Showing papers on "Critical theory published in 1987"

Lifeworld and system : a critique of functionalist reason

Abstract: Part 5 The paradigm shift in Mead and Durkheim: from purposive activity to communicative action the foundations of social science in the theory of communication the authority of the sacred and the normative background of communicative action the rational structure of the linguistification of the sacred. Part 6 Intermediate reflections: system and lifeworld the concept of the lifeworld and the hermeneutic idealism of interpretive sociology the uncoupling of system and lifeworld. Part 7 Talcott Parsons: problems in constructing a theory of society from a normativistic theory of action to a systems theory of society the develpment of systems theory the theory of modernity. Part 8 Concluding reflections - from Parsons via Weber to Marx: a backward glance - Weber's theory of modernity Marx and the thesis of internal colonization the tasks of a critical theory of society.

Accounting systems in organisational contexts: A case for critical theory

Abstract: This paper starts from the view that accounting systems in organisational contexts are more than technical phenomena and that to understand and change these technical elements the social roots must also be both understood and changed. To develop these insights, it is argued, requires major changes in the methodologies we adopt. This paper is addressed to arguing a case for a methodological approach to further these purposes which is derived from a German philosophical school of thought called “critical theory” — more specifically from Jurgen Habermas' interpretation of this thinking which gives particular emphasis to the social and technical aspects of societal phenomena which includes accounting systems.

New philosophies of social science: Realism, hermeneutics, and critical theory

Abstract: Introduction - Philosophies of Social Science: the Old and the New - Realist Philosophies of Science - Realism and Social Science - Hermeneutics - Critical Theory - Realism and the Sociological Tradition - Action, Structure and Realist Philosophy - Index

Logics of Disintegration: Poststructuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory

Abstract: Over the last two decades, contemporary French philosophy has exercised a powerful influence on intellectual life, across both Europe and America. Post-structuralist strategies and concepts have played an important role in many forms of social, cultural and aesthetic analysis, particularly on the Left. Despite the widespread reception, however, there has still been comparatively little analysis of the basic philosophical assumptions of post-structuralism, or of the compatibility of many of its central tenets with the progressive political orientations with which it is frequently associated. In this book, Peter Dews seeks to remedy this situation by setting post-structuralist thought in relation to another, more explicitly critical, tradition in the philosophical analysis of modernity - that of the Frankfurt School, from Adorno to Habermas. "Logics of Disintegration" will be of interest to readers across a wide range of disciplines, from literary criticism to social theory, which have felt the impact of post-structuralism - and to anyone who wishes to reach a balanced assessment of one of the most influential intellectual currents of our time.

Critical Theory and the Inter-paradigm Debate

Abstract: International Relations as an academic discipline is at a major crossroads. Since it was first constituted as an academic discipline in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, International Relations has moved through a series of ‘debates’ with the result that in the course of its development, and as a consequence of these debates, International Relations theory has been undergoing constant change and modification. After moving through the debate between Idealism and Realism in the inter–war period, between Realism and Behaviouralism in the Great Debate of the 1960s, through to the complementary impact of Kuhn’s development of the idea of ‘paradigms’ and the post-Behavioural revolution of the early 1970s and on to the rise of International Political Economy and neo-Marxist, Structuralist dependency theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s, International Relations has arrived at a point that Banks has termed the ‘inter-paradigm debate’.1 The effect of this evolutionary process is contradictory. On the one hand, it makes the discipline exciting and alive because of the diversity of approaches, issues and questions within it, creating opportunities for research which would previously have been deemed to be outside the boundaries of the discipline. On the other hand, the lack of an agreed core to the subject has lead to confusion and a degree of intellectual insecurity.

Critical Theory and Public Life

Abstract: Jurgen Habermas's communications theory of society has excited widespread interest and the literature discussing and developing it has grown rapidly. The essays in this book explore the applied turn in contemporary critical theory by examining the research implications of Habermas's theory for the analysis of concrete problems of public life.Spanning the spectrum of the social sciences, they relate critical theory to issues in six major areas: industrial policy under advanced capitalism; education; the mass media and consumerism; public participation in planning; policy analysis; and critical historical studies. Although the essays emphasize applications of Habermas's critical theory to public issues, they seek to criticize and reformulate the theory as well.Habermas has contributed a chapter on modernity and post-modernity in architecture. Joining him with essays written especially for this book are Ben Agger, Timothy Luke and Stephen White, John O'Neill, Dieter Misgeld, Daniel C. Hallin, Peter Grahame, Ray Kemp, John Forester, Frank Fischer, and Trent Schroyer.John Forester is Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University. "Critical Theory and Public Life" is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

Social theory and archaeology

Abstract: Archaeological theory and method have recently become the subject of vigorous debate centred on the growing realization that archaeological theory is social theory and as such can be looked at by means of a wide variety of sociological frameworks, such as structuralism and post-structuralism, Marxism and critical theory. In this analysis, Shanks and Tilley argue against the functionalism and positivism which result from an inadequate assimilation of social theory into the day-to-day practice of archaeology. Aimed at an advanced undergraduate audience, the book presents a challenge to the traditional idea of the archaeologist as explorer or discoverer and the more recent emphasis on archaeology as behavioural science. The authors examine and evaluate the new possibilities for a self-reflexive, critical and political practice of archaeology, productively linking the past to the present.

Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity

Abstract: This book brings together leading figures in history, sociology, political science, feminism and critical theory to interpret, evaluate, criticize and update Weber's legacy. In a collection of specially commissioned pieces and translated articles the Weberian scholarship recognizes Max Weber as the figure central to contemporary debates on the need for societal rationality, the limits of reason and the place of culture and conduct in the supposedly post-religious age. In Part 1, Wolfgang Mommsen, Wilhelm Hennis, Guenther Roth and Wolfgang Schluchter provide a full and varied account of the theme of rationalization in the world civilizations. In Part 2 Pierre Bourdieu and Barry Hindess critically examine Weber's social action model, and Johannes Weiss and Martin Albrow address the putative 'crisis' of Western rationality. In Part 3 Jeffrey Alexander, Ralph Schroeder, Bryan Turner, Roslyn Bologh and Sam Whimster scrutinize Weber's understanding of modernity with its characteristic plurality of 'gods and demons'; they focus on its implications for individuality and personality, the body and sexuality, feminism and aesthetic modernism. Part 4 turns to politics, law and the state in the contemporary world: Colin Gordon on liberalism, Luciano Cavalli on charismatic politics, Stephen Turner and Regis Factor on decisionism and power and Scott Lash on modernism, substantice rationality and law. First published in 1987

Writing Critical Ethnographic Narratives

Abstract: This article assumes that educational anthropologists are interested in critical theory, or what Marcus and Fischer have recently called “a renewal of the critical function of anthropology as it is pursued in ethnographic projects at home” (1986:112), because critical theory argues that social institutions, such as schools, are sites of cultural hegemony. In other words, I am presuming that educational anthropologists, like many other academics, are interested in grounding their research in a theory of social construction because they wish not only to describe and analyze social practices, but to interrupt those social practices they believe oppress certain designated classes inside educational institutions, namely students, teachers, minorities, and women. Hence, whether one's interest in cultural criticism derives from the work of the founding members of the Frankfurt School or from that of educational revisionists, such as Friere's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1973), Bowles and Gintis's Schooling in Capitalist America (1976), Bourdieu and Passeron's Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (1977), Apple and Weiss's Ideology and Practice in Schooling (1983), and Giroux's Theory and Resistance in Education (1983), to name only a few, the goal of critical ethnography is always the same: to help create the possibility of transforming such institutions as schools—through a process of negative critique. NEGATIVE CRITIQUE, ETHNOGRAPHIC NARRATIVE, CULTURAL HEGEMONY, WRITING

Feminist Literary Criticism

Abstract: Looks at the work of a range of critics, including Elaine Showalter, Kate Millett, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and the French feminists. The critical approaches encompass Marxist feminism and contemporary critical theory as well as other forms of discourse. It also provides an overview of the developments in feminist literary theory, and covers all the major debates within literary feminism, including "male feminism".

Discursive Designs: Critical Theory and Political Institutions*

Abstract: Critical theory faces frequent charges of excessive abstraction, aridity, and political irrelevance. This paper seeks to counter such claims by developing a critical theory program for political organization, linking social theory, epistemology, and institutions. The elements demanded of such a program are identified through reference to the moves successfully accomplished in similar pursuit by critical theory's more established and accepted competitor, Popperian critical rationalism. A comparison of the capabilities of the practices and institutions inspired by the two programs adds further weight to critical theory's claims.

Domination and power

Abstract: Peter Miller compares the writings of the principal exponents of critical theory - Max Horkeimer, Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas - with those of Michel Foucault.

Teachers as Political Actors: From Reproductive Theory to the Crisis of Schooling

Abstract: Critical theories of education, in focusing on the social reproductive function of school systems, often fail to emphasize the potential of teachers as agents of educational and social change. Dennis Carlson criticizes this tendency as he reviews and analyzes the treatment of teachers in influential forms of critical theory. In laying the basis for a view of teachers as an important force for transformative change in the schools, the author also reviews the historical development of teachers' professional and trade-union movements, locating them in a general analysis of U.S. work culture. He argues that since teachers are victims of the current system of public education, their collective interests as workers are more compatible with transformative than with merely reformist change.

Radical-Critical Theories

Abstract: The goal of this chapter is to explicate a perspective termed radical-critical theory that questions the most fundamental assumptions of traditional family sociology. Basically, radical critics claim that family sociology, one of the oldest areas in the discipline, reflects its subject matter (rather than explaining it) and, as a consequence, constructs a deeply conservative sociological approach that limits its contribution to sociology and serves to justify the status quo in society.1

Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory.

Abstract: This important study of the relationship between historical developments and the work of the scholars associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research yields fascinating insights into the actual workings of the Institute and the relationships among its members. The book has already had a major impact in Germany, where it has opened up the subject for argument and analysis by a new generation of scholars.Theory and Politics first explores the effect of political experience on the process of theory construction from 1930 to 1945. The central figure in this examination is Max Horkheimer, whose work is seen as the key to the shift in the Frankfurt School's focus from materialism to Critical Theory to a "critique of instrumental reason." Within each of the three periods defined by these foci the author examines external historical-political events (including the School's emigration to America) and their reflection in the group's changing conception of the relation of theory to practice as well as in its detailed theoretical position. Along the way he helps to clarify such questions as the Schools's evolving attitudes toward the Soviet Union, fascism, science, and the desired utopia.The book then examines what may have been the strongest stage of Critical Theory - the program for interdisciplinary research that emerged in the early 1930s. The author acutely portrays Horkheimer's conception of a synthesis between philosophy and empirical social science that would result in a form of social research relevant to the central problems of the day.As Martin Jay notes in his foreword, Helmut Dubiel has become not only an analyst of Critical Theory but a gifted contributor to its ongoing reception and development. He is currently a research fellow at the University of Frankfurt. Theory and Politics is included in the series, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

Critical Theory and the Dialectic of Rationalism

Abstract: ion, the tool of enlightenment, treats its objects as it did fate, the notion of which it rejects: it liquidates them .... The distance between subject and object, a presupposition of abstraction, is grounded in the distance from the thing itself which the master achieved through the mastered .... The universality of ideas as developed by discursive logic, domination 40. Cf. Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin ofNegative Dialectics (New York, 1977). 41. Cf. Benjamin, Illuminations 254 ff. I have explored the relationship between the philosophies of history ofBenjamin and the authors ofDialecticofEnlightenment in my study WalterBenjamin: An Aesthetic ofRedemption (New York, 1982) 266 ff. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.144 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 05:29:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 48 Dialectic ofRationality in the conceptual sphere, is raised up on the basis of actual domination. The dissolution of the magical heritage, of the old diffuse ideas, by conceptual unity, expresses the hierarchical constitution of life determined by those who are free. The individuality that learned order and subordination in the subjection of the world, soon wholly equated truth with the regulative thought without whose fixed distinctions universal truth cannot exist.42 The explanation for the emergence of rational thought offered here is a thoroughly disenchanted one. Its motives point in the direction of a radicalized ideology-critique that seems to draw more on pragmatist insights and a genealogical focus of Nietzschean inspiration than the Marxist tradition with which critical theory was earlier associated. The utopian potentials of the rational concept could emerge only with great difficulty from this perspective. Instead, the faculty of rational thought would appear to have more determinate links with the history of domination over human and non-human nature than with prospects for emancipation. Whereas Horkheimer seemed for the most part to retain this negative historico-philosophical orientation in his later work, he never attempted to work out fully the epistemological implications of the critique of reason in Dialectic ofEnlightenment. Instead, this task was left to Adorno, who, one might say, executed it with a vengeance in Negative Dialectics, where it seems that the most essential function that conceptual thought could assume at present would be to reflect on its own inadequacies. As Adorno remarks: Reflection upon its own meaning is the way out of the concept's seeming being-in-itself as a unit of meaning .... Disenchantment of the concept is the antidote of philosophy. It keeps it from growing rampant and becoming an absolute unto itself.4s If the preceding reconstruction of the development of critical theory is correct, then its own internal ambivalences concerning the history of Western rationalism would have to be taken into consideration to a much greater extent than it has been in the secondary literature heretofore. One possible way out of this dilemma would seem to be to 42. Horkheimerand Adorno, DialecticofEnlightenment 13-14. 43. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (NewYork, 1973) 12-13. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.144 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 05:29:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

8. The Tasks of a Critical Theory of Society

Abstract: The confrontation with the tradition through the critique of ideology could aim at the truth content of philosophical concepts and problems, at appropriating their systematic content, only because critique was guided by theoretical assumptions. At that time critical theory was still based on the Marxist philosophy of history, that is, on the conviction that the forces of production were developing on objectively explosive power. Critical theory could secure its normative foundations only in a philosophy of history. But this foundation was not able to support an empirical research program. The basic concepts of critical theory placed the consciousness of individuals directly vis-a-vis economic and administrative mechanisms of integration, which were only extended inward, intrapsychically. A capitalist path of modernization opens up as soon as the economic system develops its own intrinsic dynamic of growth and, with its endogenously produced problems, takes the lead, that is, the evolutionary primacy, for society as a whole.

Reflective Minds/Intentional Hearts: Joining Humanistic Education and Critical Theory for Liberating Education.

Abstract: This paper proposes an integration of critical theory and humanistic education. Strengths and limitations of each are discussed, and a model for liberatory education is proposed that incorporates t...

When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle of Economy

Abstract: Continuity, sovereignty, intimacy, immanent immensity: a single thought in the work of Bataille, a single mythic thought behind these multiple terms: \"Iam of those who destine men to things other than the incessant growth of production, who incite them to the sacred horror.\" The sacred is par excellence the sphere of \"La part maudite\" [the accursed share] (the central essay of this seventh volume of Bataille's works), sphere of sacrificial expenditure, of wealth [luxe] and of death; sphere of a \"general\" economywhich refutes all the axioms ofeconomy as it is usually understood (an economy which, in generalizing itself, overruns [brtlle] its boundaries and truly passes beyond political economy, something that the latter, and all Marxist thought, are powerless to do in accordance with the internal logic ofvalue). It is also the sphere of non-knowledge [non-savoir] . Paradoxically, the works collected here are in a way Bataille's \"Book of Knowledge,\" the onewherehe tries to erect the buttresses ofa visionwhich, at bottom, doesn't need them; indeed, the drive [pulsion] toward the sacred ought, in its destructive incandescence, to deny the kind of apology and discursive rendition contained in \"La Part maudite\" and \"La Theorie de Religion .\" \"Myphilosophicposition is basedon non-knowledge ofthe whole, on knowledge concered only with details.\" It is necessary, therefore, to read these defensive fragments from thetwo antithetical perspectives [sur le double versant] ofknowledge and non-knowledge.

Critical theory and educational administration

Abstract: Among recent criticisms levelled against traditional administrative theory those raised by adherents to the Critical Theory perspective have gained considerable influence. This paper examines their claim that Habermasian Critical Theory in particular is in a better position to solve the theoretical and practical problems of educational administration. The focal points of discussion are Habermas's fundamental categories of “interests” and the “ideal speech situation” since their theoretical coherence is a minimum requirement for the theory's validity and practical applicability. It is concluded that Critical Theory, while being the most ambitious attempt to date to provide a new, post‐positivist framework for social and administrative studies, has insufficient epistemological resources to justify its claims. As a result, the theory is driven to rational a prioris which deprive it of empirical content and relevance. Since Critical Theory claims to have reunited theory with practice, lack of empirical content would seem to disqualify the claim and render questionable the theory's value for educational administration.

Critical Encounters: Between Philosophy and Politics

Abstract: Critical Encounters, a study of contemporary philosophy and political and social theory, inserts itself into ongoing conversation at the junctures of philosophy and political thought, and modernity and post-modernism. Through dialogue and critique Fred R. Dallmayr seeks to find a viable path for political theory in the midst of contemporary discussions in philosophy and the social sciences, shadowed by twentieth-century phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory, structuralism, pragmatism, and deconstruction.

Foucault's Disappearing Body

Abstract: The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated Self (adopting the illusion of substantial unity), and a volume in disintegration . Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history's destruction of the body.'

Epistemology and Exchange: Marx, Nietzsche, and Critical Theory

Abstract: Jurgen Habermas argues that critical theorists' analyses ofthe dialectic of enlightenment contain a performative contradiction. By identifying reason with repression, they undermine the foundations of their own critique.' Habermas traces this performative contradiction to Friedrich Nietzsche's influence upon critical theory, but a significant gap appears in his analysis of it.2 Habermas argues that Adorno, by associating identity with exchange, extends Marx's critique of political economy to instrumental reason. He also maintains that Adorno adopts this Marxian critique too hastily, neglecting its instrumental biases. Yet