Miguel Afonso Caetano

"This introduction to the special section “Critical Theory after Frankfurt” reflects on recent demands to reorient Frankfurt School Critical Theory in the wake of its centennial toward the critique of political economy, capitalism, colonialism, militarism, and the climate crisis. It reviews concerns that critics have raised about Jürgen Habermas’s inheritance of Critical Theory, and it considers several of the alternative paths proposed for charting the Frankfurt School’s future. It argues that, in place of simply reviving the Critical Theory of the 1930s and 1940s, Critical Theory’s reorientation should also consider its diffuse receptions and trajectories among abolitionist, feminist, and left-wing activists and intellectuals in the United States, beginning with the student voices of 1968."

https://read.dukeupress.edu/new-german-critique/article/52/2%20(155)/1/402174/Introduction-Critical-Theory-after-Frankfurt

#CriticalTheory #FrankfurtSchool #PoliticalEconomy #Capitalism

Aug 24 at 6:33pmWeb
Show threadMiguel Afonso CaetanoAug 24
"According to this small but emerging consensus, Habermasian academic philosophy is simply not (or no longer) up to the task of ruthless critique in the interest of collective emancipation. Rather, in consciously taking leave of early Critical Theory’s neo-Marxist framework, the centrality of political economy, issues of class inequality, and analyses of imperialism in all its guises, Habermas and his academic heirs made too many concessions to the postwar liberal capitalist order, and as the end of this order rapidly approaches, their utility for social critique is eroding just as rapidly. If it is to regain and retain its utility, so the new consensus argues, Critical Theory must first be restored to its origins."