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Critical theory: from ideology critique to the

sociology of culture

The term ‘critical theory’ was coined by the Institute for Social
Research at the University of Frankfurt, to distinguish their own
kind of ‘critical’ sociology from what they saw as the ‘traditional
theory’ of mainstream social science. Founded in 1923, the
‘Frankfurt School’, as it became known, included such figures
as Theodor Adorno (1903–69), Max Horkheimer (1895–1973),
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) and,
more recently, Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth. In a 1937
essay entitled ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, Horkheimer had
argued that where traditional theory conceived of itself as
‘stored-up knowledge’, that is, a condensed description of ‘the
actual facts’ of the present, critical theory sought to understand
the social world as changeable, thereby stripping reality of its
character as ‘pure factuality’ (Horkheimer, 1972, pp. 188, 209).
In a postscript to the main body of the essay, he spelt out the
position more forcefully: ‘critical theory . . . never aims simply
at an increase of knowledge as such. Its goal is man’s emanci-
pation from slavery’ (p. 246). Committed to such radical goals,
it is hardly surprising that their work is often characterised as
‘Marxist’. And they were indeed indebted to Marx in many
significant respects, not least their shared sense of mass culture
as ideology. But the Frankfurt School writers were inspired as
much by the subtitle as the main title of Marx’s masterpiece:
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Moreover, Horkheimer

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