Critical theory

About: Critical theory is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5372 publications have been published within this topic receiving 164765 citations.

From the culture industry to the society of the spectacle: Critical theory and the situationist international

Abstract: Since Karl Marx fashioned his theory of capitalism in the nineteenth century, scholars have continually updated Marxian theory to capture the pervasiveness of commodity relations in modern society. Influenced by Georg Lukacs and Henri Lefebvre, the members of the French avant-guard group, the Situationist International (1957–1972), developed an intransigent critique of consumer capitalism based on the concept of the spectacle. In the spectacle, media and consumer society replace lived experience, the passive gaze of images supplants active social participation, and new forms of alienation induce social atomization at a more abstract level than in previous societies. We endeavor to make two theoretical contributions: First, we highlight the contributions of the Situationist International, pointing out how they revised the Marxian categories of alienation, commodification, and reification in order to analyze the dynamics of twentieth century capitalism and to give these concepts new explanatory power. Second, we build a critical theory of consumer capitalism that incorporates the theoretical assumptions and arguments of the Situationists and the Frankfurt School. Today, critical theory can make an important contribution to sociology by critically examining the plurality of spectacles and their reifying manifestations. In addition, critical theorists can explore how different spectacles connect to one another, how they connect to different social institutions, and how spectacles express contradictions and conflicting meanings. A critical theory of spectacle and consumption can disclose both novelties and discontinuities in the current period, as well as continuities in the development of globalized consumer capitalism.

Habermas and education: knowledge, communication, discourse

Abstract: In this article, the author examines the inherent potential of the critical social theory suggested by the Institute for Social Research (the so-called ‘Frankfurt School’) as a means of conceptualising the problems of education at the present time. In particular, the author concentrates on the work of critical theory's most important contemporary exponent, Jurgen Habermas, with particular regard to ideas of knowledge and of the importance of linguistic communication as a means to reach agreement on significant issues, such as education, through informed discourse in a revitalised sphere of public debate. Such a progression from absolute knowledge by way of communication to political will-formation seems to the author to indicate the means by which critical theory may become praxis.

The peripheral core of law and criminology: On postmodern social theory and conceptual integration

Abstract: Despite significant challenges to some of the ideological underpinnings of the postmodern critique, critical theory building in law and criminology increasingly is subjected to the wholesale advances of this growing, albeit heterodox, school of thought. One greatly underexamined component of postmodern research is a provisional treatment of how its various formulations might suggest alternative approaches to understanding criminal justicians, their research, and their practice. Accordingly this essay assesses core themes (both sociological and epistemological) informing the regard of this perspective for theory construction in law and criminology. Several topics are considered: the social structure of society, role formation, human agency, discourse construction, knowledge or sense making, and social change. Building on Milovanovic's conceptual distinctions between the modernist and the postmodernist projects, the author concludes by speculating on what a model of postmodern conceptual synthesis might enc...