt School critical theory since the pragmatic turn has become a richer source of critical analysis that is at the same time socially and politically more effective. The essays are dedicated to Thomas McCarthy, who has done per…
These essays reveal another side of Horkheimer, focusing on his remarkable contributions to critical theory in the 1930s. Max Horkheimer is well known as the director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and as a sometime collaborator with Theodor Adorno, especially on their classic Dialectic of Enlightenment. These essays reveal another side of Horkheimer, focusing on his remarkable …
A proposal for negotiating the tension between an anti-authoritarian impulse and a guiding idea of context-transcending validity in critical social theory. Contemporary critical social theories face the question of how to justify the ideas of the good society that guide their critical analyses. Traditionally, these more or less determinate ideas of the good society were held to be independent o…