Conceptualizing Politics

4.   Critical  Theory
What we are going to talk about in this section is one of the paths followed by the 
thinkers who do not recognise the primacy or the legitimacy of ideal theory and 
also try to escape the frontal opposition realism-idealism. ‘Critical Theory’ com-
prises a thick and precise, as well as a thin and vague version. In the first one, it was 
institutionalised in the Institut für Sozialforschung, established by mostly Jewish 
academics of Marxist orientation in 1923 at the University of Frankfurt am Main, 
where it is still active; it was renamed as the Institute of Social Research during the 
Nazi years, in which the Institute was hosted by Columbia University in New York 
City. The leading figure of this interdisciplinary group was Max Horkheimer, who 
in the 1930s defined the idea of ‘critical theory’ in opposition to the traditional 
one and redefined philosophical materialism; he was supported by the economist 
Friedrich Pollock and later by Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Leo Löwen-
thal and others. ‘Critical theory of society’ was the heading they used for their own 

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196  Ethics and politics
view,
15
 while the more popular label ‘the Frankfurt School’ came up much later 
and was never endorsed by the founders – although being embedded in the lib-
eral spirit of the city of Frankfurt am Main was an aspect of the group’s identity.
16
 
Horkheimer and Adorno wrote around 1944 the already mentioned Dialektik der 
Aufklärung/Dialectics of Enlightenment, the major philosophical foundation of Criti-
cal Theory. From the 1960s onwards, the leading figure has been Jürgen Habermas. 
Endorsing Critical Theory in the thinner sense, often without connecting it to the 
founding period, means acknowledging his thought as defining. In a still thinner 
sense, ‘critical’ has become a fairly fuzzy adjective, applied to whatever is or pre-
tends to be against the mainstream in philosophy or politics or literary criticism; 
this attitude has thus become itself a part of the mainstream on the market of ideas.
The old Critical Theory has been relevant to social movements, being a large