A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CRITICAL SCHOOL: GOALS AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO DATE Richard Weiner University of North Florida April, 1979 No. Distributed as part of the Red Feather Institute Transforming Sociology Series. The Red Feather Institute, 8085 Essex, Weidman, Michigan, 48893. A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CRITICAL SCHOOL: GOALS AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO DATE This essay attempts to provide a historical overview,of the approach referred to as the "critical theory of society." it is an approach associated with two generations of the Frankfurt School whose contributions we shall review: 1) the founding generation of Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Pollock, Kirchheimer, and Marcuse, and 2) a post-World War Ii generation of Habermas, Schmidt, Apel, Neat, Offe, and Wellmer. These two generations of contributions have relentlessly pursued a historical critique of societal constraints for the purpose of revealing objective possibilities of human development. An inherently practical interest orients such a critical school--that of fostering the type of self-consciousness and understanding of existing social and political conditions that would, in the words of Max Horkheimer (1972:210), enable us all "to transcend the tension and to abolish the opposition between the individual's purposefulness, spontaneity, and rationality, and those work-process relationships on which society is built." The critical school perceives a fundamental internal conflict in each of us "until this opposition is removed"; and looks to the time when humankind will be a conscious subject that actively determines its own way of life" (Ibid). Critical thinking, Horkheimer continues (Ibid: 206-207), is "a human activity which has society itself for its object. The aim of this activity is not simply to eliminate one or another abuse, for it regards such abuses as necessarily connected with the way in which the social structure is organized." For Hork- heimer, a "critical theory of society" attempts to penetrate the false conceptions that people have of their willfulness and freedom, and to divulge these ideas and beliefs as "ideological mystifications and forms of false consciousness that distort the meaning of existing social conditions" (Bernstein, 1976:182). The piercing of ideological veils (Ideologiekritik) envisioned by Horkheimer derives from the philosophical tradition of the critique of appearances and emphasizes a commitment to oppositional thinking. At the same time, critical theory is grounded in Hegelian-Marxian notions of "potential truth" and embedded in the data of economic existence. The validity claims of a particular society are detailed and confronted with what is: legitimations are confronted with objective socioeconomic practices. No rationales are accepted unreflectively as the basis of truth within a society. The critical reflections of two generations of the Frankfurt School are primarily concerned with relating the object of knowledge to the constitutive practices of the active subject within a historical context. They go beyond the language of convention and seek to trace back all "mediations" (e.g., meanings, values, institutions) to the human actions that constitute them. It is only from the perspective of critique that self- reflection, of knowledge is understood: 1) to become aware of its own interests, and 2) to recognize the context of its own self- constitution as well as its own role as a moment in the dialectical movement and transcendence of some historically constituted "self," i.e., some historically constituted collective identity. The critical school seeks to bring a theoretical understanding of the contradictions implicit in material existence and its legitimations to the full self- consciousness of the exploited. Such understanding when appropriated by a class consciousness acting "for itself," is seen as constitutive of the very collective action necessary to transform society. And thus a true unity of theory and revolutionary praxis is to be attained. Horkheimer (1972:215) emphasizes that the critical theorist is not content to take a merely negative stance toward existing social conditions. (The) theoretician and his specific object are seen as forming a dynamic unity with the oppressed class, so that the presentation of societal contradictions is not merely an expression of the concrete historical situation but also a force within it to stimulate change. Critical theory emerges as an alternative paradigm to challenge the claims of positivism in the social sciences. Traditional positivist/empirico-analytical theory, Horkheimer argued, renounces inquiry into the constitution of meaning: the knowing subject's constitution of its objects of meaningful reference (ibid; Wellmer, 1970b: Chapter 1). Such meaningful objects of the intentional practical consciousness include ideologies, traditions, institutions, legitimations and policies. These objectifications are produced symbolically and represent mediations, "historical warrants of the injection of practical reason into the social life world" (Habermas, 1970b: 118). By "traditional theory" Horkheimer (Ibid: 188-198, 222-231) means the conception of theory that has served as a regulative ideal for the natural sciences. The "goal" of this conception of theory is "a universal-systematic theory, not limited to any particular subject matter but embracing all possible objects. For critical theory, the paradigm is no longer the observation but the dialogue: the dialogic relation of objects interacting within the intersubjectively formed normative framework that is accepted as legitimate. The paradigm is a representatively simulated rational discourse between groups that are differentiated (or could be differentiated) from one another by articulated, or at least virtual opposition of interests (Habermas: 1970a, 1970c, 19-16c; Apel: 1972, 1973). Contrary to Lenin's argument in Materialism and Empirico- Criticism (similar to the epistemological line taken by Durkheim), the critical school argues that consciousness is never discernable in vacuo, but only insofar as it illuminates various objects of meaningful reference: illuminating them variously. For consciousness amounts to a network of intentions, sometimes clear to themselves, sometimes beyond cognition and intuitive, lived rather than known. Consciousness embraces the way in which frames of mind (frames of reference) may vary independently of what they are of, thus showing that there is something more to such frames of mind than what they are of. Hegel had demonstrated that we can ground knowledge adequately only in a phenomenological radicalization of critical philosophy--one that reflects, not just on the process of science, but on the general self-formation of consciousness. Hegel's phenomenological method attempts to reconstruct successive stages in the development of culture: the institutions of society and the forms of consciousness basic to the historic activity of humankind. As "reflective critique" it attempts--at the same time that it establishes the limits of possible knowledge--to reveal the constraints of cultural norms that block the development of consciousness. Critique of the limits of theoretical knowledge and of practical choice cannot be comprehended without at the same time reconstructing the cultural constraints that block the pursuit of truth. For the critical school, the achievement of "the true consciousness" is the regulative ideal of the critique of a dominant value system. The limitations or falsity of a dominant value system can be demonstrated without having attained some final absolute, "true" understanding of social and political reality. Truth is not outside the society but contained in a society's validity claims, i.e., its ultimate legitimations. Men and women have an emancipatory interest in actualizing the rationale underlying those legitimations. Thus, in its "immanent critique" of bourgeois society, the critical school compares the pretensions of bourgeois ideology with the reality of bourgeois social conditions. Marx had addressed himself to this regulative ideal in the second of the Theses on Feuerbach; however, Habermas argues, Marx broke off the dialectic of material activity and reflective consciousness implicit in his critique of Hegel. The category of communicative reflection in Marx's writings is understood and reduced within the more restrictive role of the concept of labor or work. By reducing the self-constituting of ego identity to the more tangible activity of the species, Marx eliminates reflection as such as a motive force of history, even though he retains the framework of the philosophy of reflection- Habermas (1971:44) contends that Marx's reinterpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology betrays the paradoxical consequences of taking Fichte's philosophy of the ego and undermining it with materialism ... Marx conceives of reflection according to the model of production. Because he tacitly starts with this premise, it is not inconsistent that he does not distinguish between the logical status of the natural sciences and of critique. Marx's historical materialism was fundamentally concerned with the documentation of the "economic laws of motion" of capitalist society. The development of a critical theory of consciousness was but a secondary aspect of this major focus. This is in line with Marx's belief that a change of consciousness was not adequate for changing the world. Habermas sees Marx--like Hegel and Fichte before him--as being concerned with the transcendental condition of intersubjectivity wherein the individual ego is reconstituted as a unified whole; that is, through the emergence of self- consciousness by a process of "mutual recognition." However, the second generation Frankfurter Schuler sees Marx leaving incomplete a rich set of hypotheses that were part of the nineteenth century formalization of a dialectical mode of analysis. In constructing a notion of material synthesis that was to replace an ideal .notion of "self-constitution" Marx is understood by Habermas (1971: 34-42) as having recognized: 1) a Kantian moment of an invariant relation of one against nature that results developmentally in the extension of the instrumental control of nature by means of the mechanism of human productive activity on the one hand (that is, the "technical cognitive interest"); and 2) a Fichtean moment of the self-constituting of humanity as a reflexive class struggle for the comprehension (communication) of new human possibilities (that is, the "practical cognitive interest" of enlightenment). Marx's critique of political economy is viewed then as being marked by a one-sided development of the dialectic of material synthesis: that is, the development of the "technical cognitive interest" component of the dialectic. As a result, Marx's work depicts the historical emergence of a system of instrumental techniques which achieve autonomy from their creators and pull into themselves not only control of change in the human world but also the symbolic systems that allow people to recognize their humanity. These symbolic systems emerge as autonomous self- legitimating structures obstructive of any mutually reflective public life (c.f., Habermas, 1970b: 81-122). The implication of Habermas' critique of Marx is that the "self-constitution of the species" takes place not only in the context of instrumental action upon nature but simultaneously in the dimension of the power relations that regulate people's communicative interaction among themselves. Habermas' student Albrecht Wellmer (1970b: 67) points out that when in the economic analyses of The Grundrisse Marx talks of "production," the notions of "distribution" and "forms of intercourse." These latter terms correspond to communicative or symbolically interactive conduct. The very institutional framework noted by Marx with regard to the labor process, the rule of one class over another--that is, domination--and the struggle against it is but another form of symbolic interaction. For example, in the essay "On the Jewish Question" Marx noted that the French Revolution had changed governmental forms without changing the egoistic-oriented and competitive-oriented civil society within the governmental institutions rested. Historically, the "critical theory of society" represents a reaction to any passive, contemplative attitude to knowledge, to technology, or to technique robbed of the unifying potentialities of Reason. From its inception as the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in 1923, the critical school has endeavored to demonstrate the potential for liberating human understandings and action from dependence upon seemingly natural anaesthetizing structures of domination in the realm of symbolic action. The Institute's first director, the Austro-Marxist historian Carl Grunberg, attempted to direct "the school" to a re-examination of the foundations of Marxist theory as a critical philosophy derived from Hegel. And the second director, Horkheimer, emphasized the school's radical revision of Marx's analysis: redirecting its focus from the infrastructure to the super- structure, replacing the critique of political economy with the critique of instrumental rationality. For such first generation Frankfurter Schuler as Horkheimer and Adorno, the Enlightenment came to be seen as having degenerated into the positivism found in the natural sciences and in modern technology. All social issues were coming to be defined as problems of management or adjustment capable of resolution according to the techniques of social engineering and public administration. These techniques constitute a dominant logic of seeming rationality that structures and manipulates both our "work time" and our "free time," and replaces reflective capacity with an externally conditioned adjustment process. As a result, the possibilities of a rational social dialogue among political participants are blocked, hindered, co-opted or repressed. Thus, in 1944 Horkheimer and Adorno in the Dialectic of Enlightenment stressed the modern conflict between two concepts of reason: two concepts of cognitive interests distinguished three decades later by Habermas in a similar manner. Practical reason is grounded in deliberation and dialogue over the conditions of the good life. And instrumental reason is found in the technical control of nature. Adorno and Horkheimer extended Ideologiekritik into a domain of social psychology, as needs were no longer interpreted as natural and constant, and instead placed in specific.historical contexts. Social conditions were understood to be sedimented within the individual personality. Here the family was seen as the psychological agent of society; through its process of socialization underlying economic structures of domination were reinforced by conversion into psychic ones. In the Studies in Authority and Family (cf. Horkheimer, 1949; and Jay, 1973: chapters 3 and 4), the critical school exposes a network of mediations in what is seen as a society dominated by the authority of capital. Authoritarian experience dominates everyday life in that all men are the objects, not the subjects of social and economic determination. Going beyond Freud's discussion of parental treatment of the child, Horkheimer emphasizes the authoritarian "intervention by parents" mirrors the authoritarian experience of the father in the socioeconomic sphere. Horkheimer and Adorno see the family as a sphere where the forces of reification are halted if only slightly, where traditionally a person was not just a function. Their attitude toward the annihilation of the family by the forces of collectivism was one of sadness. As Adorno notes in Minima Moralia 1951, 1974: 23), this impact of collectivism on the family: "while liquidating the bourgeois individual, it also liquidates the utopia that once drew sustenance from motherly love." In the 1940's the critical school extended their critique of manipulation to popular or mass culture, especially the role of radio, the standardization promoted by the mass cultural industry, the production of cultural commodities, and deliberate propagandizing. Earlier, Adorno and Walter Benjamin (Buck-Morss, 1977) had discussed how art too had become infected with ideology and commodified. They sought to demonstrate how art is both born of specific social pressures and responsive to specific social needs, while at the same time preserving the underlying idea of artistic quality bracketed out of relations of production and sociological determinism. Adorno came to locate a crucial element in fascism within the psychology of the individual citizen, a so-called new anthropological type: "the authoritarian personality" that possessed characteristics resembling those of the sado-maso- chistic type constructed by Erich Fromm in his studies for the Institute. Adorno and Horkheimer had been most impressed with Erik Erikson's conception of the German family, in which the father lacked the inner authority (cf. Jay, 1973: 205-206). The pseudo-revolt of what Fromm had called "the rebel" was in fact a search for a new authority, produced in part by the absence of a positive authority model at home. This syndrome was important for The Authoritarian Personality study (Adorno, Frenkel- Brunswick, et al., 1950). Adorno and his associates concluded that the authoritarian personality syndrome was prevalent among the lower-middle-classes in Europe and might be expected "among people whose actual status differs from that to which they actually aspire" in America (Ibid: 760). Such a syndrome did not entail simple identification with a strong patriarchal figure, rather it implied: 1) considerable ambivalence and conflict about the relationship, and 2) intensified external repression that served to activate the latent tensions in the poorly resolved Oedipal situation. The authoritarian family that emerges from Adorno and Horkheimer's studies is a reflection of growing external pressures. As its economic and social functions are increasingly liquidated, the authoritarian family, anxious about its status, rigidly adheres to values it no longer spontaneously holds. There results an attempted frantic overcompensation for outmoded conventions. Pursuing the arguments of Horkheimer and Adorno, Herbert Marcuse emphasizes how the mechanisms of socialization have been altered in a qualitatively distinctive manner in advanced industrial societies--both capitalist and socialist. These societies are understood as being guided by underlying principles of technical efficiency. Marcuse's critique of "one dimensional rationality" (1964) contends that the extension of science and technology in such societies represents an extension of social control and domination. The greater capacity to control nature turns into a deeper control of man, although -@his remains unrecognized in the universal celebration of the power of science and technology. The world tends to become the object of total administration. Technological rationality becomes accepted as the basis for truth. Along the way, the critical functions of the ego are weakened as social control penetrates -@o a new depth level of consciousness. And men and women are further estranged from their potentiality for being self-determining agents. Marcuse sees socialization in the advanced industrial societies not as the internalization of collective norms and values, but as an externally conditioned adjustment process, requiring neither reflective capacity nor dialogue. Socializing agents are perceived (1970:47-51) as having changed from the father oriented family to a situation where "others" such as peer groups (school and sports teams, gangs, etc.) as well as the mass media have become more important at an earlier age. The decline in the role of the father follows the decline of the role of private and family enterprise. The socially necessary repressions and behavior are no longer learned and internalized in the long struggle with the father. The ego ideal is brought to bear on the ego directly and from outside before the ego is actually formed as the personal and relatively autonomous subject of mediation between self and others. Marcuse (1955a) integrates Freud's psychoanalytic theory into the foundations of a critical theory of society. The accumulated wealth of advanced industrial society could be effectively used to pacify the struggle for existence, rather than to perpetuate it. There is a need for the release of "surplus repression" to provide the necessary energy for the appropriate guidance and direction of existing technology (1970:65-66; 1973:61) to a more liberated existence beyond the irrationality of the existing system of domination. Marcuse's "hope" for liberation (1969a) is rooted in a deeper and more instinctive level of existence than the recognition of the class basis of society. For Marcuse, Freud's analysis, like Marx's, is obsolete. The organization of the instincts have become a product of socio- political forces rather than of the intra-familial dialectic. We are pointed to the development of a "new sensibility," a change in the fundamental mode by which we interact with nature. The erotic force of the sensuous capabilities sublimated as labor, Marcuse argues, can be redirected toward instinctually gratifying tasks (cf. Horkheimer, 1947: 92-127). However, Marcuse (1964: 231-233; 1968: 19) ends up attributing a political content to scientific rationality itself, arguing (1) that the use of scientific rationality leads to a form of domination and control, and (2) that science itself must be transformed to reflect the new "sensible" mediation between man and nature. While agreeing with Marcuse on the contemporary existence of an interpenetration of technology and power, Habermas (1970b: 86-90) disagrees with Marcuse's notion of the political content of technical reason itself and, to quote Farganis (1975: 496), "redefines the problem as the political impact of technical reason, rather than the political content of science."For Habermas, the modern dilemma is that of the domination of the social life-world by technical (or instrumental) reason, and the recovery of practical (or communicative) reason. In Habermas' reformulation of historical materialism in terms of the critique of ideology, the intersubjectivity of the social life-world is conceived as the practical component of the concrete social totality embedded within a dominant technical component of such a totality. This conception derives from the "categorical dualism" of practical (cognitive interests) and technical (cognitive interests) which he develops in Knowledge and Human Interests. That epistemological distinction defines (1) two analytically distinct logics of development within the concrete social totality, as well as (2) two functionally distinct problematics (Habermas, 1970b: 90-95; 1975: 4-5): (a) system integration, i.e., the steering of the capitalist system according to its imperatives of reproduction and capital accumulation (goal attainment and adaptation in the Parsonian terminology), and (b) social integration, i.e., the patterns of collective identity provided by the institutional normative order (integration and pattern maintenance in the Parsonian framework). In contrast to systems analysis, critique is understood as related to the consciousness of addressees susceptible to enlightenment (Habermas, 1975a: 28; 1971: 187 ff). Habermas (1976c: 158-164) visualizes an actualizable communication community of those affected who, as constituting participants in practical discourse--that is, symbolic interaction--test the claims for norms, especially norms for action. The norms, i.e., legitimations, are either accepted with reasons or rejected with reasons. Thus Habermas (1970c: 143; 1975a: 102ff; 1975: 166) builds into Ideologiekritik the dimension of validity claims, re- defining the realizable telos of rationality as a discursive consensus. Max Weber elevated the pluralism of values to a principle of rationality and an empirical dogma of the ultimate impenetrability of pluralistic value preferences, assuming that such preferences cannot be grounded rationally. Habermas (1974: 91-112; 1975: 107, 158n) following the epistemological leads of Charles Peirce and Stephen Toulmin, contends: (1) that in the logic of discourse, achieving a consensus about rationally motivated value decisions is possible; and (2) that practical sentences can be understood as belonging to an autonomous domain that is subject to a logic different from that governing theoretical-empirical sentences; i.e., a logic connected with belief, acts, or decisions rather than objective experience. In his emphasis on the concept of symbolic interaction, Habermas deepens our appreciation of the potential for liberating human understandings and actions from dependence upon seemingly natural, anaesthetized structures of power and domination that hinder, block, co-opt, or violently repress dialogue within the realm of symbolic interaction--the practical realm of consciousness, the classical public sphere. This is the realm of social institutions mediated by language and by social rules. Habermas (1974) reminds us of the significance of the fiction of "the public sphere/public opinion" (offenhichkeit) as a discursive formation of the public will that can dissolve political rule-making. The fiction was resurrected by the European bourgeoisie in its assault upon feudal structures, and institutionalized within the liberal model of the constitutional state. The liberal model based its legitimacy in: (1) the rational self-enlightenment of individual citizens on matters concerning their collective interests, and (2) the unbiased opportunity for all classes to utilize the State's services and to benefit from its regulatory acts of intervention. The young Marx had seen through the liberal model: how it hid within itself its true character as a mask of bourgeois interests and took the form of a political ideology that distorts accurate perception and the possibility of consensus, as well as engenders "false consciousness." In the increasing encroachment of the technical realm on the practical, Habermas (1975a: 111-117) sees the removal of the critical content of the public sphere. Within the administrative and "systemic" procedures of the institutions of the bourgeois, i.e., capitalist state, legitimacy assumptions are seldom questioned and to that extent are ideologically immune from a critical discursive testing of the "generalizability" of interest-based policies and practices. Habermas contends (1970a; 1970c; 1976c) that the truth relation of a system integration exists primarily for the observer (or systems theorist) and not precisely for the participants of the intersubjective action system in question. On the other hand, claims as to normative integration admit of an intersubjectively understood validity. Such competing claims can be conceived as recommendations for or warnings against some commonly binding norms of action, judgments passed on during practical discourse. The Habermas attempt can be understood as a completion of the basis for a critical theory that could become a material force for the enlightenment necessary for the generalizing self- formation of the consciousness of an active historical subject. It amounts to a model of the suppression of generalizable interests (Habermas, 1975: 111-117): one which is founded on the recognition of communication as a "universal medium" of social life and the ideal of a dialogic resolution of practical questions. The theorizing of Habermas relevant to such a model takes into account the following considerations: (1) An observable institutional (i.e., role) system presupposes a "language. " (2) The language and the dialogue metaphor expresses the conditions of the social lifeworld and entails structures and communicative rules. (3) The very structures and content of language and dialogue contain the telos of an "ideal speech situation" which functions ideal-typically as an a priori form of the generalizability of intersubjective validity. (4) The "ideal speech situation" is utilized to evaluate every norm of practical consequence. (5) Validity claims of norms thus ideal-typically evaluated are considered according to (a) their justifiability in terms of the systems of legitimation they reflect; and (b) the "truth" of its propositions. (6) Normative structures existing at a given time can be compared counterfactually (dialectically) with a projective hypothetical discursive consensus (the ideal speech situation). (7) The generalizability of suppressed interests can be ascertained in a representatively simulated discourse. (8) Action guided by institutionalized values can be understood as nonproblematical only so long as the normatively prescribed distribution of opportunities for the legitimate satisfaction of needs rests on an actual if only apparent consensus. For Habermas practical activity is oriented to some "order" or "structure": a grammatical system of normative rules, i.e., legitimations, which help constitute social reality and provide rationales for the self-reflexive consciousness. His focus is on emergent situations in which one or more of these legitimations becomes problematical: situations where the validity claims of a previously implicit background consensus of normally accepted legitimations are called into question. The social and cultural life-world is comprehended as a field for practical rationality, and its noetic (reconstituting) projects vis-a-vis the noematic (already constituted) structure of rules. Habermas' interpretive model involves both a diachronic agent causality intent on the constituting and reconstituting of meaning and identity, as well as a synchronic structural causality here focuses on a reflexive consciousness: that is, both a reflexive awareness and a reflexive monitoring of intentions in relation to one's wants and the demands of the outer world. For Horkheimer and Adorno in the Dialectic of Enlightenment critique "became philosophical" in reaction to the bureaucratic socialism and the rise of communist orthodoxy. Horkheimer would ultimately return to the Hegelian mode, while Adorno (1973a) produced a critique of the philosophy of identity in both its ontological and objectivistic forms. Unlike these two predecessors, Habermas argues that practical reason could be characteristic of collective or social identity, and not only of separate individuals. This second generation Frankfurter Schuler puts the spotlight (1978) on the problematic of a developing ("evolving") rational identity. This would be an identity in the consciousness of universal and equal chances to participate in the kind of communicative process by which identity formation (a forming of values and norms) becomes a continuous learning experience. Habermas stresses how study of the "social evolutionary learning process" is crucial to the practical reason problematic vis-a-vis converting and interpreting new institutional arrangements. And disregarding Marcuse's call for a "new science" (1964: 227-234; 1972b: 59-63) in which nomological endeavors--those directed primarily to an interest in instrumental mastery of a set of causal relations--are replaced, Habermas and Karl Otto Apel (1972) point to the complementarity of the nomological and the hermeneutic modes of analysis. The hermeneutic mode is directed toward understanding the participation of actors within intersubjective contexts of meaning: traditions, conventions, "forms of life" (Apel- 1957). As Stewart Clegg in Power, Rule and Domination (1975: 36) so graphically put it, such an interpretive mode is attentive to shared meaning, "what people do, as they comment upon, reflect upon and formulate what they perform." Its focus is on practical reasoning--intention, purpose, deliberation. The hermeneutic mode is seen as reducing the natural scientific (i.e., nomological) mode to a-particular form of knowledge generated by a technical cognitive interest amidst other quasi-transcendent cognitive interests of a more pragmatistic or emancipatory bent. For Habermas (1970b: 119; 1971: 306-317), the technical cognitive interest in mastery of nature may be absolutely necessary in alleviating human misery; however, it must not be allowed to dominate our institutional life. Habermas, Apel, and Schmidt (1971) see Marx as having a foot in the hermeneutic tradition of the practical and emancipatory interests as well as in the empirics-analytical tradition of the technical interests. All communication is seen as alienating when it ignores its origins and treats the life-world and the speakers involved in it as instrumental "things" rather than as essentially practical activities. Social or cultural sciences in their nomological concern focus on the objective, coercive, and normative facets of the systematic reproduction of practices; while in their hermeneutic bent they study the intersubjective condition of communication. Whereas the former perspective deals with the social structure in terms of language with a grammatical system of rules and inherent contradictions, the latter cues in on discourse in the life-world and the conflicts engendered therein. The purpose of the Ideologiekritik of the critical school is to open up a discourse that can proceed to a generalizable consensus (its "true immanency") and at the same time appreciate repressed interests and ideological distortion. For Habermas (1970a) a dominant ideology is a distorting and illusory communication that raises the problem of limits: both reflecting and distorting the historical material conditions of social life, as well as justifying the existent status quo. In the recent work of Habermas (1974, 1975a) and Claus Offe (1972, 1973, 1973/74, 1974) there is an attempt to demonstrate how the implications of the bourgeois public sphere (burgerliche Offentlichkeit) notions of citizenship are not developed by dominant classes because they are contradictory to the rule- system of capitalism. Such notions base their legitimacy on the postulate of universal participation in consensus-formation, that is, the rational self-enlightenment of individual citizens in matters concerning their collective interests. Now groups or classes holding political power may distort or control the collective articulation of experienced deprivations and the collective generation of symbols and ideas alternative to the dominant ones. Otto Kirchheimer (1969: 290-318) had detected the "waning of the opposition principle" and the forces of integration at work within organized capitalism. Their consequence was a reversion of the citizen to the status of a private individual, minding one's own business and regarding the apparatus of public power as an alien phenomenon with which one has intercourse only through agents of bureaucracy (Ibid: 215). In the political sociology of Offe (1972: 81-83) the apparatus of public power is conceived of as operating within an institutional environment of "rules of the game," "boundaries," "limits," "parameters," and "basic logics." That institutional context is in turn structured by the underlying mode of organized class society and its operating principles--exchange value and the accumulation of capital. In terms highly reminiscent of Kirchheimer, Offe notes (in Mueller, 1973: 94, 197n) the transformation of the idea of "consensus-formation" that ensues in the transition to organized capitalism. Consensus comes to be seen as "a product of, rather than a condition for a political system of domination"....it is the formation of a "false" or alienated consensus rather than the free evolution of a "true consensus" (cf. McCarthy, 1973). As Offe (1972: 83) cogently puts it, ... consensus is no longer filtered and controlled primarily through positive rights granted to determinate categories of persons, but rather through disciplined mechanisms built into the institutions charged with the articulation of political needs. With a remarkable consistency, these mechanisms see to the failure or collapse of such political institutions as parties, associations, labor unions, or the parliament as soon as they exceed the limits laid down in the pluralistic system for the articulation of needs. Already at the time of World War II, Kirchheimer, Friedrich Pollock (1941a, 1941b) and Franz Neuman (1944) had sensed that the liberal notion of a public sphere based on the "free play of individual forces" was being superseded in the transition from liberal capitalism to organized capitalism. Pollock (1941a: 207) discussed how in organized capitalism the profit motive--which had always been a variant of the power motive--is "superseded by the power motive" as the mediation once provided by the market was steadily declining. Pollock pointed to the re-politicization of the sectors of the once private economic sphere and the relations of production. It is a theme picked up and developed in the political sociology of Habermas (1975a) and Offe (1972-75). Pollock and Kirchheimer emphasized the emergence of the autonomous state and its central role in societies characterized by organized or state capitalism. Kirchheimer (1969: 139-176) noted how increasingly "governmental assistance reserves administrative favors to association members"; and in a telling footnote he cited an article title that metaphorically described that developing process, "The Gild Returns to America." Ideally in the bourgeois public sphere, only argumentation effectively tests the generalizability of interests. The "liberal" model of the public sphere is perceived by the critical school to have become both an object of the profit-maximizing process as well as an object of manipulation by privileged groups. The bourgeois public sphere is understood (Knodler- Bunte, 1975: 54) as having undergone a rational reorganization of social and political power under the mutual control of rival organizations committed to the public sphere in their internal structure as well as in their relations with the state and (with) each other. The bourgeois public sphere of the welfare state in organized capitalism bases its legitimacy on the unbiased opportunity for all classes to utilize the state services and to benefit from its regulatory acts of intervention. Offe (1973, 1973/74) and Neat (cf. Knodler-Bunte, 1975) argue that such an altered bourgeois public sphere is only maintainable at the cost of concealing the fundamental contradictions of capitalist production and transforming them into crises of legitimation (cf. Habermas, 1975a). Offe and Neat seek to expand the concept of public sphere within the dialectic of distorted interaction and unrepressed interaction that Habermas develops. Beyond a public sphere viewed in terms of repressed dialogue, such a reconceptualization might point the way to a horizon of social experience which enables some alternative interpretation and institutionalization of social reality. For Offe (1974: 45-46), we need to focus on the "self-explanation of a practical movement, that is already in process": one that seeks to articulate a universalizing discourse and to concertize institutional structures. Neat (1974: 46) emphasizes the "emancipatory forces and perspectives which the movement sets in motion," the dialectical movement of the form and substance of an emergent collective identity. The intent behind the reconceptualization discussed in Offe and Neat is to facilitate some empirical examination of "the levels of mediation within which the organization of consciousness and experience takes place" (Knodler-Bunte, 1975: 57). What is studied is the raw data of social movements, e.g., strikes, occupations, and mass protest, as well as more organized efforts in factories, schools, and local communities. After a half century the critical school remains vibrant, full of constructive debate as to the role of consciousness and intentional activity. (1) in constituting, reproducing, or changing a particular form of society, and (2) amidst the overarching influence of dominant ideologies. The focus is maintained on how lived identities and relationships of the practical consciousness are organized. We confront the limits not only on what we do, but on what we think as well. The scholarly contributions of the critical school to date provide us in the cultural or social sciences with an alternative paradigm to that based on the methodology of the natural sciences. Beyond their significance for the methodology of the social sciences and in reawakening us to the tradition of the Geisteswissenschaft (cultural sciences), these contributions also offer us important new leads in the political sociology of public opinion, social movements, authority, and legitimation; in the theory of the state; in the integration of Freudian analysis into social and political thought; in the sociology of the family; in political economy; and in appreciating the sociological dimension of the arts and the infectious quality of ideology even in that domain. And while their emphasis on institutional and interpretive analysis corrects what they perceive as a deficiency in the original marxian corpus, never do they fail to assume that certain material conditions of well being will be necessary for any institutional designs of demystified consciousness to be realized. BIBLIOGRAPHY The critical theory publications listed below comprise the major primary and secondary sources printed in English. A more comprehensive catalogue including titles of the original German versions appears in my article, "Sociological Implications of the Habermas-Related Second Generation of the Frankfurt School: A Bibliographic Essay," Mid-American Review of Sociology, Vol. III, no. 2 (Winter, 1979), 83-107. Adorno, Theodor W. (with E. Frenkel-Brunswick, D. J. Levinson, and R. Nevill Stanford). 1950 The Authoritarian Personality. New York. Adorno, Theodor W. 1959 "Contemporary German sociology." Translated by Norman Birnbaum in Transactions of the Fourth World Congress of Sociology, Vol. 1. Washington, D.C. 1967 Prisms. Translated by S. and S. Weber- London. 1973a Negative Dialects. Translated by E. B. Ashton. New York. 1973b The Jargon of Authenticity. Translated K. Tarnowski and F. Will. Introduction by Trent Schroyer. Evanston. 1974 Minima Moralia: Reflexions from Damaged Life. Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott. London. Originally published in German in 1951. Adorno, Theodor W. and Hans Albert, et al. 1976 The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. Translated by G. Adey and D. Firsby. New York. Agger, Ben 1976 "Marcuse and Habermas on New Science." Polity, Vol. IX, no. 2 (Winter). Apel, Karl Otto 1957 Analytical Philosophy and the Geisteswissenschaft-Dordreckt. 1972 Communication and the Foundations of the Humanities. Acta Sociologica, Vol. 15 and Man and the World, Vol. 5. 1973 "Apriori of Communication." Man and the World, Vol. 6. Benjamin, Walter 1970 Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn, edited by Hannah Arendt. New York. First published 1936. Bernstein, Richard J. 1976 The Re-Structuring of Social and Political Theory. New York. Breines, Paul, ed. 1970 Critical Interruptions: New Perspectives on Herbert Marcuse. New York. Buck-Morss, Susan 1977 The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute. New York. Dallmayr, Fred 1972a "Critical Theory Criticized: Habermas' Knowledge and Human Interests and Its Aftermath." Philosophy of the Social Sciences 2. 1972b "Reason and Emancipation: Notes on Habermas." Man and the World, 5. 1976 "Marxism and Truth." Telos, 29. Farganis, James 1975 "A Preface to Critical Theory." Theory and Society, Vol. II, no. 4 (Winter). Fleming, Donald and Bernard Bailyn 1969 The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960. Cambridge. Frankel, Boris 1974 "Habermas talking: An Interview." Theory and Society, Vol. 1, No. 2. Frisby, David 1974 "The Frankfurt School: A Critical Theory of Society," in J. Rex, ed., Approaches to Sociology. London. Giddens, Anthony 1976 New Rules of Sociological Method: A Critique of interpretive Sociologies. New York. Giddens, Anthony 1977 Studies in Social and Political Theory. New York. Habermas, Jurgen 1970a "On Systematically Distorted Communication," Inquiry, 13. 1970b Towards a Rational Society. Translated by J. Shapiro. Boston. 1970c "Towards a Theory of Communicative Competence," Recent Sociology, No. 2, edited by H. P. Dreitzel. 1971 Knowledge and Human Interests, translated by J. Shapiro. Boston. Originally published in German, 1968. 1973 Theory and Practice. Translated by J. Viertal. Boston. Originally published in German, 1963. Habermas, Jurgen 1974 "The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964), New German Critique, Vol. I, no. 3. 1975a Legitimation Crisis. Translated by T. McCarthy. Boston. 1975b A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests." Philosophy of Social Science, 3. 1976a "The Analytical Theory of Science and Dialectics," in Adorno, Albert, et al., op. cit. 1976b "A Positivistically Bisected Rationalism" in Adorno, Albert, et al., op. cit. Previously translated as "Rationalism Divided in Two: A Reply to Albert," in A. Giddens, ed., Positivism and Sociology. London. 1976c "Some Distinctions in Universal Pragmatics: A Working Paper." Theory and Society, Vol. ill, no. 2. 1977a "A Review of Gadamer's Truth and Method." In F. Dallmayr and T. McCarthy, eds., Understanding and Social Inquiry. Notre Dame. 1977h "Hannah Arendt's Communications Concept of Power." Social Research, Vol. XLIV, no. 1. 1978 Communication and the Evolution of Society. Translated by T. McCarthy. Boston. Hohendal, Peter 1974 "Jurgen Habermas' 'The Public Sphere (1964)'." New German Critique, Vol. I, no.3. Horkheimer, Max 1939 "The Social Function of Philosophy." Studies in Philosophy and Social Science. Vol. VIII, no. 3 1941 "Art and Mass Culture." Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Vol. IX, no. 2. 1947 The Eclipse of Reason. Oxford. 1949 "Authoritarianism and the Family Today. In R. N. Anshen, ed., The Family: Its Function and Destiny. New York. 1972 Critical Theory. Translated by M. J. O'Connell. New York. Horkheimer, Max, ed. 1949-50 Studies in Prejudice. New York. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno 1973 Dialectics of Enlightenment. Translated by J. Cumming. New York. Howard, Dick 1974 "A Politics in Search of the Political." Theory and Society, 2. Jay, Martin 1973 The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923- 50. Boston. Keane, John 1975 "On Tools and Language: Habermas on Work and Interaction." New German Critique, 6. Kellner, Douglas 1975 "The Frankfurt School Revisited: A Critique of Martin Jay's The Dialectical Imagination." New German Critique, 4. Kirchheimer, Otto 1939a Punishment and Social Structure, with George Rusche. New York. 1939b The Fate of Small Business in Nazi Germany, with A. R. L. Gurlaud and Franz Neumann. Washington, D.C. 1969 Politics, Law and Social Change: Selected Essays of Otto Kirchheimer, ed. by Frederic S. Burin and Kurt Schell. New York. Knodler-Bunte, Eberhard 1975 The Proletarian Public Sphere and Political Organization: An Analysis of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge's The Public Sphere and Experience." New German Critique, 4. Owenthal, Richard 1976 "Social Transformation and Democratic Legitimacy." Social Research, Vol. 43, no. 2. McCarthy, Thomas 1973 "A Theory of Communicative Competence." Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 3. Marcuse, Herbert 1941, 1955 Reason and Revolution. New York. 1955a Eros and Civilization. Boston. 1955b "On Science and Phenomenology." Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 2. 1958 Soviet Marxism. New York. 1964 One Dimensional Man. Boston. 1967a "The Obsolescence of Marxism," in Marx and the Western World, edited by N. Lobkowicz. Notre Dame. 1967b A Critique of Pure Tolerance. with R. P. Wolff and Barrington Moore, Jr. Boston. 1968 Negations. Boston. Piccone, Paul 1971 "Phenomenological Marxism," Telos, 9. Pilot, Harald 1976 Jurgen Habermas' Empirically Falsifiable Philosophy of History." In Adorno, Albert, et al., op. cit. Pollock, Friedrich 1941a "State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations." Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Vol. IX, no. 2. 1941b "Is National Socialism a New Order?" Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Vol. IX, no. 3. 1957 The Economic and Social Consequences of Automation. Translated by W. 0. Henderson and W. H. Chalmer. Oxford. Sardei-Bierman, Sabine, Jens Christiansen, and Knuth Dohse 1973/74 "Class Domination and the Political System: A Critical Interpretation of the Recent Contribution of Claus Offe." in Working Papers in the Kapitalstate, 2. (December/January). Schmidt, Alfred 1971 The Concept of Nature in Marx. Translated by B. Fowkes. Schroyer, Trent 1973 The Critique of Domination. New York. 1975 "The Re-Politicization of the Relations of Production: An Interpretation of Jurgen Habermas' Analytic Theory of Late Capitalist Development," New German Critique, 5. Wellmer, Albrecht 1970a "Communication and Emancipation: Reflexions on the 'Linguistic Turn' in Critical Theory," in P. Bryns, C. Evans, D. Howard, eds., Stony Brook Studies in Philosophy 1. 1970b Critical Theory of Society. Translated by J. Cumming. New York. Winters, Laurence 1973/74 "Habermas' Theory of Truth and Its Centrality in His Critical Project." Graduate Faculty Philosophical Journal, New School for Social Research, 3.