Showing papers on "Critical theory published in 1983"

Critical Heuristics of Social Planning: A New Approach to Practical Philosophy

Abstract: CONTEMPORARY MODELS OF RATIONAL DISCOURSE. Karl R. Popper's Critical Rationalism: Blind Criticism? Jurgen Habermas' Critical Theory: Toward a Transformed Transcendental Approach. FROM KANTIAN A PRIORI SCIENCE TO CRITICAL HEURISTICS. Introduction to Kantian A Priori Science. Kantian A Priori Science and the Systems Idea: The Critically-Heuristic Turn. Kantian A Priori Science and the Process of Unfolding: The Dialectical Turn. APPLICATION. Toward a "Purposeful Systems" Paradigm of Planning. Project Cybersyn: The Chilean Experience with Cybernetics, 1971-73. Health Systems Planning: The Case of the 1976 Areawide Health Systems Plan for Central Puget Sound. Epilogue. Bibliography. Indexes.

Foucault, Marxism, and critique

Abstract: In this work, originally released in 1983, Barry Smart examines the relevance of Foucault's work for developing an understanding of those issues which lie beyond the limits of Marxist theory and analysis - issues such as 'individualising' forms of power, power-knowledge relations, the rise of 'the social', and the associated socialisation of politics. He argues that there exist clear and substantial differences between Foucault's genealogical analysis and that of Marxist theory. Smart thus presents Foucault's work as a new form of critical theory, whose object is a critical analysis of rationalities, and of how relations of power are rationalised.

Toward a Critical Theory of Sport

Abstract: A single, dominant ideology informs both bourgeois and socialist theories of contemporary sport. The gist of this ideology, I argue, is that sport is essentially an instrument of the social order whose central function is to further the economic and political interests of the various nation-states. I restrict my critical attention here to the New Left's perpetuation of this reductionist ideology. My intent in doing so, however, is not to discredit Neo-Marxist sport theory. On the contrary, what I attempt to show is that the New Left's recent advocacy of this ideology vitiates the major tenets of Neo-Marxist thought. My criticism is geared, then, to a resuscitation of the genuine critical thread underlying Neo-Marxist theory. I thus conclude that Neo-Marxist theory, free of ideological distortions, represents one of the most promising critical approaches to understanding the complexities and subtleties of modern sport.

Emancipatory Social Science and Social Critique

Abstract: Developing as a systematic alternative to positivistically oriented social science, critical theory emerged from the work of the Frankfurt school in the between-wars period and was continued by them during the Second World War, principally in the United States. Under some of its original leadership, the Frankfurt school was reinstated in Frankfurt in the postwar years and continued the development of critical theory there. This work, in turn, has been continued and indeed radically transformed by Jurgen Habermas. Utilizing and synthesizing a considerable array of contemporary developments in social science and philosophy, we have in Habermas’s work a subtle and developed, as well as developing, concept of an emancipatory social science. I shall elucidate it, critique it, build on it, and show some of its implications for policymaking.

Kant and the Transcendental Object: A Hermeneutic Study

Abstract: This book is an attempt to conduct a comprehensive examination of Kant's metaphysic of Transcendental Idealism, which is everywhere presupposed by his critical theory of knowledge, his theory of the moral and the aesthetic judgement, and his rational approach to religion. It will attempt to show that this metaphysic is profoundly coherent, despite frequent inconsistencies of expression, and that it throws an indispensable light on his critical enquiries. Kant conceives of knowledge in especially narrow terms, and there is nothing absurd in the view that thinkables must, in his sense, extend far more widely than knowables. Kant also goes further than most who have thought in his fashion in holding that, not only the qualities of the senses, but also the space and time in which we place them, have non-sensuous, non-spatial, and non-temporal foundations in relations among thinkables that transcend empirical knowledge. This contention also reposes on important arguments, and can be given a sense that will render it interesting and consistent. The book explores this sense, and connects it with the thought of Kant's immediate predecessors in the great German scholastic movement that began with Leibniz: this scholasticism, it will be held, is throughout preserved as the unspoken background of Kant's critical developments, whose great innovation really consisted in pushing it out of the region of the knowable, into the region of what is permissively or, in some cases, obligatorily, thinkable.

The Crisis of Canadian Political Economy: Dependency Theory Versus The New Orthodoxy

Abstract: Canadian political economy is in danger of losing the vitality, originality and critical spirit of inquiry which was much in evidence during the seventies . , This is the result of two unhappy developments, leading away from heterodoxy to orthodoxy . First, an important number of political economists are no longer interested in addressing the issues and concerns identified with liberal political economy. On the left, there is a widely held belief that liberal and Marxist traditions of political economy are incompatible and that it is necessary to purify Canadian political economy of original sin, its liberal origins and the \"heretical\" views of Innis and the Innis tradition, on the grounds that Innis wasn't a Marxist and the questions he addressed are largely unimportant .2 The second danger rises from a misplaced idealization of Marxism a naive belief in Marxism as a science a tout faire . Here I am going to suggest that much of the current debate in political economy is unproductive and misdirected because Marxism is treated as a dogma to be defended rather than as a methodology and a mode of inquiry in constant flux and need of restatement and refinement . In Canada, Marxism encounters particular problems and it is no exaggeration to say that the Marxist paradigm, as it has been applied by many Canadian political economists, has not proven as fruitful as in other contexts . At the very least, Marxism as a mode of analysis has to be reformulated to allow for the particular nature of the semiperipheral social and economic formation here as well as in other cases such as Australia and New Zealand . This is the essence of my reflection . In the first part, I am going to defend not Innis but Innisian-based Marxism as it relates to the current debate on Canadian capitalist development. In second part, I am going to argue the importance of maintaining an open paradigm in political economy. What is happening in Canadian political economy? Canadian political economy is being torn by diverging tendencies . Ray Morrow's provocative and thorough analysis warns that Canadian political economy cannot afford to ignore the importanttheoretical work being done elsewhere on the relationship between culture and economics.3 But from another perspective a different danger is imminent . The Canadian political economy paradigm is in the process of closing . The current debates, which surface in the special issue of Studies in Political Economy entitled \"Rethinking Canadian Political Economy\", reveal a series of limitations which must be confronted4 : . the disastrously oversimplified belief in \"class analysis\" ;

Critical theory and schooling: implications for the development of a radical pedagogy

Abstract: (1983). CRITICAL THEORY AND SCHOOLING: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF A RADICAL PEDAGOGY. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education: Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 1-21.

The contemporary rhetoric of the social theories of law

Abstract: Traditionally, law and justice have been conceived in a cognitive or formal mode, but in today's society the legitimacy of law must be based on its immanence: Does it address and make sense to the everyday concerns of citizens? This essay argues for a critical theory of justice based on the communicative competence of the community.

Concepts of Ideology in Marx

Abstract: There is surprising agreement concerning the significance of Marx's theory of ideology, inasmuch as it is generally regarded as one of his major contributions both to a general social theory and to philosophy . Through the introduction of this theory, Marx is said to have seriously contributed to a fundamental reorientation-an historically and socially oriented \"turn\"-in the treatment of problems concerning human knowledge and cognition. This agreement about the historical importance of the theory nevertheless goes hand in hand with an almost complete disagreement about the content of these significant views. Both Marxist and non-Marxist interpretations of the Marxian concept of ideology seem to disagree about even the most elementary questions concerning its meaning. Does the notion of ideology carry a negative-pejorative emphasis, or is it in this respect value-neutral and therefore capable of being applied to Marx's own theory, which could in turn be characterised (at least in its intentions) as a \"scientific ideology\"? Does science, including the natural sciences, represent the principal opposite of ideology, or is it just one of the forms of its manifestations? Is the theory of ideology essentially a genetic one, dealing above all with problems concerning the historical origin of ideas regarded as effects of other causes? Or is it a functional theory that basically deals with problems related to the effects which ideas and their systems-treated as relatively independent causes-can and do have in other areas of socially significant behaviour? To all these, certainly very basic, questions one can find widely differing, even diametrically opposed, answers. The situation becomes even more paradoxical if one turns from the secondary interpretative literature toward those perhaps more significant writings which attempt to continue the tradition initiated by the Marxian conception of ideology. On the one hand, it seems unclear how these theories can appeal to a common ancestry at all, since they deal with quite divergent, almost unrelated topics ., In the so-called concept of \"ideological state apparatuses\"developed in structuralist Marxism by Althusser, for instance, the term \"ideology\" refers essentially to the functioning of such institutions as the family, the school system, the Church, and the mass media. In the works of Marxists such as Lukacs or Lucien Goldmann, however, ideology almost exclusively denotes the paradigmatic products of high culture-great philosophical systems, exemplary works of art, the historically most significant social and economic theories, and so on . On the other hand, and despite the radically divergent problematics they deal

Ernst Bloch: 'Ideology' and Postmodern Social Philosophy

Abstract: The work of the German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) on 'ideology' has still not been adequately assimilated. In this essay I draw attention to Bloch's work on 'ideology' (part one) and highlight its wider implications (part two), while in part three I subject it to criticism . I then turn, in part four, to the significance of Bloch's theoryof 'ideology' for postmodern social philosophy .

The dialectic of desire - The Holocaust, monopoly capitalism and radical anamnesis

Abstract: tempt a version of psychohistory. While that might be fruitful it would be too much a device of bourgeois historiography: I am interested in the particular past, including intellectual biography, only as it might illuminate larger dialectical trends in social structure and open what few emancipatory avenues remain. Of course the Frankfurt theorists as Jews acutely felt their own estrangement from the dom? inant German social order that threatened their mortal existence (Walter Benjamin com? mitted suicide just before he thought he was to be caught by the fascists.) But it is insuffi? cient to reduce their revision of Marxism to this biographical contingency. Instead their identity as outsiders and potential victims was not simply a cause of their subsequent critical theory but a moment within the complex totality of biography and history that allowed them to see the unfolding social world in a new and innovative way. Their own estrange ment as left-wing Jewish intellectuals was for them an example of universal estrangement, which they understood in Marxist terms. But rather than viewing their cultural formation as a reflex of their own class-position, their self-understanding as Marxist Jews became a mode of theoretical articulation in a world gone mad [ 1 ]. It is that mode of articulation which I want to bring to bear here as I discuss the Holocaust and the subsequent evolution of capitalism. The Frankfurt theorists even in the 1930s recognized in almost singular prescience that the perverse horrors of embryonic German fascism would not be erased by an Allied victory, seemingly the triumph of western reason over Aryan myth [2]. Rather they sug? gested that there is a dialectic of victor and vanquished whereby, in Hegelian terms, the essential nature of the vanquished is aufge? hoben negated, preserved, transcended by the victor. In this sense they offered a profound analysis of anti-Semitism that did not exaggerate its historical specificity but rather viewed it as a stage in the development of what Adorno was later to call "totally ad? ministered" society. The eradication of Jewish "otherness" by the fascists presaged the attempt to eradicate all deviant otherness in post-World War II capitalism. Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin and Marcuse wrote a Judaic Marxism that, first, allows us to understand the Holocaust as a stage in the development of Ben Agger is Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

The “theory-praxis nexus” in Marcuse's critical theory

Abstract: Writers who deal with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School inevitably present the central problem as the attempt (generally seen as unsuccessful) to relate "theory" and "prax? is." Elaboration on their concept of theory critical as opposed to "traditional" theory is usually straightforward given the fact that the Frankfurt theorists themselves were relatively clear in their definition. The difficulty with such discussions, however, is that they usually fail to deal with the ambiguous concept of praxis. In this context, I wish to deal with the "theory-praxis nexus" by emphasizing that there are at least two levels of meaning for the term "praxis" operating in the writings of the Frankfurt School and its critics: (1) praxis as revolutionary organization and activity; and (2) praxis as an anthropological/ontological con? ception of human potentiality. This is certainly no new or startling insight to those familiar with critical theory. Nevertheless, this crucial distinction is often neglected by those who write of the attempt, or failure, of the Frank? furt School to "unite theory and practice." Of the "first generation" Frankfurt theorists, it was Herbert Marcuse who was most consistent? ly concerned with developing a theory of prax? is in both of the above senses. Thus, I will focus primarily on Marcuse's work in this area below, noting the implications for the political project of critical theory.

Dialectical materialism and political theology: Two views of the future

Abstract: In a wide variety of publications,1 Johannes B. Metz programatically represented a new political theology of subject, society, history, and future. This theology participates intensely in the lively, ongoing discourse on the political and theological actuality and significance of the critical theory of society, religion and future set forth by the Marxist, Walter Benjamin.2 The purpose of this study is to illuminate several connections between Benjamin's critical theory and Metz's political theology, particularly with respect to the present stage of development in advanced capitalistic society and to their future.

Ideology, Culture and Personality

Abstract: A significant problem concerning the category of \"ideology\" becomes apparent when we ask questions about the kind of entity to which it is applicable.' Surely the answer is self-evident . It must be the person or human subject, the individual mind or consciousness, revealed to us in language and conduct. Persons are the victims of ideological obfuscations ; only they utilise ideologies as a means to further their class interests . Ultimately, whatever the determining role of economic conditions and class interest, ideology \"works\" only when it penetrates and forms individual experience and consciousness.

Social Criticism and Critical Theory: A Comment on Axel Van Den Berg

Abstract: Horkheimer, Max. 1947. Eclipse of Reason. New York: Oxford University Press. . 1972. Critical Theory: Selected Essays. Translated by Matthew J. O'Connell et al. New York: Herder & Herder. Jameson, Fredric. 1971. Marxism and Form. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Wallisch-Prinz, Baerbel. 1981. \"Critical Reason or Rational Criticism? The Dispute over Neopositivistic Methodology ('Positivismusstreit').\" Psychology and Social Theory, no. 1, pp. 6-11. Whyte, William F. 1981. Preliminary program, 76th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Washington, D.C.

Between Fontane and Tucholsky: Literary Criticism and the Public Sphere in Imperial Germany

Abstract: Contents: Critical Theory and Literary Criticism - Nineteenth-Century Liberalism and the Wilhelmine Press, Karl Frenzel, Paul Lindau, and Feuilletonism - Fontane's Criticism and its Reception - Critical Theory in the Kritische Waffengaenge - Literary Criticism in Naturalism - Otto Brahm, Alfred Kerr - Subjectivity and Political Criticism.

An Immodest Proposal: From Critical Theory to Critical Practice for School Renewal.

Abstract: AUTHOR Oakes, Jeannie; Sixotnik, Kenneth.A. TITLE . An Immodest Proposal: From CritioalfTheory to Critical Practice for School Renewal. INSTITUTION ealifornia Univ., Los Angeles. Center for the Study of Evaluation. California Univ:, Los Angeles. Lab. in School and Community Education. SPOVS AGENCY Mott (C.S.) FoAdation, Flint, Mich.; National Inst. of Education (ED), Washington, DC. PUB DATE 83 GRANT NIE-G-80-0012-P3 NOTE 52p. PUB TYPE Vi,ewpoints (120) 1

Transvaluation sociology: nietzsche as critical theorist

Abstract: INTRODUCTION An analysis of Nietzsche promises to illuminate some of the central concerns of critical theory. Questions of the role of reason in society, the relation between values and knowledge, and the effects of Western civilization on humanity occupy places of prominence for both Nietzsche and the Frankfurt $chool. Examination of the Nietzschean roots of critical theory is worthwhile as intellectual history. The value of such an exercise 'is increased if it can be used to reformulate productively the critical vision of society. This reformulation is not predicated on the assumption that Nietzsche is the primordial critical theorist, but uses Nietzschean thought to address the central concerns of critical theory.