Showing papers on "Critical theory published in 1976"

Towards a Critical Sociology: An Essay on Commonsense and Emancipation

Abstract: Part 1: The Science of Unfreedom 1. Second nature' Defined 2. 'Second nature' Deified 3. 'Second Nature' and the Commonsense Part 2: Critique of Sociology 4. The Husserlian Revolution 5. The Existentialist Restoration 6. 'Second Nature' Vindicated Part 3: Critique of Unfreedom 7. Technical and Emancipatory Reason 8. 'Second Nature' Seen Historically 9. Can Critical Sociology be a Science? 10.Truth and Authentication.

Beyond Dogma and Despair: Toward a Critical Theory of Politics

Abstract: In contradistinction both to positivist empiricism and to the essentialism of “traditional” political thought, the paper delineates an approach to political study and theory stressing the critical interrogation between inquirer or participant and the experienced world. The approach—which relies chiefly on existential phenomenology and recent writings of the Frankfurt School— is illustrated and explicated in three contexts: those of philosophical anthropology, of epistemology, and of ethics and political action. With regard to the conception of “human nature,” critical theory refuses to equate man either with a reactive mechanism or with pure consciousness, preferring to treat him as an embodied creature concerned (in Heidegger's terms) with the sense of his existence. In the domain of epistemology, the sketched outlook deviates from simple “mirror” doctrines by emphasizing the experiential underpinnings of cognition and the need for continuous symbolic articulation. Concerning ethics, the perspective opposes both cognitivist and noncognitivist formulas in favor of the critical reconstruction of standards implicit in everyday life. The concluding portion of the paper indicates the relevance of such standards for practical politics and contemporary democratic theory.

Society, Nature, and Critical Theory:

Abstract: Nature has been viewed as a curative for the problems of urbanized society, and primitivism has been forwarded as a viable alternative to modification of the industrial world Critical theory maintains that the current phase of social development tends toward 'total administration', and that escapes to nature are them selves administered and controlled by the larger society Back-to-nature is critiqued as an unproductive strategy whose middle-class origins render it elitist

Marcuse's Aesthetics and the Displacement of Critical Theory

Abstract: Marcuse's initial concern with the relationship between art and politics, as set forth in "Affirmative Character of Culture," I originated during the years which witnessed the efforts of the fascists to consolidate their political interests by means of a total mobilization of all social strata in German society. Whereas the major thrust of the article was directed towards an exposition of the decline and redefinition of the bourgeois culture under National Socialism, also present in this early essay is the inclination to see art as the victim of similar pressures in advanced industrial society, since Marcuse believes fascism to be but one, and the most primitive technologically and politically, of many forms of authoritarianism that serve to preserve monopoly capitalism.2 The parallel trends of the debilitation of art in pre-World War II Germany and in postwar democracies serve Marcuse as the basic motive for imparting a (non-violent) authoritarianism to liberal political systems. Though western democracies operate according to principles of tolerance, because they appear to share many of the ebbing cultural traits that colored fascist society, the historical analogy between the fate and future of art in fascist and liberal democratic regimes means that we will be exploring changes in the nature and function of art--relative to its general historical character--as a response to tendencies endemic to 19thcentury capitalism and not merely in response to the conflicts proceeding from a Soviet-modeled suppression of art as part of a vulgar political curtailment of free expression. Significantly, therefore, Marcuse's "Affirmative Character of Culture" possesses many of the same ideas and motifs which distinguish his subsequent writings on art and aesthetics. The concept "affirmative culture" denotes those dimensions of the

Toward a Theological Understanding of Praxis

Abstract: Edward Schillebeeckx's recent book, The Understanding of Faith, can be read as a series of exercises in the critical reconstruction of theological hermeneutics. It is not a systematic or exhaustive treatment, but it is significant in representing the effort of perhaps the most cosmopolitan of European Roman Catholic theologians to come to grips with certain problems in theological method that have emerged in light of recent developments in the general field of cultural hermenuetics. Schillebeeckx's range of concern and some of the approaches that he develops seem to bear a family resemblance to similar efforts in the field of cultural hermeneutics advanced by Paul Ricoeur and Gibson Winter, and in theological hermeneutics as in the recent work of Langdon Gilkey and David Tracy. Whatever the reasons for this convergence, it certainly can be taken as encouraging news for those who have found promise in the recent discussions of the problem of interpretation conducted on this side of the Atlantic. An especially important parallel is discerned in Schillebeeckx's willingness to explore the relevance of a praxis criterion for the manifold operations of theological hermeneutics. That he attempts to specify this criterion through a serious discussion of the work ofJuirgen Habermas's critical theory of society is particularly significant, in that Schillebeeckx's discussion of Habermas can be taken as a clue to

Freud and Recent Sociological Theory: the Frankfurt School

Abstract: Apart from the work of Talcott Parsons, there have been no major attempts systematically to link Freud’s theory with mainstream sociology. The work of the Frankfurt School is now coming into the mainstream of sociological theory, with the breakdown of positivistic schools of sociology. Critical theory is the only alternative base for sociological theory to that of positivism in all its varieties, apart from the phenomenological approaches which have recently emerged and been developed, for example, by Cicourel, Berger and Luckmann.