Showing papers on "Critical theory published in 1978"

The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work

Abstract: Louise M. Rosenblatt s award-winning work continues increasingly to be read in a wide range of academic fieldsliterary criticism, reading theory, aesthetics, composition, rhetoric, speech communication, and education. Her view of the reading transaction as a unique event involving reader and text at a particular time under particular circumstances rules out the dualistic emphasis of other theories on either the reader or the text as separate and static entities. The transactional concept accounts for the importance of factors such as gender, ethnicity, culture, and socioeconomic context. Essential reading for the specialist, this book is also well suited for courses in criticism, critical theory, rhetoric, and aesthetics.Starting from the same nonfoundationalist premises, Rosenblatt avoids the extreme relativism of postmodern theories derived mainly from Continental sources. A deep understanding of the pragmatism of Dewey, James, and Peirce and of key issues in the social sciences is the basis for a view of language and the reading process that recognizes the potentialities for alternative interpretations and at the same time provides a rationale for the responsible reading of texts.The book has been praised for its lucid explanation of the multidimensional character of the reading processevoking, interpreting, and evaluating the work. The nonliterary (efferent) and the literary (aesthetic) are shown not to be opposites but to represent a continuum of reading behaviors. The author amply illustrates her theoretical points with interpretations of varied texts. The epilogue carries further her critique of rival contemporary theories."

Critical Social Theory: An Introduction and Critique

Abstract: This paper gives a systematic introduction to the major themes of Jurgen Habermas' formulation of critical social theory. A discussion of his views on knowledge, cognitive interests, and scientific method is followed by an account of his social theory and his attempt to combine Marxism with mainstream sociology. In criticism it is argued that Habermas has not yet solved all the problems of a 'realist' approach to sociology and that his synthesis is incomplete. It is argued that sociology can progress through a critical dialogue with Habermas' work. The aim of this paperl is to give an introduction to the thought of Jurgen Habermas in such a way that those who are interested in understanding his ideas yet do not have the stamina to read all his available work will possess a 'sketch map' of his version of critical sociology. Hopefully, this will encourage readers to consult the original works. Only on the basis of informed discussion can scientific advance be made. The fate of complex writers is to be rejected rather than refuted that is, they are disregarded because of their complexity and obscurity rather than because of their lack of scientific rigour, validity, etc. The aim of this paper, then, is to initiate fruitful discussion, to give a systematic account of Habermas' ideas, and to suggest some important lines of

The Frankfurt School: The Critical Theories of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno

Abstract: Tar's thesis is simple: the “Critical Theory” or “Theory of Society” is neither Marxism nor sociology but rather an existential philosophy. With it he hopes to enlighten all those who have been duped into believing that the Frankfurt School represents “a Marxist orientation in sociology” (p. 2). Tar wishes to exercise this spectre of a radical sociology that he sees as haunting sociology. The book is, therefore, explicitly political in its value-committment to a “scientific sociology” that is compatible with establishment thinking; it sees radicalism and radical sociologies as merely infantile disorders of those headed for an establishment maturity (pp. 4, 12).

A World Upside Down

Abstract: George Grant moves among the circle ofthe great critics of modernity . From the vantage point of the Christian apocalypse, he attempts to come to terms with its startling recapitulation in the visions of modern secular society . Its chief embodiment perhaps is within the Marxist vision of a perfect community on earth the universal socialist society . Eric Voegelin is another exponent ofthis theme:

The dialectic of ideology and technology

Abstract: In this book, Alvin Gouldner weaves a dialectic of intellectual approaches to the questions of ideology. The sophistication of the new sociolinguistics, hermeneutics and its near relative, Frankfurt-style critical sociology, the revelations of social and intellectual historiography, some elements of traditional social science along with reflections on the experiences and moods of the world of the Movement, the counterculture, and the Watergate scandal all these find their places in the book. Some of it, I think, is a product of too much closeness to the particular situation of the late 1960's and early 70's. Other parts make a general contribution to the analysis of ideology that marks a major intellectual advance. For just how much of an advance, one need only compare it with the work of Mannheim a full generation ago.

The Frankfurt School : The Critical Theories of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno

Abstract: The Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory particular established at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, Germany in 1923. Tarr's investigation focuses on three key issues. The first is the Frankfurt School's original program of providing a general theory of modern capitalist society. The second is the claim to represent a continuation of the original Marxian theory through the school's Critical Theory. The third is the scientific validity of Critical Theory in light of the generally accepted canons of the natural and social sciences.Tarr proposes that in the last analysis, Critical Theory is simply another existentialist philosophy. As such, it is a specific expression of certain socio-historical conditions and of the situation of a particular social group, the marginal Jewish bourgeois intelligentsia of Central Europe. This European-Jewish contribution became apparent after the great metaphysical impulse of the pre-Socratic and Platonic-Aristotelian philosophies had run their respective courses. Both philosophies represented philosophical schools of ethics, and both wanted to help man take up a defense against the storms of passions and fate. It was from these ancient sources that the Frankfurt School emerged.The Frankfurt School derived its impetus in the twentieth century, in which Tarr claims a shift occurred from the ontological to the subjective realm. This in turn led to deep changes in philosophical theory and practice which led to a more psychologically oriented mode of social thought. This in-depth study covers the entire career of the Frankfurt School's Critical Theory from 1923 to 1974. It does so by applying the same standards of criticism to its primary doctrines as it turned on other theories, but with a keen sense of balance and fairness.

Needs, Exchanges and the Fetishism of Objects

Abstract: The anthropologist Raymond Firth has written : \"I was once asked by the late Robert Redfield to address his seminar with reference to the question, `What can one say of a man -any man?' My theme in reply was that at some points of his social existence every man will engage in acts of exchange .\"' In this remark there seems to echo the opening passages ofAdam Smith's Wealth of Nations, where it is said that the \"propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another . . . is common to all men.\" Those who are looking for an account of the human essence, and who have considered the options ranging from homo faber to homo ludens, may have overlooked an obvious candidate : homo mercator, man the trader. In fact Firth's point is not the same as Smith's . From the latter stemmed a tradition in modern political economy which judged the material output of \"savage\" societies according to an invidious criterion of economic rationality and found them wanting . Firth's work, on the other hand, is one ofthe most important contributions to the twentieth-century economic anthropology which has altered fundamentally our understanding ofearlier human cultures . This research exposed the fallacy of attempting to fit all human history into the conceptual mold of a market society . (Of course Marxism tried to do this as well, but less successfully, for it shared with its bourgeois opponents the need to find a linear logic in history .) The restricted scope of market exchanges in many primitive societies caused many earlier observers to misrepresent their socio-economic arrangements .

Domination, legitimation, and resistance : the incorporation of the nineteenth-century English working class

Abstract: This work uses the critical theory developed by Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas to analyze the English working class from 1750 to 1867, in particular its social protest activities.

Reinhold Niebuhr and Jacques Maritain on Marxism: A Comparison of Two Traditional Models of Practical Theology

Abstract: The renewal of practical theology in our time has been inspired to a great extent by a fresh consideration of the significance of Marxism. Various new proposals for practical theology-European "political theology" and Latin American liberation theology come to mind-have been based on the premise that Marxism provides an intellectual resource that will contribute much more than just a critical theory of social conflict. In fact, one observer, the esteemed archbishop of Recife, Brazil, Dom Helder Camara, has suggested that Karl Marx may be for our time what Aristotle was for the theologians of the thirteenth century. Consequently, urges Camara, theologians today should "do with Karl Marx what St. Thomas, in his day, did with Aristotle."' Dom Helder's enthusiasm is understandable. Marxism today looks different than it did a generation ago, thanks largely to the intellectual renewal of the Marxist tradition itself. On the other hand, the world looks different too. No longer can concerned intellectuals and theologians assume that "the system" is capable of even "rough justice." Thus, it is not surprising that Marxism should once again be taken seriously. As with many powerful and promising insights, the renewal of theological interest in Marxism is not without its problems. In reading some of the recent proposals for practical theology, one gets the impression that some theologians consider the current conversation with Marxism as something of an innovation. For example, Johannes Metz, one of the architects of the new European political theology, asserts that "political theology undertakes to confront critically a philosophical tradition which was too little considered in modern theology."2 Metz makes the charge specific: "Recent systematic theology (and Catholic theology chiefly where it broke out of the neo-Scholastic system) debated the transcendental philosophy of Kant, German Idealism and its successors in personalism and existentialism. But the

The Legacy of Political Economy: Thinking With and Against Claus Offe

Abstract: Recent statements by Pierre Trudeau have confirmed what many ofus have long suspected : the age of liberalism and its sensitivity to problems of power is over. I Notwithstanding widespread official chatter about \"de-controls\" and \"cutbacks\" and the renewed call for \"free markets\", we of the advanced capitalist world are witness to state activities unparalleled in their extent, sophistication, and intrusiveness in the market-place . Marx's exceptional comments on the \"huge state edifice\" of the France of his day \"a country where every mouse is under police administration\"z become universally applicable to our times . In light of these developments, the recent enthusiastic revival of interest in Marx's discussion of political economy and the state is long overdue . Yet this renewal (e.g. the Miliband-Poulantzas confrontation3) is a thoroughly ambiguous, even precarious development . This is because the promise that its real insights would condemn to obscurity the by-now stale political \"classics\" of the Marxist tradition,4 tends to go hand in hand with attempts at a more general theory of politics characterized by a \"retreat\" to Marxian formulations . Almost invariably, this textual regression is accompanied by lamentations about Marx's well-known failure to complete his foreshadowed fourth volume (of a more extensive, six-part treatises) on the state . Since Marx never effected this comprehensive, systematic theory of the capitalist state, it is said that the latter is now only possible on the basis of a reconstruction of various of his pieces de circonstance. For all their important disagreements, this is the shared point of departure of Poulantzas' early claim that Marx and Engels understood Bonapartism as the paradigmatic type of capitalist state,b Miliband's derivation ofthe theory ofthe \"relative autonomy\" of the capitalist state from a well-known Manifesto passage,? and Altvater's \"Kapital-logik\" analysis of \"the separation of Economy and Politics .\" 8 This \"return\" to Marx

Habermas' purge of pure theory: Critical theory without ontology?

Abstract: Reading J?rgen Habermas and his associates of the Frankfurt School of ide? ology critique more often than not leaves the impression that ontology is anath? ema to critical social theory. For ontology, in promoting a quietistic attitude of contemplation and mimesis in the face of a stable cosmic order, readily becomes a witting or unwitting ideological instrument for a politics of conservatism and ethics of conformity to the already given. But what if ontology took upon itself to describe the entire gamut of reality in the ways in which it is encountered and provokes us in our most concrete pursuits, so that the descriptive "is" of its givenness would eo ipso imply the prescriptive "ought" of immediate tasks? The world could then be interpreted as a direct invitation, if not to revolutionary ac? tivism, at least to rational change, thereby fulfilling the tacit ontological demand hidden in Marx's most familiar thesis on Feuerbach. The reciprocities involved here find a particularly telling formulation in the German: Die Welt ist uns nicht nur gegeben, sondern auch aufgegeben. Recent decades have witnessed a number of beginnings toward conceptualiz? ing such a task-structured reality as it presents itself to human endeavors. Hei? degger's explication of "the being for whom being is at issue" aims to elaborate the "perfect tense a priori," future as well as past, of the world in and through

Toward a Critical Theory of Revolution

Abstract: Social scientists and radical interpreters alike have viewed revolution mainly from an instrumental perspective as "an event caused" by applying certain techniques. Perhaps the clearest expression of this approach is embodied in Leninist thought. Drawing upon the critical philosophy of the early Marx, his prefigurative projection of the Paris Commune, the anarchist and council tradition within the communist movement, and Antonio Gramsci's writings, this article attempts to develop an alternative "prefigurative" theory of revolution as a continuing process of transformation. In elaborating the central intention of Critical Theory-abolition of all forms of class domination-the author bases his theoretical attempt on the categories of human needs, praxis, and participation.

Psycholanalysis, Evolution and the End of Metaphysics

Abstract: The end of metaphysics is the story which, in Freud's eyes, psychoanalysis brings to its conclusion . That story begins with the insights of Copernicus . But that beginning did not truly complete itself until the turn of our own century when, through psychoanalysis, science finally penetrated the sacrosanct domain of the self to provide a methodology of self-understanding for men living in a rationalized world . , In what follows, I explore the movement of mind that underlies Freud's theoretical self-understanding in order to see what was at stake at the moment when the metaphysical tradition lost all relevance to the understanding of life . For seen from the perspective of our contemporary situation, psychoanalysis appears as a last effort to articulate an integrative, determinate vision of man before the understanding of life dissolved into the existential morass we live in today . The key to Freud's vision, and to the place of his thought within Western speculation about man, can be stated simply: psychoanalysis realizes the end of metaphysics by elaborating the meaning of Darwinism for human selfunderstanding . By this I do not mean that Freud had such a project in mind as a formal program of thought . Rather, evolution was for Freud an indubitable reality . And psychoanalytic theory arose out of the genuine perplexities that surrounded the question of man in the light of the reality Darwin had disclosed . Still, psychoanalysis is no evolutionary anthropology, at least not in any conventional sense, for Freud does not approach the phenomenon of man from the methodological perspective of evolutionary biology . That is, he does not interrogate human evidences with a view to discovering the relative survival advantages, and thus the raison d'etre, of such distinctive features of homo sapiens as language, tool-fabrication and use, or the upright posture . Instead of the biological meaning of being human, psychoanalysis is concerned with the human meaning of being a biological entity, and with finding a way of making that meaning the basis of our self-understanding, both as individuals and as species-members . It is the question of meaning that sustains the speculative vitality of psychoanalytic theory, and forms its point of critical engagement with the metaphysical tradition.

Reification and Recollection: Emancipatory Intentions and the Sociology of Knowledge

Abstract: The sociology of knowledge is the spectre which haunts Marxism , or so it would seem from the amount of ink spilled in efforts to exorcise the demon. Beginning with the publication of Ideology and Utopia in 1929 Marxian critics have attempted time and again to indicate what precisely it is which distinguishes the study of ideology initiated by Mannheim from that proposed by Marx.2 At its worst the debate has shown the remarkable:: extent to which Marxism can remain non-problematic to itself, an exercise which has long since reached a type of scholastic perfection with Soviet Marxism. But, at its best, the presence of the sociology of knowledge has forced reflection on what constitutes the emancipatory intentions which Marxism claims to embody. By showing how such allegedly critical concepts as " ideology" and "class" could be appropriated into a nonMarxian frame of reference, the sociology of knowledge has forced its more acute Marxian aritics to define the:: emancipatory core of Marxism which remains unassimilated in Mannheim's project. This article proceeds from a basic sympathy towards the efforts of a few of the sociology of knowledge's critics: most specifically Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Yet a repetition of their position would be disloyal to the most important insights of their critique. Since the:: 1930s both the sociology of knowledge and society itself have altered. And the critical theory of sooety they proposed, which defined itself in opposition to Mannheim in its early years, has changed also, becoming more suspicious of its own premises, more:: critical of the emancipatory potential present even in the original Marxian program. Thus a reexamination of the sociology of knowledge cannot ignore recent efforts at reformulating the program of a sociology of knowledge, nor can the evaluation of Mannheim's work made in the 1930s by Horkheimer and Adorno be:: taken over without reexamination. The main thesis explored in this essay is that while the:: sociology of knowlc::dge, as Mannheim conceived it, manifested what could be:: termed a "practical" or even "emancipatory" intent, these intentions were projected in a way which could not be preserved in more modern versions of the:: theory.

Issues in Phenomenology and Critical Theory

Abstract: The essentially different orientations of phenomenology and critical theory have been so much debated in the history of modern thought that one has reason to wonder if there is any historical evidence for a debate at all. To be sure phenomenology and critical theory have been compared, even formally, in recent history with a view to making them at least similar in orientation, if not identical, in their mutual quests for philosophic truth.1 Equally, or at the same time, critical theorists in particular have attempted to make it emminently clear that there is no relation between phenomenology and critical theory, or if there is, it is a mere appearance.2 Others have argued that if there is a relationship it is a mere pseudo-relationship since those under the influence of phenomenology (later hermeneutics) and those influenced by critical theory (namely Habermas) are really in the same idealistic camp.3 Hence, anyone who enters into this quandry of positions and counter positions is to say the least confused by the rich offering from which to choose. My own reflections on the issue, reflections which were at one time under the influence of phenomenology and now are under the influence of social theory,4 have in some sense attempted to come to terms with these various and conflicting interpretations.