critical theory and problem solving

IR Theory: Problem-Solving Theory Versus Critical Theory?

Robert Cox began his canonical 1981 essay “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory” with the observation that it is “necessary and practical” for academic disciplines to “divide up the seamless web of the real social world”. We make these divisions, Cox wrote, in order to analyse the world and thus to produce practical knowledge of that world. It is not a stretch to suggest that the real social world of International Relations scholarship might also be approached as worthy of analysis and theory. Indeed, reflection on International Relations as theory appears in the field as part of the necessary and practical division of the complexity of the social and political world. Rare is the introduction to IR textbook that does not emphasize, and usually begin with, the “great (theoretical) debates” that have structured the field since it emerged as an academic discipline.

Thus theory itself has long and often been treated as an object for theoretical reflection in International Relations. Recently, we could point to both the founding of a specific section of the US-based International Studies Association dedicated to Theory – indeed, this section honoured Professor Cox at the ISA convention in Toronto in 2014 – as well as the special issue in September 2013 of the European Journal of International Relations on “ The End of IR Theory? ”, accompanied by a wide-ranging discussion of the papers collected there in the Duck of Minerva blog.

For some of the contributors to the special issue and to the debates on the symposium – and I hope I can be forgiven for making an impressionistic observation rather than an analytical one – it seems that the question mark at the end of “the end of IR theory?” was a sign of fatigue rather than a sense that the debates over theory needed to be renewed. Fatigue, in the sense of “are we still having this conversation?” or “haven’t we moved on yet?” Emblematic of this fatigue were the reflections of Professor Chris Brown in both his article in the EJIR and his contribution to the symposium . It’s not that Brown is hostile to theory; on the contrary, his contribution was a complaint that the critical theories that emerged in the 1980s had not fulfilled their potential and that problem-solving theory had contributed much more.

I disagree with his assessment of the status of critical theory, as do many of the contributors to the special issue and to the symposium, in particular with his claim that it has failed to live up to the promise it showed in the 1980s – but that’s a conversation for another time. What is most interesting here is how Brown takes up Cox’s analytical division of “critical theory” from “problem-solving theory”. Indeed, the trope of problem-solving versus critical theory is asserted quite often in discussions of the status of theory in IR: for example, in A. C. McKeil ; in Robert W. Murray ; or in Ali Diskaya , just to take a few examples appearing here in e-IR. It is this trope, along with Cox’s other oft-cited claim in the 1981 Millennium article that “theory is always for someone and for some purpose” (Cox 1981: 129) that have made his article canonical. Indeed, Cox’s categories of “critical” and “problem-solving” are now part of the very common-sense ordering of theory in IR.

It is therefore important to consider what Cox actually said about these categories. Problem-solving theory, first, “takes the world as it finds it, with the prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are organised, as the given framework for action. The general aim of problem-solving is to make these relationships and institutions work smoothly by dealing effectively with particular sources of trouble” (Cox 1981, 128-129). This definition, remember, follows Cox’s opening statements in the article about the importance of theory for the production of practical knowledge. Cox is often interpreted as elevating critical theory over problem solving theory – Brown takes him to do so, for example, in the symposium when he says Cox “compared ‘problem-solving’ theory unfavourably with ‘critical theory’” but I am not convinced that a careful reading of Cox’s article supports this (and Cox argues something similar ). In addition to signalling the importance of theory for practical knowledge, Cox explicitly notes, for example, how the analytical procedures he sees as defining problem-solving theory are the source of its strength. He takes issue with the idea that problem-solving theory is value-free and asserts that it is conservative (Cox 1981: 129-130) but this is as close to a normative assessment of problem-solving theory as Cox gets.

Critical theory, in contrast, is holistic where problem-solving theory is analytic. It “does not take institutions and social and power relations for granted but calls them into question by concerning itself with their origins and how and whether they might be in the process of changing. … Critical theory is directed to the social and political complex as a whole rather than to the separate parts” (Cox 1981: 129). Cox also allows that where problem-solving theory might be seen as conservative, critical theory might be seen as utopian: “Its aims are just as practical as those of problem-solving theory, but it approaches practice from a perspective with transcends that of the existing order. … Critical theory allows for a normative choice in favour of a social and political order different from the prevailing order, but it limits the range of choice to alternative orders which are feasible transformations of the existing world” (Cox 1981: 130).

I suspect that it is this holistic and utopian range for critical theory as asserted by Cox that leads Brown to identify critical theory with Quentin Skinner’s notion of Grand Theory and leads so many of the rest of us to assume that critical theory is posited as a superior theoretical approach to problem-solving theory. I’ve tried to show that Cox, at least, makes no explicit claims to that effect. Nevertheless, the categories Cox bequeathed to us seem to encourage us to turn this binary, critical versus problem-solving theory, into a hierarchy. Readers of International Relations theory instinctively want to read it as political theory – though as Rob Walker might remind us, this does not make us careful readers of political theory either. Perhaps we need to acknowledge that the theoretical choice presented by the binary critical theory-problem-solving theory is, at least, theory as engaged in a political contest.

Should Cox’s categories be preserved, critiqued, or abandoned? Would doing so lend a clearer (and practical) view of theory in the field? One way to extend the engagement with the practice of theory would be to read Cox’s categories alongside the other famous definition of critical theory, in Max Horkheimer’s essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” (Horkheimer 2014 [1937]). Though Cox did not explicitly cite Horkheimer, the latter’s efforts to distinguish critical theory from what he called “traditional theory” make him an obvious interlocutor. (There are, of course, many other serious contributions to the effort to situate theory socially and politically, from Bourdieu to Foucault, from Bruno Latour to Walter Mignolo. Many of these efforts are considered in the EJIR special issue and the Duck of Minerva symposium.) I focus on Horkheimer here in part due to the clear affinities between his approach and Cox’s and in part because Horkheimer, like Cox and as I would like to do, provides an explicit defence of the enterprise of critical theory.

While the scale of Horkheimer’s critique, engaged as he was with theory per se , is much grander than the stage Cox builds when he focuses on IR theory in the 1981 article, their accounts of “traditional” and “problem-solving” theory are remarkably similar. Cox notes how the power of problem-solving theory stems from its methodological “fixing” of the social and institutional parameters surrounding the variables it examines. For Horkheimer, this method, rooted in Descartes and predominant not only in social sciences but in science generally in his time, stems from the ability of the scholar to abstract him or herself from these social and institutional parameters in the production of theories and analyses. In other words, just as in any production process where a division of labour separates the subjective functions of planning, designing, interpreting, and analysing from the executive functions, traditional theory renders the world under study as objective and passive and the scientist an active, analysing subject.

In their conceptualisations of critical theory, however, Cox and Horkheimer differ slightly but in an important way. While both are concerned to defend theory as an approach to a dynamic and interconnected totality, Cox does not foreground the status of the theorist, while for Horkheimer the critical theorist must engage with theory as a productive process. Cox does take neorealism to task for neglecting the production process in the constitution of national interest (Cox 1981: 134-135) but Horkheimer goes further: it is not a matter of adding another parameter or variable to the theoretical enterprise; it is a matter of understanding the theoretical enterprise itself in relation to and as a part of a general production process and division of labour. When Cox wrote in 1981, the prevailing epistemology in IR and the epistemological commitment of problem-solving or traditional theory was realist: the world exists independently of our thoughts about it and the task of theory is to make thought adequate to reality. What Horkheimer shows is that there is no neat division between thought and reality that can justify the privileged position of the theorist in the social division of labour: our thoughts are part of reality, as real as the city you live in or the job you work at and they must be analysed as part of the general social division of labour and of social reproduction.

Thus the problem-solving theorist becomes a functionary in the maintenance of social order. The critical theorist must understand the role of theory in social reproduction in order to break down the divisions between theoretical reflection and the making of the world.

I am not suggesting that Horkheimer was right where Cox was wrong. Cox was certainly aware of the – explicit or implicit – political commitments of the theorist when he said, “theory is always for someone and for some purpose”. The question for me here is whether our common-sense taxonomy of International Relations theory as “problem-solving” or “critical” remains appropriate. Given how embedded it is in our ways of seeing ourselves and our field, and given that it can be quite useful for teaching theory, I don’t think it should necessarily be abandoned. Given the implicit, instinctual way IR theorists tend to treat the division as a contest, as in Chris Brown for whom problem-solving has produced better results than critical theory, I wonder if it would not be better to try to make the political stakes of that contest more evident.

For me, reading Cox with Horkheimer provides an interesting start on this task. The description of the first category as “problem-solving” or “traditional” points to a theoretical practice where expertise rules, where specialists take up their specific tasks and succeed or fail on the basis of how powerful their explanations are and the impact of their work. Cox and Horkheimer both acknowledge the importance of this approach in terms of method and results. And they both hint at the cost: politically, we might better describe this approach as technocratic theory . The enterprise is to uncover the timeless essences of things and relations and to keep things working by keeping them in their place.

The contrasting approach to theory, which Cox and Horkheimer both dub “critical theory”, seeks instead to enable the transformation of things. But critical theory is more than this, too; after all, as social constructivism suggests, the transformation of things is just the normal state of affairs as people make themselves and make their history. Critical theory does more: it disagrees . As Rancière suggests, it disrupts the order of the “distribution of the sensible.” Critical theory works by making visible the relationships and the things that International Relations refuses to recognise and qualify as relationships or things. It makes audible the voices of people not qualified to speak in International Relations. Against the technocratic barriers to international living and understandings, critical theory identifies the arbitrariness and artificiality of barriers and explains them in relation to their roles in the division of labour, social reproduction, or system maintenance. Politically, critical theory must be democratic theory – not a theory of democracy, posed externally to its object, but a theory that is democratic in its everyday practices. These are the political stakes in our theoretical choices.

Further Reading on E-International Relations

• Alienation and Marxism: An Alternative Starting Point for Critical IR Theory 
• The ‘Failure of Critical Theory’ as an Ideological Discourse
• Reflections on Critical Theory and Process Sociology
• Introducing Critical Theory in International Relations
• Why Is There No Minor International Theory?
• Rethinking Critical IR: Towards a Plurilogue of Cosmologies

Matt Davies lectures in International Political Economy at Newcastle University and is the Degree Programme Director for the MA in World Politics and Popular Culture . He is also a co-editor of the Popular Culture and World Politics book series , published by Routledge.

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Critical Thinking Is About Asking Better Questions

• John Coleman

Six practices to sharpen your inquiry.

Critical thinking is the ability to analyze and effectively break down an issue in order to make a decision or find a solution. At the heart of critical thinking is the ability to formulate deep, different, and effective questions. For effective questioning, start by holding your hypotheses loosely. Be willing to fundamentally reconsider your initial conclusions — and do so without defensiveness. Second, listen more than you talk through active listening. Third, leave your queries open-ended, and avoid yes-or-no questions. Fourth, consider the counterintuitive to avoid falling into groupthink. Fifth, take the time to stew in a problem, rather than making decisions unnecessarily quickly. Last, ask thoughtful, even difficult, follow-ups.

Are you tackling a new and difficult problem at work? Recently promoted and trying to both understand your new role and bring a fresh perspective? Or are you new to the workforce and seeking ways to meaningfully contribute alongside your more experienced colleagues? If so, critical thinking — the ability to analyze and effectively break down an issue in order to make a decision or find a solution — will be core to your success. And at the heart of critical thinking is the ability to formulate deep, different, and effective questions.

• JC John Coleman is the author of the HBR Guide to Crafting Your Purpose . Subscribe to his free newsletter, On Purpose , follow him on Twitter @johnwcoleman, or contact him at johnwilliamcoleman.com.

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Critical Thinking: A Model of Intelligence for Solving Real-World Problems

Diane f. halpern.

1 Department of Psychology, Claremont McKenna College, Emerita, Altadena, CA 91001, USA

Dana S. Dunn

2 Department of Psychology, Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA 18018, USA; ude.naivarom@nnud

Most theories of intelligence do not directly address the question of whether people with high intelligence can successfully solve real world problems. A high IQ is correlated with many important outcomes (e.g., academic prominence, reduced crime), but it does not protect against cognitive biases, partisan thinking, reactance, or confirmation bias, among others. There are several newer theories that directly address the question about solving real-world problems. Prominent among them is Sternberg’s adaptive intelligence with “adaptation to the environment” as the central premise, a construct that does not exist on standardized IQ tests. Similarly, some scholars argue that standardized tests of intelligence are not measures of rational thought—the sort of skill/ability that would be needed to address complex real-world problems. Other investigators advocate for critical thinking as a model of intelligence specifically designed for addressing real-world problems. Yes, intelligence (i.e., critical thinking) can be enhanced and used for solving a real-world problem such as COVID-19, which we use as an example of contemporary problems that need a new approach.

1. Introduction

The editors of this Special Issue asked authors to respond to a deceptively simple statement: “How Intelligence Can Be a Solution to Consequential World Problems.” This statement holds many complexities, including how intelligence is defined and which theories are designed to address real-world problems.

2. The Problem with Using Standardized IQ Measures for Real-World Problems

For the most part, we identify high intelligence as having a high score on a standardized test of intelligence. Like any test score, IQ can only reflect what is on the given test. Most contemporary standardized measures of intelligence include vocabulary, working memory, spatial skills, analogies, processing speed, and puzzle-like elements (e.g., Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale Fourth Edition; see ( Drozdick et al. 2012 )). Measures of IQ correlate with many important outcomes, including academic performance ( Kretzschmar et al. 2016 ), job-related skills ( Hunter and Schmidt 1996 ), reduced likelihood of criminal behavior ( Burhan et al. 2014 ), and for those with exceptionally high IQs, obtaining a doctorate and publishing scholarly articles ( McCabe et al. 2020 ). Gottfredson ( 1997, p. 81 ) summarized these effects when she said the “predictive validity of g is ubiquitous.” More recent research using longitudinal data, found that general mental abilities and specific abilities are good predictors of several work variables including job prestige, and income ( Lang and Kell 2020 ). Although assessments of IQ are useful in many contexts, having a high IQ does not protect against falling for common cognitive fallacies (e.g., blind spot bias, reactance, anecdotal reasoning), relying on biased and blatantly one-sided information sources, failing to consider information that does not conform to one’s preferred view of reality (confirmation bias), resisting pressure to think and act in a certain way, among others. This point was clearly articulated by Stanovich ( 2009, p. 3 ) when he stated that,” IQ tests measure only a small set of the thinking abilities that people need.”

3. Which Theories of Intelligence Are Relevant to the Question?

Most theories of intelligence do not directly address the question of whether people with high intelligence can successfully solve real world problems. For example, Grossmann et al. ( 2013 ) cite many studies in which IQ scores have not predicted well-being, including life satisfaction and longevity. Using a stratified random sample of Americans, these investigators found that wise reasoning is associated with life satisfaction, and that “there was no association between intelligence and well-being” (p. 944). (critical thinking [CT] is often referred to as “wise reasoning” or “rational thinking,”). Similar results were reported by Wirthwein and Rost ( 2011 ) who compared life satisfaction in several domains for gifted adults and adults of average intelligence. There were no differences in any of the measures of subjective well-being, except for leisure, which was significantly lower for the gifted adults. Additional research in a series of experiments by Stanovich and West ( 2008 ) found that participants with high cognitive ability were as likely as others to endorse positions that are consistent with their biases, and they were equally likely to prefer one-sided arguments over those that provided a balanced argument. There are several newer theories that directly address the question about solving real-world problems. Prominent among them is Sternberg’s adaptive intelligence with “adaptation to the environment” as the central premise, a construct that does not exist on standardized IQ tests (e.g., Sternberg 2019 ). Similarly, Stanovich and West ( 2014 ) argue that standardized tests of intelligence are not measures of rational thought—the sort of skill/ability that would be needed to address complex real-world problems. Halpern and Butler ( 2020 ) advocate for CT as a useful model of intelligence for addressing real-world problems because it was designed for this purpose. Although there is much overlap among these more recent theories, often using different terms for similar concepts, we use Halpern and Butler’s conceptualization to make our point: Yes, intelligence (i.e., CT) can be enhanced and used for solving a real-world problem like COVID-19.

4. Critical Thinking as an Applied Model for Intelligence

One definition of intelligence that directly addresses the question about intelligence and real-world problem solving comes from Nickerson ( 2020, p. 205 ): “the ability to learn, to reason well, to solve novel problems, and to deal effectively with novel problems—often unpredictable—that confront one in daily life.” Using this definition, the question of whether intelligent thinking can solve a world problem like the novel coronavirus is a resounding “yes” because solutions to real-world novel problems are part of his definition. This is a popular idea in the general public. For example, over 1000 business managers and hiring executives said that they want employees who can think critically based on the belief that CT skills will help them solve work-related problems ( Hart Research Associates 2018 ).

We define CT as the use of those cognitive skills or strategies that increase the probability of a desirable outcome. It is used to describe thinking that is purposeful, reasoned, and goal directed--the kind of thinking involved in solving problems, formulating inferences, calculating likelihoods, and making decisions, when the thinker is using skills that are thoughtful and effective for the particular context and type of thinking task. International surveys conducted by the OECD ( 2019, p. 16 ) established “key information-processing competencies” that are “highly transferable, in that they are relevant to many social contexts and work situations; and ‘learnable’ and therefore subject to the influence of policy.” One of these skills is problem solving, which is one subset of CT skills.

The CT model of intelligence is comprised of two components: (1) understanding information at a deep, meaningful level and (2) appropriate use of CT skills. The underlying idea is that CT skills can be identified, taught, and learned, and when they are recognized and applied in novel settings, the individual is demonstrating intelligent thought. CT skills include judging the credibility of an information source, making cost–benefit calculations, recognizing regression to the mean, understanding the limits of extrapolation, muting reactance responses, using analogical reasoning, rating the strength of reasons that support and fail to support a conclusion, and recognizing hindsight bias or confirmation bias, among others. Critical thinkers use these skills appropriately, without prompting, and usually with conscious intent in a variety of settings.

One of the key concepts in this model is that CT skills transfer in appropriate situations. Thus, assessments using situational judgments are needed to assess whether particular skills have transferred to a novel situation where it is appropriate. In an assessment created by the first author ( Halpern 2018 ), short paragraphs provide information about 20 different everyday scenarios (e.g., A speaker at the meeting of your local school board reported that when drug use rises, grades decline; so schools need to enforce a “war on drugs” to improve student grades); participants provide two response formats for every scenario: (a) constructed responses where they respond with short written responses, followed by (b) forced choice responses (e.g., multiple choice, rating or ranking of alternatives) for the same situations.

There is a large and growing empirical literature to support the assertion that CT skills can be learned and will transfer (when taught for transfer). See for example, Holmes et al. ( 2015 ), who wrote in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , that there was “significant and sustained improvement in students’ critical thinking behavior” (p. 11,199) for students who received CT instruction. Abrami et al. ( 2015, para. 1 ) concluded from a meta-analysis that “there are effective strategies for teaching CT skills, both generic and content specific, and CT dispositions, at all educational levels and across all disciplinary areas.” Abrami et al. ( 2008, para. 1 ), included 341 effect sizes in a meta-analysis. They wrote: “findings make it clear that improvement in students’ CT skills and dispositions cannot be a matter of implicit expectation.” A strong test of whether CT skills can be used for real-word problems comes from research by Butler et al. ( 2017 ). Community adults and college students (N = 244) completed several scales including an assessment of CT, an intelligence test, and an inventory of real-life events. Both CT scores and intelligence scores predicted individual outcomes on the inventory of real-life events, but CT was a stronger predictor.

Heijltjes et al. ( 2015, p. 487 ) randomly assigned participants to either a CT instruction group or one of six other control conditions. They found that “only participants assigned to CT instruction improved their reasoning skills.” Similarly, when Halpern et al. ( 2012 ) used random assignment of participants to either a learning group where they were taught scientific reasoning skills using a game format or a control condition (which also used computerized learning and was similar in length), participants in the scientific skills learning group showed higher proportional learning gains than students who did not play the game. As the body of additional supportive research is too large to report here, interested readers can find additional lists of CT skills and support for the assertion that these skills can be learned and will transfer in Halpern and Dunn ( Forthcoming ). There is a clear need for more high-quality research on the application and transfer of CT and its relationship to IQ.

5. Pandemics: COVID-19 as a Consequential Real-World Problem

A pandemic occurs when a disease runs rampant over an entire country or even the world. Pandemics have occurred throughout history: At the time of writing this article, COVID-19 is a world-wide pandemic whose actual death rate is unknown but estimated with projections of several million over the course of 2021 and beyond ( Mega 2020 ). Although vaccines are available, it will take some time to inoculate most or much of the world’s population. Since March 2020, national and international health agencies have created a list of actions that can slow and hopefully stop the spread of COVID (e.g., wearing face masks, practicing social distancing, avoiding group gatherings), yet many people in the United States and other countries have resisted their advice.

Could instruction in CT encourage more people to accept and comply with simple life-saving measures? There are many possible reasons to believe that by increasing citizens’ CT abilities, this problematic trend can be reversed for, at least, some unknown percentage of the population. We recognize the long history of social and cognitive research showing that changing attitudes and behaviors is difficult, and it would be unrealistic to expect that individuals with extreme beliefs supported by their social group and consistent with their political ideologies are likely to change. For example, an Iranian cleric and an orthodox rabbi both claimed (separately) that the COVID-19 vaccine can make people gay ( Marr 2021 ). These unfounded opinions are based on deeply held prejudicial beliefs that we expect to be resistant to CT. We are targeting those individuals who beliefs are less extreme and may be based on reasonable reservations, such as concern about the hasty development of the vaccine and the lack of long-term data on its effects. There should be some unknown proportion of individuals who can change their COVID-19-related beliefs and actions with appropriate instruction in CT. CT can be a (partial) antidote for the chaos of the modern world with armies of bots creating content on social media, political and other forces deliberately attempting to confuse issues, and almost all media labeled “fake news” by social influencers (i.e., people with followers that sometimes run to millions on various social media). Here, are some CT skills that could be helpful in getting more people to think more critically about pandemic-related issues.

Reasoning by Analogy and Judging the Credibility of the Source of Information

Early communications about the ability of masks to prevent the spread of COVID from national health agencies were not consistent. In many regions of the world, the benefits of wearing masks incited prolonged and acrimonious debates ( Tang 2020 ). However, after the initial confusion, virtually all of the global and national health organizations (e.g., WHO, National Health Service in the U. K., U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) endorse masks as a way to slow the spread of COVID ( Cheng et al. 2020 ; Chu et al. 2020 ). However, as we know, some people do not trust governmental agencies and often cite the conflicting information that was originally given as a reason for not wearing a mask. There are varied reasons for refusing to wear a mask, but the one most often cited is that it is against civil liberties ( Smith 2020 ). Reasoning by analogy is an appropriate CT skill for evaluating this belief (and a key skill in legal thinking). It might be useful to cite some of the many laws that already regulate our behavior such as, requiring health inspections for restaurants, setting speed limits, mandating seat belts when riding in a car, and establishing the age at which someone can consume alcohol. Individuals would be asked to consider how the mandate to wear a mask compares to these and other regulatory laws.

Another reason why some people resist the measures suggested by virtually every health agency concerns questions about whom to believe. Could training in CT change the beliefs and actions of even a small percentage of those opposed to wearing masks? Such training would include considering the following questions with practice across a wide domain of knowledge: (a) Does the source have sufficient expertise? (b) Is the expertise recent and relevant? (c) Is there a potential for gain by the information source, such as financial gain? (d) What would the ideal information source be and how close is the current source to the ideal? (e) Does the information source offer evidence that what they are recommending is likely to be correct? (f) Have you traced URLs to determine if the information in front of you really came from the alleged source?, etc. Of course, not everyone will respond in the same way to each question, so there is little likelihood that we would all think alike, but these questions provide a framework for evaluating credibility. Donovan et al. ( 2015 ) were successful using a similar approach to improve dynamic decision-making by asking participants to reflect on questions that relate to the decision. Imagine the effect of rigorous large-scale education in CT from elementary through secondary schools, as well as at the university-level. As stated above, empirical evidence has shown that people can become better thinkers with appropriate instruction in CT. With training, could we encourage some portion of the population to become more astute at judging the credibility of a source of information? It is an experiment worth trying.

6. Making Cost—Benefit Assessments for Actions That Would Slow the Spread of COVID-19

Historical records show that refusal to wear a mask during a pandemic is not a new reaction. The epidemic of 1918 also included mandates to wear masks, which drew public backlash. Then, as now, many people refused, even when they were told that it was a symbol of “wartime patriotism” because the 1918 pandemic occurred during World War I ( Lovelace 2020 ). CT instruction would include instruction in why and how to compute cost–benefit analyses. Estimates of “lives saved” by wearing a mask can be made meaningful with graphical displays that allow more people to understand large numbers. Gigerenzer ( 2020 ) found that people can understand risk ratios in medicine when the numbers are presented as frequencies instead of probabilities. If this information were used when presenting the likelihood of illness and death from COVID-19, could we increase the numbers of people who understand the severity of this disease? Small scale studies by Gigerenzer have shown that it is possible.

Analyzing Arguments to Determine Degree of Support for a Conclusion

The process of analyzing arguments requires that individuals rate the strength of support for and against a conclusion. By engaging in this practice, they must consider evidence and reasoning that may run counter to a preferred outcome. Kozyreva et al. ( 2020 ) call the deliberate failure to consider both supporting and conflicting data “deliberate ignorance”—avoiding or failing to consider information that could be useful in decision-making because it may collide with an existing belief. When applied to COVID-19, people would have to decide if the evidence for and against wearing a face mask is a reasonable way to stop the spread of this disease, and if they conclude that it is not, what are the costs and benefits of not wearing masks at a time when governmental health organizations are making them mandatory in public spaces? Again, we wonder if rigorous and systematic instruction in argument analysis would result in more positive attitudes and behaviors that relate to wearing a mask or other real-world problems. We believe that it is an experiment worth doing.

7. Conclusions

We believe that teaching CT is a worthwhile approach for educating the general public in order to improve reasoning and motivate actions to address, avert, or ameliorate real-world problems like the COVID-19 pandemic. Evidence suggests that CT can guide intelligent responses to societal and global problems. We are NOT claiming that CT skills will be a universal solution for the many real-world problems that we confront in contemporary society, or that everyone will substitute CT for other decision-making practices, but we do believe that systematic education in CT can help many people become better thinkers, and we believe that this is an important step toward creating a society that values and practices routine CT. The challenges are great, but the tools to tackle them are available, if we are willing to use them.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, D.F.H. and D.S.D.; resources, D.F.H.; data curation, writing—original draft preparation, D.F.H.; writing—review and editing, D.F.H. and D.S.D. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

This research received no external funding.

Institutional Review Board Statement

No IRB Review.

Informed Consent Statement

No Informed Consent.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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• Published: 11 January 2023

The effectiveness of collaborative problem solving in promoting students’ critical thinking: A meta-analysis based on empirical literature

• Enwei Xu   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6424-8169 1 ,
• Wei Wang 1 &
• Qingxia Wang 1  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  10 , Article number:  16 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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Collaborative problem-solving has been widely embraced in the classroom instruction of critical thinking, which is regarded as the core of curriculum reform based on key competencies in the field of education as well as a key competence for learners in the 21st century. However, the effectiveness of collaborative problem-solving in promoting students’ critical thinking remains uncertain. This current research presents the major findings of a meta-analysis of 36 pieces of the literature revealed in worldwide educational periodicals during the 21st century to identify the effectiveness of collaborative problem-solving in promoting students’ critical thinking and to determine, based on evidence, whether and to what extent collaborative problem solving can result in a rise or decrease in critical thinking. The findings show that (1) collaborative problem solving is an effective teaching approach to foster students’ critical thinking, with a significant overall effect size (ES = 0.82, z  = 12.78, P  < 0.01, 95% CI [0.69, 0.95]); (2) in respect to the dimensions of critical thinking, collaborative problem solving can significantly and successfully enhance students’ attitudinal tendencies (ES = 1.17, z  = 7.62, P  < 0.01, 95% CI[0.87, 1.47]); nevertheless, it falls short in terms of improving students’ cognitive skills, having only an upper-middle impact (ES = 0.70, z  = 11.55, P  < 0.01, 95% CI[0.58, 0.82]); and (3) the teaching type (chi 2  = 7.20, P  < 0.05), intervention duration (chi 2  = 12.18, P  < 0.01), subject area (chi 2  = 13.36, P  < 0.05), group size (chi 2  = 8.77, P  < 0.05), and learning scaffold (chi 2  = 9.03, P  < 0.01) all have an impact on critical thinking, and they can be viewed as important moderating factors that affect how critical thinking develops. On the basis of these results, recommendations are made for further study and instruction to better support students’ critical thinking in the context of collaborative problem-solving.

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Introduction.

Although critical thinking has a long history in research, the concept of critical thinking, which is regarded as an essential competence for learners in the 21st century, has recently attracted more attention from researchers and teaching practitioners (National Research Council, 2012 ). Critical thinking should be the core of curriculum reform based on key competencies in the field of education (Peng and Deng, 2017 ) because students with critical thinking can not only understand the meaning of knowledge but also effectively solve practical problems in real life even after knowledge is forgotten (Kek and Huijser, 2011 ). The definition of critical thinking is not universal (Ennis, 1989 ; Castle, 2009 ; Niu et al., 2013 ). In general, the definition of critical thinking is a self-aware and self-regulated thought process (Facione, 1990 ; Niu et al., 2013 ). It refers to the cognitive skills needed to interpret, analyze, synthesize, reason, and evaluate information as well as the attitudinal tendency to apply these abilities (Halpern, 2001 ). The view that critical thinking can be taught and learned through curriculum teaching has been widely supported by many researchers (e.g., Kuncel, 2011 ; Leng and Lu, 2020 ), leading to educators’ efforts to foster it among students. In the field of teaching practice, there are three types of courses for teaching critical thinking (Ennis, 1989 ). The first is an independent curriculum in which critical thinking is taught and cultivated without involving the knowledge of specific disciplines; the second is an integrated curriculum in which critical thinking is integrated into the teaching of other disciplines as a clear teaching goal; and the third is a mixed curriculum in which critical thinking is taught in parallel to the teaching of other disciplines for mixed teaching training. Furthermore, numerous measuring tools have been developed by researchers and educators to measure critical thinking in the context of teaching practice. These include standardized measurement tools, such as WGCTA, CCTST, CCTT, and CCTDI, which have been verified by repeated experiments and are considered effective and reliable by international scholars (Facione and Facione, 1992 ). In short, descriptions of critical thinking, including its two dimensions of attitudinal tendency and cognitive skills, different types of teaching courses, and standardized measurement tools provide a complex normative framework for understanding, teaching, and evaluating critical thinking.

Cultivating critical thinking in curriculum teaching can start with a problem, and one of the most popular critical thinking instructional approaches is problem-based learning (Liu et al., 2020 ). Duch et al. ( 2001 ) noted that problem-based learning in group collaboration is progressive active learning, which can improve students’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Collaborative problem-solving is the organic integration of collaborative learning and problem-based learning, which takes learners as the center of the learning process and uses problems with poor structure in real-world situations as the starting point for the learning process (Liang et al., 2017 ). Students learn the knowledge needed to solve problems in a collaborative group, reach a consensus on problems in the field, and form solutions through social cooperation methods, such as dialogue, interpretation, questioning, debate, negotiation, and reflection, thus promoting the development of learners’ domain knowledge and critical thinking (Cindy, 2004 ; Liang et al., 2017 ).

Collaborative problem-solving has been widely used in the teaching practice of critical thinking, and several studies have attempted to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of the empirical literature on critical thinking from various perspectives. However, little attention has been paid to the impact of collaborative problem-solving on critical thinking. Therefore, the best approach for developing and enhancing critical thinking throughout collaborative problem-solving is to examine how to implement critical thinking instruction; however, this issue is still unexplored, which means that many teachers are incapable of better instructing critical thinking (Leng and Lu, 2020 ; Niu et al., 2013 ). For example, Huber ( 2016 ) provided the meta-analysis findings of 71 publications on gaining critical thinking over various time frames in college with the aim of determining whether critical thinking was truly teachable. These authors found that learners significantly improve their critical thinking while in college and that critical thinking differs with factors such as teaching strategies, intervention duration, subject area, and teaching type. The usefulness of collaborative problem-solving in fostering students’ critical thinking, however, was not determined by this study, nor did it reveal whether there existed significant variations among the different elements. A meta-analysis of 31 pieces of educational literature was conducted by Liu et al. ( 2020 ) to assess the impact of problem-solving on college students’ critical thinking. These authors found that problem-solving could promote the development of critical thinking among college students and proposed establishing a reasonable group structure for problem-solving in a follow-up study to improve students’ critical thinking. Additionally, previous empirical studies have reached inconclusive and even contradictory conclusions about whether and to what extent collaborative problem-solving increases or decreases critical thinking levels. As an illustration, Yang et al. ( 2008 ) carried out an experiment on the integrated curriculum teaching of college students based on a web bulletin board with the goal of fostering participants’ critical thinking in the context of collaborative problem-solving. These authors’ research revealed that through sharing, debating, examining, and reflecting on various experiences and ideas, collaborative problem-solving can considerably enhance students’ critical thinking in real-life problem situations. In contrast, collaborative problem-solving had a positive impact on learners’ interaction and could improve learning interest and motivation but could not significantly improve students’ critical thinking when compared to traditional classroom teaching, according to research by Naber and Wyatt ( 2014 ) and Sendag and Odabasi ( 2009 ) on undergraduate and high school students, respectively.

The above studies show that there is inconsistency regarding the effectiveness of collaborative problem-solving in promoting students’ critical thinking. Therefore, it is essential to conduct a thorough and trustworthy review to detect and decide whether and to what degree collaborative problem-solving can result in a rise or decrease in critical thinking. Meta-analysis is a quantitative analysis approach that is utilized to examine quantitative data from various separate studies that are all focused on the same research topic. This approach characterizes the effectiveness of its impact by averaging the effect sizes of numerous qualitative studies in an effort to reduce the uncertainty brought on by independent research and produce more conclusive findings (Lipsey and Wilson, 2001 ).

This paper used a meta-analytic approach and carried out a meta-analysis to examine the effectiveness of collaborative problem-solving in promoting students’ critical thinking in order to make a contribution to both research and practice. The following research questions were addressed by this meta-analysis:

What is the overall effect size of collaborative problem-solving in promoting students’ critical thinking and its impact on the two dimensions of critical thinking (i.e., attitudinal tendency and cognitive skills)?

How are the disparities between the study conclusions impacted by various moderating variables if the impacts of various experimental designs in the included studies are heterogeneous?

This research followed the strict procedures (e.g., database searching, identification, screening, eligibility, merging, duplicate removal, and analysis of included studies) of Cooper’s ( 2010 ) proposed meta-analysis approach for examining quantitative data from various separate studies that are all focused on the same research topic. The relevant empirical research that appeared in worldwide educational periodicals within the 21st century was subjected to this meta-analysis using Rev-Man 5.4. The consistency of the data extracted separately by two researchers was tested using Cohen’s kappa coefficient, and a publication bias test and a heterogeneity test were run on the sample data to ascertain the quality of this meta-analysis.

Data sources and search strategies

There were three stages to the data collection process for this meta-analysis, as shown in Fig. 1 , which shows the number of articles included and eliminated during the selection process based on the statement and study eligibility criteria.

This flowchart shows the number of records identified, included and excluded in the article.

First, the databases used to systematically search for relevant articles were the journal papers of the Web of Science Core Collection and the Chinese Core source journal, as well as the Chinese Social Science Citation Index (CSSCI) source journal papers included in CNKI. These databases were selected because they are credible platforms that are sources of scholarly and peer-reviewed information with advanced search tools and contain literature relevant to the subject of our topic from reliable researchers and experts. The search string with the Boolean operator used in the Web of Science was “TS = (((“critical thinking” or “ct” and “pretest” or “posttest”) or (“critical thinking” or “ct” and “control group” or “quasi experiment” or “experiment”)) and (“collaboration” or “collaborative learning” or “CSCL”) and (“problem solving” or “problem-based learning” or “PBL”))”. The research area was “Education Educational Research”, and the search period was “January 1, 2000, to December 30, 2021”. A total of 412 papers were obtained. The search string with the Boolean operator used in the CNKI was “SU = (‘critical thinking’*‘collaboration’ + ‘critical thinking’*‘collaborative learning’ + ‘critical thinking’*‘CSCL’ + ‘critical thinking’*‘problem solving’ + ‘critical thinking’*‘problem-based learning’ + ‘critical thinking’*‘PBL’ + ‘critical thinking’*‘problem oriented’) AND FT = (‘experiment’ + ‘quasi experiment’ + ‘pretest’ + ‘posttest’ + ‘empirical study’)” (translated into Chinese when searching). A total of 56 studies were found throughout the search period of “January 2000 to December 2021”. From the databases, all duplicates and retractions were eliminated before exporting the references into Endnote, a program for managing bibliographic references. In all, 466 studies were found.

Second, the studies that matched the inclusion and exclusion criteria for the meta-analysis were chosen by two researchers after they had reviewed the abstracts and titles of the gathered articles, yielding a total of 126 studies.

Third, two researchers thoroughly reviewed each included article’s whole text in accordance with the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Meanwhile, a snowball search was performed using the references and citations of the included articles to ensure complete coverage of the articles. Ultimately, 36 articles were kept.

Two researchers worked together to carry out this entire process, and a consensus rate of almost 94.7% was reached after discussion and negotiation to clarify any emerging differences.

Eligibility criteria

Since not all the retrieved studies matched the criteria for this meta-analysis, eligibility criteria for both inclusion and exclusion were developed as follows:

The publication language of the included studies was limited to English and Chinese, and the full text could be obtained. Articles that did not meet the publication language and articles not published between 2000 and 2021 were excluded.

The research design of the included studies must be empirical and quantitative studies that can assess the effect of collaborative problem-solving on the development of critical thinking. Articles that could not identify the causal mechanisms by which collaborative problem-solving affects critical thinking, such as review articles and theoretical articles, were excluded.

The research method of the included studies must feature a randomized control experiment or a quasi-experiment, or a natural experiment, which have a higher degree of internal validity with strong experimental designs and can all plausibly provide evidence that critical thinking and collaborative problem-solving are causally related. Articles with non-experimental research methods, such as purely correlational or observational studies, were excluded.

The participants of the included studies were only students in school, including K-12 students and college students. Articles in which the participants were non-school students, such as social workers or adult learners, were excluded.

The research results of the included studies must mention definite signs that may be utilized to gauge critical thinking’s impact (e.g., sample size, mean value, or standard deviation). Articles that lacked specific measurement indicators for critical thinking and could not calculate the effect size were excluded.

Data coding design

In order to perform a meta-analysis, it is necessary to collect the most important information from the articles, codify that information’s properties, and convert descriptive data into quantitative data. Therefore, this study designed a data coding template (see Table 1 ). Ultimately, 16 coding fields were retained.

The designed data-coding template consisted of three pieces of information. Basic information about the papers was included in the descriptive information: the publishing year, author, serial number, and title of the paper.

The variable information for the experimental design had three variables: the independent variable (instruction method), the dependent variable (critical thinking), and the moderating variable (learning stage, teaching type, intervention duration, learning scaffold, group size, measuring tool, and subject area). Depending on the topic of this study, the intervention strategy, as the independent variable, was coded into collaborative and non-collaborative problem-solving. The dependent variable, critical thinking, was coded as a cognitive skill and an attitudinal tendency. And seven moderating variables were created by grouping and combining the experimental design variables discovered within the 36 studies (see Table 1 ), where learning stages were encoded as higher education, high school, middle school, and primary school or lower; teaching types were encoded as mixed courses, integrated courses, and independent courses; intervention durations were encoded as 0–1 weeks, 1–4 weeks, 4–12 weeks, and more than 12 weeks; group sizes were encoded as 2–3 persons, 4–6 persons, 7–10 persons, and more than 10 persons; learning scaffolds were encoded as teacher-supported learning scaffold, technique-supported learning scaffold, and resource-supported learning scaffold; measuring tools were encoded as standardized measurement tools (e.g., WGCTA, CCTT, CCTST, and CCTDI) and self-adapting measurement tools (e.g., modified or made by researchers); and subject areas were encoded according to the specific subjects used in the 36 included studies.

The data information contained three metrics for measuring critical thinking: sample size, average value, and standard deviation. It is vital to remember that studies with various experimental designs frequently adopt various formulas to determine the effect size. And this paper used Morris’ proposed standardized mean difference (SMD) calculation formula ( 2008 , p. 369; see Supplementary Table S3 ).

Procedure for extracting and coding data

According to the data coding template (see Table 1 ), the 36 papers’ information was retrieved by two researchers, who then entered them into Excel (see Supplementary Table S1 ). The results of each study were extracted separately in the data extraction procedure if an article contained numerous studies on critical thinking, or if a study assessed different critical thinking dimensions. For instance, Tiwari et al. ( 2010 ) used four time points, which were viewed as numerous different studies, to examine the outcomes of critical thinking, and Chen ( 2013 ) included the two outcome variables of attitudinal tendency and cognitive skills, which were regarded as two studies. After discussion and negotiation during data extraction, the two researchers’ consistency test coefficients were roughly 93.27%. Supplementary Table S2 details the key characteristics of the 36 included articles with 79 effect quantities, including descriptive information (e.g., the publishing year, author, serial number, and title of the paper), variable information (e.g., independent variables, dependent variables, and moderating variables), and data information (e.g., mean values, standard deviations, and sample size). Following that, testing for publication bias and heterogeneity was done on the sample data using the Rev-Man 5.4 software, and then the test results were used to conduct a meta-analysis.

Publication bias test

When the sample of studies included in a meta-analysis does not accurately reflect the general status of research on the relevant subject, publication bias is said to be exhibited in this research. The reliability and accuracy of the meta-analysis may be impacted by publication bias. Due to this, the meta-analysis needs to check the sample data for publication bias (Stewart et al., 2006 ). A popular method to check for publication bias is the funnel plot; and it is unlikely that there will be publishing bias when the data are equally dispersed on either side of the average effect size and targeted within the higher region. The data are equally dispersed within the higher portion of the efficient zone, consistent with the funnel plot connected with this analysis (see Fig. 2 ), indicating that publication bias is unlikely in this situation.

This funnel plot shows the result of publication bias of 79 effect quantities across 36 studies.

Heterogeneity test

To select the appropriate effect models for the meta-analysis, one might use the results of a heterogeneity test on the data effect sizes. In a meta-analysis, it is common practice to gauge the degree of data heterogeneity using the I 2 value, and I 2  ≥ 50% is typically understood to denote medium-high heterogeneity, which calls for the adoption of a random effect model; if not, a fixed effect model ought to be applied (Lipsey and Wilson, 2001 ). The findings of the heterogeneity test in this paper (see Table 2 ) revealed that I 2 was 86% and displayed significant heterogeneity ( P  < 0.01). To ensure accuracy and reliability, the overall effect size ought to be calculated utilizing the random effect model.

The analysis of the overall effect size

This meta-analysis utilized a random effect model to examine 79 effect quantities from 36 studies after eliminating heterogeneity. In accordance with Cohen’s criterion (Cohen, 1992 ), it is abundantly clear from the analysis results, which are shown in the forest plot of the overall effect (see Fig. 3 ), that the cumulative impact size of cooperative problem-solving is 0.82, which is statistically significant ( z  = 12.78, P  < 0.01, 95% CI [0.69, 0.95]), and can encourage learners to practice critical thinking.

This forest plot shows the analysis result of the overall effect size across 36 studies.

In addition, this study examined two distinct dimensions of critical thinking to better understand the precise contributions that collaborative problem-solving makes to the growth of critical thinking. The findings (see Table 3 ) indicate that collaborative problem-solving improves cognitive skills (ES = 0.70) and attitudinal tendency (ES = 1.17), with significant intergroup differences (chi 2  = 7.95, P  < 0.01). Although collaborative problem-solving improves both dimensions of critical thinking, it is essential to point out that the improvements in students’ attitudinal tendency are much more pronounced and have a significant comprehensive effect (ES = 1.17, z  = 7.62, P  < 0.01, 95% CI [0.87, 1.47]), whereas gains in learners’ cognitive skill are slightly improved and are just above average. (ES = 0.70, z  = 11.55, P  < 0.01, 95% CI [0.58, 0.82]).

The analysis of moderator effect size

The whole forest plot’s 79 effect quantities underwent a two-tailed test, which revealed significant heterogeneity ( I 2  = 86%, z  = 12.78, P  < 0.01), indicating differences between various effect sizes that may have been influenced by moderating factors other than sampling error. Therefore, exploring possible moderating factors that might produce considerable heterogeneity was done using subgroup analysis, such as the learning stage, learning scaffold, teaching type, group size, duration of the intervention, measuring tool, and the subject area included in the 36 experimental designs, in order to further explore the key factors that influence critical thinking. The findings (see Table 4 ) indicate that various moderating factors have advantageous effects on critical thinking. In this situation, the subject area (chi 2  = 13.36, P  < 0.05), group size (chi 2  = 8.77, P  < 0.05), intervention duration (chi 2  = 12.18, P  < 0.01), learning scaffold (chi 2  = 9.03, P  < 0.01), and teaching type (chi 2  = 7.20, P  < 0.05) are all significant moderators that can be applied to support the cultivation of critical thinking. However, since the learning stage and the measuring tools did not significantly differ among intergroup (chi 2  = 3.15, P  = 0.21 > 0.05, and chi 2  = 0.08, P  = 0.78 > 0.05), we are unable to explain why these two factors are crucial in supporting the cultivation of critical thinking in the context of collaborative problem-solving. These are the precise outcomes, as follows:

Various learning stages influenced critical thinking positively, without significant intergroup differences (chi 2  = 3.15, P  = 0.21 > 0.05). High school was first on the list of effect sizes (ES = 1.36, P  < 0.01), then higher education (ES = 0.78, P  < 0.01), and middle school (ES = 0.73, P  < 0.01). These results show that, despite the learning stage’s beneficial influence on cultivating learners’ critical thinking, we are unable to explain why it is essential for cultivating critical thinking in the context of collaborative problem-solving.

Different teaching types had varying degrees of positive impact on critical thinking, with significant intergroup differences (chi 2  = 7.20, P  < 0.05). The effect size was ranked as follows: mixed courses (ES = 1.34, P  < 0.01), integrated courses (ES = 0.81, P  < 0.01), and independent courses (ES = 0.27, P  < 0.01). These results indicate that the most effective approach to cultivate critical thinking utilizing collaborative problem solving is through the teaching type of mixed courses.

Various intervention durations significantly improved critical thinking, and there were significant intergroup differences (chi 2  = 12.18, P  < 0.01). The effect sizes related to this variable showed a tendency to increase with longer intervention durations. The improvement in critical thinking reached a significant level (ES = 0.85, P  < 0.01) after more than 12 weeks of training. These findings indicate that the intervention duration and critical thinking’s impact are positively correlated, with a longer intervention duration having a greater effect.

Different learning scaffolds influenced critical thinking positively, with significant intergroup differences (chi 2  = 9.03, P  < 0.01). The resource-supported learning scaffold (ES = 0.69, P  < 0.01) acquired a medium-to-higher level of impact, the technique-supported learning scaffold (ES = 0.63, P  < 0.01) also attained a medium-to-higher level of impact, and the teacher-supported learning scaffold (ES = 0.92, P  < 0.01) displayed a high level of significant impact. These results show that the learning scaffold with teacher support has the greatest impact on cultivating critical thinking.

Various group sizes influenced critical thinking positively, and the intergroup differences were statistically significant (chi 2  = 8.77, P  < 0.05). Critical thinking showed a general declining trend with increasing group size. The overall effect size of 2–3 people in this situation was the biggest (ES = 0.99, P  < 0.01), and when the group size was greater than 7 people, the improvement in critical thinking was at the lower-middle level (ES < 0.5, P  < 0.01). These results show that the impact on critical thinking is positively connected with group size, and as group size grows, so does the overall impact.

Various measuring tools influenced critical thinking positively, with significant intergroup differences (chi 2  = 0.08, P  = 0.78 > 0.05). In this situation, the self-adapting measurement tools obtained an upper-medium level of effect (ES = 0.78), whereas the complete effect size of the standardized measurement tools was the largest, achieving a significant level of effect (ES = 0.84, P  < 0.01). These results show that, despite the beneficial influence of the measuring tool on cultivating critical thinking, we are unable to explain why it is crucial in fostering the growth of critical thinking by utilizing the approach of collaborative problem-solving.

Different subject areas had a greater impact on critical thinking, and the intergroup differences were statistically significant (chi 2  = 13.36, P  < 0.05). Mathematics had the greatest overall impact, achieving a significant level of effect (ES = 1.68, P  < 0.01), followed by science (ES = 1.25, P  < 0.01) and medical science (ES = 0.87, P  < 0.01), both of which also achieved a significant level of effect. Programming technology was the least effective (ES = 0.39, P  < 0.01), only having a medium-low degree of effect compared to education (ES = 0.72, P  < 0.01) and other fields (such as language, art, and social sciences) (ES = 0.58, P  < 0.01). These results suggest that scientific fields (e.g., mathematics, science) may be the most effective subject areas for cultivating critical thinking utilizing the approach of collaborative problem-solving.

The effectiveness of collaborative problem solving with regard to teaching critical thinking

According to this meta-analysis, using collaborative problem-solving as an intervention strategy in critical thinking teaching has a considerable amount of impact on cultivating learners’ critical thinking as a whole and has a favorable promotional effect on the two dimensions of critical thinking. According to certain studies, collaborative problem solving, the most frequently used critical thinking teaching strategy in curriculum instruction can considerably enhance students’ critical thinking (e.g., Liang et al., 2017 ; Liu et al., 2020 ; Cindy, 2004 ). This meta-analysis provides convergent data support for the above research views. Thus, the findings of this meta-analysis not only effectively address the first research query regarding the overall effect of cultivating critical thinking and its impact on the two dimensions of critical thinking (i.e., attitudinal tendency and cognitive skills) utilizing the approach of collaborative problem-solving, but also enhance our confidence in cultivating critical thinking by using collaborative problem-solving intervention approach in the context of classroom teaching.

Furthermore, the associated improvements in attitudinal tendency are much stronger, but the corresponding improvements in cognitive skill are only marginally better. According to certain studies, cognitive skill differs from the attitudinal tendency in classroom instruction; the cultivation and development of the former as a key ability is a process of gradual accumulation, while the latter as an attitude is affected by the context of the teaching situation (e.g., a novel and exciting teaching approach, challenging and rewarding tasks) (Halpern, 2001 ; Wei and Hong, 2022 ). Collaborative problem-solving as a teaching approach is exciting and interesting, as well as rewarding and challenging; because it takes the learners as the focus and examines problems with poor structure in real situations, and it can inspire students to fully realize their potential for problem-solving, which will significantly improve their attitudinal tendency toward solving problems (Liu et al., 2020 ). Similar to how collaborative problem-solving influences attitudinal tendency, attitudinal tendency impacts cognitive skill when attempting to solve a problem (Liu et al., 2020 ; Zhang et al., 2022 ), and stronger attitudinal tendencies are associated with improved learning achievement and cognitive ability in students (Sison, 2008 ; Zhang et al., 2022 ). It can be seen that the two specific dimensions of critical thinking as well as critical thinking as a whole are affected by collaborative problem-solving, and this study illuminates the nuanced links between cognitive skills and attitudinal tendencies with regard to these two dimensions of critical thinking. To fully develop students’ capacity for critical thinking, future empirical research should pay closer attention to cognitive skills.

The moderating effects of collaborative problem solving with regard to teaching critical thinking

In order to further explore the key factors that influence critical thinking, exploring possible moderating effects that might produce considerable heterogeneity was done using subgroup analysis. The findings show that the moderating factors, such as the teaching type, learning stage, group size, learning scaffold, duration of the intervention, measuring tool, and the subject area included in the 36 experimental designs, could all support the cultivation of collaborative problem-solving in critical thinking. Among them, the effect size differences between the learning stage and measuring tool are not significant, which does not explain why these two factors are crucial in supporting the cultivation of critical thinking utilizing the approach of collaborative problem-solving.

In terms of the learning stage, various learning stages influenced critical thinking positively without significant intergroup differences, indicating that we are unable to explain why it is crucial in fostering the growth of critical thinking.

Although high education accounts for 70.89% of all empirical studies performed by researchers, high school may be the appropriate learning stage to foster students’ critical thinking by utilizing the approach of collaborative problem-solving since it has the largest overall effect size. This phenomenon may be related to student’s cognitive development, which needs to be further studied in follow-up research.

With regard to teaching type, mixed course teaching may be the best teaching method to cultivate students’ critical thinking. Relevant studies have shown that in the actual teaching process if students are trained in thinking methods alone, the methods they learn are isolated and divorced from subject knowledge, which is not conducive to their transfer of thinking methods; therefore, if students’ thinking is trained only in subject teaching without systematic method training, it is challenging to apply to real-world circumstances (Ruggiero, 2012 ; Hu and Liu, 2015 ). Teaching critical thinking as mixed course teaching in parallel to other subject teachings can achieve the best effect on learners’ critical thinking, and explicit critical thinking instruction is more effective than less explicit critical thinking instruction (Bensley and Spero, 2014 ).

In terms of the intervention duration, with longer intervention times, the overall effect size shows an upward tendency. Thus, the intervention duration and critical thinking’s impact are positively correlated. Critical thinking, as a key competency for students in the 21st century, is difficult to get a meaningful improvement in a brief intervention duration. Instead, it could be developed over a lengthy period of time through consistent teaching and the progressive accumulation of knowledge (Halpern, 2001 ; Hu and Liu, 2015 ). Therefore, future empirical studies ought to take these restrictions into account throughout a longer period of critical thinking instruction.

With regard to group size, a group size of 2–3 persons has the highest effect size, and the comprehensive effect size decreases with increasing group size in general. This outcome is in line with some research findings; as an example, a group composed of two to four members is most appropriate for collaborative learning (Schellens and Valcke, 2006 ). However, the meta-analysis results also indicate that once the group size exceeds 7 people, small groups cannot produce better interaction and performance than large groups. This may be because the learning scaffolds of technique support, resource support, and teacher support improve the frequency and effectiveness of interaction among group members, and a collaborative group with more members may increase the diversity of views, which is helpful to cultivate critical thinking utilizing the approach of collaborative problem-solving.

With regard to the learning scaffold, the three different kinds of learning scaffolds can all enhance critical thinking. Among them, the teacher-supported learning scaffold has the largest overall effect size, demonstrating the interdependence of effective learning scaffolds and collaborative problem-solving. This outcome is in line with some research findings; as an example, a successful strategy is to encourage learners to collaborate, come up with solutions, and develop critical thinking skills by using learning scaffolds (Reiser, 2004 ; Xu et al., 2022 ); learning scaffolds can lower task complexity and unpleasant feelings while also enticing students to engage in learning activities (Wood et al., 2006 ); learning scaffolds are designed to assist students in using learning approaches more successfully to adapt the collaborative problem-solving process, and the teacher-supported learning scaffolds have the greatest influence on critical thinking in this process because they are more targeted, informative, and timely (Xu et al., 2022 ).

With respect to the measuring tool, despite the fact that standardized measurement tools (such as the WGCTA, CCTT, and CCTST) have been acknowledged as trustworthy and effective by worldwide experts, only 54.43% of the research included in this meta-analysis adopted them for assessment, and the results indicated no intergroup differences. These results suggest that not all teaching circumstances are appropriate for measuring critical thinking using standardized measurement tools. “The measuring tools for measuring thinking ability have limits in assessing learners in educational situations and should be adapted appropriately to accurately assess the changes in learners’ critical thinking.”, according to Simpson and Courtney ( 2002 , p. 91). As a result, in order to more fully and precisely gauge how learners’ critical thinking has evolved, we must properly modify standardized measuring tools based on collaborative problem-solving learning contexts.

With regard to the subject area, the comprehensive effect size of science departments (e.g., mathematics, science, medical science) is larger than that of language arts and social sciences. Some recent international education reforms have noted that critical thinking is a basic part of scientific literacy. Students with scientific literacy can prove the rationality of their judgment according to accurate evidence and reasonable standards when they face challenges or poorly structured problems (Kyndt et al., 2013 ), which makes critical thinking crucial for developing scientific understanding and applying this understanding to practical problem solving for problems related to science, technology, and society (Yore et al., 2007 ).

Suggestions for critical thinking teaching

Other than those stated in the discussion above, the following suggestions are offered for critical thinking instruction utilizing the approach of collaborative problem-solving.

First, teachers should put a special emphasis on the two core elements, which are collaboration and problem-solving, to design real problems based on collaborative situations. This meta-analysis provides evidence to support the view that collaborative problem-solving has a strong synergistic effect on promoting students’ critical thinking. Asking questions about real situations and allowing learners to take part in critical discussions on real problems during class instruction are key ways to teach critical thinking rather than simply reading speculative articles without practice (Mulnix, 2012 ). Furthermore, the improvement of students’ critical thinking is realized through cognitive conflict with other learners in the problem situation (Yang et al., 2008 ). Consequently, it is essential for teachers to put a special emphasis on the two core elements, which are collaboration and problem-solving, and design real problems and encourage students to discuss, negotiate, and argue based on collaborative problem-solving situations.

Second, teachers should design and implement mixed courses to cultivate learners’ critical thinking, utilizing the approach of collaborative problem-solving. Critical thinking can be taught through curriculum instruction (Kuncel, 2011 ; Leng and Lu, 2020 ), with the goal of cultivating learners’ critical thinking for flexible transfer and application in real problem-solving situations. This meta-analysis shows that mixed course teaching has a highly substantial impact on the cultivation and promotion of learners’ critical thinking. Therefore, teachers should design and implement mixed course teaching with real collaborative problem-solving situations in combination with the knowledge content of specific disciplines in conventional teaching, teach methods and strategies of critical thinking based on poorly structured problems to help students master critical thinking, and provide practical activities in which students can interact with each other to develop knowledge construction and critical thinking utilizing the approach of collaborative problem-solving.

Third, teachers should be more trained in critical thinking, particularly preservice teachers, and they also should be conscious of the ways in which teachers’ support for learning scaffolds can promote critical thinking. The learning scaffold supported by teachers had the greatest impact on learners’ critical thinking, in addition to being more directive, targeted, and timely (Wood et al., 2006 ). Critical thinking can only be effectively taught when teachers recognize the significance of critical thinking for students’ growth and use the proper approaches while designing instructional activities (Forawi, 2016 ). Therefore, with the intention of enabling teachers to create learning scaffolds to cultivate learners’ critical thinking utilizing the approach of collaborative problem solving, it is essential to concentrate on the teacher-supported learning scaffolds and enhance the instruction for teaching critical thinking to teachers, especially preservice teachers.

Implications and limitations

There are certain limitations in this meta-analysis, but future research can correct them. First, the search languages were restricted to English and Chinese, so it is possible that pertinent studies that were written in other languages were overlooked, resulting in an inadequate number of articles for review. Second, these data provided by the included studies are partially missing, such as whether teachers were trained in the theory and practice of critical thinking, the average age and gender of learners, and the differences in critical thinking among learners of various ages and genders. Third, as is typical for review articles, more studies were released while this meta-analysis was being done; therefore, it had a time limit. With the development of relevant research, future studies focusing on these issues are highly relevant and needed.

Conclusions

The subject of the magnitude of collaborative problem-solving’s impact on fostering students’ critical thinking, which received scant attention from other studies, was successfully addressed by this study. The question of the effectiveness of collaborative problem-solving in promoting students’ critical thinking was addressed in this study, which addressed a topic that had gotten little attention in earlier research. The following conclusions can be made:

Regarding the results obtained, collaborative problem solving is an effective teaching approach to foster learners’ critical thinking, with a significant overall effect size (ES = 0.82, z  = 12.78, P  < 0.01, 95% CI [0.69, 0.95]). With respect to the dimensions of critical thinking, collaborative problem-solving can significantly and effectively improve students’ attitudinal tendency, and the comprehensive effect is significant (ES = 1.17, z  = 7.62, P  < 0.01, 95% CI [0.87, 1.47]); nevertheless, it falls short in terms of improving students’ cognitive skills, having only an upper-middle impact (ES = 0.70, z  = 11.55, P  < 0.01, 95% CI [0.58, 0.82]).

As demonstrated by both the results and the discussion, there are varying degrees of beneficial effects on students’ critical thinking from all seven moderating factors, which were found across 36 studies. In this context, the teaching type (chi 2  = 7.20, P  < 0.05), intervention duration (chi 2  = 12.18, P  < 0.01), subject area (chi 2  = 13.36, P  < 0.05), group size (chi 2  = 8.77, P  < 0.05), and learning scaffold (chi 2  = 9.03, P  < 0.01) all have a positive impact on critical thinking, and they can be viewed as important moderating factors that affect how critical thinking develops. Since the learning stage (chi 2  = 3.15, P  = 0.21 > 0.05) and measuring tools (chi 2  = 0.08, P  = 0.78 > 0.05) did not demonstrate any significant intergroup differences, we are unable to explain why these two factors are crucial in supporting the cultivation of critical thinking in the context of collaborative problem-solving.

Data availability

All data generated or analyzed during this study are included within the article and its supplementary information files, and the supplementary information files are available in the Dataverse repository: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/IPFJO6 .

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the graduate scientific research and innovation project of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region named “Research on in-depth learning of high school information technology courses for the cultivation of computing thinking” (No. XJ2022G190) and the independent innovation fund project for doctoral students of the College of Educational Science of Xinjiang Normal University named “Research on project-based teaching of high school information technology courses from the perspective of discipline core literacy” (No. XJNUJKYA2003).

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Xu, E., Wang, W. & Wang, Q. The effectiveness of collaborative problem solving in promoting students’ critical thinking: A meta-analysis based on empirical literature. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 10 , 16 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-01508-1

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Critical Theory (Frankfurt School)

[ Editor’s Note: The following new entry by Robin Celikates and Jeffrey Flynn replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author. ]

“Critical theory” refers to a family of theories that aim at a critique and transformation of society by integrating normative perspectives with empirically informed analysis of society’s conflicts, contradictions, and tendencies. In a narrow sense, “Critical Theory” (often denoted with capital letters) refers to the work of several generations of philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School. Beginning in the 1930s at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, it is best known for interdisciplinary research that combines philosophy and social science with the practical aim of furthering emancipation. There are separate entries on influential figures of the first generation of the Frankfurt School – Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), and Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) – and the leading figure of the second generation, Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929).

In a broader sense, there are many different strands of critical theory that have emerged as forms of reflective engagement with the emancipatory goals of various social and political movements, such as feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory, and postcolonial/decolonial theory. In another, third sense, “critical theory” or sometimes just “Theory” is used to refer to work by theorists associated with psychoanalysis and post-structuralism, such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida (see these separate entries as well as the entry on postmodernism ).

This entry is primarily focused on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, but broadens outward at various points to discuss engagements by that tradition with a range of critical theories and social developments. The need for a broad approach to critical theory is prompted today by a range of contemporary social, political, economic, and ecological crises and struggles as well as the critique of Eurocentric forms of knowledge production.

1.1 Origins and Generations

1.2 influences, 1.3 critical theory versus traditional theory, 1.4 studies on authoritarianism and mass culture, 1.5 the dialectic of enlightenment, 1.6 the communicative turn, 1.7 a continuing and contested tradition, 2.1 immanent critique, 2.2 normative foundations for critique, 2.3 reconstructive critique, 2.4 disclosive critique, genealogy, and the critique of normativity, 2.5 current challenges, 3.1 alienation, 3.2 reification, 3.3 ideology, 3.4 emancipation, 4.1.1 gender, 4.1.3 colonialism and post-colonialism, 4.2.1 economic crises, 4.2.2 ecological crises, 4.2.3 political crises, 4.3 critical practices, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the frankfurt school: origins, influences, and development.

The “Frankfurt School” of critical theory is not really a school at all. It is a loosely held together tradition constituted by ongoing debates among adherents about how best to define and develop that tradition. This includes disagreements about methods, about how to interpret earlier figures and texts in the tradition, about whether past shifts in focus were advances or dead ends, and about how to respond to new challenges arising from other schools of thought and current social developments. This section tells a largely chronological story, focusing on the origins, influences, and key texts of the Frankfurt School, and concludes with reference to ongoing debates on how to inherit and continue the tradition.

In their attempt to combine philosophy and social science in a critical theory with emancipatory intent, the wide-ranging work of the first generation of the Frankfurt School was methodologically innovative. They revised and updated Marxism by integrating it with the work of Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, and Friedrich Nietzsche while developing a model of radical critique that is immanently anchored in social reality. They used this model to analyze a wide range of phenomena – from authoritarianism as a political formation and as it manifests in both the nuclear family and deep-seated psychological dispositions, to the effects of capitalism on psychological, social, cultural, and political formations as well as on the production of knowledge itself (for excellent guides, see Thompson 2017 and Gordon et al. 2019).

Max Horkheimer outlined the original research agenda for the Frankfurt School in his 1931 inaugural lecture upon becoming director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt (founded in 1923). He proposed an interdisciplinary research program combining philosophy and social theory with psychology, political economy, and cultural analysis (Horkheimer 1931). In that way, “social philosophy” aims at providing an encompassing interpretation of social reality as a whole – as “social totality,” to use a concept central to the Marxist tradition (Jay 1984).

Other key figures of the first generation include Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin, along with Erich Fromm, Friedrich Pollock, Leo Löwenthal, Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, and figures like Siegfried Kracauer, who belonged to the broader circle for a few years (for rich historical accounts, see Jay 1973, Buck-Morss 1977, Dubiel 1978, Wiggershaus 1986, Wheatland 2009). The work of the largely Jewish members of the first generation was deeply marked by the rise of National Socialism, the experience of exile, and, for some of its inner circle, their return to Germany after 1945. After the Nazis closed the Institute, Horkheimer, who had already moved it to Geneva, re-established it at Columbia University in 1934, where he was soon joined by Pollock, Marcuse, and Löwenthal, while Adorno did not emigrate to the US until 1938. Horkheimer, Adorno, and Pollock moved the Institute from New York to Los Angeles in 1941. Those three reestablished the Institute in Germany after the War, with Horkeimer as director from 1951 to 1958 and Adorno from 1958 to 1969. Key figures who worked with first generation figures during this period emerged as the second generation: Jürgen Habermas, Alfred Schmidt, Albrecht Wellmer, Oskar Negt, and Claus Offe.

Habermas was the leading figure of this second generation, taking up Horkheimer’s chair in Frankfurt in 1964 before moving to a research post in Starnberg in 1971. Habermas returned to Frankfurt in 1981, retiring from this position in 1994. Axel Honneth worked closely with Habermas in the 1980s and took over the chair in social philosophy in Frankfurt in 1996; Honneth was also director of, and largely responsible for the revival of, the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt from 2001 to 2018. He is considered a leading figure in the third generation, along with Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, and Christoph Menke (Anderson 2000, Allen 2010). Going beyond the second and third generations of the Frankfurt School, there are far too many figures to list; and the focal points for critical theory in this tradition have expanded, both geographically – with prominent figures in the United States and an active reception in Latin America – and thematically – for example, with a turn to feminism (see §4.1.1 ).

The first generation of the Frankfurt School took inspiration from an earlier generation of critical theorists: “Left Hegelians” in Germany who, after Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s death in 1831, applied his philosophy critically to social and political phenomena like religion and the state, maintaining that the progressive realization of freedom in history that was central to Hegel’s thought was not yet complete and required a fundamental transformation of the status quo. Karl Marx became the most influential of this group. In a materialist transformation of Hegel’s thought, Marx analyzed the concrete conditions for realizing autonomy for all and viewed philosophy itself as conditioned by socioeconomic developments. By developing a critique of political economy in order to analyze the nature of capitalism and the possibilities for revolutionary social transformation, Marx set the standard for future generations of critical theory by combining radical philosophy with a critique of the best available social science of the day in the pursuit of emancipation.

Marx’s early writings, in the 1840s, were written when capitalist modernization was only just beginning in Germany, but he already saw contradictory social relations as the objective condition of capitalist society and exploited workers as a nascent revolutionary force. By the time the Frankfurt School began working out a critical theory of society in the 1930s much had changed as Germany had emerged as a leading economic power in an industrialized, capitalist Europe. Frankfurt School theorists were committed to social transformation, but the vehicle for change Marx identified – workers in advanced capitalist states like Germany – not only lacked revolutionary consciousness, but would soon embrace fascist politics when faced with economic crisis and mass unemployment. Radical social theorists would need revised analytical tools.

To study the psychology of individuals and groups along with social and cultural influences on that psychology, they could not rely on the then-dominant dogmatic versions of scientific Marxism (Pensky 2019). To understand how social conflicts get denied or repressed, and why individuals and groups turn to authoritarian politics that seem not to align with their class interests, they turned to Freudian psychoanalysis. In contrast to orthodox Marxism, they analyzed individual and group psychology, changes in the modern family, and the cultural “superstructure” of society, not just the material “base,” in order to understand how the rise of “mass culture” and the decline of authority figures in the family led to the decline of critical capacities both in the individual psyche and in society generally. This effort to combine Marx and Freud is one of the distinctive features of the Frankfurt School; exactly how to integrate psychoanalytic theory into critical theory has been a long-standing debate (Marcuse 1955, Whitebook 1995, Honneth 2010, Part IV; Allen and O’Connor 2019, Allen 2021).

In addition to incorporating insights from Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, early critical theorists drew on Max Weber’s social theory to analyze contemporary society. Crucial here was Weber’s theory of rationalization, which stressed the growing dominance of instrumental rationality, or means-end reasoning, through the expanding bureaucratization of society. Weber posited a loss of freedom, due to the “iron cage” of modern bureaucracy, and a loss of meaning generated by the “disenchantment of the world” associated with secularization. Weber’s work was crucial for Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of instrumental reason (1947) as well as for Habermas’s later theory of communicative action (1981).

In synthesizing Marx and Weber, the first generation of critical theory was heavily influenced by Georg Lukács’s attempt to do the same in his ground-breaking 1923 essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” (see Brunkhorst 1983). Radically extending Marx’s analysis of commodities by analyzing how they transform the character of society as a whole, and drawing on Weber to describe a process of rationalization that extends to all aspects of life, Lukács used the term “reification” (see 3.2 below) to describe how the commodity form transforms the consciousness of those living in capitalist societies, who then see all social relations, even their relation to themselves, as taking on a “thing-like” character.

The classic philosophical influences on the Frankfurt School range widely, from Immanuel Kant and German Idealism to Nietzsche. In some form, Kant’s appeal to Mündigkeit (autonomy, maturity, responsibility) in his famous essay “What is Enlightenment?” – with its call for freely and publicly making use of reason – animates the ideal of emancipation throughout the work of the Frankfurt School, along with the Kantian conception of the critique of reason: the use of reason to reflect on the limits of reason. But its adherents follow Hegel and Marx in focusing on the social, cultural, and material conditions for achieving autonomy and insisting that reason is always socially and historically embedded. For first generation critical theorists, this entailed a critique of Kant’s own individualist and repressive understanding of autonomy as it arises within capitalist social conditions (Horkheimer 1933) and formalizes the domination of our own inner nature (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947, Excursus II, Adorno 1963a, Chs. 10–11). Some later critical theorists have engaged more positively with Kant, as in Habermas’s attempt to “detranscendentalize” core aspects of Kant’s transcendental philosophy (Habermas 2005, Ch. 2) and Rainer Forst’s Kantian constructivism in moral and political theory (Forst 2007, 2021a).

Hegel’s work has been a continual reference point for Frankfurt School philosophers, with key figures in the tradition – from Marcuse (1941) and Adorno (1963b) to Benhabib (1986, Part I) and Honneth (1992, 2001, 2011) – contributing both substantive studies and relying on Hegel’s methodology either for its holistic approach or as a paradigm of immanent critique while eschewing his metaphysical, teleological, and reconciliatory tendencies. Honneth first built on Hegel’s account of the struggle for recognition and the intersubjective conditions for living an autonomous life (Honneth 1992) before developing his own account of the practices and institutions of modern ethical life that realize freedom in a way that goes beyond its liberal and Kantian interpretations (Honneth 2011). Rahel Jaeggi builds on Hegel’s method of immanent critique in her account of progressive social change as learning processes in response to problems, contradictions, and crises that arise from within ethically thick forms of life (Jaeggi 2014).

In aiming to explain irrationality, the first generation extended the critique of reason, going beyond rationalist philosophers like Kant and Hegel to figures like Freud and Nietzsche. They turned to Nietzsche in particular as a critic of modern bourgeois culture and the violent formation of individual subjectivity. Engagement with Nietzsche’s thought extends from early essays by Horkheimer (1933, 1936a) through Horkheimer and Adorno’s shift toward doing critical theory in a more Nietzschean spirit with the genealogy of reason in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), and Habermas’s more critical take on Nietzsche’s supposed irrationalism (1985, Ch. 3–4), to contemporary authors such as Menke, who returns to Nietzsche as a positive reference point in the critique of the repressive dimensions of the modern ideal of equality (2000) and for a genealogical analysis of the modern subject who demands rights (2015).

One way of categorizing work by later generations of the Frankfurt School is to note how, even when drawing on a range of theoretical resources, they give pride of place to the legacy of a particular figure like Kant, Hegel, Marx, or Nietzsche (often via Foucault), or how they combine approaches. For instance, Honneth and Jaeggi are more Hegelian while Forst is more Kantian, and Benhabib is, like Habermas, a Hegelianized Kantian, and Fraser draws heavily on Marx in recent work while Amy Allen and Martin Saar are influenced by Foucauldian genealogy. The latter is part of a broader engagement between the Frankfurt School and post-structuralism, ranging from the more critical (Habermas 1985) through the more sympathetic (Honneth 1985, Menke 1988, 2000) to attempts to combine deconstructive and reconstructive approaches to critical theory (McCarthy 1991; see also Fraser 1989).

It is not easy to capture key features of an intellectual tradition shaped by such a variety of influences, including multiple figures whose own thinking changed over time, and a body of work addressing a vast range of topics spanning from the 1930s to the present. The rest of this section outlines some of the main arguments and focal points of key texts by key figures. It is not meant to be exhaustive, but to identify influential methodological approaches, arguments, and themes that are indicative of the work of the Frankfurt School and still provide important reference points for contemporary debates.

One largely undisputed reference for defining Frankfurt School critical theory is Horkheimer’s 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in which he defines critical theory by contrasting it with traditional theories that take the existing social order as given. Social sciences do this, for example, when they model themselves after the natural sciences in attempting to descriptively mirror a given set of facts or establish law-like generalizations. The point is not that empirical social research is invalid, but that traditional theories fail to analyze the broader social context in which they are embedded. This form of “positivism” views science as a purely theoretical undertaking divorced from practical interests even while it actually serves a particular social function in relying on established concepts and categories in a way that reinforces dominant ideologies and power structures. In that way, the forms of knowledge production that we rely on for insight into the social order become obstacles to social change.

Critical theory, by contrast, reflects on the context of its own origins and aims to be a transformative force within that context. It explicitly embraces an interdisciplinary methodology that aims to bridge the gap between empirical research and the kind of philosophical thinking needed to grasp the overall historical situation and mediate between specialized empirical disciplines. Critical theory aims not merely to describe social reality, but to generate insights into the forces of domination operating within society in a way that can inform practical action and stimulate change. It aims to unite theory and practice, so that the theorist forms “a dynamic unity with the oppressed class” (1937a [1972, 215]) that is guided by an emancipatory interest – defined negatively as an interest in the “abolition of social injustice” (ibid., 242) and positively as an interest in establishing “reasonable conditions of life” (ibid., 199). “The theory never aims simply at an increase of knowledge as such,” but at “emancipation from slavery” (1937b [1972, 246]) in the broadest sense of eliminating all forms of domination. The critique of traditional social science was further developed by Adorno and Habermas in the so-called positivism dispute in German sociology (Adorno et al. 1969, Wellmer 1969) and Horkheimer’s model of critical theory continues to inform discussions about how social critique might be carried out today in a variety of contexts (Outlaw 2005, Collins 2019, 57–65).

Nothing epitomizes the Frankfurt School’s interdisciplinary approach to analyzing irrational elements of modern society better than their studies of authoritarianism, beginning with studies of German society in the 1930s and continuing with studies of the U.S. in the 1940s. This work combined philosophy, social theory, and psychoanalytic theory with empirical research.

The first substantial foray was Studies in Authority and the Family (Horkheimer 1936b), the product of five years of research carried out by members of the Institute as part of the research agenda outlined by Horkheimer when he became director in 1930. In an essay articulating the study’s theoretical framework, Erich Fromm argued that the “drives underlying the authoritarian character” are “the pleasure of obedience, submission, and the surrender of one’s personality” along with “aggression against the defenseless and sympathy with the powerful” (Fromm 1936 [2020, 39, 41]). A main concern of the Studies was that the nuclear family had lost the power it once had to counter other socializing forces, which could now more directly influence the individual, and that individuals who view the world as governed by irrational forces submit to powerful leaders who ease their feelings of powerlessness.

The focus on authoritarianism continued into exile, with Neumann and Kirchheimer focusing more on distinctly political phenomena such as law, the state structure, and competing political groups under the Nazi regime (see Neumann 1944, Scheuerman 1996). Neumann and Kirchheimer were the main legal and political analysts of the first generation, but were outside the inner circle and less influential on the trajectory the Frankfurt School took in the 1940s (see Scheuerman 1994 and Buchstein 2020 for attempts to revive interest in their legal and political analysis).

The work on authoritarianism that the Institute is most well-known for came with the publication of The Authoritarian Personality (1950), the result of research conducted by Adorno in collaboration with a team of psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley. The aim was to identify personality types that might be susceptible to authoritarianism, based not on explicit commitments to fascist political movements but on psychological characteristics and social attitudes (measured on an “F-scale”). The researchers posited that individuals with an authoritarian personality tend to exhibit traits such as rigid conformity to conventional norms, a tendency toward stereotypical thinking, a preference for strong authority figures and disdain for perceived weakness, a preoccupation with power and status, and a propensity for prejudice and hostility towards minority groups. The book explored the link between authoritarianism and antisemitism, highlighting the role of scapegoating and the projection of repressed aggression onto targeted minority groups.

The text was published in a series edited by Horkheimer, titled Studies in Prejudice , along with other innovative studies such as Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1949), a psychoanalytic analysis of the rhetoric and tropes of American demagogues authored by Frankfurt School member Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman. If The Authoritarian Personality studied the kinds of people potentially receptive to the messages of authoritarian leaders, Prophets of Deceit studied the content of the messaging itself. Adorno would later follow up on all these themes – both the form and content of fascist agitation and the social and psychological conditions under which it can succeed (1951b, 1967a).

The Authoritarian Personality had a major impact on the field of political sociology, inspiring a wave of similar studies and commentary. The recent resurgence of authoritarian populism has inspired renewed interest in Frankfurt School analysis of authoritarianism (see Section 4.2 below) in conjunction with publication of new editions of some of the classic texts along with previously untranslated work by Kracauer on totalitarian propaganda dating from the late 1930s (Kracauer 2013 [2022]) and a 1967 lecture by Adorno on “Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism” (Adorno 1967a [2020]).

One point of continuity between the studies of authoritarianism and Frankfurt School cultural analysis more broadly was the idea that “mass culture” was one of the powerful forces playing an increasing role in the direct socialization of individuals, a role that led to the “disappearance of the inner life” of the individual (Horkheimer 1941) and an increasing loss of the ability to imagine a world any different than the existing one. In its various forms, this general thesis was common to Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse in their critiques of mass culture from the 1930s to the 1960s.

More generally, the Frankfurt School is known for its analysis of popular culture. By contrast to orthodox Marxist dismissal of cultural analysis for focusing on the less consequential “superstructure” of society, Frankfurt School theorists attentively analyzed the form and content of cultural objects along with the genres and modes of producing works of art and popular culture. In an early essay titled “Mass Ornament” (1927), Kracauer argued that analyzing the “inconspicuous surface-level expressions” of an epoch, by virtue of their “unconscious nature,” can disclose its “fundamental substance” and “unheeded impulses” (1927 [1975, 75]). Adorno would later maintain that “cultural criticism must become social physiognomy” (1951a [1967, 30]), a method he pursued in his interpretations of works of literature and music by interpreting the surface features and forms of various cultural artifacts in relation to underlying social conditions as a mode of disclosive critique.

The more pessimistic analysis of mass culture of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse can be distinguished from the more optimistic views developed by Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. Benjamin posited, in his famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility” (1936), that the rise of technologies for mechanical reproduction, such as photography and film, led to the decline of the “aura” surrounding traditional works of art – the “authenticity” associated with the unique presence of the original in space and time – in part because it makes no sense to talk about the “original” version of a photograph. The resulting changes in perception and modes of collective experience and participation in cultural production could, Benjamin hoped, also bring about political forms of art and a more general democratization of culture. He contrasted this emancipatory potential of mass culture, through a politicization of aesthetics, with the aestheticization of politics under fascism (Buck-Morss 1992). Adorno expressed his disagreement in an earlier letter to Benjamin and in published work (Adorno 1936, 1938). As Wellmer puts it, “in technologized mass culture, Benjamin sees elements of an antidote to the psychic destruction of society, whereas Adorno regards it above all as a medium of conformism and psychic manipulation” (1985/86 [1991, 32–33]). While Benjamin placed hope in mass culture, Adorno saw it lying in the kind of autonomous art that resists reconciling subjects to their social world, instead offering a kind of “promise of happiness” in a transfigured future that lies beyond that social world (Adorno 1970, Finlayson 2015, Gordon 2023).

The critique of mass culture took its most dramatic form in the chapter on the “culture industry” in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (first circulated in 1944 and published in 1947). They introduced the term “culture industry” to underline the fact that “mass culture” is not something “the masses” spontaneously generate (Adorno 1967b [1991, 98]), but is manufactured using the same standardized and profit-oriented methods as any industrial production method. In this sense, culture is no longer a relatively autonomous realm of meaning (that might aim, at its best, at beauty, freedom, and truth) or source of critical awareness, but is thoroughly commodified by the “distraction factories” of the culture industry. “Cultural entities typical of the culture industry are no longer also commodities, they are commodities through and through” (ibid., 129). Entertainment replaces experience, numbing the audience’s capacity for critical thought and reconciling them to the status quo in a form of domination far more subtle than direct tyranny.

In this way, Dialectic of Enlightenment , which is perhaps the most influential text by Frankfurt School philosophers, analyzes two forms of mass society, fascist Germany and the United States, focusing primarily on the latter. Co-authored by Horkheimer and Adorno between 1939 and 1944 at the height of Nazi rule and World War II, the text opens with these lines:

Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity (1947 [2002, 1]).

The book is a genealogy of reason that traces its self-destruction from the dawn of human history to the present. Reason was supposed to liberate human beings. Instead, in the dominant form it takes as instrumental rationality, it has become the primary instrument of their domination. With reason taking this form, humans lose their capacity for critical reflection as their thinking is increasingly oriented solely toward self-preservation within a system in which they are powerless. “Thought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process, aping the machine it has itself produced, so that it can finally be replaced by the machine” (ibid., 19).

The root of the catastrophic dynamic lies not just with modernity or capitalism, but goes back to humanity’s earliest attempts to dominate nature. A core thesis of the book is that myth and enlightenment are entwined. The process of enlightenment began with the earliest attempts to overcome “mythic fear” as a way of explaining the unknown and mitigating threats from nature. This anthropological claim about enlightenment is combined with a historical claim about the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science and technology. This is when instrumental rationality truly comes to dominate, as means-end calculation is the kind of reasoning required for capitalist production and efficient bureaucracy. “Enlightenment is totalitarian” (ibid., 50), Adorno and Horkheimer argue; it subsumes everything under its dissolvent rationality. In this way, enlightenment reverts back to myth.

The book represents a shift away from the critique of political economy, indebted to Marx, to the critique of instrumental reason, indebted to Weber (Benhabib 1986, 149–163). Although this shift is sometimes attributed to the growing pessimism of its authors during National Socialism, it was also motivated by Pollock’s analysis of the shift from nineteenth-century liberal capitalism to “state capitalism”: increased intervention by the state into the economy meant that the primacy of the economy posited by Marx had been replaced by the primacy of politics (1941). This claim supported the focus in Dialectic of Enlightenment on the administered control of society by the state apparatus. The book paints a bleak picture of a society in which people live “totally administered lives” under the sway of efficient and calculating institutions. For the sake of self-preservation, they adapt themselves entirely to this apparatus. All the while the culture industry, as an “organ of mass deception,” keeps them entertained at the price of numbing their critical capacities, producing conformity, and undermining any sense of individuality or capacity for autonomy. The book also represents a shift away from the earlier idea of critical theory as interdisciplinary social theory, which could marshal the findings of empirical social science toward the practical aim of emancipation, and more toward speculative history. In the story they tell, the effects of domination are so ubiquitous that every form of scientific knowledge is corrupted.

If Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment was supposed to provide the grounds for a positive concept of enlightenment – as they maintained in its preface (1947 [2002, xviii]) – many critics have wondered what that is supposed to be (Wellmer 1983). Habermas would later argue that the authors needed to leave “at least one rational criterion intact for their explanation of the corruption of all rational criteria” in order to “set the normative foundations of critical social theory;” but they failed to do so (1985 [1987, 127–9]; see also Benhabib 1986).

Reappraisals of the text in recent decades range from defending its approach as a form of world-disclosive critique (Kompridis 2006) that reveals our familiar social world as pathological by using techniques like “rhetorical condensation” (Honneth 1998), to reading it as developing a dialectical conception of progress – not simply a history of decline – aimed at making us more aware of the inevitable entanglement of reason with power (Allen 2014, 2016), and attempts to build on the chapter on antisemitism, which analyzes its social function in providing a “release valve” that allows rage to be “vented on those who are both conspicuous and unprotected” (1947 [2002, 140]), thereby stabilizing domination by channeling potential resistance to social suffering into hatred of a group (Rabinbach 2000, Rensmann 2017).

Herbert Marcuse’s influential book One-Dimensional Man (1964) – best summarized by its subtitle, Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society – can be read as an attempt to update Dialectic of Enlightenment in the form of a diagnosis of U.S. society and its perfected mechanisms of pacification and social control, ranging from art, sexuality, and politics to philosophy and the very act of thinking. Marcuse argues that all forms of critical thought and practice, having been wholly integrated into the wasteful, dehumanizing, profit-seeking, imperialist logic of advanced capitalism, are subsumed by one-dimensional ideology, a “flattening out of the antagonism between culture and social reality” (61).

Marcuse developed his influential concept of “repressive desublimation” to explain how the manipulated need for instant gratification has sanitized any transgressive forces within the domains of sexuality and art. Prior to the rise of the “affluent society,” art contained a transcendent capacity in the sense that it thought of, engaged with, and appropriated the idea of breaking out of the world in which one lived and embodied the hope for a better one to replace it. Within late capitalism, art has lost this critical aspect and dissolved into consumer culture and technological rationality, masking the “surplus repression” that shapes human instincts and needs in line with the functional requirements of social domination and the reproduction of the status quo.

Marcuse’s work has been criticized for its totalizing diagnosis of domination, his reliance on an objectivist account of human nature and needs, and the paternalistic or even authoritarian implications that possibly result from combining these two elements (Jaeggi 2014 [2018, 104–108]). Nonetheless, it has remained an important reference point for the critique of technology (Feenberg 2023a, 2023b, Fong 2016, Ch. 5) and of false needs, and of new right-wing forms of “repressive desublimation” that affirm the status quo in a transgressive mode (Brown 2019, 165–169). Regardless of how one today assesses Marcuse’s concrete analyses, his work exemplifies a tension that all critical theories have to address between the dominating forces of one-dimensionality and the possibility of breaking free of them.

First-generation critical theorists posited various responses to their own bleak diagnoses of society from the 1940s to the 1960s. Marcuse supported rebellious social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, in contrast to other leading representatives of critical theory who kept a conspicuous distance. In One-Dimensional Man , he placed hope for overcoming the repressive, one-dimensional society in a “Great Refusal” to abide by its norms, as carried out by the “substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable” (1964, 256). He later expressed solidarity with, and saw as examples of this refusal in, both the global student movement (1968, 119) and the feminist movement with its aim of overcoming dominant forms of aggressive masculinity (1974). He likewise praised counter-cultural movements for expressing sexual, moral, and political rebellion in a non-aggressive form of life that might generate a total change in values (1967). For Marcuse, emancipation involves a new morality that fulfills the vital needs for joy and happiness and encompasses an aesthetic-erotic dimension that is foreshadowed in alternative artistic tastes and new social and cultural practices. While Horkheimer and Adorno were less supportive of rebellious social movements, they did become important institutional figures and public intellectuals after their return to Germany (Müller-Doohm 2003, part IV; Demirović 2016). Adorno’s radio addresses in particular can be viewed as an attempt to educate the public for autonomy and so as a kind of response to their own bleak diagnoses of society.

But the core of Adorno’s response, from the early essay on the culture industry to his posthumously published Aesthetic Theory (1970), was to posit that “autonomous” or “authentic” art, by contrast to the products of the culture industry, maintains a utopian impulse insofar as it points beyond, and provides a moment of resistance to, the status quo. For example, atonal music by composers like Arnold Schoenberg generates dissonance in the listener by challenging the unity of the whole found in more harmonious music. Adorno maintained that such art, in challenging aesthetic norms and conventions, can provide aesthetic experiences that are resistant to the homogenizing forces of the culture industry. Critics of this turn to the aesthetic have wondered how this is supposed to provide a sound basis for a critical theory of society (Benhabib 1986, 222).

But one can argue that Adorno’s later work was an attempt to push against that kind of grounding for critical theory. The title of Adorno’s 1966 magnum opus, Negative Dialectics (1966a), refers to a methodology that takes from traditional Hegelian dialectics the emphasis on difference and mediation but abandons the attempt to overcome difference through a unifying synthesis. Instead, taking up an argument already developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment , Adorno argues that “identity thinking” and the “identity principle” have been at the basis of humanity’s destructive project of cognitive as well as practical domination of external as well as internal nature, thereby linking the philosophical to the social oppression of particularity. Adorno rejects “identity thinking” in favor of affirming the negative, namely “non-identity,” that is, the irreducible particularity of objects, experiences, and persons that cannot be subsumed under concepts.

This approach undermines the totalizing aspirations of theoretical systems in philosophy as traditionally understood. The struggle to recognize that which is nonidentical is not only an epistemological but also an ethical and political project that seeks to do justice to both the object and the subject of cognition in their irreducible individuality (Bernstein 2001). Linking epistemology and the philosophy of language to critical theory of society, this leads Adorno to reject not only Hegel’s affirmative synthesis but also Heideggerian ontology and Kantian dualism. Methodologically, Adorno explores alternative ways of thinking about how to use and develop philosophical concepts, taking up the Benjaminian notion of constellation and developing “critical models” in order to articulate the complexity of experience, and suffering, without reducing or constraining it. In Adorno’s view, negative dialectics is a form of immanent critique engaged in a dynamic and transformative process, as it “must transform the concepts which it brings, as it were, from outside into those which the object has of itself, into what the object, left to itself, seeks to be, and confront it with what it is” (Adorno 1957 [1976, 69]). In his cultural criticism and interventions in public debates, Adorno follows this paradigm by exploring how concrete experiences exemplify a form of social domination that is obscured by mass culture but also open up the possibility of transcending reified consciousness by articulating the internal contradictions within social reality.

Jürgen Habermas, who worked closely with Horkheimer and Adorno in the 1950s until he fell out of favor with Horkheimer for seeming too radical, inherited one of the central claims of the Dialectic of Enlightenment , namely that Enlightenment is inseparable from the self-critique of Enlightenment, while also insisting on the context-transcending force of reason embedded in everyday practice.

Two works from the 1960s established his status as a leading figure in the second generation: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) and Knowledge and Human Interests (1968b). In the former, Habermas provides a historical and conceptual reconstruction of the idea of the public sphere in which subjects recognize each other as equals, submit to the “force of the better argument,” and subject legislation to the public use of reason. Against the backdrop of its emergence in eighteenth-century European societies, Habermas identifies the internal contradictions of the public sphere under the conditions of capitalism and traces its decline under the combined pressure of mass culture and mass media that has gradually transformed a reasoning public into passive consumers – a claim consistent with the “culture industry” thesis.

Critics argued that Habermas’s historical narrative of decline presupposes highly idealized versions of public debate and a “reasoning” public – a public that has always in truth been fragmented by class, gender, and race-based domination – and neglects the political significance of a multiplicity of subaltern and non-official public spheres and counter-publics (Negt and Kluge 1972, Fraser 1990, Warner 2002, Allen 2012). Nevertheless, his critical analysis of a contemporary public of consumers as the objects of processes of de-politicization, commercialization, political manipulation, and refeudalization seems to have lost nothing of its relevance (Seeliger and Sevignani 2022). The claim that a robust and independent public sphere is crucial to a healthy democracy is central to Habermas’s later, systematic contribution to democratic theory in Between Facts and Norms (1992), and he continues to analyze recent transformations in the structures and modes of communication within the public sphere (Habermas 2006, 2021).

Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests (1968b) was an ambitious attempt to ground critical social theory as a form of inquiry aimed at fostering a distinct type of knowledge tied to a deep-seated human interest in emancipation. This was a return to Horkheimer’s methodological aims in “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937), but with a novel set of arguments, such as Habermas’s claim that the method of critical theory can be illuminated by way of an analogy with psychoanalysis – “the only tangible example of a science incorporating methodological self-reflection” (1968b [1971, 124]). Like Horkheimer, Habermas was critical of the positivist understanding of science for failing to see the connection between specific kinds of inquiry and fundamental human interests. Habermas posited that both the natural sciences and the “human sciences” (interpretive social sciences and humanities) are grounded in distinct practical interests. The natural sciences are a reflective extension of “labor” (instrumental action), which is tied to the practical interest in material reproduction. The human sciences are a reflective extension of “interaction” (linguistic communication), which is tied to the practical interest in symbolic reproduction. Habermas distinguished “critique” or “reflection” as a third practice organized around the interest in emancipation, understood in terms of overcoming various forms of heteronomy, domination, and dependency.

In the early 1970s, Habermas largely abandoned this framework, based in an anthropology of knowledge, though he did continue to pursue some of its themes, and epistemological questions have remained central to his work in at least two domains: first, in his “postmetaphysical” (non-foundationalist and fallibilistic) understanding of philosophy as a form of critical reflection at the intersection between science and society (Habermas 1983a, Ch. 1) and, second, in his critique of naturalism, especially neuroscience as a form of positivism or scientism that absolutizes the observer’s perspective, thereby negating the irreducibility of the participants’ perspective and occluding the normative structure of interpersonal communication (Habermas 2005, Ch. 6).

Habermas increasingly came to the view that critical theory needed more robust social-theoretical and normative foundations, since, in his eyes, the totalizing critique of the first generation had proven to be self-undermining (1985, Ch. 5) and his own approach in Knowledge and Human Interests had conflated the reconstruction of invariant structures of communication (formal pragmatics) with the critique of the false consciousness of particular persons and societies (1973a). Habermas’s alternative path, after abandoning that methodological framework, was to focus on communicative reason in a two-volume magnum opus titled The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). By contrast with an instrumentalist understanding of reason and action, Habermas’s “communicative turn” starts from a reconstruction of the rational and normative potential of everyday interactions.

This turn involves a multidimensional paradigm shift, illustrating the theoretical ambition of Habermas’ enterprise. He develops a theory of communicative action and rationality that is anchored in everyday practices of communication, in which we raise validity claims whose normative dynamic is context-transcendent and which allow for consensus-based coordination of action. He provides a historical reconstruction of modern rationalization processes, in which social integration via authority or shared tradition has been increasingly replaced by an expanded use of communicative reason in response to the pressure to cooperate. Finally, he constructs a two-level model of society based on the distinction between “system” and “lifeworld,” claiming that the regulation of coexistence in modern societies depends on both communication oriented towards mutual understanding (“lifeworld”) and on the anonymous systems of state bureaucracy and the capitalist market (“system”).

For the methodological renewal of critical theory, Habermas’s central claim is that within complex societies, social order always has a double form: It must simultaneously be viewed as lifeworld and as system. The lifeworld can only be understood from the hermeneutic perspective of its participants while the mechanisms of systemic integration only come into view from a system-theoretical or external perspective. Critical theory needs both perspectives in order to identify distorting effects of the system on the lifeworld. Habermas famously and controversially diagnoses a “colonization of the lifeworld” by the systemic media of money and power, which impose economic and administrative rationality – the main forms of “functionalist reason” – on areas of the lifeworld whose reproduction relies on communicative processes of cultural reproduction, social integration, and socialization that cannot be subsumed under the media of money and power without generating resistance. This provides a new foundation for critical theory by updating the critique of reification in the form of a critique of systematic distortions of communication. The “critique of functionalist reason” becomes a central task for critical theory, along with the aim of diagnosing the “selective pattern” of capitalist modernization that only partially realizes the actually available potential for rationality and learning within society.

In the ensuing discussion, Habermas was accused of reifying the “system” by conceptualizing the capitalist market and the bureaucratic state as functionally necessary and supposedly norm-free systems that lie beyond the theoretical reach of critical social theory and the political reach of emancipatory politics (Honneth and Joas 1991), of idealizing the lifeworld in ways that largely ignore the domination and exploitation of women and minorities (Fraser 1985), of subscribing to a progressivist theory of modernization and history that is Eurocentric and insensitive to the continuing effects of colonial domination (Allen 2016, Ch. 2), and of underestimating how deeply power penetrates into and distorts the very heart of communicative reason (Allen 2008, Chs. 5–6).

Habermas and his followers insist that while these phenomena are real, it is only the power of communicative reason – and the public discourses and deliberations in which it manifests itself and gets institutionalized – that allows us to detect, criticize, and ultimately overcome (if only partially and temporarily) those forms of domination. Whether one agrees or not that the communicative turn enables critical theory to analyze and bring to agents’ attention the distortions that block them from addressing and overcoming obstacles to emancipation, one important legacy of Habermas’s theory can be seen in opening up space for a methodologically pluralist critical theory in response to the fundamental need to capture the perspective of both participants and observers (Bohman 2003). Some Frankfurt School theorists have also built on Habermas’s system-lifeworld distinction in maintaining that social change must be viewed from the perspective of both “evolution” and “revolution” (Brunkhorst 2002, 2014).

One dominant story told about the Frankfurt School begins with Horkheimer’s original research program in the 1930s and views Horkheimer and Adorno’s radical departure from that vision in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) as an intellectual dead end from which Habermas rescued the tradition and returned it to its original methodology. From this perspective, the second generation, dominated by Habermas, superseded the first (see Kompridis 2006, 255–258, for a critique of this story). An alternative story would point out that Dialectic of Enlightenment was in many ways consistent with themes first articulated by Adorno in work from the 1930s – particularly his 1931 inaugural lecture, heavily inspired by Benjamin – that ultimately came to fruition in Negative Dialectics (1966a). To complicate matters in another way, while collaborating on Dialectic of Enlightenment in the 1940s Adorno also contributed to the interdisciplinary collaboration that culminated in The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a product of Horkheimer’s original vision for critical theory that combined social theory with empirical research.

Rather than viewing the second generation solely in terms of Habermas overcoming deficits in the first, this alternative story recognizes that there have always been multiple models and styles of critical theory operating simultaneously within the tradition ​​and that Adorno was heavily influenced by Benjamin prior to collaborating with Horkheimer (Buck-Morss 1977, Wolin 1994, 166, 265–274). Moreover, Adorno’s influence is evident in work by figures in the second generation such as Albrecht Wellmer (1933–2018), who used Adorno’s work as a basis for challenging Habermas’s approach (Wellmer 1985/86, 1993) and was far more sympathetic with post-structuralism than Habermas – also true of Wellmer’s students in the third generation, Christoph Menke (1988, 2000) and Martin Seel. Adorno scholars have defended his work directly against Habermas’s criticisms (Cook 2004, O’Connor 2004: 165–170), and critical theorists continue to defend Adorno’s approach to critical theory (Allen 2016, 2021, 175–183, Marasco 2015, Ch. 3).

To complicate the story further, Benjamin’s work has had an enormous influence on work by a variety of critical theorists, though his wider influence had to wait until Adorno collected Benjamin’s essays for a German audience in 1955 and Hannah Arendt edited them for English readers in 1968. There have been significant studies of Benjamin’s work by scholars working within the Frankfurt School tradition (see Buck-Morss 1989 and Pensky 1993), while many critical theorists beyond the Frankfurt School have engaged Benjamin’s critique of linear notions of progress, and the ways in which they fail to break with the catastrophic continuity of the present (Benjamin 1940, see Löwy 2001), as well as his analysis of the constitutive relation between law and violence (Benjamin 1920/21; see the recently published critical edition, 2021), to mention only Jacques Derrida’s “Force of Law” (1990), Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (1995), and Judith Butler’s Parting Ways (2012) (see also Loick 2012).

Methodological debates within the Frankfurt School focus not only on the legacy of first-generation theorists but also on Habermas’s earlier work, with some arguing that Knowledge and Human Interests is worth revisiting because it was more attuned than his subsequent work to the dynamics of power and domination, making it more apt for addressing oppression based on gender (Allen 2008) or race (McCarthy 2004), or for developing a more comprehensive critical theory of domination (Klein 2020). Honneth (2017) has recently taken Habermas’s text as a jumping off point for refocusing critical theory on the task of elaborating the relation between emancipatory interests and emancipatory knowledge. Honneth nonetheless maintains that Habermas’s use of the methodology of psychoanalysis as a model for emancipatory critique is not apt, while others argue that it is still in many ways productive (Celikates 2009 [2018, 137–157]; see Allen 2021, Ch. 5 for a critique of Habermas, Honneth, and Celikates).

The latter debate is part of the resurging interest in psychoanalysis by some theorists working in the Frankfurt School tradition. Habermas’s own engagement with Freud and psychoanalysis in Knowledge and Human Interests was largely methodological in contrast to the substantive use of Freudian ideas by the first generation (in their analysis of the entanglement of reason and repression and the concrete forces of fascism and antisemitism), and Habermas (1983a) subsequently abandoned psychoanalytic theory entirely in favor of engagement with developmental psychologists like Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg. In developing his theory of recognition, Honneth (1992, Ch. 5) returned to psychoanalysis in the form of object relations theory, primarily in the work of Donald Winnicott, arguing that the experience of fusion and symbiosis that characterizes the early infant-mother relationship is foundational in two ways: It serves as the template for the type of recognition Honneth calls “love” and explains why individuals and groups continue to experience existing relations of recognition – that necessarily fall short of fusion and symbiosis – as unsatisfactory and continue to struggle for recognition. While Honneth’s use of Winnicott is controversial (McAfee 2019, Ch. 2; Whitebook 2021, Deranty 2021), recent debates have more generally focused on how to take up object relations within critical theory (Allen and O’Connor 2019). As a result, the divide now seems to be primarily between those who focus on the pro-social implications of psychoanalytic theory (Honneth 2010, Part IV) and those who also stress asocial or antisocial forces of Freud’s drive theory in general and the death drive in particular in order to avoid what they see as the risk of over-idealization and romanticization built into Honneth’s way of integrating psychoanalysis into his theory of recognition (Allen 2021, Ch. 5). Those critics advocate returning to the more negativistic approaches familiar from first-generation critical theorists (Fong 2016, McAfee 2019, Allen 2021).

Honneth’s return to the question of struggles oriented by emancipatory interests (2017) hearkens back to a shift that began in the 1980s, when a significant strand of Frankfurt School critical theory, including Honneth’s early work (1985), aimed at recovering the connection between theory and practice by linking the development of theory itself to social conflicts and movements. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s Public Sphere and Experience (1972) is an early example of a critique of the bourgeois (i.e. hegemonic) public sphere that invokes proletarian or plebeian non-state forms of the public and the divergent critical experiences they articulate as alternative sources of normativity, while also identifying blockages they face in the form of the “consciousness industry” and the pacification of social conflicts through “pseudo-publics.”

In a more explicit vein, Nancy Fraser contributed to the feminist turn in Frankfurt School critical theory – for which the work of Seyla Benhabib, Jean Cohen, and Amy Allen has also been decisive – in echoing Marx by arguing that critical theory should frame its “research program and its conceptual framework with an eye to the aims and activities of those oppositional social movements with which it has a partisan, though not uncritical, identification” (Fraser 1985, 97), and that the Frankfurt School in general and Habermas in particular had failed to theorize one of the most significant struggles against domination: the feminist movement (see §4.1.1 ).

Honneth has also sought to systematically reconstruct the link between theory development and struggles by taking experiences of misrecognition that lead to social struggles for recognition as a pre-theoretical reference point (1992). Drawing on a wide range of philosophical work, psychological and psychoanalytic accounts of identity-formation, and sociological and historical accounts of social movements struggling for recognition, Honneth has developed a theory of recognition that is the most prominent alternative paradigm, within Habermasian critical theory broadly construed, to Habermas’s theory of communicative action (Honneth 2000, Zurn 2015). Honneth maintains Habermas’s focus on intersubjectivity, but instead of linguistic practice and the ideal of “undistorted communication,” he focuses on relations of mutual recognition and the ideal of “undistorted recognition,” which then serve as the basis for the critique of “social pathologies” that he considers central to the project of critical theory (Honneth 2004).

In short, the Frankfurt School of critical theory is today constituted by lively debates, discussed more below, about how to deploy various critical methods ( Section 2 ) and concepts ( Section 3 ) while remaining attuned to social struggles and crises ( Section 4 ) and positioning itself in relation to critical theories developed out of other traditions.

2. Critical Methods

Frankfurt School critical theory is best characterized by a set of methodological aspirations that set it apart from many other forms of social and political theorizing (both in philosophy and the social sciences): It aspires to be (1) self-reflexive , accounting for its own embeddedness in specific social and historical conditions, (2) interdisciplinary , integrating philosophical analysis with social theory and empirical social research, (3) materialist , grounding critical theorizing in social reality, and (4) emancipatory , orienting itself toward the goal of social emancipation. These commitments situate the Frankfurt School firmly in the Marxist tradition, and that tradition’s aim of overcoming the division between theory and practice without uncritically subsuming one under the other.

This has given rise to three interrelated methodological challenges: how to conceptualize (1) the relation of theory to social reality, (2) the role and standpoint of critical theorists, and (3) the normative foundations, content, or force of their critical theorizing. In light of historical developments in the first half of the twentieth century – the rise of fascism and Stalinism and the integration of the working class into the liberal welfare state – Frankfurt School theorists lost confidence in an identifiable direction of history or an identifiable collective subject like the proletariat to lead the way. It became increasingly unclear how to uphold a link between their theories and a pre-theoretical anchor within social reality – such as oppositional experiences, forms of consciousness, practices of resistance, or social struggles and movements – or even to see how the conditions for any of those things to emerge were present at all.

Against this backdrop, this section first sketches the common ground most Frankfurt School theorists find in the approach of immanent critique ( §2.1 ) before tracing the various ways in which they have sought normative foundations ( §2.2 ) in a more or less constructive or reconstructive ( §2.3 ) register, then turns to methods such as disclosive and genealogical critique that are critical of those normative approaches ( §2.4 ), and concludes by outlining a set of methodological challenges that shape contemporary debates ( §2.5 ).

In responding to the three-pronged methodological challenge of relating theory to social reality, reflecting on the standpoint of critique, and spelling out its normativity, Frankfurt School critical theory moves beyond the usual juxtaposition between internal and external critique. Frankfurt School theorists rely on a third model of critique, which builds on Hegel and Marx and is often understood as immanent or reconstructive. Critique proceeds immanently or reconstructively when it seeks to secure its normative resources and epistemic standpoint from the (often implicit) normative structures and epistemic possibilities of the practices and self‐understandings that are constitutive of the (type of) society in question. Immanent critique avoids the dichotomy between an internal critique that refers to standards and standpoints that are already recognized by those criticized and an external critique that refers to standards and standpoints that are not (or not yet) recognized and therefore have to be derived independently from the agents’ perspective and their social context (see Jaeggi 2005, 2014, Celikates 2009, Stahl 2013a). Critical theory understood in this way is both grounded in social reality as it exists and emancipatory in seeking to radically transform this reality.

The critique of ideology can both serve as a paradigmatic example of immanent critique in this sense and illustrate some of the challenges this model faces (Ng 2015). Ideology critique is immanent insofar as it starts from the contradictions of a social and ideological constellation and the experience of those affected, which is shaped by these contradictions. It does not criticize an ideological form of consciousness because it is immoral or unethical, but because of its epistemic, functional, and genetic features, i.e. for being false or distorted, for contributing to the reproduction of relations of domination, and for arising from within such relations in ways that are relatively immune to self-reflection. Consequently, the critique of ideology does not focus primarily on the injustice or domination found in society, but on the forms of consciousness, culture, practice, habit, and affect that make this injustice or domination seem natural or unavoidable (Jaeggi 2008). On this view, any critical theory that aims at emancipation must first aim at diagnosing and overcoming those obstacles that keep agents from fully experiencing, critically reflecting on, and collectively acting against the unjust and dominating conditions under which they live. The question is how critical theorists can do so without falling back into epistemologically and politically problematic distinctions between false and true consciousness, between ideology and scientific insight, and between true (“objective”) and false (“purely subjective”) interests and needs (Celikates 2006; see Section 3.3 below).

These challenges are among the many challenges critical theorists face in developing an immanent critique that is linked to social reality and practice, a link that comes out in two ways. First, theory is anchored in social reality in terms of its genesis, as it is shaped by the social context from which it emerges. Second, theory aims at a practice that transforms social reality. This dual commitment to linking theory and practice is spelled out in two rather different ways, both in the history of the Frankfurt School and in contemporary discussions. One way of anchoring theory in social reality – call it the crisis approach – starts with social contradictions, antagonisms, and crises, along with the practical challenges and conflicts that result, and maintains that identifying those conflicts requires socio-theoretical analysis and sociological research (Jaeggi 2017a, Fraser and Jaeggi 2018). A second way of anchoring theory in social reality – call it the struggles approach – takes social struggles and movements and the practices of critique and resistance of oppressed groups as its starting point. This approach incorporates alternative standpoints and counter-hegemonic epistemologies into its theorizing with the aim of countering the potentially disempowering and anti-emancipatory effects that arise when critical theorists view crises mainly in terms of structural contradictions while ignoring or underestimating the ways that social and political movements themselves can produce and intensify crises (Collins 2019, Celikates 2022).

While this distinction between crisis and struggle is useful for heuristic purposes, it should not be overstated. Most critical theorists share a commitment to the emancipatory role of theory as well as an immanent anchoring of theory in social reality, whether qua crises or struggles. The distinction is a matter of degree and starting points, and it is usually agreed that crises and struggles stand in need of mutual articulation (see Benhabib 1986, 123–133, and Section 4.1 and Section 4.2 below).

Horkheimer maintained that a critical theory should not have an external relation to, but must enter into a “dynamic unity” with, practice, so that it is “not merely an expression of the concrete historical situation but also a force within it to stimulate change” (1937a [1972: 215], see also Marcuse 1937, Horkheimer 1937b). But under social conditions that neutralize social struggles or turn them into regressive backlash movements, the “dynamic unity” envisaged by Horkheimer can appear foreclosed. Even for Adorno, whose diagnosis of the “totally administered world” is the most radical example of this foreclosure, however, it would be a mistake to conceptualize existing society as a perfectly closed, monolithic, and functionally integrated self-reproducing totality. Rather, even when society is viewed as a totality, it has to be understood not in terms of homogeneity or frozen stability but in terms of structural antagonisms (Adorno 1957 [1976, 77]), conflict, and process (Adorno 1966b), i.e. as riddled with contradictions that, at least in principle, allow for forms of oppositional experience, consciousness, or practice that a critical theory can build on. In one of his last texts written shortly before his death, Adorno concludes that “critical theory is not aiming at totality, but criticizes it. This also means, however, that it is, in its substance, anti-totalitarian, with the utmost political determination” (Adorno 1969a; our translation). Even – or especially – in the face of the closure of political space, the political significance of a critical theory can consist in safeguarding the link between theory and the possibility of a radically different practice. At the same time, this defense of the relation to practice needs to be complemented by a defense of theory in the face of what Adorno identified as an “actionist” and anti-theoretical ideology of “pseudo-activity” in arguing that “praxis without theory, lagging behind the most advanced state of cognition, cannot but fail, and praxis, in keeping with its own concept, would like to succeed” (Adorno 1969b [1998, 265]).

Despite this more nuanced reading of Adorno on the relation between theory and practice, the broader diagnosis – put forth in different guises by Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse – that social integration, the pacification of class conflict, and the internalization of conformist attitudes had robbed critical theory of any pre-theoretical anchor, provides an important background for Habermas’s break with the first generation. That break concerns not only their “pessimism,” but the basic methodological and substantial premises of their theories. In Habermas’s view, the first generation had navigated themselves into a dead end with their totalizing diagnosis of an all-encompassing state of delusion dominated by instrumental rationality. In response, and in order to provide firm normative foundations for critical theory, Habermas advocates a “communicative turn,” reformulating social critique in terms of a critique of the conditions of communication and grounding it in the normative content presupposed within the practice of linguistically mediated social interaction and argumentation.

This element of normative validity – as opposed to merely factual social validity that is forced, imposed, or presupposed – is elaborated in Habermas’s discourse theory, originally referred to as “discourse ethics” (Habermas 1983a, Ch. 4) but later evolving into a differentiated approach that distinguishes between ethical and moral norms (Habermas 1991) and a discourse theory of law and democracy (Habermas 1992). At the heart of discourse theory is a principle of discursive justification that Habermas refers to as the “discourse principle” or “D,” which states: “just those norms of action are valid if all persons affected could agree as participants in rational discourse” (Habermas 1992 [1996, 107]). He further specifies discourse theory with a universalization principle (“U”) that is operative when arguing about moral norms, and a democratic principle that is operative when attempting to justify legal norms within a democratic society. Habermas does not naively suggest that actually existing discourses correspond to these ideals, but maintains that in those discourses participants necessarily make idealizing presuppositions that can then be used to identify and criticize the shortcomings of actual discourse as distorted by interests, power relations, and ideologies.

As a response to the challenges of immanent critique outlined above, Habermas’s work can be understood in terms of a “dialectics of immanence and transcendence” (Cooke 2006, Ch. 3). Habermas maintains the need to situate reason historically and within social reality – the largely Hegelian, pragmatist, or reconstructive element of his thought. But the idealizations that are immanent in our linguistic practices point toward context-transcending validity claims that must be defended in a discursive procedure – the Kantian or constructivist element in his thought. Habermas now refers to his attempt to “de-transcendentalize Kant” as a form of “Kantian pragmatism” (Habermas 1999; see also Bernstein 2010, Ch. 8; Baynes 2016, Ch. 4; Flynn 2014b).

Some interpretations of Habermas stress that his theory of communicative action is still a form of immanent critique (Finlayson 2007, Stahl 2013b) while others object to his increasingly Kantian focus on moral norms (Heath 2014). To provide empirical confirmation of his rational reconstruction of the “moral point of view,” further situating it within social reality, Habermas drew on Kohlberg’s developmental moral psychology, itself decidedly Kantian in its defining the highest stage of moral development in terms of the ability to make universalizable moral judgements (Habermas 1983a, Ch. 4; for a critique, see Benhabib 1992, Chs. 5–6, which, drawing on Carol Gilligan’s critique of Kohlberg, distinguishes a “generalized other” from a “concrete other” whose experience cannot be accounted for by abstract conceptions of the moral standpoint).

Habermas’s shift toward a Kantian position is particularly evident in the Rawls-Habermas debate (Habermas 1995a, Rawls 1995, Habermas 1996), widely viewed as a “family quarrel” among two Kantian political philosophers. In his early work on discourse ethics, Habermas compared his own principle (U) to Rawls’s “original position,” arguing that his approach was the better way to “operationalize” the moral point of view as a form of moral constructivism that tests moral norms in a discursive procedure posited as a dialogical alternative to Kant’s categorical imperative (Habermas 1991). The debate shifted in the 1990s with their contributions to legal-political constructivism: Rawls’s Political Liberalism (1993) and Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms (1992), in which he provides a rational reconstruction of the institutions of constitutional democracy. In that context, Habermas argues that Rawls’s approach is not transcendent enough, since in Habermas’s view Rawls reduces normative validity to the notion of reasonableness immanent within liberal democratic societies (for the implications of their debate for multiple issues in moral and political philosophy, see Hedrick 2010, Baynes 2016, Chs. 6–7, and Finlayson 2019).

Habermas’s Kantian turn also came to the fore when extending his work in a cosmopolitan or “post-national” direction (beginning with Habermas 1995b), even if he has continued to combine a Kantian approach to justifying universal norms with a wide-ranging analysis of the empirical phenomena of globalization (1998). This combination of normative and empirical theorizing, a hallmark of the Frankfurt School, is present in a range of work by other critical theorists addressing global issues (Ingram 2019, Ibsen 2023), from the challenge of disaggregating citizenship from the nation-state (Benhabib 2004) to transnationalizing the public sphere (Fraser et al. 2014), and theorizing new forms of transnational democracy (Bohman 2007). Rather than simply defending abstract cosmopolitan norms, such approaches typically aim at some form of critical cosmopolitanism (Milstein 2015), with some stressing the crucial role of political contestation of allegedly universal norms “from below” (J. Ingram 2013) or of concrete struggles for rights as part of a broadly construed intercultural dialogue on human rights (Flynn 2014a).

In light of Habermas’s turn to Kant, a significant focus of debate among Habermasians and interpreters of Habermas has been the status of idealizing presuppositions and the ultimate status of the principles of justification within discourse theory. Defenders of discourse theory can be divided up into those who focus more on immanence – pointing in a Hegelian, pragmatist, contextualist, or reconstructive direction – and those who focus more on transcendence – pointing in a Kantian or constructivist direction. Among the former, some argue, echoing Hegel’s critique of Kant, that Habermas should situate reason more thoroughly within its social and historical context in order to avoid an overly rationalistic, abstract, or gendered approach (Benhabib 1986, 1992), while others have argued for Habermas to embrace a more pragmatist (McCarthy 1991, Bernstein 2010) or contextualist approach (Rorty 1985, Allen 2008, Ch. 6). Habermas’s most recent work (2019) attempts a kind of middle path, going in a decidedly historical direction by tracing the provincial, European origins of his “post-metaphysical” mode of theorizing as a preparatory stage to a fully inclusive, global intercultural dialogue as the way to establish its universal validity in a world characterized by “multiple modernities” (see Forst 2021b, Chambers 2022, and Flynn 2022 for critical assessments).

Those who have taken discourse theory in a more Kantian or transcendental direction include Habermas’s long-time interlocutor Karl Otto-Apel, who argued that the dynamic of universal validity claims in practices of argumentation transcendentally presupposes an ideal communication community from which universal normative foundations for the assessment of discourses can be derived (Apel 1985). Apel maintained that grounding reason, and thereby critique, requires a more transcendental justification (or “ultimate grounding”) than Habermas has provided (Apel 1989; see Habermas’s most recent reply to Apel in 2005, Ch. 3).

More recently, Rainer Forst has embraced Kantian constructivism in positing that every human being has a “right to justification,” a right to demand reciprocal and general reasons for the practices, institutions, and structures that affect them (Forst 2007). Forst views moral and political constructivism as distinct, but integrated stages. While the task of moral constructivism is to construct a list of basic moral rights that cannot be reasonably rejected, those abstract rights must be given concrete content by citizens in a process of political constructivism. He maintains that his approach is immanent insofar as the right to justification is “recursively grounded” by reconstructing the validity claims implicit in all morally justified claims, while maintaining a moment of transcendence since the right to justification can be justifiably claimed in any context. Forst views this as the normative core of a critical theory that understands society as an ensemble of practices of justification. In that sense, the concept of justification is both descriptive (referring to actual arguments given within a particular social order) and normative (referring to reasons that could or should be accepted), and Forst maintains both perspectives are needed for a critique of existing justification narratives and relations of justification (see the Introductions to Forst 2011 and 2021a).

Various critics of Habermas have argued that his normative turn and shift to Kant risks transforming critical theory into something that looks increasingly like a liberal theory of justice. They posit alternative approaches such as reconstructive, disclosive, and genealogical critique that also return to questions and arguments developed by the first generation.

Those who subscribe to the model of reconstructive critique emphasize the downsides of uncoupling normative argument from social analysis and social theory. In Axel Honneth’s work, this shift takes two forms. In his earlier work (1992), he argues that the relatively narrow rationalist focus on communicative reason occludes more fundamental and often prelinguistic experiences and intersubjective relations that give rise to struggles for recognition and that his Hegel-inspired theory is better able to articulate, thus reestablishing the link between theory and social reality in more substantial ways. Relatedly, Honneth insists that critical theory can be distinguished from other normative enterprises by its reference to “the pretheoretical resource in which its own critical viewpoint is anchored extra-theoretically as an empirical interest or moral experience” (Honneth 1994 [2007, 63–64]).

Expanding on this earlier commitment, in his later work Honneth argues against the division of theoretical labor in which (constructivist) philosophy engages in normative theorizing while empirical sociology investigates our social reality (2011). By contrast, he undertakes a “normative reconstruction” of how modern society – its legal, moral, political as well as social and economic practices and institutions – came to be centered around individual freedom as the highest value of this cultural formation. Honneth wants to show that we can only gain an adequate theoretical understanding of, and critical perspective on, modern society if we analyze its different social spheres as attempts to institutionalize the value of freedom. In contrast to both revolutionary and conservative approaches, he wants to show that the structure of this institutionalization allows for a progressive realization of the value of freedom as social actors appeal to the constitutive idea of freedom to challenge the concrete forms of unfreedom that remain characteristic of our social reality.

Similar to Honneth methodologically, Rahel Jaeggi argues, in her reconstructive approach to the critique of forms of life, that bracketing the question of how to rationally evaluate and criticize forms of life as a whole, as Rawlsians do in the name of liberal neutrality and Habermasians in the name of “ethical abstinence,” ends up hindering precisely the kind of experimental learning processes that are crucial for forms of life to remain dynamic and avoid stagnation and failure (2014 [2018, 9–24, 318–319]). But Jaeggi places a greater emphasis on contradictions, crises, and conflicts than the later Honneth (see also Schaub 2015).

The approaches of both Honneth and Jaeggi exemplify a conception of immanent critique that closely links analysis and critique, issuing in a critique that is neither a mere description of what exists nor a normative demand imposed on what exists from the outside. Accordingly, it does not proceed in a free-standing, normative way, but relies on a specific combination of philosophical reflection and social-theoretical as well as empirical research that is grounded in social developments and crises and actual social experiences and self-understandings. This methodological reorientation has also led to a more substantial engagement with questions of the economy and the sphere of work, both from a more Durkheim-inspired (Honneth 2022, 2023, Celikates, Honneth, and Jaeggi 2023) and a more Marx-inspired (Fraser 2022) position that has also resulted in a fundamental (non-reformist) critique of capitalism (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018).

While these approaches seek to develop a socially grounded form of normativity, critics argue that they are still too idealizing in their understanding of social reality and its historical genesis, as well as too normative in their methods from the point of view of yet another model of critique, which has been called disclosive or genealogical.

Disclosive critique typically takes its cue from Adorno (and sometimes other theoretical sources from Heidegger to contemporary aesthetics), moving beyond the dichotomy between literary world-disclosure and philosophical reason-giving or the quest for normative foundations. On this view, critique has the task of revealing the world in a new and different light, disclosing unrecognized suffering and intricate forms of domination that are not only occluded by dominant ideologies but also shape the norms that emanate from that order in ways that escape more strongly normative versions of immanent critique that build on them. Dialectic of Enlightenment can be read as an exercise in disclosive critique that seeks to defamiliarize the social world for its readers and thereby break open their unquestioned acceptance of how things appear to them (Honneth 1998).

This negative orientation of disclosive critique can be complemented by a more positive one, in which what is disclosed also involves potentialities and horizons that have no space or way to articulate themselves within the existing social and normative order. Walter Benjamin’s writings on the radical potential of mass culture or Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) can be seen as examples of disclosive critique that involve both the disruption of established and the experimental opening up of new experiences and schemas (Vogelmann 2016).

Some critical theorists attempt to integrate a more positive idea of disclosure into critical theory while maintaining that this is not at odds with expanded conceptions or normativity. Some draw on Heidegger to develop an account of world-disclosive critique that rethinks reason and agency, stressing receptivity and “self-decentering” as an alternative model to Habermas’s focus on procedural reason (Kompridis 2006). Others stress that while disclosure can and must be subject to intersubjective validation through argumentation, critical theory must have recourse to the disclosive power of imagination, which is revealed in the force of exemplarity (Ferrara 2008), in focusing attention on the aesthetic dimension of narratives that social movements use to imagine alternative possibilities (Lara 1998, 2021), or in the way that powerful representations of the good society function to disclose a transcendent object that cannot be fully known or represented but can nonetheless provide ethical orientation (Cooke 2006). In a variety of different ways, these approaches attempt to maintain the utopian dimension of critique (Marcuse 1937).

Genealogical critique, by contrast, can be seen as a form of disclosive critique that is more focused on problematizing, unmasking, and disrupting (Saar 2002, Koopman 2013). Given its association with Nietzsche and Foucault, it also has a distinct trajectory, set of methodological commitments, and theoretical implications. Taking aim at social practices, self-understandings, identities and normative commitments that are seen as natural or accepted as given, genealogical critique traces their historical emergence, highlighting their contingency and denaturalizing them with the aim of opening up the possibility of thinking and acting differently. From this perspective, the search for normative foundations is misguided as it both underestimates how normativity is shaped by unacknowledged histories and power relations and overestimates the transformative power of a normative critique that appeals to reason alone. Genealogical critique, by contrast, seeks to destabilize and decenter the subject and its fundamental commitments (Owen 2002, Hoy and McCarthy 1994; for a version of this claim that builds on psychoanalytic theory, see Allen 2021, Ch. 5).

While earlier engagements with genealogical critique, especially Foucault’s, were marked by criticisms of his supposed rejection of all normative and rational standards, lack of social theorizing, and relativism (Habermas 1985, Chs. IX–X, Fraser 1981, Dews 1987), more recently critical theorists have sought to emphasize the potential convergence and mutual illumination of genealogy and Frankfurt School critical theory in providing an analysis of the workings of contemporary forms of power and domination (Allen 2008, Koopman 2013, Ch. 7, Saar 2018). At the same time, a recent debate between Forst and Wendy Brown exemplifies how the earlier split between Habermas and Foucault is rearticulated today, with Forst taking a broadly Habermasian position in arguing that his “respect conception of tolerance” manages to safeguard the autonomy of individuals by grounding toleration in the right to justification, and Brown insisting, with Foucault, on the normalizing, disciplining, and depoliticizing effects of liberal discourses of toleration that ultimately obfuscate the complex operations of social power (Brown and Forst 2014, see also Vogelmann 2021).

A genealogical orientation also characterizes postcolonial critiques of Frankfurt School critical theory that point out the lack of explicit and sustained engagement with European colonialism and imperialism and its legacies, including contemporary forms of racism, and the ways in which these have enabled and shaped the processes of “modernization” and thus the formation of “modern”’ societies, subjects, and forms of knowledge and rationality, all of which critical theorists purport to investigate critically (see §4.1.3 below).

Exponents of genealogical critique and struggle-centered approaches problematize forms of immanent or reconstructive critique that take institutional achievements as their starting point, challenging them by excavating the histories of domination and repression, as well as struggles, that have constituted these institutions and continue to shape their functioning. This gives rise to numerous challenges that continue to animate methodological debates in critical theory: (1) how (or even whether) to defend the putative normative achievements of liberal democracies, and if those are to be defended as achievements, then (2) how to theorize about the relation between struggles, crises, and institutional achievements, in contexts that may involve either (3) an absence of struggles, or (4), the opposite problem, a proliferation and fragmentation of struggles:

From the perspective of genealogical and post-colonial critique, the commitment to the institutions of the modern liberal nation-state (Habermas 1992, Honneth 2011) relies on an idealizing view of the history and present of this political formation that ignores, or treats as historically contingent and philosophically inconsequential, the forms of domination and exclusion that have accompanied it. At a time when the putative institutional achievements of liberal democracies – such as the separation of powers, the independence of the judiciary, the integrity of elections, or the protection of fundamental rights, especially for minorities – have come under attack from right-wing and neo-authoritarian movements and governments, the question is how critical theorists can defend the normative achievements of the existing order despite its systemic shortcomings. Offering a more radical challenge, some critical race theorists and post-colonial critics argue that those shortcomings reveal that what were thought to be normative achievements were historically premised on, and continue to functionally presuppose, domination and exclusion both at a societal and global level (see §4.1.2 and §4.1.3 below). On a methodological level, this involves the challenge of revising or going beyond the normative and sociological categories of critical theory that seem, at least in part, to be tied to a specifically Western experience.

Many critical theorists who accept the claim that these are normative achievements insist that a more complex view of the relation between institutions, struggles, and crises is necessary. As mentioned above, an alternative strand within critical theory that reaches from Negt and Kluge’s recovery of proletarian counterpublics through Fraser’s theorization of feminist movements to current attempts to reconnect critical theory with the struggles of our age, has insisted that abstracting from collective movements and struggles and relocating the emancipatory potential in the normative achievements of the existing institutional order risks underestimating how institutional dynamics, the inherent crisis tendencies of (more or less) liberal democracies, and social struggles are inextricably intertwined. Beyond a merely historical and social-theoretical point, how this question is answered will also affect how to conceptualize the role of emancipatory as opposed to regressive struggles in the face of the new authoritarianism (see §4.2.3 below).

More abstractly, critical theorists must account for situations in which there seem to be no struggles or forms of critical consciousness to latch onto, or only highly constrained forms of them. How can a critical theory respond to a situation in which domination is more or less total and has managed to suppress any critical consciousness and practice? Some of Marcuse’s descriptions of contemporary society come closest to this scenario. One might respond that “a society of happy slaves, genuinely content with their chains,” a society in which domination is experienced not as domination but as freedom, might be the critical theorists’ nightmare, but it “is a nightmare, not a realistic view of a state of society which is at present possible” (Geuss 1981, 83–84). Nevertheless, the challenge points to a dilemma critical theorists need to navigate. On the one hand, a critical theory requires a starting point in the forms of consciousness, experience, and practice of its addressees, but, on the other hand, critical theory should respond to and address distortions and blockages of precisely these forms of consciousness, experience, and practice. While these distortions and blockages will in most cases turn out to be partial rather than total and thus allow for some form of problematization to emerge (Celikates 2009, Part III), it seems equally important to not simply tie a critical theory to already existing social movements and thus to “goals that have already been publicly articulated” since this “neglects the everyday, still unthematized, but no less pressing embryonic form of social misery and moral injustice” (Honneth 2003, 114; see also Renault 2004, 2008).

The opposite problem can arise when critical theorists diagnose a proliferation of social struggles and lines of conflict beyond the classic antagonism of labor and capital. After the demise of the kind of philosophy of history that identified the proletariat as the revolutionary subject and the workers’ movement as the emancipatory force to which critical theory could and should attach itself, it has become unclear how critical theorists can determine with which of the different emancipatory movements of their day to enter into the kind of alliance envisaged by Marx and Horkheimer and which “forms of existing social critique” or “experiences of injustice” to pick up on. This difficulty is not only due to the plurality – or intersectionality – of movements, practices of critique, and experiences of injustice, but also due to the fact that struggles are often far from perfectly aligned and can operate at cross-purposes, with regard to both their aims and their methods. In answering this challenge, critical theorists can neither simply deduce the “correct” struggle from some overarching laws of historical development (the pole of determinism), nor claim that theorists simply have to decide which struggle or movement to link their theory to (the pole of voluntarism).

Insofar as critical theory is committed to immanent critique, focusing on the internal contradictions and crises of a specific social order and the struggles and movements that arise from within it, these challenges cannot be easily resolved. Rather than seeking to resolve them at an abstract level, they could instead be viewed as opening up a field of tensions that critical theorists need to navigate within the specific constellation they find themselves in. While critical theory needs to be anchored in actually existing forms of theoretical as well as practical critique, in the social struggles that people actually engage in, it also has the task of articulating the experiences of those who are blocked from engaging in struggles of their own and of contributing to the further theoretical articulation of existing struggles. At times, critical theory may need “to push beyond the ‘subjective’ elements of struggle and languages of claims-making to the more ‘objective’ dimensions of contradictions and crises, which turn more on the dynamics of systemic elements operating independently of whether or not people actually thematize them via struggle” (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018, 11), without losing sight of the epistemic and political risks this involves.

In addressing these risks, one way forward has been to embrace methodological pluralism and to understand critical theory less as a comprehensive social theory and more as a critical practice, as something critics do (Bohman 2003, Kompridis 2006, Celikates 2019a). This approach can more systematically incorporate alternative standpoints and epistemologies and the practices of epistemic resistance they are tied to, and more easily build on other traditions and paradigms of critical theory, such as feminist, anti-colonial, and anti-racist struggles and theorizing (Mills 1988, Collins 1990, 2019, Medina 2013, Loick 2021, Celikates 2022; see Section 4.1 below). Anchoring the perspective of critical theory within the social struggles and epistemic standpoints of the oppressed can serve as a counterweight – in the sense of “reflexive accountability” (Collins 2019) – to the tendency of actually existing critical theories to set in motion a disempowering spiral of epistemic asymmetries that denies the existence of theoretically sophisticated practices of critique and resistance on the ground and thereby reproduces existing obstacles to equal participation in knowledge production and to radical social transformation. On this view, critical theorizing is itself a social practice that recognizes its addressees as equal partners in a dialogical struggle for appropriate interpretations and realization of transformative potentials that is informed by social theory and sociological research. As such, it can make use of a variety of critical methods – reconstructive, constructive, disclosive, or genealogical (Freyenhagen 2018) – that are not easily subsumed under one unified metatheoretical framework, even if they can be seen as various attempts to spell out the idea of a critical theory as self-reflexive, interdisciplinary, materialist, and emancipatory.

3. Critical Concepts

The basic concepts of Frankfurt School critical theory – such as alienation, reification, ideology, but also emancipation – are expressive of the specific methodology, or set of methodologies, that critical theorists in this tradition employ. As explained in the previous section, critical theory in this tradition proceeds in an immanent way, and this implies that its concepts are both developed from within a certain social constellation and seek to go beyond the self-understanding characteristic of this constellation, they are both descriptive and evaluative, and they exemplify the unity of analysis and critique inherited from Marx. While some concepts are primarily “anticipatory-utopian” (like emancipation) and others primarily “explanatory-diagnostic” (like alienation, reification, and ideology, as obstacles to emancipation) (Benhabib 1986), they are all “thick concepts” whose descriptive content is irreducibly social-theoretically as well as evaluatively loaded.

In addition, some of the critical concepts developed by Frankfurt School authors – again alienation, reification and ideology are the clearest examples – point to second-order phenomena. In contrast to substantial first-order injustices, these concepts seek to critically diagnose what happens when unjust (or exploitative or oppressive) social relations are not experienced as unjust (or exploitative or oppressive) but are accepted as legitimate or natural, or if they are intuitively experienced but not explicitly recognized as such, or recognized but not adequately interpreted and articulated. These concepts pick out social phenomena that are often ignored by more mainstream approaches in moral and political philosophy that focus on the moral status of the individual and their actions, or the legitimacy of institutional arrangements, to the neglect of the domain of the social, with its distinct structure, dynamics, and challenges (see, e.g., Honneth 2000, Ch. 1, Zurn 2011, Neuhouser 2022, Ch. 1). The following subsections introduce four key concepts that exemplify both the critical methodologies discussed in the previous section and the substantial social-theoretical and diagnostic contributions to our understanding of contemporary society that Frankfurt School critical theory aspires to. There are of course other concepts used by critical theorists – from normativity, justice, and autonomy to power, domination, and oppression – but the focus here is on concepts less widely discussed in other traditions or to which Frankfurt School theorists have made distinctive contributions.

The concept of alienation has a long history within critical theory. The basic concept refers to the idea of humans being separated, estranged, or distanced from something crucial to their freedom or capacity to flourish. One is alienated when one has a distorted or deficient relation to oneself or to the natural or social world. Critical theorists face a number of challenges in developing a critique of alienation. Classic critiques of alienation, Rousseau and the early Marx for example, relied on substantive conceptions of human nature or self-realization to ground their diagnoses and provide standards for critique. Thick accounts of human nature are less compelling today, which means contemporary critics of alienation have pursued alternative approaches. Since a critique of alienation attempts to diagnose a social pathology, not a problem with particular individuals, critical theorists must also provide a social theory that can convincingly diagnose the social causes of, and possible paths for overcoming, alienation.

Rousseau can be credited with inaugurating “social philosophy” as a domain of inquiry while developing a critique of alienation (Honneth 2000, Ch. 1). Although he does not refer to alienation in his “Second Discourse” (1755), the term captures his argument that living in society leaves human beings disconnected from their true desires and passions, which he explored by speculating about what humans would have been like in a state of nature. Within Hegelian and Marxist social criticism, the concept of alienation has been used to capture the idea that something produced by humans is wrongly taken by them as something given or outside their conscious control (Jaeggi 2005 [2014, 13–14]). In his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel first develops a concept of alienation to describe the relation of the human mind to reality when the products of human reason are not recognized as our own creation but are instead experienced as alien forces. In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), Marx analyzed how wage labor within capitalist societies causes alienation. Workers produce a world of objects, but the products of their labor as well as their own productive activity are commodities over which they have no control; the world they create becomes an alien power with increasing control over them. They are alienated from the kind of spontaneous and creative productive activity that Marx, in his early work, posits as the essence of human nature.

The concept of alienation was influential among first-generation Frankfurt School theorists, particularly in the work of Marcuse and the later work of Erich Fromm (1961). In Dialectic of Enlightenment , Horkheimer and Adorno echo Rousseau in telling a story of alienation going back to the dawn of civilization. They maintain that human beings, in their quest to dominate the natural world (external nature) and to acquire mastery over themselves (inner nature), become estranged from both aspects of nature, failing to see what Enlightenment denies: that we are fundamentally natural beings (Vogel 1996, 69).

Contemporary critical theorists have attempted to rejuvenate the concept of alienation without relying on overly substantive accounts of human nature and without the totalizing diagnosis of Dialectic of Enlightenment . Rahel Jaeggi formalizes key elements of the Hegelian-Marxist approach in developing a philosophical account of alienation focused on how failure to adequately appropriate oneself or the world results in a “relation of relationlessnes” (2005). In this way, the non-alienated self is not defined by a substantive conception of human nature but by the quality of one’s relation to the world: whether this relation is sustained by successful processes of appropriation. Hartmut Rosa also defines alienation as a distorted relation to the world but with a more substantive approach to the quality of non-alienated relations to the world. For this, he has developed a multifaceted concept of “resonance” to capture a kind of vibrant or responsive relation to the world by contrast with the alienated experience of the world as ossified, mute, or hostile (2016). In contrast to these approaches, which are largely framed in terms of necessary conditions for living a good life, Rainer Forst has argued that deontological aspects of the critique of alienation have been neglected, and that there is a kind of “noumenal alienation” that results from not being recognized, or failing to recognize oneself, as an agent of justification (2017).

Reification is a concept with close ties to alienation. If alienation is viewed as diagnosing a distorted relation to the world, reification can be understood as one way of articulating the form that distortion can take. In the broadest sense, reification is a term used to critique cases in which some entity that should not be viewed as an object – oneself, other people, or some segment of the social or natural world – is treated as a thing-like object. It is instrumentalized, objectified, or quantified in a way that is inappropriate according to some critical standard. One challenge for critical theorists is articulating the standard or perspective – a non-reified relation or perspective – according to which the reified stance is not appropriate.

Georg Lukács’s classic 1923 essay on reification heavily influenced the Frankfurt School. Lukács combined Marx’s analysis of the “fetishism of commodities” – which causes social relations between human beings to appear as quantifiable and thing-like – with Weber’s analysis of bureaucracy – which extends this instrumentalizing attitude to all social domains. Reification becomes “the necessary, immediate reality of every person living in capitalist society” (1923 [1971, 197]), which can refer to an instrumentalizing attitude taken toward objects (whose qualitative feature are reduced to quantitative terms), other people, and features of one’s own personality when viewed solely from the perspective of their marketability.

Different critical theorists have appealed to the concept of reification to capture similar but not identical phenomena, with differing definitions corresponding to differences in the larger theoretical framework in which they deploy the concept. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the concept captures the dominance of instrumental reason and the totally administered world that results (1947). Habermas reinterpreted the concept to describe the ways in which systems such as the economy and the bureaucratic state, which function properly as spheres in which instrumental rationality dominates, extend too far into spheres of everyday life that he refers to as the lifeword (1981). This “colonization” of the lifeworld by the system results in the communicative structures of the lifeworld becoming reified. Honneth, by contrast, takes up the concept of reification in relation to his theory of recognition, arguing that reification involves a kind of forgetting of a primary relation of mutual recognition that he calls “empathetic engagement” (2005). Within Rosa’s theory of resonance, in which he attempts to capture one side of the history of modernity as a “catastrophe of resonance,” reification can be viewed as a “forgetfulness of resonance” (2016 [2019, 325]). The revival of this concept has been extended in other ways by using reification as a guiding concept for analyzing the relation between economics and subject formation within a “political economy of the senses” (Chari 2015) or pairing reification with a suitably modified notion of reconciliation to assess experiences of exclusion and integration within modern social orders (Hedrick 2019).

Ideology is similar to alienation and reification in being both a concept critical theory inherits from the Marxist tradition and one that is used to identify a distorted relationship to the world and one’s own place in it (Eagleton 1991). In the Marxist tradition, it has played a prominent role in answering questions such as why people accept social and political conditions that seem to be contrary to their own interests, or how it is possible that subjects feel free although they are dominated. When people experience and describe relations of exploitation and domination as natural and without alternative or even as just, this seems to be an effect of ideology. Ideology, on this critical understanding, usually denotes a more or less coherent system of action-guiding beliefs, such as liberal individualism, that is said to obscure social reality – especially power relations, crisis tendencies, and social conflicts. As Marx (1844, 1846, 1867) and subsequent critical theorists argue, by obscuring these, ideology contributes to the reproduction of the prevailing order (Rosen 1996). Accordingly, any radically transformative and emancipatory practice presupposes that this ideological obfuscation must be recognized as such, criticized, and overcome. The challenge to such critical reflection is particularly acute when the possibility of even asking questions about how we might want to live, if we could transform society, is occluded by a technocratic ideology that reframes such practical questions as technical problems with narrow solutions (Habermas 1963, 1968a).

Ideology differs from mere deception, propaganda, or conspiracy theories. Because it is structurally anchored in social reality and plays a functional role for its reproduction, it cannot be explained with reference to the individual psyche or manipulation by others alone. Even if false consciousness is an element of ideology, critical theorists from Adorno to Jaeggi emphasize the practical nature of ideology as it shapes identities, is embedded in social practice, and functions via affects and habitus.

According to one influential interpretation, the critical notion of ideology developed in the Frankfurt School is characterized by three dimensions (Geuss 1981, Jaeggi 2008). In the first, epistemic dimension, ideologies always encompass epistemically deficient beliefs and attitudes that can range from substantially false beliefs to the confusion of particular and universal interests and inadequate concepts (such as “illegal alien” to refer to undocumented immigrants). In the second, functional dimension, ideologies are seen as playing a necessary, or at least supporting, role for the stabilization and legitimation of social relations of domination, i.e. for their more or less smooth reproduction. In the third, genetic dimension, ideologies are shaped, in ways that are not transparent to the agents themselves, by the social conditions under which they emerge, so that it is not an accident that people end up with the specific sets of beliefs they end up with in a specific type of society.

Radicalizing the Marxist notion of ideology as “necessarily false consciousness,” i.e. consciousness that is false (and not simply morally problematic) for structural reasons (and not just accidentally), Adorno and Marcuse often seem to argue that ideology reaches into the innermost core of subjects, who are shaped all the way down to their psychological and physical impulses, leading them to affirm the existing order and thereby preempting any resistance to domination. While this might help explain the resilience of ideology and its continued effectiveness, it also poses the challenge for critical theorists to find an anchor for their critique in the forms of consciousness, experience, and practice of its addressees (Celikates 2006, and Section 2.5 above).

Due to its emancipatory orientation, the critique of ideology must connect up with the self-understanding of those affected by trying to initiate learning processes, which in turn are supposed to lead to a transformation of those social conditions that are hidden behind ideologies. At the same time, without recourse to critical theories agents themselves will often continue to face obstacles to identifying, diagnosing, and explaining the effects of ideology on their critical capacities and practices. Arguably, showing that a contradiction is inscribed in the existing social order and can only be “dissolved” if this order itself is fundamentally transformed is also a task for a critical theory.

Although for most critical theorists ideology is not merely false consciousness but embedded in social practices and identities, ideology critique has been criticized for being overly cognitivist and underestimating the role of habitualized attitudes and cultural practices, for relying on an overly strong distinction between true and distorted consciousness, and for presupposing an idealized notion of the subject. Critics such as Foucault and Bourdieu speak instead of power-knowledge (Foucault 1973, 15) or of symbolic power and its embodiment (Bourdieu 1980, Ch. 8). The epistemological and political challenges the notion of ideology gives rise to continue to animate discussions (Celikates, Haslanger, and Stanley (eds.) forthcoming), including, more recently, on the relation between ideology and epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007, Mills 2017), cultural technē (Haslanger 2017a), and propaganda (Stanley 2015).

Frankfurt School critical theory inherits its emancipatory orientation from Marx, in the sense that it aims not only to understand, but also to contribute to a radical transformation of the social world that is already under way, and the commitment to real emancipation as requiring a radical, irreducibly social and political transformation that overcomes the fundamental contradictions of modern society instead of partial or local reforms aimed at surface-level symptoms. Emancipation is thus understood as liberation, including self-liberation, from domination by social, political, and economic powers, both personal and structural. Against this background, however, critical theorists have given different accounts of what emancipation is, what it requires, and how much can be said about it as a process and as an aim or state. While some (Horkheimer 1937a, Habermas 1968b) have thought of emancipation as a process of enlightenment and self-reflection that would allow for the realization of a rational organization of society, others thought of emancipation as sensual liberation (Marcuse 1969), or as emancipation from the (internalized) destructive imperatives of capitalism towards a state “of lying on water and looking peacefully at the sky” (Adorno 1951c [2005, 157]).

At the same time, and insofar as the working class has been integrated, fragmented, or at least reconstituted, it has become increasingly less clear who is to be emancipated (or self-emancipated) from which forms of domination and how. The challenges to the possibility of emancipation include reflections on the potentially overblown ideals of autonomy, sovereignty, and transparency that seem to underlie it (Laclau 1992), the limits of active self-transformation under conditions in which subjects have been shaped by power-ridden forms of subjectivation (Allen 2015), and the prospects of overcoming capitalism given the apparent lack of any clear and viable alternative. Today, critical theorists also face the challenge of reorienting the emancipatory project in the face of a catastrophic climate crisis that seems to privilege adaptation, mitigation, and sheer survival over utopian visions of emancipation that have also served historically as a pretext for an extractive and dominating relation to nature (Brown 2022).

In light of these challenges, a critical theory that wishes to hold on to its emancipatory orientation will need to articulate emancipation as an immanent possibility that is enabled and in some ways required by unprecedented historical developments. Whether in doing so it can build on the presumption of an emancipatory interest of the oppressed that theorists from Marx and Horkheimer to Habermas and Honneth (2017) have sought to identify remains contested. But thinking of emancipation as a second-order process that aims at enabling collective practices of self-determination over and against the obstacles picked out by concepts such as alienation, reification, and ideology, rather than as a substantial ideal or positive utopian vision of emancipation to be attained, might provide a starting point. Insofar as critical theory continues to see the existing social order as one of structurally entrenched domination, exploitation, and alienation, it will also continue to rely on some notion of an emancipatory process that points beyond those structures, even if this process is invariably plural, non-teleological, open-ended, and negative in orientation.

4. Critical Theories Today

Marx defined critical theory as the “self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age” (Marx 1843). The vitality of this approach to critical theory depends on continually taking up this task in new social contexts, as the first generation of the Frankfurt School did. Contemporary critical theorists continue this legacy by engaging with and theorizing in relation to contemporary struggles, crises, and practices. This has meant engaging a much wider range of emancipatory social movements than earlier generations of the Frankfurt School, who focused more on class struggle and capitalism (and the ways these were entangled with antisemitism and fascism) while largely neglecting issues like colonialism, racism, and the subordination of women. Contemporary critical theorists have expanded and enriched the Frankfurt School tradition by engaging with, and in some cases making contributions to, feminist theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial and decolonial theory (4.1), enlarging their analyses of crises beyond capitalism and its contradictions (4.2), and exploring a variety of critical practices ranging from civil disobedience to prefigurative, abolitionist, and revolutionary practices (4.3).

4.1 Theorizing Struggles and Movements

As emphasized above, Frankfurt School critical theory is methodologically interdisciplinary and defined by its aim of contributing to the emancipatory transformation of society by critically reflecting on the ways in which thinking itself can be distorted by structures of domination. This is also true of the various forms of critical theorizing that have emerged from and in relation to struggles against gendered oppression, racism, and colonialism and its legacies. Indeed, those critical theories bring to light structures of domination and modes of thinking (patriarchy, white supremacy, neocolonialism and Eurocentrism) that have until recently been neglected by the Frankfurt School and must be taken into account by any theory that aims to be critical and emancipatory.

More than one feminist theorist has argued that engaging feminism has been, and still is, crucial to renewing Frankfurt School critical theory both methodologically and in order to live up to its emancipatory aims (Fraser 1985, Ferrarese 2018). But analyzing the intersection between feminist theory and the Frankfurt School is complicated by the diverse array of theorists on both sides of that intersection. Some of the debates among feminist critical theorists mirror debates already discussed, for instance between those who draw on first generation versus Habermas or those who embrace Habermasian versus poststructuralist critical theory.

In most accounts, the first generation of the Frankfurt School is portrayed as not including any women and, with the exception of Marcuse in the 1970s (Marcuse 1974), its main protagonists largely failed to theorize about gender-based oppression or engage with feminist movements or the feminist theory of their time (there is, however, a new research project at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt that aims to challenge the dominant historiography by highlighting contributions of female researchers such as Käthe Weil and Else Frenkel-Brunswik and feminist work within the Frankfurt School). While fully acknowledging why feminists might find little of value in the first generation, some feminist theorists have highlighted important methodological affinities between, and potential for productive engagement with, that body of work (Brown 2006, Heberle 2006, Marasco 2006). In spite of the first generation’s nostalgia for the authority of the patriarchal family, their studies of authoritarianism were groundbreaking in analyzing the family as a political institution and breeding ground for fascism (Marasco 2018). Recent interest in Adorno’s work in particular builds on his theory of the nonidentical as support for the feminist critique of essentialist identities as well as affinities between feminist aims and his deconstruction of dualisms like nature and history or reason and desire, and his appeal to lived experience as crucial to philosophy and critique (Heberle 2006, 5–6). Attempts at synthesis include using his theory of the nonidentical, in dialogue with Lacan and Marx, to theorize a new approach to feminist political subjectivity (Leeb 2017), and combining Adorno’s insights into “bourgeois coldness” with the feminist ethics of care to rethink the fragility of our concern for others within a capitalist form of life that fosters “generalized indifference” while also producing a gendered form of attention to others (Ferrarese 2018).

Turning to the second generation, the critique of Habermas’s failure to adequately theorize gender in his Theory of Communicative Action (1981) was a turning point. In a now-classic essay, Nancy Fraser (1985) took a cue from the Marx quote about critical theory reflecting on the struggles of the age to criticize the Frankfurt School, and Habermas in particular, for failing to theorize one of the most significant struggles against domination. Seyla Benhabib raised similar concerns about whether the theory of communicative action could adequately theorize the feminist movement (1986, 252), and in Situating the Self (1992) aimed to make Habermasian discourse theory more cognizant of the self as gendered (see also the essays collected in Meehan 1995). In his later discourse theory of democracy, Habermas does engage the feminist theory and politics of equality to illuminate his core thesis about how private and public autonomy mutually presuppose each other (1992 [1996, 418–427]). But feminist critical theorists maintain that his rationalist approach fails to adequately capture the way power operates (Allen 2008, Ch. 5; McNay 2022, Ch. 1) or to incorporate forms of communication like narrative that have been crucial to feminism (Lara 1998, 2021; Young 2000).

The third generation of the Frankfurt School represents a crucial shift, with prominent feminist theorists like Fraser and Benhabib attempting to make critical theory more amenable to feminism from within the tradition, while also engaging in debates with leading figures in the poststructuralist strand of feminist critical theory like Judith Butler (Benhabib et. al. 1995). A core issue in these debates has been between Habermasian feminists who stress autonomy and poststructuralists who stress the idea of subjection – the ways in which power is central to the formation of subjects and their desires (Butler 1997). Amy Allen critically engages and synthesizes insights from both sides of this debate in viewing subjects as both constituted through relations of power and able to exercise autonomy in the form of critical reflection (Allen 2008). Axel Honneth, another key figure in the third generation, has engaged with feminist theory (Honneth 2000) and the feminist movement (2011 [2014, 154–176]), and in debates with feminist critical theorists including Fraser (Fraser and Honneth 2003) and Butler (Ikäheimo et al. 2021), but his work has also been the subject of sustained feminist critique of his conception of love, the family, and caring labor (Young 2007, Rössler 2007, Wimbauer 2023).

Fraser has, over several decades, developed a systematic defense of socialist feminism while charting various shifts in the feminist movement (see the essays collected in Fraser 2013), recently making the case that the contemporary crisis in care work must be understood as part of a larger general crisis in capitalist society (Fraser 2016, 2022, Ch. 3). Other feminist critical theorists also argue for a return to the critique of capitalism as crucial to feminist theorizing (Leeb 2017). From a different perspective, Lois McNay argues that recent Frankfurt School theorists, not only Honneth and Forst but also Fraser and Jaeggi, have failed to adequately incorporate the experience of gendered oppression into critical theory (McNay 2022). Another set of challenges arises from the need to develop an intersectional analysis of power and domination while engaging with a broader range of work in feminist and gender theory including queer and trans* theory as well as transnational and postcolonial feminism (Allen 2019, 537–538).

Apart from the influential studies on antisemitism and fascism by the first generation, Frankfurt School theorists have until recently shown little interest in issues of race and racism despite the prominence of anti-racist struggles and theorizing throughout the twentieth century and the present. The silence is of course not total. Early analyses point to prejudice toward Jews and other minority groups as an important part of the authoritarian personality and a key mechanism of providing “pseudo-orientation in an estranged world” (Adorno et al. 1950, 622), diagnose a culturalist transformation of the earlier biological racism at the center of fascism in post-war Europe that serves to maintain white supremacy (Adorno 1955, 148–9), and identify the phantasmatic dimension of racism and its fictions of homogeneity, purity, and essential difference (Adorno 1967a). Arguably, there are also broader methodological lessons from the relational and materialist theory of antisemitism developed by Adorno and Horkheimer that also hold for the study of racism (even if their relation remains contested, see Catlin 2023), namely the rejection of psychologizing and individualizing approaches, the insistence that the pathology always lies in the antisemitic or racist subjects and not in their victims, and the emphasis on structural factors that include the functional role of racism in the context of the crisis of capitalism and democracy (see Postone 1980 for an early attempt to explain modern antisemitism in relation to the nature of capitalism and the anti-capitalism of National Socialism).

Despite these openings, there has not been any sustained engagement with the phenomena of race and racism or with anti-racist struggles and theorizing, an eminently emancipatory form of knowledge production that, from W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon to Black feminism (Collins 1990, 2019, Mills 2017), has been engaged in crossing the theory-practice divide and articulating dominated standpoints in ways that should have been of significant interest to Frankfurt School theorists (Outlaw 2005; for a relatively early exception see McCarthy 2009).

This missed opportunity is all the more astonishing as the intersection of class and race, of racism and capitalism has been at the center of theorists that share a Marxist orientation, and even some closeness to the Frankfurt School, most notably Angela Davis – who had studied with Marcuse in the US and with Adorno in Frankfurt, and, following Marcuse, insists on the need to bridge the gap between theory and practice and to combine the critique of racism as well as gender-based domination with a critique of capitalism (Davis 1983, 2004) – and Stuart Hall, who, building on Marxist and post-Marxist approaches, theorizes racism as a historically variable response to crisis and as a mechanism that allows capital to divide the working class (Hall 2021).

In contrast to the first generation’s focus on the “dark side” of modernity, later theorists, from Habermas to Honneth, developed a stronger commitment not only to Enlightenment values, but to the belief that these have been, more or less successfully, institutionalized in Western societies. As a result, their views clash with a core aim of Critical Race Theory (Crenshaw et al. 1995) – itself influenced by Marxist theories of the state and the law – namely, the aim of debunking the idea that the law and the state are neutral institutions that secure the common good and the rights of all as an ideology masking their character as instruments of racial (and class) oppression, as evidenced by massive and persistent inequalities that systematically disadvantage Blacks in the US in particular and racialized populations on a global scale, in various areas of life, from access to education, health, jobs, and housing to the risk of becoming a victim of police violence. According to this view, the forms of freedom and solidarity realized in liberal-democratic societies are not just contingently accompanied by exclusions of racialized groups, as if these values had only been insufficiently realized up to now and only need to be extended to those hitherto excluded. Rather, the thesis is that these exclusions have played a constitutive role in the history of these societies and their value systems and continue to shape them to this day, and that radical emancipation would therefore require developing entirely different visions of living together in freedom and solidarity (Kelley 2002).

More recently, Nancy Fraser (2022, Ch. 2) has picked up on Black Marxist discussions of racial capitalism (prominently Du Bois 1935) by arguing that capitalism provides a structural basis for racial oppression and thus exhibits an inherent (even if historically variable) tendency to racialize populations in order to more effectively expropriate and exploit them. Others have elaborated a relational and materialist understanding of racism that builds on how antisemitism was theorized in the early Frankfurt School, and how racism was rearticulated in a culturalist register in reaction to anticolonial and antiracist struggles (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991, Bojadžijev 2020). What these approaches share, and what might be a distinctive contribution of a critical theory of race and racism, is a commitment to understanding racism as a comprehensive social relation that needs to be understood in relation to broader (capitalist) social formations, “race” as an ideological effect rather than an unquestioned category for social analysis, and anti-racist struggles as a starting point for critical theorizing about race – commitments that are at least partially shared with important contributions in the critical philosophy of race (Mills 2003, Shelby 2003, Haslanger 2017b).

For all its focus on modes of domination in modern society, Frankfurt School critical theory has largely failed to address European colonialism and imperialism (Said 1993, 278) and their continuing effects in a world structured by massive inequalities and asymmetries between the Global North and the Global South. With a few recent exceptions to be discussed here, critical theorists in this tradition have not engaged much with the large body of postcolonial and decolonial theory, even if in recent years debates about the universal validity of human rights and cosmopolitanism, globalization and multiple modernities, religious pluralism and postsecularism, have provided ample occasion to go beyond still operative Eurocentric limitations and become more globally relevant (Mendieta 2007, Butler et al. 2011, Baum 2015, Ingram 2019, Kerner 2018; on some early Frankfurt School engagement with Chinese thought, specifically in Benjamin’s work, see Ng 2023).

The main target of postcolonial critique is the idea of a universal history in which the central engine of progress is located in modern Europe while non-Europeans are viewed as always lagging behind. The story has taken many forms, from narratives of progress in Enlightenment thinkers and their critics, such as Hegel (Buck-Morss 2009), to nineteenth-century theories of racial hierarchy and twentieth-century theories of development that have been shaped by, and in turn, rationalized, racism, slavery, and imperialism (McCarthy 2009, Bhambra and Holmwood 2021). Both anticolonial struggles and theorizing (in the work of Mahatma Gandhi, Aimé Césaire, Fanon and others) have insisted that the history and present of capitalism and of modern European and North American societies are constitutively entangled with colonialism, imperialism, and their afterlives, and that taking their trajectory as paradigmatically modern ends up representing a specific and heterogeneous trajectory and experience as universal and self-contained (Grüner 2010). While some aspects of postcolonial critique can be seen as overlapping with the critique of conceptions of the subject, reason, and universal history in the early Frankfurt School, the former also goes beyond the latter by understanding these as the effects of specifically colonial forms of domination and by tracing a different genealogy of fascism through its roots in the colonialism of the nineteenth century (Bardawil 2018).

Recent decades have seen attempts to bring postcolonial theory into dialogue with the Frankfurt School. From the side of decolonial theory, Enrique Dussel has been one of the most prominent decolonial philosophers to engage with Frankfurt School philosophers, developing a global ethics of liberation in critical dialogue with the discourse ethics of Apel and Habermas (Dussel 1998; see also Dusell 2011 and Allen and Mendieta 2021).

From the side of Frankfurt School critical theory, postcolonial critique has been taken up in a variety of ways (see also Vázquez-Arroyo 2018). In the same spirit of Horkheimer and Adorno’s attempt to critique enlightenment in the name of an alternative conception of enlightenment, both Susan Buck-Morss (2009) and Thomas McCarthy (2009) attempt to salvage something of the core idea that is the target of their critique: “universal history” for Buck-Morss, and “development” for McCarthy.

Amy Allen (2016), on the other hand, is more decidedly critical of the role of the discourse of “progress” and the role of such concepts in grounding normativity and shaping assumptions about historical development, modernization, and reason in the work of Habermas, Honneth, and Forst. She regards the latter approaches as deeply Eurocentric and contrasts them with a contextualist form of critique, inspired by Foucault and Adorno, that takes the form of a critical history of the present that uncovers the deep entanglement between reason and domination. Calling for an even more thorough revision of historical narratives, conceptual frameworks, and normative criteria, Gurminder Bhambra (2021) argues that the prevalent understanding of modernity as an endogenous European achievement obscures the fact that colonization and slavery were integral to and constitutive of the Enlightenment project of modernity in both its epistemic and institutional dimensions, a task for which historical and theoretical resources beyond Adorno and Foucault would be required. Fundamental questions about modernity, the human subject, and freedom also emerge from an encounter between critical theory in the Frankfurt School tradition and Caribbean thought (Sealey and Davis forthcoming). In a similar vein, contemporary critics of the persistence of colonial structures point to how a denial of the colonial past reaffirms a violent global color line (Mbembe 2016) that affects how societies treat Indigenous peoples (Coulthard 2014) and racialized and migrant populations (Celikates 2022).

4.2 Diagnosing Crises

Diagnosing crises, and the social contradictions that give rise to them, is a hallmark of Hegelian-Marxist critical theory. Marx famously diagnosed capitalism as a crisis-ridden social system, and the early work of the first generation of the Frankfurt School was a response to the economic, social, and political crises of their time. Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947) can be understood as addressing the crisis of reason that was experienced with the rise of National Socialism, but the critique of instrumental reason was disconnected from more concrete crises and struggles. Habermas aimed to restore the link between critique and crisis beginning with his 1973 book Legitimation Crisis (Benhabib 1986, 252–3, Cordero 2017, Ch. 3). Writing in the context of state-managed capitalism, Habermas diagnosed the distinctively political contradictions and potential for political crises within a social system that aims to steer the economy and manage economic crises (a point influentially elaborated by Offe 1984).

In subsequent decades, crisis critique, along with the critique of capitalism, was largely abandoned by Frankfurt School theorists (for a notable exception see Postone 1993). Renewed theoretical interest has coincided with rising public concern about social, political, and economic systems currently in, or always seemingly on the brink of, crisis, all against the backdrop of the unfolding effects of the ongoing climate catastrophe.

Nancy Fraser was one of the first critical theorists to revive crisis critique and to do so as part of a comprehensive critique of capitalism that renews the link between analytical diagnosis and critique (Fraser 2011, 2014; see Wellmer 2014 for a critique of the Frankfurt School’s earlier neglect). What distinguishes Fraser’s approach is that it posits capitalism as the unifying causal link among seemingly distinct crises – in relation to care work, the environment, and political institutions – by viewing capitalism as an institutionalized social order in which the economic system “cannibalizes” the very conditions that make it possible within the spheres of social reproduction, the natural environment, and the political system (Fraser 2022). Fraser combines analysis of “objective” social conditions – contradictions and crises – with an orientation toward social movements by analyzing the “boundary struggles” that arise at the seams between the economic system and other domains, making the case for these struggles to unite around an anti-capitalist agenda.

In a similar way, Rahel Jaeggi has developed a crisis-oriented theory of immanent critique (2014, Ch. 6) that is not limited to diagnosing systemic dysfunction but includes the normative expectations and self-understandings of social agents (Jaeggi 2017a; see Fraser and Jaeggi 2018), but at a more abstract theoretical level than Fraser’s immanent analysis of capitalism as a social order. Like Fraser and Jaeggi, Albena Azmanova argues for renewed attention to the critique of capitalism but is skeptical about how helpful “crisis” talk is (2014) and maintains that radical social change is possible without crisis, revolution, or utopia through a united struggle against forms of precarity that are endemic to contemporary capitalism (2020). More generally, the turn to economic crisis dynamics has also led to a renewed interest in work – its general significance, pathologies, and emancipatory potential (Jaeggi 2017b, Dejours et al. 2018, Honneth 2023).

Turning specifically to the ecological crisis, Frankfurt School theorists have only recently begun taking seriously the task of rethinking their approach to critical theory in the current context of an ongoing ecological disaster on a global scale (for an early exception, see Vogel 1996). Some critical theorists argue that this situation calls for a new paradigm of “Critical Naturalism” (Gregoratto et al., 2022); others argue for a fundamental rethinking of Western conceptions of human freedom and a radical shift in conceptions of the ethically good life as a precondition for the kind of radical social change required by the current crisis (Cooke 2020, 2023). Fraser focuses on the role of capitalism in the climate catastrophe and the need for eco-politics to be anti-capitalist so that we can reassert control over, and begin to reinvent from the ground up, our relation to nature (Fraser 2021, 2022; see Bernstein 2022 for a recent approach to such rethinking).

In rethinking our conception of nature, given the lack of serious attention to theorizing about nature in the second and, until quite recently, third generation of the Frankfurt School, it is not surprising that many critical theorists have looked more to the first generation (see the collected essays in Biro 2011), with Adorno’s work viewed as a promising starting point for rethinking humans’ relation to nature (Cook 2011, Cassegård 2021, Ch. 3). Cook argues that the “project of showing that human history is always also natural history and that non-human nature is entwined with history… informs all Adorno’s work” and that there are important affinities between his work and proponents of radical ecology (Cook 2011, 1, 5–6). On the other hand, the view of nature as having a kind of otherness that is beyond and not fully graspable by humans – a view expressed at times by Adorno and Horkeimer as well as Marcuse – has been criticized in favor of a more Hegelian-Marxist approach that sees “nature” as a product of human activity (Vogel 1996, 2011). Others argue for reviving critical engagement with Marcuse’s work as a resource for addressing the ecological crisis, with its combination of a critique of science and technology (most radically, as a call for a “new science”) with the idea that social transformation must include a changed, aesthetic relation to nature (Feenberg 2023a, 2023b). At this point, it is clear that there must be more engagement between Frankfurt School theorists and the many “critical ecologies” being developed today, e.g., deep ecology, eco-feminism, eco-socialism, ecological Marxism, environmental justice, indigenous and decolonial ecologies, and new materialism (on the recent dialogue between Frankfurt School theorists and new materialism, see Rosa et al., 2021).

Finally, Frankfurt School theorists have turned their attention to political crises and the rise of right-wing populist, authoritarian, and neo-fascist movements, parties, and governments (Brown, Gordon, and Pensky 2018, Gordon 2017, Abromeit 2016). This crisis is particularly important because adequately addressing the economic and ecological crises of our time requires political solutions, which will be hindered by political systems that are themselves in crisis, thereby contributing to a regressive dynamic (Jaeggi 2022, Forst 2023).

From the perspective of critical theorists, there seem to be two aspects of the political crisis that are often missing from mainstream liberal accounts. The first pertains to the genesis and the causes of the crisis (Brown 2019, Gambetti 2020). Against accounts that see authoritarianism only in terms of a rupture with and as entirely foreign to liberal democracy, they argue that we need to examine the continuities and enabling conditions that allow authoritarian tendencies to arise from within liberal-democratic capitalist societies. Without analyzing the neoliberal restructuring of social relations and the ways in which populist and authoritarian movements exploit electoral strategies, fragmented public spheres, and liberal ideological frameworks such as “freedom of speech,” the critique of and resistance to them will necessarily remain truncated.

The second aspect pertains to the dynamic of authoritarianism and the political crisis it engenders. Beyond focusing on its political dimension (e.g. political aims and values), critical theorists have sought to analyze the socio-cultural, affective, and psycho-social dynamics of authoritarianism and its attractiveness to populations that seem to have little to gain from the election of populist leaders (Marasco 2018, Brown 2019, McAfee 2019, Redecker 2020, Zaretsky 2022). These approaches can draw on and are supported by Adorno’s analysis (1967a) of core features of authoritarian right-wing populism. First, it is not so much actual abandonment but a feared, anticipated, or imagined abandonment, along with a perceived loss of privileges that had come to seem natural, that are the driving force of the rise of a reactionary authoritarianism that then gets misdescribed as a revolt of the oppressed and exploited. Second, the proponents of authoritarianism, following an antisemitic and/or racist logic, personalize the blame for their fears and feelings of abandonment by projecting it onto groups they classify as alien, rather than attributing it to structural features of society.

In responding to all the crises discussed here – economic, ecological, and political – critical theorists must grapple with a number of challenges. Purely at the level of theory, there is the question of whether positing unity or convergence among crises is diagnostically accurate. At a practical level, it remains to be seen whether a unity thesis will be politically motivating and whether a convergence of social struggles is indeed on the horizon. The issue of practice also bears on the question of whether and to what extent the objective conditions of crisis and contradiction diagnosed by critical theorists actually affect people’s everyday lived experience and become motivating factors for political movements (see Section 2.5 ). Such questions about the relation between theory and practice have long been a focus of critical theorists and have recently gained attention in theorizing about a range of critical and political practices.

While overcoming the gap between theory and practice has been a central methodological and political concern for critical theorists, critics have pointed out the prominent turn away from practice to theory in the first generation – accused by Lukács of taking up residence in the “Grand Hotel Abyss” (Lukács 1963, 22) – and the continued marginalization of critical praxis in later generations (Harcourt 2020). There are multiple grounds for challenging this assessment. Frankfurt School theorists had arguments all along about how to assess and relate to radical movements, such as the student movement of 1968 (Adorno and Marcuse 1969, Freyenhagen 2014, Pickford 2023), and there has always been a strand that continuously engaged with struggles and movements, from Marcuse to Negt and Kluge and Fraser. Some critical theorists have focused on deliberative democracy, the public sphere, and civil society (Habermas 1962, 1992, 2021, Cohen and Arato 1992, Benhabib 2004, Lafont 2019) as core fora for critical practice, while others have argued for critical theory itself to be democratized and understood as a critical practice (Bohman 2003, Celikates 2009).

Still, many of these approaches have been criticized for prioritizing institutional achievements over struggles and critical practices, and reform over revolution. Given the challenges outlined above (4.2), it is not surprising that some recent work tries to reverse this tendency by exploring more radical responses to such crises. These attempts notably push beyond the dichotomy between reform and revolution – for example, by promoting non-reformist reforms that could “alter the terrain on which future struggles will be waged, thus expanding the set of feasible options for future reforms” (Fraser, in Fraser and Honneth 2003, 79) – and mine the rich history and present of radical struggles outside traditional forms of political organizing such as the party or reimagine the party in radical ways (Dean 2016).

The range of critical practices engaged with by critical theorists past and present is extensive (for an inventory, see Harcourt 2020, Ch. 15). Frankfurt School theorists of earlier generations covered various forms of resistance, from the “Great Refusal” of the 1960s (Marcuse) and the potential for resistance in independent thinking and critical analysis in the face of universal reification (Adorno) to civil disobedience as a sign of a dynamic public sphere and civil society (Habermas 1983b, Cohen and Arato 1992, Ch. 11). More recently, critical theorists within various traditions have analyzed forms of disobedience (direct, digital, migrant etc.) as political practices of contestation and struggles for democratization “from below” (Young 2001, Smith 2013, Scheuerman 2018, Celikates 2019b). Other practices of resistance that do not directly engage with state institutions or appeal to the broader public include forms of sabotage (Malm 2020), fleeing, withdrawal, or defection. These turn away from what are seen as state-oriented struggles for visibility, recognition, or representation (Virno 2004, Roberts 2015) and towards subaltern forms of sociality (Moten and Harney 2013) and counter-communities that prefigure fundamental alternatives for living together (Loick 2021). Emphasizing the revolutionary dimension of critical practices, theorists have drawn on the abolitionist tradition of struggles against slavery and colonialism, and its revitalization in movements like Black Lives Matter, to call for a fundamental critique of racial capitalism and its entanglement with the punitive state, and a correspondingly radical transformation of all social relations and institutions (Davis 2005, Gilmore 2022). Critical theorists have also explored political practices of assembling (Butler 2015), occupying, striking, and reorganizing processes of social reproduction (Gago 2019), linking these to the need to rethink revolution beyond the model of a single break or event and more as an interstitial process (Redecker 2018, Saar 2020).

Whether the new revolutionary subjects and struggles that emerge in these critical practices will indeed converge to fundamentally challenge the existing order, open up new pathways to emancipation, and develop emancipated – more just, democratic, and sustainable – modes of living together remains to be seen. Horkheimer’s quip still holds: “if the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the eating here is still in the future” (1937a [1972, 220–1]). Against this background, theoretical explorations of critical practices – in the multiplicity of their forms, terrains, and actors – can be seen as part of the ongoing attempt to bring theory and practice together with an emancipatory orientation in light of the crises and struggles of the age. This approach has characterized the Frankfurt School from its very beginnings and has been a driving force in its continual (self-)transformation, making it into one of the most influential paradigms in social philosophy today.

• Abromeit, John, 2016, “Critical Theory and the Persistence of Right-Wing Populism”, Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture , 15(2) [ Abromeit 2016 available online ].
• Adorno, Theodor W., 1931 [year this lecture was given], “Die Aktualität der Philosophie”, in Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften I: Philosophische Frühschriften , Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973, pp. 325–344; translated as “The Actuality of Philosophy”, Benjamin Snow (trans.), Telos , 31 (1977): 120–133.
• –––, 1936 “Wiesengrund-Adorno an Benjamin, 18. März 1936”, in Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Briefwechsel 1928–1940 , Henri Lonitz (ed.), Frankfurt am Main, 1994, pp. 168–177; translated as March 18, 1936, “Wiesengrund-Adorno to Benjamin, March 18, 1936”, Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin , The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940 ,, Nicholas Walker (trans.), Henri Lonitz (ed.), Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999, pp. 127–133.
• –––, 1938, “Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 7(3), 321–356; translated as “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening”, Susan L. Gillespie (trans.), in Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music , Richard Leppert (ed.), Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, pp. 288–317.
• –––, 1951a, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft”, in Karl Gustav Specht (ed.), Soziologische Forschung unserer Zeit , Köln and Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1951, pp. 228–240, republished in Theodor W. Adorno, Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1955, pp. 7–31; translated as “Cultural Criticism and Society”, in Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms , Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981, pp. 17–34.
• –––, 1951b, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda”, in Géza Roheim (ed.), Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences Vol. 3 , New York: International Universities Press, 279–300. Reprinted in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture , Jay Bernstein (ed.), New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 132–157.
• –––, 1951c, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life , Edmund Jephcott (trans.), London: Verso, 2005.
• –––, 1955, “Schuld und Abwehr”, in Friedrich Pollock (ed.), Gruppenexperiment: Ein Studienbericht , Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 278–428; translated as Guilt and Defense: On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar Germany , Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin (eds./trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
• –––, 1957, “Soziologie und empirische Forschung”, in K . Ziegler (ed.), Wesen und Wirklichkeit des Menschen: Festschrift für Helmuth Plessner , Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, pp. 245–260; translated as “Sociology and Empirical Research”, Glyn Adey and David Frisby (trans.), in Theodor W. Adorno et al. (eds.), The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology , London: Heinemann, 1976, pp. 68–86.
• –––, 1963a [year this transcribed lecture course was given], Probleme der Moralphilosophie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996; translated as Problems of Moral Philosophy , Rodney Livingstone (trans.), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
• –––, 1963b, Drei Studien zu Hegel , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Hegel: Three Studies , Shierry Weber Nicholsen (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.
• –––, 1966a, Negative Dialektik , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Negative Dialectics , E. B. Ashton (trans.), New York: Seabury Press, 1973.
• –––, 1966b, “Gesellschaft”, in Hermann Kunst and Siegfried Grundmann (eds.), Evangelisches Staatslexikon , Stuttgart: Kreuz Verlag, pp. 636–643; translated as “Society”, Fredric R. Jameson (trans.), Salmagundi , 10–11 (1969): 144–153.
• –––, 1969a, “Zur Spezifikation der kritischen Theorie”, in Theodor W. Adorno Archiv (ed.), Adorno. Eine Bildmonographie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 292.
• –––, 1969b, “Marginalien zu Theorie und Praxis”, Die Zeit , No. 33 (1969); translated as “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis”, Henry W. Pickford (trans.), in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords , New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, pp. 259–278.
• –––, 1967a [year this transcribed lecture was given], Aspekte des neuen Rechtsradikalismus , Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1999; translated as Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism , Wieland Hoban (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2020.
• –––, 1967b, “Résumé über Kulturindustrie”, in Theodor W. Adorno, Ohne Leitbild: Parva Aesthetica , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 60–70; translated as “The Culture Industry Reconsidered”, Anson G. Rabinbach (trans.), in Jay Bernstein, (ed.), The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture , New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 98–106.
• –––, 1970, Ästhetische Theorie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Aesthetic Theory , Robert Hullot-Kentor (trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977.
• Adorno, Theodor W., Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, 1950, The Authoritarian Personality , with a new Introduction by Peter E. Gordon, New York: Verso, 2019.
• Adorno, Theodor W., Hans Albert, Ralf Dahrendorf, Jürgen Habermas, Harald Pilot, and Karl R. Popper, 1969, Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie , Neuwied/Berlin: Luchterhand; translated as The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology , Glyn Adey and David Frisby (trans.), London: Heinemann, 1976.
• Adorno, Theodor W. and Herbert Marcuse, 1969, “Correspondence on the German Student Movement”, New Left Review , 233 (1999), 123–136.
• Agamben, Giorgio, 1995, Homo Sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita , Turin: Einaudi; translated as Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life , Daniel Heller-Roazen (trans.), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
• Allen, Amy, 2008, The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory , New York: Columbia University Press.
• –––, 2010, “Third Generation Critical Theory: Benhabib, Fraser, and Honneth”, in Rosi Braidotti (ed.), After Poststructuralism: Transitions and Transformations , Durham: Acumen, pp. 129–48.
• –––, 2012, “The Public Sphere: Ideology and/or Ideal?”, Political Theory , 40(6): 822–829. doi:10.1177/0090591712457664
• –––, 2014, “Reason, Power and History: Re-reading the Dialectic of Enlightenment ”, Thesis Eleven , 120(1): 10–25. doi:10.1177/0725513613519588
• –––, 2015, “Emancipation without Utopia: Subjection, Modernity, and the Normative Claims of Feminist Critical Theory”, Hypatia , 30(3): 513–29. doi:10.1111/hypa.12160
• –––, 2016, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory , New York: Columbia University Press.
• –––, 2019, “Critical Theory and Feminism”, in Gordon, Peter, Espen Hammer, and Axel Honneth (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School , London: Routledge, pp. 528–541.
• –––, 2021, Critique on the Couch: Why Critical Theory Needs Psychoanalysis , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Allen, Amy, and Eduardo Mendieta, (eds.), 2021, Decolonizing Ethics: The Critical Theory of Enrique Dussel , University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
• Allen, Amy, and Brian O’Connor (eds.), 2019, Transitional Subjects: Critical Theory and Object Relations , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Anderson, Joel, 2000, “The ‘Third Generation’ of the Frankfurt School”, Intellectual History Newsletter 22, 49–61.
• Apel, Karl-Otto, 1985, “Ist die Ethik der idealen Kommunikationsgemeinschaft eine Utopie? Zum Verhältnis von Ethik, Utopie und Utopiekritik”, in Wilhelm Vosskamp (ed.), Utopieforschung , Frankfurt: Suhrkamp; translated as “Is the Ideal Communication Community a Utopia? On the Relationship between Ethics, Utopia, and the Critique of Utopia”, David Frisby (trans.), in Seyla Benhabib and Fred Dallmayr (eds.), The Communicative Ethics Controversy , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990, pp. 23–59.
• –––, 1989, “Normative Begründung der ‘Kritischen Theorie’” durch Rekurs auf lebensweltliche Sittlichkeit? Ein transzendentalpragmatisch orientierter Versuch, mit Habermas gegen Habermas zu denken”, in Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer (eds.), Zwischenbetrachtungen im Prozess der Aufklärung: Jürgen Habermas zum 60. Geburtstag , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 15–65; translated as “Normatively Grounding ‘Critical Theory’ through Recourse to Lifeworld? A Transcendental-Pragmatic Attempt to Think With Habermas Against Habermas”, William Rehg (trans.), in Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer (eds.), Philosophical Interventions Into the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992, pp. 125–70.
• Azmanova, Albena, 2014, “Crisis? Capitalism is Doing Very Well. How is Critical Theory?”, Constellations , 21(3): 351–365. doi:10.1215/00382876-7165857
• –––, 2020, Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Balibar, Etienne, and Immanuel Wallerstein, 1988, Race, nation, classe: les identités ambiguës , Paris: La Découverte; translated as Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities , Chris Turner (trans.), New York: Verso, 1991.
• Bardawil, Fadi, 2018, “Césaire with Adorno: Critical Theory and the Colonial Problem”, South Atlantic Quarterly , 117(4): 773–789. doi:10.1215/00382876-7165857
• Baum, Bruce, 2015, “Decolonizing Critical Theory”, Constellations , 22(3): 420–434. doi:10.1111/1467-8675.12169
• Baynes, Kenneth, 2016, Habermas , New York: Routledge.
• Benhabib, Seyla, 1986, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory , New York: Columbia University Press.
• –––, 1992, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2004, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Benhabib, Seyla, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, 1995, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange , New York: Routledge.
• Benjamin, Walter, 1920/21, “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”, in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik , 47(3): 809–832; translated as “Toward the Critique of Violence”, Julia Ng (trans.), in Peter Fenves and Julia Ng (eds.), Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition , Stanford University Press, 2021, pp. 39–60.
• –––, 1936, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”, originally published as “L’œuvre d’art à l’époque de sa réproduction mécanisée”, Pierre Klossowski (trans.), Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 5(1), 40–68, all textual variants can be found in Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Walter Benjamin Werke und Nachlaß: Kritische Gesamtausgabe vol. 16), Burkhardt Lindner (ed.), Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012, the essay was translated as “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility”, Michael W. Jennings (trans.), Grey Room , 39 (2010): 11–37. doi:10.1162/grey.2010.1.39.11
• –––, 1940, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte”, in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften I , Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (eds.), Frankfurt am Main, 1974, pp. 691–706; translated as “On the Concept of History”, Harry Zohn (trans.) in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds.) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings (Volume 4), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, pp. 389–400.
• –––, 1955, Schriften , 2 vols., Theodor W. Adorno and Gretel Adorno (eds.), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated in parts as Illuminations , Harry Zohn (trans.), Hannah Arendt (ed.), New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.
• Bernstein, Jay, 2001, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bernstein, Richard, 2010, The Pragmatic Turn , Malden, MA: Polity.
• –––, 2022, The Vicissitudes of Nature: From Spinoza to Freud , Malden, MA: Polity.
• Bhambra, Gurminder K., 2021, “Decolonizing Critical Theory?: Epistemological Justice, Progress, Reparations”, Critical Times , 4(1): 73–89. doi:10.1215/26410478-8855227
• Bhambra, Gurminder K., and John Holmwood, 2021, Colonialism and Modern Social Theory , Malden, MA: Polity.
• Biro, Andrew, 2011, Critical Ecologies: The Frankfurt School and Contemporary Environmental Crises , Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Bohman, James, 2003, “Critical Theory as Practical Knowledge: Participants, Observers, and Critics”, in S. P. Turner and P. A. Roth (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences , Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 91–109.
• –––, 2007, Democracy Across Borders: From Dêmos to Dêmoi, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Bojadžijev, Manuela, 2020, “Anti-Racism as Method”, in John Solomos (ed.), The Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Racisms , London: Routledge 2020, pp. 193–204.
• Bourdieu, Pierre, 1980, Le sens pratique , Paris: Minuit; translated as The Logic of Practic e, Richard Nice (trans.), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992.
• Brown, Wendy (ed.), 2006, “Feminist Theory and the Frankfurt School”: a Special Issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies , 17(1).
• –––, 2019, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West , New York: Columbia University Press.
• –––, 2022, “Rethinking Politics and Freedom in the Anthropocene”, Crisis and Critique , 9(2): 24–44 [ Brown 2022 available online ].
• Brown, Wendy, and Rainer Forst, 2014, The Power of Tolerance: A Debate , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Brown, Wendy, Peter Gordon, and Max Pensky, 2018, Authoritarianism. Three Inquiries in Critical Theory , Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
• Brunkhorst, Hauke, 1983, “Paradigmenkern und Theoriedynamik der Kritischen Theorie der Gesellschaft”, Soziale Welt , 34: 22–36; translated as “Paradigm-core and theory-dynamics in critical social theory: people and programs”, Peter Krockenberger (trans.), Philosophy & Social Criticism , 24(6) (1998): 67–110.
• –––, 2002, Solidarität: Von der Bürgerfreundschaft zur globalen Rechtsgenossenschaft , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community , Jeffrey Flynn (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
• –––, 2014, Critical Theory of Legal Revolutions: Evolutionary Perspectives , New York: Bloomsbury.
• Buchstein, Hubertus, 2020, “Otto Kirchheimer and the Frankfurt School: Failed Collaborations in the Search for a Critical Theory of Politics”, New German Critique , 47(2): 81–106.
• Buck-Morss, Susan, 1977, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute , New York: The Free Press.
• –––, 1989, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• –––, 1992, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered”, October , 62: 3–41. doi:10.2307/778700
• –––, 2009, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History , Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
• Butler, Judith, 1990, Gender Trouble , London: Routledge.
• –––, 1997, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• –––, 2012, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism , New York: Columbia University Press.
• –––, 2015, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Butler, Judith, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West, 2011, The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Cassegård, Carl, 2021, Toward a Critical Theory of Nature: Capital, Ecology, and Dialectics , New York: Bloomsbury.
• Catlin, Jonathon, 2023, “Antisemitism and Racism ‘After Auschwitz’: Adorno on the ‘Hellish Unity’ of ‘Permanent Catastrophe’ ”, in Marcel Stoetzler (ed.), Critical Theory and the Critique of Antisemitism , New York: Bloomsbury, pp. 203–230.
• Celikates, Robin, 2006, “From Critical Social Theory to a Social Theory of Critique: On the Critique of Ideology after the Pragmatic Turn”, Constellations , 13(1): 21–40. doi:10.1111/j.1351-0487.2006.00438.x
• –––, 2009, Kritik als soziale Praxis: Gesellschaftliche Selbstverständigung und kritische Theorie , Frankfurt am Main: Campus; translated as Critique as Social Practice: Critical Theory and Social Self-Understanding , Naomi van Steenbergen (trans.), London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.
• –––, 2019a, “Critical Theory and the Unfinished Project of Mediating Theory and Practice”, in Peter Gordon, Espen Hammer, and Axel Honneth (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School , London: Routledge, pp. 206–220.
• –––, 2019b, “Constituent Power Beyond Exceptionalism: Irregular Migration, Disobedience, and (Re-)Constitution”, Journal of International Political Theory , 15(1): 67–81. doi:10.1177/1755088218808311
• –––, 2022, “Remaking the Demos ‘from Below’? Critical Theory, Migrant Struggles, and Epistemic Resistance”, in Didier Fassin and Axel Honneth (eds.), Crisis Under Critique: How People Assess, Transform, and Respond to Critical Situations , New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 97–120.
• Celikates, Robin, Sally Haslanger, and Jason Stanley (eds.), forthcoming, Analyzing Ideology , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Celikates, Robin, Axel Honneth, and Rahel Jaeggi, 2023, “The Working Sovereign: A conversation with Axel Honneth”, Journal of Classical Sociology , 23(3): 318–338. doi:10.1177/1468795X231170980
• Chambers, Simone, 2022, “Can Postmetaphysical Reason Escape its Provincial Roots?”, in Tom Bailey (ed.), Deprovincializing Habermas: Global Perspectives , Second Edition , New York: Routledge, pp. 229–248.
• Chari, Anita, 2015, A Political Economy of the Senses: Neoliberalism, Reification, Critique , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Cohen, Jean L., and Andrew Arato, 1992, Civil Society and Political Theory , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Collins, Patricia Hill, 1990, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment , London: Routledge. Second edition published in 2000.
• –––, 2019, Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory , Durham and London: Duke University Press. doi:10.1515/9781478007098
• Cook, Deborah, 2004, Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society , London and New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2011, Adorno on Nature , Durham: Acumen.
• Cooke, Maeve, 2006, Re-Presenting the Good Society , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• –––, 2020, “Ethics and Politics in the Anthropocene”, Philosophy & Social Criticism , 46(10): 1167–1181. doi:10.1177/0191453720903491
• –––, 2023, “Reenvisioning Freedom: Human Agency in Times of Ecological Disaster”, Constellations , 30: 119–127. doi:10.1111/1467-8675.12681
• Cordero, Rodrigo, 2017, Crisis and Critique: On the Fragile Foundations of Social Life , New York: Routledge.
• Coulthard, Glen Sean, 2014, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, 1995, “Introduction”, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement , New York: The New Press, pp. viii–xxxii.
• Davis, Angela Y., 1983, Women, Race and Class , New York: Vintage.
• –––, 2004, “Marcuse’s Legacies”, in John Abromeit and W. Mark Cobb (eds.), Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader . New York, Routledge, pp. 43–50.
• –––, 2005, Abolition Democracy , New York: Seven Stories Press.
• Dean, Jodi, 2016, Crowds and Party , London: Verso.
• Dejours, Christophe, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Emmanuel Renault, and Nicholas H. Smith, 2018, The Return of Work in Critical Theory: Self, Society, Politics , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Demirović, Alex, 2016, “The Frankfurt School, Critical Theory, and Sociology at the Institute for Social Research (1950 to 1960)”, in Gabriel R. Ricci (ed.), The Persistence of Critical Theory , London: Routledge, pp. 25–40.
• Deranty, Jean-Philippe, 2021, “Negativity in Recognition: Post-Freudian Legacies in Contemporary Critical Theory”, in Ikäheimo, Heikki, Kristina Lepold and Titus Stahl (eds.), Recognition and Ambivalence , New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 223–255.
• Derrida, Jacques, 1990 [year the lecture was given], Force de loi , Paris: Galilée, 1994; translated as “The Force of Law”, Mary Quaintance (trans.), in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David G. Carlson (eds.), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice , New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 3–67.
• Dews, Peter, 1987, Logics of Disintegration: Poststructuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory , London: Verso.
• Dubiel, Helmut, 1978, Wissenschaftsorganisation und politische Erfahrung: Studien zur frühen Kritischen Theorie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory , Benjamin Gregg (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985.
• Du Bois, W. E. B., 1935, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 , New York: The Free Press, 1998.
• Dussel, Enrique, 1998, Ética de la Liberación en la edad de globalización y de la exclusión ; translated as Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion , Eduardo Mendieta, Camilo Pérez Bustillo, Yolanda Angulo, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres (trans.), Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.
• –––, 2011, “From Critical Theory to the Philosophy of Liberation: Some Themes for Dialogue”, Transmodernity , 1(2): 16–43. doi.org:10.5070/T412011806
• Eagleton, Terry, 1991, Ideology: An Introduction , London, Verso.
• Feenberg, Andrew, 2023a, “Marcuse’s Critique of Technology Today”, Philosophy & Social Criticism 49(6): 672–685. doi:10.1177/01914537231164657
• –––, 2023b, The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing: Nature and Revolution in Marcuse’s Philosophy of Praxis , London: Verso.
• Ferrara, Alessandro, 2008, The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Ferrarese, Estelle, 2018, La fragilité du souci des autres: Adorno et le care , Lyon: ENS Éditions; translated as The Fragility of Concern for Others: Adorno and the Ethics of Care , Steven Corcoran (trans.), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
• Finlayson, James Gordon, 2007, “Political, Moral and Critical Theory: On the Practical Philosophy of the Frankfurt School”, in Michael Rosen and B. Leiter (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 626–670.
• –––, 2015, “The Artwork and the Promesse du Bonheur in Adorno”, European Journal of Philosophy , 23(3): 392–419. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0378.2012.00542.x
• –––, 2019, The Habermas-Rawls Debate , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Flynn, Jeffrey, 2014a, Reframing the Intercultural Dialogue on Human Rights: A Philosophical Approach , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2014b, “Truth, Objectivity, and Experience after the Pragmatic Turn: Bernstein on Habermas’s ‘Kantian Pragmatism’ ”, in Judith M. Green (ed.), Richard J Bernstein and the Pragmatist Turn in Contemporary Philosophy , Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 190–209.
• –––, 2022, “Decentering Eurocentrism through Dialogue”, in Tom Bailey (ed.), Deprovincializing Habermas: Global Perspectives , Second Edition , New York: Routledge, pp. 249–270.
• Fong, Benjamin Y., 2016, Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Forst, Rainer, 2007, Das Recht auf Rechtfertigung: Elemente einer konstruktivistischen Theorie der Gerechtigkeit , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translated as The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice , Jeffrey Flynn (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
• –––, 2011, Kritik der Rechtfertigungsverhältnisse , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translated as Justification and Critique: Towards a Critical Theory of Politics , Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2014.
• –––, 2017, “Noumenal Alienation: Rousseau, Kant and Marx on the Dialectics of Self-Determination”, Kantian Review , 22(4): 523–551. doi:10.1017/S1369415417000267
• –––, 2021a, Die noumenale Republik: Kritischer Konstruktivismus nach Kant , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translation, The Noumenal Republic: Critical Constructivism after Kant , Ciaran Cronin (trans.), forthcoming.
• –––, (ed)., 2021b, “Symposium on Jürgen Habermas, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie ”, Constellations , 28(1): 1–147.
• –––, 2023, “The rule of unreason: Analyzing (Anti-)Democratic Regression”, Constellations , 30(3): 217–224. doi:10.1111/1467-8675.12671
• Foucault, Michel, 1973 [year this lecture was given], “La vérités et les formes juridiques”, Chimères , 10 (1990): 8–28; translated as “Truth and Juridical Forms”, in Michel Foucault, Power , ed. James D. Faubion, New York: New Press, 2000, pp. 31–45.
• Fraser, Nancy, 1981, “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions”, PRAXIS International , 3: 272–287.
• –––, 1985, “What’s Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender”, New German Critique , 35: 97–131. doi:10.2307/488202
• –––, 1989, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• –––, 1990, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text , 25/26: 56–80.
• –––, 2011, “Marketization, Social Protection, Emancipation: Toward a Neo-Polanyian Conception of Capitalist Crisis”, in Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derlugian (eds.), Business as Usual: The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown , New York University Press, pp. 137–58.
• –––, 2013, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis , London: Verso.
• –––, 2014, “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode”, New Left Review , 86: 55–72.
• –––, 2016, “Contradictions of Capital and Care”, New Left Review , 100: 99–117.
• –––, 2021, “Climates of Capital”, New Left Review , 127: 94–127.
• –––, 2022, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – And What We Can Do about It , New York: Verso.
• Fraser, Nancy, et al., 2014, Transnationalizing the Public Sphere , Kate Nash (ed.), Cambridge: Polity.
• Fraser, Nancy, and Axel Honneth, 2003, Redistribution or Recognition? A Philosophical-Political Exchange , New York: Verso.
• Fraser, Nancy and Rahel Jaeggi, 2018, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory , Brian Milstein (ed.), Cambridge: Polity.
• Freyenhagen, Fabian, 2014, “Adorno’s Politics: Theory and Praxis in Germany’s 1960s”, Philosophy & Social Criticism , 40: 867–893. doi:10.1177/0191453714545198
• –––, 2018, “Critical Theory: Self-Reflexive Theorizing and Struggles for Emancipation”, in: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics [ Freyenhagen 2018 available online ].
• Fricker, Miranda, 2007, Epistemic Injustice , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Fromm, Erich, 1936, “Studien über Autorität und Familie. Sozialpsychologischer Teil”, in Max Horkheimer (ed.), Schriften des Instituts für Sozialforschung, Vol. V: Studien über Autorität und Familie , Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan; translated as “Studies on Authority and the Family. Socio-psychological Dimensions”, Fromm Forum , 24 (2020): 8–58.
• –––, 1961, Marx’s Concept of Man , New York: Continuum.
• Gago, Verónica, 2019, La potencia feminista: O el deseo de cambiarlo todo , Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón; translated as Feminist International: How to Change Everything , Liz Mason-Deese (trans.), London: Verso, 2020.
• Gambetti, Zeynep, 2020, “Exploratory Notes on the Origins of New Fascisms”, Critical Times , 3(1): 1–32. doi:10.1215/26410478-8189841
• Geuss, Raymond, 1981, The Idea of a Critical Theory , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, 2022, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation , London: Verso.
• Gordon, Peter, 2017, “The Authoritarian Personality Revisited”, boundary 2 , 44(2): 31–56. doi:10.1215/01903659-3826618
• –––, 2023, A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity , Chicago: University of Chicago Press. doi:10.4324/9780429443374
• Gordon, Peter, Espen Hammer, and Axel Honneth (eds.), 2019, The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School , London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780429443374
• Gregoratto, Federica, Heikki Ikäheimo, Emmanuel Renault, Arvi Särkelä, and Italo Testa, 2022, “Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto”, Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy , 42(1): 108–24. doi:10.21827/krisis.42.1.38637
• Grüner, Eduardo, 2010, La oscuridad y las luces , Buenos Aires: Edhasa; translated as The Haitian Revolution: Capitalism, Slavery and Counter-Modernity , Ramsey McGlazer (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2019.
• Habermas, Jürgen, 1962, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft , Neuwied, Berlin: Luchterhand; translated as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society , Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.
• –––, 1963, Theorie und Praxis: Sozialphilosophische Studien , Neuwied am Rhein and Berlin: Luchterhand. New and extended edition Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971; translated as Theory and Practice , John Viertel (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press, 1973.
• –––, 1968a, Technik und Wissenschaft als ‘Ideologie’ , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Chapters 4–6 of Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics , Jeremy J. Shapiro (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press, 1970.
• –––, 1968b, Erkenntnis und Interesse , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Knowledge and Human Interests , Jeremy J. Shapiro (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press, 1971.
• –––, 1973a, “Nachwort”, in Jürgen Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse, Mit einem neuen Nachwort , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 367–417; translated as “A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests ”, Christian Lenhardt (trans.), Philosophy of the Social Sciences , 3: 157–189.
• –––, 1973b, Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Legitimation Crisis , Thomas McCarthy (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press, 1975.
• –––, 1981, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns , 2 vols., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as The Theory of Communicative Action , 2 vols., Thomas A. McCarthy (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press, 1984.
• –––, 1983a, Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, translated as Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action , Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.
• –––, 1983b, “Ziviler Ungehorsam: Testfall für den demokratischen Rechtsstaat”, in Peter Glotz (ed.), Ziviler Ungehorsam im Rechtsstaat , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 29–53; translated as “Civil Disobedience: Litmus Test for the Democratic Constitutional State”, Berkeley Journal of Sociology , 30: 95–116.
• –––, 1985, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures , Frederick Lawrence (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.
• –––, 1991, Erläuterungen zur Diskursethik , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics , Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.
• –––, 1992, Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy , William Rehg (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
• –––, 1995a, “Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s Political Liberalism”, The Journal of Philosophy , 92(3): 109–131. doi:10.5840/jphil199592335
• –––, 1995b, “Kants Idee des ewigen Friedens aus dem historischen Abstand von 200 Jahren”, Kritische Jusitiz , 3: 293–319; translated as “Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the Benefit of Two Hundred Years’ Hindsight”, in James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (eds.), Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997, pp. 113–153.
• –––, 1996, “Vernünftig versus Wahr oder die Moral der Weltbilder”, in Die Einbeziehung des Anderen: Studien zur politischen Theorie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as “‘Reasonable’ versus ‘True,’ or the Morality of Worldviews”, Ciaran Cronin (trans.), in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory , Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff (eds.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998, pp. 75-105.
• –––, 1998, Die postnationale Konstellation: politische Essays , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays , Max Pensky (ed./trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
• –––, 1999, Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung: philosophische Aufsätze , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Truth and Justification , Barbara Fultner (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
• –––, 2005, Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion. Philosophische Aufsätze , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Between Naturalism and Religion , Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Malden, MA: Polity, 2008.
• –––, 2006, “Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research”, Communication Theory , 16(4): 411–426. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2006.00280.x
• –––, 2019, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie , 2 vols., Berlin: Suhrkamp; part of volume 1 translated as Also a History of Philosophy, Volume 1: The Project of a Genealogy of Postmetaphysical Thinking , Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2023.
• –––, 2021, “Überlegungen und Hypothesen zu einem erneuten Strukturwandel der politischen Öffentlichkeit”, in: Martin Seeliger and Sebastian Sevignani (eds.), Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit? , Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag, 470–500; translated as “Reflections and Hypotheses on a Further Structural Transformation of the Political Public Sphere”, Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Theory, Culture & Society , 39(4) (2022): 145–171. doi:10.1177/02632764221112341
• Hall, Stuart, 2021, Selected Writings on Race and Difference , Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Harcourt, Bernard E., 2020, Critique and Praxis , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Haslanger, Sally, 2017a, “Culture and Critique”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Supplementary Volume), 91: 149–173. doi:10.1093/arisup/akx001
• –––, 2017b, “Racism, Ideology, and Social Movements”, Res Philosophica , 94(1): 1–22. doi:10.11612/RESPHIL.1547
• Heath, Joseph, 2014, “Rebooting Discourse Ethics”, Philosophy & Social Criticism , 40(9): 829–866. doi:10.1177/0191453714545340
• Hedrick, Todd, 2010, Rawls and Habermas: Reason, Pluralism, and the Claims of Political Philosophy , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• –––, 2019, Reconciliation and Reification: Freedom’s Semblance and Actuality from Hegel to Contemporary Critical Theory , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Heberle, Renée (ed.), 2006, Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno , University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania University Press.
• Honneth, Axel, 1985, Kritik der Macht: Reflexionsstufen einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory , Kenneth Baynes (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
• –––, 1992, Kampf um Anerkennung: Zur moralischen Grammatik sozialer Konflikte , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts , Joel Anderson (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 1995.
• –––, 1994, “Die soziale Dynamik von Mißachtung: Zur Ortsbestimmung einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie”, Leviathan , 22(1): 78–93; translated as “The Social Dynamics of Disrespect: On the Location of Critical Theory Today”, John Farrell (trans.), Constellations , 1(2): 255–69, reprinted in in Axel Honneth, Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory , Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007, pp. 63–79.
• –––, 1998, “Über die Möglichkeit einer erschließenden Kritik. Die Dialektik der Aufklärung im Horizont gegenwärtiger Debatten über Sozialkritik”, Paradigmi. Rivista di critica filosofica , 16(48): 501–514; translated as “The Possibility of a Disclosing Critique of Society: The Dialectic of Enlightenment in Light of Current Debates in Social Criticism”, Constellations , 7(1) (2000): 116–127. doi:10.1111/1467-8675.00173
• –––, 2000, Das Andere der Gerechtigkeit ; translated as Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory , Joseph Ganahl (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2007.
• –––, 2001, Leiden an Unbestimmtheit: Eine Reaktualisierung der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie , Stuttgart: Reclam; translated as The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel’s Social Theory , Ladislaus Löb (trans.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
• –––, 2003, “Redistribution as Recognition”, in N. Fraser and A. Honneth (eds.), Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange , London: Verso, pp. 110–197.
• –––, 2004, “Eine soziale Pathologie der Vernunft. Zur intellektuellen Erbschaft der Kritischen Theorie”, in Christoph Halbig and Michael Quante (eds.), Axel Honneth: Sozialphilosophie zwischen Kritik und Anerkennung , Münster: LIT-Verlag, pp. 9-32; translated as “A Social Pathology of Reason: On the Intellectual Legacy of Critical Theory”, in A. Honneth , Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory , New York: Columbia University Press, 2009, pp. 19-42.
• –––, 2005, Verdinglichung: Eine anerkennungstheoretische Studie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Reification , Martin Jay (ed.), New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• –––, 2010, Das Ich im Wir: Studien zur Anerkennungstheorie , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translated as The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition , Joseph Ganahl (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2012.
• –––, 2011, Das Recht der Freiheit: Grundriß einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translated as Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life , Joseph Ganahl (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
• –––, 2017, “Is There an Emancipatory Interest? An Attempt to Answer Critical Theory’s Most Fundamental Question”, European Journal of Philosophy , 25: 908–920. doi:10.1111/ejop.12321
• –––, 2022, “‘Labour’, A Brief History of a Modern Concept”, Philosophy , 97(2), 149–167. doi:10.1017/S003181912100036X
• –––, 2023, Der arbeitende Souverän , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translation, The Working Sovereign , Cambridge: Polity, forthcoming.
• Honneth, Axel, and Hans Joas (eds.), 1986, Kommunikatives Handeln: Beiträge zu Jürgen Habermas ‘Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action, Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
• Horkheimer, Max, 1931, “Die gegenwärtige Lage der Sozialphilosophie und die Aufgaben eines Instituts für Sozialforschung”, Frankfurter Universitätsreden , XXXVII: 3–16; translated as “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research”, John Torpey (trans.), in Max Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993, pp. 1–14. Retranslated as “The State of Contemporary Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research”, Journal for Cultural Research , Peter Wagner (trans.), 22(2) (2018): 113–121. doi:10.1080/14797585.2018.1461354
• –––, 1933, “Materialismus und Moral”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 2(2): 162–197; translated as “Materialism and Morality”, G. Frederick Hunter (trans.), in Max Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings , Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993, pp. 15–47.
• –––, 1936a, “Egoismus und Freiheitsbewegung: Zur Anthropologie des bürgerlichen Zeitalters”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 5(2): 161–234; translated as “Egoism and Freedom Movements: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Era”, G. Frederick Hunter (trans.), in Max Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings , Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993, pp. 49–110.
• ––– (ed.), 1936b, Studien über Autorität und Familie: Forschungsberichte aus dem Institut für Sozialforschung , Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan.
• –––, 1937a, “Traditionelle und kritische Theorie”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 6(2): 245–294; translated as “Traditional and Critical Theory”, Matthew J. O’Connell (trans.), in Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays , New York: Continuum, 1972, pp. 188–243.
• –––, 1937b, “Nachtrag”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 6(3): 625–631; translated as “Postscript”, Matthew J. O’Connell (trans.), in Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays , New York: Continuum, 1972, pp. 244–252.
• –––, 1941, “Art and Mass Culture”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 9(2), 290–304, republished in Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays , New York: Continuum, 1972, pp. 273–290.
• Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno, 1947, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente , Amsterdam: Querido; translated as Dialectic of Enlightenment , Edmund Jephcott (trans.), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
• Hoy, David Couzens and Thomas McCarthy, 1994, Critical Theory , Oxford: Blackwell.
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• Ingram, James, 2013, Radical Cosmopolitics: The Ethics and Politics of Democratic Universalism , New York: Columbia University Press.
• –––, 2019, “Critical Theory and Postcolonialism”, in Gordon, Peter, Espen Hammer, and Axel Honneth (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School , London: Routledge, pp. 500–513.
• Jaeggi, Rahel, 2005, Entfremdung: Zur Aktualität eines sozialphilosophischen Problems , Campus; translated as Alienation , Frederick Neuhouser and Alan E. Smith (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
• –––, 2008, “Re-Thinking Ideology”, in Christopher Zurn, Boujdewijn de Bruijn (eds.), New Waves in Political Philosophy , Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
• –––, 2014, Kritik von Lebensformen , Berlin.: Suhrkamp; translated as Critique of Forms of Life , Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.
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• –––, 2022, “Modes of Regression: The Case of Ressentiment”, Critical Times , 5(3): 501–537. doi:10.1215/26410478-10030204
• Jay, Martin, 1973, The Dialectical Imagination , Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown.
• –––, 1984, Marxism and Totality , Cambridge: Polity.
• Kelley, Robin D. G., 2002, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination , Boston: Beacon Press. Revised and expanded edition published in 2022.
• Kerner, Ina, 2018, “Postcolonial Theories as Global Critical Theories”, Constellations , 25(4): 614– 628. doi:10.1111/1467-8675.12346
• Klein, Steven, 2020, The Work of Politics: Making a Democratic Welfare State , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Kompridis, Nikolas, 2006, Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Koopman, Colin, 2013, Genealogy as Critique , Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Kracauer, Siegfried, 1927, “Das Ornament der Masse”, Frankfurter Zeitung , July 9–10, 1927; translated as “Mass Ornament”, Barbara Correll and Jack Zipes (trans.) New German Critique , 5 (1975): 67–76.
• –––, 2013, Totalitäre Propaganda , Bernd Stiegler (ed.), Berlin: Suhrkamp. Selections are translated as part of “Studies of Totalitarianism, Propaganda, and the Masses (1936–1940)” in Siegfried Kracauer, Selected Writings on Media, Propaganda, and Political Communication , Jaeho Kang, Graeme Gilloch, and John Abromeit (eds.), New York: Columbia University Press, 2022.
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• Lafont, Cristina, 2019, Democracy without Shortcuts : A Participatory Conception of Deliberative Democracy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Lara, Maria Pia, 1998, Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere , Cambridge: Polity.
• –––, 2021, Beyond the Public Sphere: Film and the Feminist Imaginary , Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
• Leeb, Claudia, 2017, Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism: Toward a New Theory of the Political Subject , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Löwenthal, Leo, and Norbert Guterman, 1949, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (Studies in Prejudice: Volume 5), with a new Introduction by Alberto Toscano, London: Verso, 2021.
• Löwy, Michael, 2001, Walter Benjamin: Avertissement d’incendie , Paris: Presses Universitaires de France; translated as Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ , Chris Turner (trans.), London: Verso, 2016.
• Loick, Daniel, 2012, Kritik der Souveränität , Frankfurt: Campus; translated as A Critique of Sovereignty , Amanda DeMarco (trans.) London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.
• –––, 2021, “The Ethical Life of Counter-Communities”, Critical Times , 4(1): 1–28. doi:10.1215/26410478-8855203
• Lukács, Georg, 1923, “Verdinglichung und das Bewußtsein des Proletariats”, in Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein , Berlin: Malik; translated as “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”, in History and Class Consciousness , Rodney Livingstone (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971, pp. 83–222.
• –––, 1963, “Vorwort” to Die Theorie des Romans , Berlin: Luchterhand; translated as The Theory of the Novel , Anna Bostock (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974.
• Malm, Andreas, 2020, How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire , London: Verso.
• Marasco, Robyn, 2006, “‘Already the Effect of the Whip’: Critical Theory and the Feminine Ideal”, differences , 17(1): 88–115. doi:10.1215/10407391-2005-005
• –––, 2015, The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory After Hegel , New York: Columbia University Press.
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• Marcuse, Herbert, 1937, “Philosophie und kritische Theorie”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 6(3): 625–647; translated as “Philosophy and Critical Theory”, in H. Marcuse (ed.), Negations , Jeremy J. Shapiro (trans), London: MayFlyBooks, 1968, pp. 99–117.
• –––, 1941, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 1955, Eros and Civilization , Boston: Beacon Press.
• –––, 1964, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society , Boston: Beacon Press.
• –––, 1967, “Liberation from the Affluent Society” in Douglas Kellner (ed.), The New Left and the 1960s: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume 3 , New York: Routledge, 2004.
• –––, 1968, “Beyond One-Dimensional Man”, in Douglas Kellner (ed.), Towards a Critical Theory of Society , Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume 2 , New York: Routledge, 2001.
• –––, 1969, An Essay on Liberation , Boston: Beacon Press.
• –––, 1974, “Marxism and Feminism”, Women’s Studies , 2: 279–288.
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• –––, 1844, “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie: Einleitung”, in Karl Marx: Werke, Artikel, Entwürfe: März 1843 – August 1944 (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels Gesamtausgabe, vol. I.2), Berlin: Dietz, 1975, pp. 170–184; translated as “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law”, Martin Milligan and Barbara Ruhemann (trans.), in Karl Marx March 1843 – August 1944 (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels Collected Works, vol. 3), London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975, pp. 3–127.
• –––, 1846, Die deutsche Ideologie: Manuskripte und Drucke (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels Gesamtausgabe, vol. I.5), Berlin: De Gruyter/Akademie, 2017; translated as The German Ideology (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels Collected Works, vol. 5), Clemens Dutt, W. Lough, and C. P. Magill (trans.), London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976.
• –––, 1867, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Erster Band (Hamburg 1867) (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels Gesamtausgabe, vol. II.5), Berlin: Dietz, 1983; translated as Capital, Volume I (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels Collected Works, vol. 35), London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1996.
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• McCarthy, Thomas, 1991, Ideals and Illusions : On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• –––, 2004, “Political Philosophy and Racial Injustice: From Normative to Critical Theory” in Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser (eds.), Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment: Essays for Richard J. Bernstein , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 147–168.
• –––, 2009, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• McNay, Lois, 2022, The Gender of Critical Theory: On the Experiential Grounds of Critique , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Medina, José, 2013, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Meehan, Johanna (ed.), 1995, Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse , New York: Routledge.
• Mendieta, Eduardo, 2007, Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory , New York: SUNY Press.
• Menke, Christoph, 1988, Die Souveränität der Kunst: Ästhetische Erfahrung nach Adorno und Derrida ; translated as The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida , Neil Solomon (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.
• –––, 2000, Spiegelungen der Gleichheit , Berlin: Akademie; translated as Reflections of Equality , Howard Rouse and Andrei Denejkine (trans.), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.
• –––, 2015, Kritik der Rechte , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translated as Critique of Rights , Christopher Turner (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2020.
• Mills, Charles, 1988, “Alternative Epistemologies”, Social Theory and Practice , 14(3): 237–63.
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• Milstein, Brian, 2015, Commercium: Critical Theory from a Cosmopolitan Point of View , New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
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• Müller-Doohm, Stefan, 2003, Adorno: Eine Biographie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Adorno: A Biography , Rodney Livingstone (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2005.
• Negt, Oskar, and Alexander Kluge, 1972, Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung: Zur Organisationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit , Frankfurt: Suhrkamp; translated as Public Sphere and Experience: Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere , Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (trans.), London: Verso, 2016.
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• Postone, Moishe, 1980, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the German Reaction to ‘Holocaust’ ”, New German Critique , 19: 97–115. doi:10.2307/487974
• –––, 1993, Time, Labor, and Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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• Thompson, Michael J. (ed.), 2017, The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory , New York: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/978-1-137-55801-5
• Vázquez-Arroyo, Antonio Y., 2018, “Critical Theory, Colonialism, and the Historicity of Thought”, Constellations , 25: 54–70. doi:10.1111/1467-8675.12348
• Virno, Paolo, 2004, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life , New York: Semiotext(e).
• Vogel, Steven, 1996, Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory , New York: SUNY Press.
• –––, 2011, “On Nature and Alienation”, in Andrew Biro (ed.), Critical Ecologies: The Frankfurt School and Contemporary Environmental Crises , Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Vogelmann, Frieder, 2016, “Measuring, Disrupting, Emancipating: Three Pictures of Critique”, Constellations , 24(1): 101–112. doi:10.1111/1467-8675.12254
• –––, 2021, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Idealism in Critical Theory”, Constellations , 28(3): 322–336. doi:10.1111/1467-8675.12548
• Warner, Michael, 2002, Publics and Counterpublics , New York: Zone Books.
• Wellmer, Albrecht, 1969, Kritische Gesellschaftstheorie und Positivismus , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Critical Theory of Society , John Gumming (trans.), New York: Herder and Herder, 1971.
• –––, 1983, “Reason, Utopia, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment”, Praxis International , 3(2): 83–107.
• –––, 1985/86, Zur Dialektik von Moderne und Postmoderne , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985, and Ethik und Dialog , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. Portions of both books are translated in The Persistence of Modernity: Aesthetics, Ethics and Postmodernism , David Midgley (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
• –––, 1993, Endspiele: Die unversöhnliche Moderne , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Endgames: The Irreconcilable Nature of Modernity , David Midgley (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1998.
• –––, 2014, “On Critical Theory”, Social Research , 81(3): 705–733. doi:10.1353/sor.2014.0045
• Wheatland, Thomas, 2009, The Frankfurt School in Exile , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Whitebook, Joel, 1995, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• –––, 2021, “Misuse of Winnicott: On Axel Honneth’s Appropriation of Psychoanalysis”, Constellations , 28(3): 306–321. doi:10.1111/1467-8675.12582
• Wiggershaus, Rolf, 1986, Die Frankfurter Schule: Geschichte, theoretische Entwicklung, politische Bedeutung , München: Hanser; translated as The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance , Michael Robertson (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.
• Wimbauer, Christine, 2023, “Taking Care Seriously: Gendering Honneth’s The Working Sovereign – A Normative Theory of Work ”, Journal of Classical Sociology , 23(3): 389–400. doi:10.1177/1468795X231170827
• Wolin, Richard, 1994, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption , Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Young, Iris Marion, 2000, Inclusion and Democracy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2001, “Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy”, Political Theory , 29(5): 670–90. doi:10.1177/0090591701029005004
• –––, 2007, “Recognition of Love’s Labor: Considering Axel Honneth’s Feminism”, in Bert van den Brink and David Owen (eds.), Recognition and Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 189–212.
• Zaretsky, Eli, 2022, “Donald Trump and the Paranoid Position”, Critical Historical Studies , 9(1): 133–157. doi:10.1086/719127
• Zurn, Christopher, 2011, “Social pathologies as second-order disorders”, in Danielle Petherbridge (ed.), Axel Honneth: Critical Essays , Leiden: Brill, pp. 345–70.
• –––, 2015, Axel Honneth: A Critical Theory of the Social , Cambridge: Polity.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Critical Theory in Berlin
• The Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt
• International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs
• Critical Theory in the Global South
• The Syllabus Exchange Platform
• Bohman, James, “Critical Theory”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/critical-theory/ >. [This was the previous entry on this topic in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – see the version history .]

Adorno, Theodor W. | alienation | Benjamin, Walter | colonialism | critical philosophy of race | disability: critical disability theory | feminist philosophy, interventions: epistemology and philosophy of science | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on power | Foucault, Michel | Habermas, Jürgen | Horkheimer, Max | Lukács, Georg [György] | Marcuse, Herbert | postmodernism | recognition

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Amy Allen, Axel Honneth, Noëlle McAfee, and Martin Saar for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts and Christian Meyer for judicious editorial assistance.

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Classroom Q&A

With larry ferlazzo.

In this EdWeek blog, an experiment in knowledge-gathering, Ferlazzo will address readers’ questions on classroom management, ELL instruction, lesson planning, and other issues facing teachers. Send your questions to [email protected]. Read more from this blog.

Eight Instructional Strategies for Promoting Critical Thinking

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(This is the first post in a three-part series.)

The new question-of-the-week is:

What is critical thinking and how can we integrate it into the classroom?

This three-part series will explore what critical thinking is, if it can be specifically taught and, if so, how can teachers do so in their classrooms.

Today’s guests are Dara Laws Savage, Patrick Brown, Meg Riordan, Ph.D., and Dr. PJ Caposey. Dara, Patrick, and Meg were also guests on my 10-minute BAM! Radio Show . You can also find a list of, and links to, previous shows here.

You might also be interested in The Best Resources On Teaching & Learning Critical Thinking In The Classroom .

Current Events

Dara Laws Savage is an English teacher at the Early College High School at Delaware State University, where she serves as a teacher and instructional coach and lead mentor. Dara has been teaching for 25 years (career preparation, English, photography, yearbook, newspaper, and graphic design) and has presented nationally on project-based learning and technology integration:

There is so much going on right now and there is an overload of information for us to process. Did you ever stop to think how our students are processing current events? They see news feeds, hear news reports, and scan photos and posts, but are they truly thinking about what they are hearing and seeing?

I tell my students that my job is not to give them answers but to teach them how to think about what they read and hear. So what is critical thinking and how can we integrate it into the classroom? There are just as many definitions of critical thinking as there are people trying to define it. However, the Critical Think Consortium focuses on the tools to create a thinking-based classroom rather than a definition: “Shape the climate to support thinking, create opportunities for thinking, build capacity to think, provide guidance to inform thinking.” Using these four criteria and pairing them with current events, teachers easily create learning spaces that thrive on thinking and keep students engaged.

One successful technique I use is the FIRE Write. Students are given a quote, a paragraph, an excerpt, or a photo from the headlines. Students are asked to F ocus and respond to the selection for three minutes. Next, students are asked to I dentify a phrase or section of the photo and write for two minutes. Third, students are asked to R eframe their response around a specific word, phrase, or section within their previous selection. Finally, students E xchange their thoughts with a classmate. Within the exchange, students also talk about how the selection connects to what we are covering in class.

There was a controversial Pepsi ad in 2017 involving Kylie Jenner and a protest with a police presence. The imagery in the photo was strikingly similar to a photo that went viral with a young lady standing opposite a police line. Using that image from a current event engaged my students and gave them the opportunity to critically think about events of the time.

Here are the two photos and a student response:

F - Focus on both photos and respond for three minutes

In the first picture, you see a strong and courageous black female, bravely standing in front of two officers in protest. She is risking her life to do so. Iesha Evans is simply proving to the world she does NOT mean less because she is black … and yet officers are there to stop her. She did not step down. In the picture below, you see Kendall Jenner handing a police officer a Pepsi. Maybe this wouldn’t be a big deal, except this was Pepsi’s weak, pathetic, and outrageous excuse of a commercial that belittles the whole movement of people fighting for their lives.

I - Identify a word or phrase, underline it, then write about it for two minutes

A white, privileged female in place of a fighting black woman was asking for trouble. A struggle we are continuously fighting every day, and they make a mockery of it. “I know what will work! Here Mr. Police Officer! Drink some Pepsi!” As if. Pepsi made a fool of themselves, and now their already dwindling fan base continues to ever shrink smaller.

R - Reframe your thoughts by choosing a different word, then write about that for one minute

You don’t know privilege until it’s gone. You don’t know privilege while it’s there—but you can and will be made accountable and aware. Don’t use it for evil. You are not stupid. Use it to do something. Kendall could’ve NOT done the commercial. Kendall could’ve released another commercial standing behind a black woman. Anything!

Exchange - Remember to discuss how this connects to our school song project and our previous discussions?

This connects two ways - 1) We want to convey a strong message. Be powerful. Show who we are. And Pepsi definitely tried. … Which leads to the second connection. 2) Not mess up and offend anyone, as had the one alma mater had been linked to black minstrels. We want to be amazing, but we have to be smart and careful and make sure we include everyone who goes to our school and everyone who may go to our school.

As a final step, students read and annotate the full article and compare it to their initial response.

Using current events and critical-thinking strategies like FIRE writing helps create a learning space where thinking is the goal rather than a score on a multiple-choice assessment. Critical-thinking skills can cross over to any of students’ other courses and into life outside the classroom. After all, we as teachers want to help the whole student be successful, and critical thinking is an important part of navigating life after they leave our classrooms.

‘Before-Explore-Explain’

Patrick Brown is the executive director of STEM and CTE for the Fort Zumwalt school district in Missouri and an experienced educator and author :

Planning for critical thinking focuses on teaching the most crucial science concepts, practices, and logical-thinking skills as well as the best use of instructional time. One way to ensure that lessons maintain a focus on critical thinking is to focus on the instructional sequence used to teach.

Explore-before-explain teaching is all about promoting critical thinking for learners to better prepare students for the reality of their world. What having an explore-before-explain mindset means is that in our planning, we prioritize giving students firsthand experiences with data, allow students to construct evidence-based claims that focus on conceptual understanding, and challenge students to discuss and think about the why behind phenomena.

Just think of the critical thinking that has to occur for students to construct a scientific claim. 1) They need the opportunity to collect data, analyze it, and determine how to make sense of what the data may mean. 2) With data in hand, students can begin thinking about the validity and reliability of their experience and information collected. 3) They can consider what differences, if any, they might have if they completed the investigation again. 4) They can scrutinize outlying data points for they may be an artifact of a true difference that merits further exploration of a misstep in the procedure, measuring device, or measurement. All of these intellectual activities help them form more robust understanding and are evidence of their critical thinking.

In explore-before-explain teaching, all of these hard critical-thinking tasks come before teacher explanations of content. Whether we use discovery experiences, problem-based learning, and or inquiry-based activities, strategies that are geared toward helping students construct understanding promote critical thinking because students learn content by doing the practices valued in the field to generate knowledge.

An Issue of Equity

Meg Riordan, Ph.D., is the chief learning officer at The Possible Project, an out-of-school program that collaborates with youth to build entrepreneurial skills and mindsets and provides pathways to careers and long-term economic prosperity. She has been in the field of education for over 25 years as a middle and high school teacher, school coach, college professor, regional director of N.Y.C. Outward Bound Schools, and director of external research with EL Education:

Although critical thinking often defies straightforward definition, most in the education field agree it consists of several components: reasoning, problem-solving, and decisionmaking, plus analysis and evaluation of information, such that multiple sides of an issue can be explored. It also includes dispositions and “the willingness to apply critical-thinking principles, rather than fall back on existing unexamined beliefs, or simply believe what you’re told by authority figures.”

Despite variation in definitions, critical thinking is nonetheless promoted as an essential outcome of students’ learning—we want to see students and adults demonstrate it across all fields, professions, and in their personal lives. Yet there is simultaneously a rationing of opportunities in schools for students of color, students from under-resourced communities, and other historically marginalized groups to deeply learn and practice critical thinking.

For example, many of our most underserved students often spend class time filling out worksheets, promoting high compliance but low engagement, inquiry, critical thinking, or creation of new ideas. At a time in our world when college and careers are critical for participation in society and the global, knowledge-based economy, far too many students struggle within classrooms and schools that reinforce low-expectations and inequity.

If educators aim to prepare all students for an ever-evolving marketplace and develop skills that will be valued no matter what tomorrow’s jobs are, then we must move critical thinking to the forefront of classroom experiences. And educators must design learning to cultivate it.

So, what does that really look like?

Unpack and define critical thinking

To understand critical thinking, educators need to first unpack and define its components. What exactly are we looking for when we speak about reasoning or exploring multiple perspectives on an issue? How does problem-solving show up in English, math, science, art, or other disciplines—and how is it assessed? At Two Rivers, an EL Education school, the faculty identified five constructs of critical thinking, defined each, and created rubrics to generate a shared picture of quality for teachers and students. The rubrics were then adapted across grade levels to indicate students’ learning progressions.

At Avenues World School, critical thinking is one of the Avenues World Elements and is an enduring outcome embedded in students’ early experiences through 12th grade. For instance, a kindergarten student may be expected to “identify cause and effect in familiar contexts,” while an 8th grader should demonstrate the ability to “seek out sufficient evidence before accepting a claim as true,” “identify bias in claims and evidence,” and “reconsider strongly held points of view in light of new evidence.”

When faculty and students embrace a common vision of what critical thinking looks and sounds like and how it is assessed, educators can then explicitly design learning experiences that call for students to employ critical-thinking skills. This kind of work must occur across all schools and programs, especially those serving large numbers of students of color. As Linda Darling-Hammond asserts , “Schools that serve large numbers of students of color are least likely to offer the kind of curriculum needed to ... help students attain the [critical-thinking] skills needed in a knowledge work economy. ”

So, what can it look like to create those kinds of learning experiences?

Designing experiences for critical thinking

After defining a shared understanding of “what” critical thinking is and “how” it shows up across multiple disciplines and grade levels, it is essential to create learning experiences that impel students to cultivate, practice, and apply these skills. There are several levers that offer pathways for teachers to promote critical thinking in lessons:

1.Choose Compelling Topics: Keep it relevant

A key Common Core State Standard asks for students to “write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.” That might not sound exciting or culturally relevant. But a learning experience designed for a 12th grade humanities class engaged learners in a compelling topic— policing in America —to analyze and evaluate multiple texts (including primary sources) and share the reasoning for their perspectives through discussion and writing. Students grappled with ideas and their beliefs and employed deep critical-thinking skills to develop arguments for their claims. Embedding critical-thinking skills in curriculum that students care about and connect with can ignite powerful learning experiences.

2. Make Local Connections: Keep it real

At The Possible Project , an out-of-school-time program designed to promote entrepreneurial skills and mindsets, students in a recent summer online program (modified from in-person due to COVID-19) explored the impact of COVID-19 on their communities and local BIPOC-owned businesses. They learned interviewing skills through a partnership with Everyday Boston , conducted virtual interviews with entrepreneurs, evaluated information from their interviews and local data, and examined their previously held beliefs. They created blog posts and videos to reflect on their learning and consider how their mindsets had changed as a result of the experience. In this way, we can design powerful community-based learning and invite students into productive struggle with multiple perspectives.

3. Create Authentic Projects: Keep it rigorous

At Big Picture Learning schools, students engage in internship-based learning experiences as a central part of their schooling. Their school-based adviser and internship-based mentor support them in developing real-world projects that promote deeper learning and critical-thinking skills. Such authentic experiences teach “young people to be thinkers, to be curious, to get from curiosity to creation … and it helps students design a learning experience that answers their questions, [providing an] opportunity to communicate it to a larger audience—a major indicator of postsecondary success.” Even in a remote environment, we can design projects that ask more of students than rote memorization and that spark critical thinking.

Our call to action is this: As educators, we need to make opportunities for critical thinking available not only to the affluent or those fortunate enough to be placed in advanced courses. The tools are available, let’s use them. Let’s interrogate our current curriculum and design learning experiences that engage all students in real, relevant, and rigorous experiences that require critical thinking and prepare them for promising postsecondary pathways.

Critical Thinking & Student Engagement

Dr. PJ Caposey is an award-winning educator, keynote speaker, consultant, and author of seven books who currently serves as the superintendent of schools for the award-winning Meridian CUSD 223 in northwest Illinois. You can find PJ on most social-media platforms as MCUSDSupe:

When I start my keynote on student engagement, I invite two people up on stage and give them each five paper balls to shoot at a garbage can also conveniently placed on stage. Contestant One shoots their shot, and the audience gives approval. Four out of 5 is a heckuva score. Then just before Contestant Two shoots, I blindfold them and start moving the garbage can back and forth. I usually try to ensure that they can at least make one of their shots. Nobody is successful in this unfair environment.

I thank them and send them back to their seats and then explain that this little activity was akin to student engagement. While we all know we want student engagement, we are shooting at different targets. More importantly, for teachers, it is near impossible for them to hit a target that is moving and that they cannot see.

Within the world of education and particularly as educational leaders, we have failed to simplify what student engagement looks like, and it is impossible to define or articulate what student engagement looks like if we cannot clearly articulate what critical thinking is and looks like in a classroom. Because, simply, without critical thought, there is no engagement.

The good news here is that critical thought has been defined and placed into taxonomies for decades already. This is not something new and not something that needs to be redefined. I am a Bloom’s person, but there is nothing wrong with DOK or some of the other taxonomies, either. To be precise, I am a huge fan of Daggett’s Rigor and Relevance Framework. I have used that as a core element of my practice for years, and it has shaped who I am as an instructional leader.

So, in order to explain critical thought, a teacher or a leader must familiarize themselves with these tried and true taxonomies. Easy, right? Yes, sort of. The issue is not understanding what critical thought is; it is the ability to integrate it into the classrooms. In order to do so, there are a four key steps every educator must take.

• Integrating critical thought/rigor into a lesson does not happen by chance, it happens by design. Planning for critical thought and engagement is much different from planning for a traditional lesson. In order to plan for kids to think critically, you have to provide a base of knowledge and excellent prompts to allow them to explore their own thinking in order to analyze, evaluate, or synthesize information.
• SIDE NOTE – Bloom’s verbs are a great way to start when writing objectives, but true planning will take you deeper than this.

QUESTIONING

• If the questions and prompts given in a classroom have correct answers or if the teacher ends up answering their own questions, the lesson will lack critical thought and rigor.
• Script five questions forcing higher-order thought prior to every lesson. Experienced teachers may not feel they need this, but it helps to create an effective habit.
• If lessons are rigorous and assessments are not, students will do well on their assessments, and that may not be an accurate representation of the knowledge and skills they have mastered. If lessons are easy and assessments are rigorous, the exact opposite will happen. When deciding to increase critical thought, it must happen in all three phases of the game: planning, instruction, and assessment.

TALK TIME / CONTROL

• To increase rigor, the teacher must DO LESS. This feels counterintuitive but is accurate. Rigorous lessons involving tons of critical thought must allow for students to work on their own, collaborate with peers, and connect their ideas. This cannot happen in a silent room except for the teacher talking. In order to increase rigor, decrease talk time and become comfortable with less control. Asking questions and giving prompts that lead to no true correct answer also means less control. This is a tough ask for some teachers. Explained differently, if you assign one assignment and get 30 very similar products, you have most likely assigned a low-rigor recipe. If you assign one assignment and get multiple varied products, then the students have had a chance to think deeply, and you have successfully integrated critical thought into your classroom.

Thanks to Dara, Patrick, Meg, and PJ for their contributions!

Please feel free to leave a comment with your reactions to the topic or directly to anything that has been said in this post.

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at [email protected] . When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo .

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Overview of the Problem-Solving Mental Process

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Rachel Goldman, PhD FTOS, is a licensed psychologist, clinical assistant professor, speaker, wellness expert specializing in eating behaviors, stress management, and health behavior change.

• Identify the Problem
• Define the Problem
• Form a Strategy
• Organize Information
• Allocate Resources
• Monitor Progress
• Evaluate the Results

Frequently Asked Questions

Problem-solving is a mental process that involves discovering, analyzing, and solving problems. The ultimate goal of problem-solving is to overcome obstacles and find a solution that best resolves the issue.

The best strategy for solving a problem depends largely on the unique situation. In some cases, people are better off learning everything they can about the issue and then using factual knowledge to come up with a solution. In other instances, creativity and insight are the best options.

It is not necessary to follow problem-solving steps sequentially, It is common to skip steps or even go back through steps multiple times until the desired solution is reached.

In order to correctly solve a problem, it is often important to follow a series of steps. Researchers sometimes refer to this as the problem-solving cycle. While this cycle is portrayed sequentially, people rarely follow a rigid series of steps to find a solution.

The following steps include developing strategies and organizing knowledge.

1. Identifying the Problem

While it may seem like an obvious step, identifying the problem is not always as simple as it sounds. In some cases, people might mistakenly identify the wrong source of a problem, which will make attempts to solve it inefficient or even useless.

Some strategies that you might use to figure out the source of a problem include :

• Asking questions about the problem
• Breaking the problem down into smaller pieces
• Looking at the problem from different perspectives
• Conducting research to figure out what relationships exist between different variables

2. Defining the Problem

After the problem has been identified, it is important to fully define the problem so that it can be solved. You can define a problem by operationally defining each aspect of the problem and setting goals for what aspects of the problem you will address

At this point, you should focus on figuring out which aspects of the problems are facts and which are opinions. State the problem clearly and identify the scope of the solution.

3. Forming a Strategy

After the problem has been identified, it is time to start brainstorming potential solutions. This step usually involves generating as many ideas as possible without judging their quality. Once several possibilities have been generated, they can be evaluated and narrowed down.

The next step is to develop a strategy to solve the problem. The approach used will vary depending upon the situation and the individual's unique preferences. Common problem-solving strategies include heuristics and algorithms.

• Heuristics are mental shortcuts that are often based on solutions that have worked in the past. They can work well if the problem is similar to something you have encountered before and are often the best choice if you need a fast solution.
• Algorithms are step-by-step strategies that are guaranteed to produce a correct result. While this approach is great for accuracy, it can also consume time and resources.

Heuristics are often best used when time is of the essence, while algorithms are a better choice when a decision needs to be as accurate as possible.

4. Organizing Information

Before coming up with a solution, you need to first organize the available information. What do you know about the problem? What do you not know? The more information that is available the better prepared you will be to come up with an accurate solution.

When approaching a problem, it is important to make sure that you have all the data you need. Making a decision without adequate information can lead to biased or inaccurate results.

5. Allocating Resources

Of course, we don't always have unlimited money, time, and other resources to solve a problem. Before you begin to solve a problem, you need to determine how high priority it is.

If it is an important problem, it is probably worth allocating more resources to solving it. If, however, it is a fairly unimportant problem, then you do not want to spend too much of your available resources on coming up with a solution.

At this stage, it is important to consider all of the factors that might affect the problem at hand. This includes looking at the available resources, deadlines that need to be met, and any possible risks involved in each solution. After careful evaluation, a decision can be made about which solution to pursue.

6. Monitoring Progress

After selecting a problem-solving strategy, it is time to put the plan into action and see if it works. This step might involve trying out different solutions to see which one is the most effective.

It is also important to monitor the situation after implementing a solution to ensure that the problem has been solved and that no new problems have arisen as a result of the proposed solution.

Effective problem-solvers tend to monitor their progress as they work towards a solution. If they are not making good progress toward reaching their goal, they will reevaluate their approach or look for new strategies .

7. Evaluating the Results

After a solution has been reached, it is important to evaluate the results to determine if it is the best possible solution to the problem. This evaluation might be immediate, such as checking the results of a math problem to ensure the answer is correct, or it can be delayed, such as evaluating the success of a therapy program after several months of treatment.

Once a problem has been solved, it is important to take some time to reflect on the process that was used and evaluate the results. This will help you to improve your problem-solving skills and become more efficient at solving future problems.

A Word From Verywell​

It is important to remember that there are many different problem-solving processes with different steps, and this is just one example. Problem-solving in real-world situations requires a great deal of resourcefulness, flexibility, resilience, and continuous interaction with the environment.

Get Advice From The Verywell Mind Podcast

Hosted by therapist Amy Morin, LCSW, this episode of The Verywell Mind Podcast shares how you can stop dwelling in a negative mindset.

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You can become a better problem solving by:

• Practicing brainstorming and coming up with multiple potential solutions to problems
• Being open-minded and considering all possible options before making a decision
• Breaking down problems into smaller, more manageable pieces
• Asking for help when needed
• Researching different problem-solving techniques and trying out new ones
• Learning from mistakes and using them as opportunities to grow

It's important to communicate openly and honestly with your partner about what's going on. Try to see things from their perspective as well as your own. Work together to find a resolution that works for both of you. Be willing to compromise and accept that there may not be a perfect solution.

Take breaks if things are getting too heated, and come back to the problem when you feel calm and collected. Don't try to fix every problem on your own—consider asking a therapist or counselor for help and insight.

If you've tried everything and there doesn't seem to be a way to fix the problem, you may have to learn to accept it. This can be difficult, but try to focus on the positive aspects of your life and remember that every situation is temporary. Don't dwell on what's going wrong—instead, think about what's going right. Find support by talking to friends or family. Seek professional help if you're having trouble coping.

Davidson JE, Sternberg RJ, editors.  The Psychology of Problem Solving .  Cambridge University Press; 2003. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511615771

Sarathy V. Real world problem-solving .  Front Hum Neurosci . 2018;12:261. Published 2018 Jun 26. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2018.00261

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Problem-Solving Theory: The Task-Centred Model

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• Blanca M. Ramos 5 &
• Randall L. Stetson 6  

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This chapter examines the task-centred model to illustrate the application of problem-solving theory for social work intervention. First, it provides a brief description of the problem-solving model. Its historical development and key principles and concepts are presented. Next, the chapter offers a general overview of the crisis intervention model. The task-centred model and crisis intervention share principles and methods drawn from problem-solving theory. The remainder of the chapter focuses on the task-centred model. It reviews its historical background, viability as a framework for social work generalist practice, as well as its applicability with diverse client populations and across cultural settings. The structured steps that guide task-centred implementation throughout the helping process are described. A brief critical review of the model’s strengths and limitations is provided. The chapter concludes with a brief summary and some closing thoughts.

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Ramos, B.M., Stetson, R.L. (2022). Problem-Solving Theory: The Task-Centred Model. In: Hölscher, D., Hugman, R., McAuliffe, D. (eds) Social Work Theory and Ethics. Social Work. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3059-0_9-1

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Perspectives on the need for digital teaching materials for empowering critical thinking skills and problem-solving in the era of freedom of learning

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Nadya Rizky Nuzul Ramadhanti , Fatchur Rohman , Sulisetijono Sulisetijono; Perspectives on the need for digital teaching materials for empowering critical thinking skills and problem-solving in the era of freedom of learning. AIP Conf. Proc. 24 May 2024; 3106 (1): 070014. https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0215009

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The Freedom of Learning era is an independent condition for educators and students to gain learning experience and knowledge to develop their potential and overcome problems in life. This concept is a response to the needs of the education system in the era of the Industrial Revolution 4.0 to prepare graduates with 21st-century skills in the form of knowledge skills, one of which is critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Educators must develop students’ knowledge skills by facilitating students to become more active, creative, and independent. The learning process needs the role of teaching materials that connect knowledge between the material taught and real-world situations in everyday life. The need for mastering technology in learning can be applied to digital-based teaching materials because it is considered practical, the material is intact in one teaching material and can be accessed anywhere, and it looks interactive. The purpose of this study is to analyze the need for digital teaching materials to empower students’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Collecting data using a questionnaire following the stages of Need Assessment and Front-end Analysis from Lee & Owen. The population of this research is the second-semester biology education students at the University of Muhammadiyah Malang. The results obtained by researchers indicate that critical thinking and problem-solving skills in students relatively raise aspects of data use and analysis as well as aspects of identifying solutions that are only limited to the surface, not in-depth and structured. Thus, it is necessary to develop digital-based teaching materials that can accommodate empowerment. Students’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills about 21st-century learning skills. E-module is a form of presenting self-study materials that are arranged systematically into certain learning units, which are presented in electronic format, where each learning activity is interactive and programmed to achieve learning competency goals. The development of e-modules will help students develop 21st-century skills that are supportive of the Freedom of Learning era.

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IR Theory: Problem-Solving Theory Versus Critical Theory?

• Post author By Matt Davies
• Post date 01/10/2014
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This article was originally published by E-International Relations on 19 September 2014.

Robert Cox began his canonical 1981 essay “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory” with the observation that it is “necessary and practical” for academic disciplines to “divide up the seamless web of the real social world”. We make these divisions, Cox wrote, in order to analyse the world and thus to produce practical knowledge of that world. It is not a stretch to suggest that the real social world of International Relations scholarship might also be approached as worthy of analysis and theory. Indeed, reflection on International Relations as theory appears in the field as part of the necessary and practical division of the complexity of the social and political world. Rare is the introduction to IR textbook that does not emphasize, and usually begin with, the “great (theoretical) debates” that have structured the field since it emerged as an academic discipline.

Thus theory itself has long and often been treated as an object for theoretical reflection in International Relations. Recently, we could point to both the founding of a specific section of the US-based International Studies Association dedicated to Theory – indeed, this section honoured Professor Cox at the ISA convention in Toronto in 2014 – as well as the special issue in September 2013 of the European Journal of International Relations on “The End of IR Theory?”, accompanied by a wide-ranging discussion of the papers collected there in the Duck of Minerva blog.

For some of the contributors to the special issue and to the debates on the symposium – and I hope I can be forgiven for making an impressionistic observation rather than an analytical one – it seems that the question mark at the end of “the end of IR theory?” was a sign of fatigue rather than a sense that the debates over theory needed to be renewed. Fatigue, in the sense of “are we still having this conversation?” or “haven’t we moved on yet?” Emblematic of this fatigue were the reflections of Professor Chris Brown in both his article in the EJIR and his contribution to the symposium. It’s not that Brown is hostile to theory; on the contrary, his contribution was a complaint that the critical theories that emerged in the 1980s had not fulfilled their potential and that problem-solving theory had contributed much more.

I disagree with his assessment of the status of critical theory, as do many of the contributors to the special issue and to the symposium, in particular with his claim that it has failed to live up to the promise it showed in the 1980s – but that’s a conversation for another time. What is most interesting here is how Brown takes up Cox’s analytical division of “critical theory” from “problem-solving theory”. Indeed, the trope of problem-solving versus critical theory is asserted quite often in discussions of the status of theory in IR: for example, in A. C. McKeil; in Robert W. Murray; or in Ali Diskaya, just to take a few examples appearing here in e-IR. It is this trope, along with Cox’s other oft-cited claim in the 1981 Millennium article that “theory is always for someone and for some purpose” (Cox 1981: 129) that have made his article canonical. Indeed, Cox’s categories of “critical” and “problem-solving” are now part of the very common-sense ordering of theory in IR.

It is therefore important to consider what Cox actually said about these categories. Problem-solving theory, first, “takes the world as it finds it, with the prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are organised, as the given framework for action. The general aim of problem-solving is to make these relationships and institutions work smoothly by dealing effectively with particular sources of trouble” (Cox 1981, 128-129). This definition, remember, follows Cox’s opening statements in the article about the importance of theory for the production of practical knowledge. Cox is often interpreted as elevating critical theory over problem solving theory – Brown takes him to do so, for example, in the symposium when he says Cox “compared ‘problem-solving’ theory unfavourably with ‘critical theory’” but I am not convinced that a careful reading of Cox’s article supports this (and Cox argues something similar). In addition to signalling the importance of theory for practical knowledge, Cox explicitly notes, for example, how the analytical procedures he sees as defining problem-solving theory are the source of its strength. He takes issue with the idea that problem-solving theory is value-free and asserts that it is conservative (Cox 1981: 129-130) but this is as close to a normative assessment of problem-solving theory as Cox gets.

Critical theory, in contrast, is holistic where problem-solving theory is analytic. It “does not take institutions and social and power relations for granted but calls them into question by concerning itself with their origins and how and whether they might be in the process of changing. … Critical theory is directed to the social and political complex as a whole rather than to the separate parts” (Cox 1981: 129). Cox also allows that where problem-solving theory might be seen as conservative, critical theory might be seen as utopian: “Its aims are just as practical as those of problem-solving theory, but it approaches practice from a perspective with transcends that of the existing order. … Critical theory allows for a normative choice in favour of a social and political order different from the prevailing order, but it limits the range of choice to alternative orders which are feasible transformations of the existing world” (Cox 1981: 130).

I suspect that it is this holistic and utopian range for critical theory as asserted by Cox that leads Brown to identify critical theory with Quentin Skinner’s notion of Grand Theory and leads so many of the rest of us to assume that critical theory is posited as a superior theoretical approach to problem-solving theory. I’ve tried to show that Cox, at least, makes no explicit claims to that effect. Nevertheless, the categories Cox bequeathed to us seem to encourage us to turn this binary, critical versus problem-solving theory, into a hierarchy. Readers of International Relations theory instinctively want to read it as political theory – though as Rob Walker might remind us, this does not make us careful readers of political theory either. Perhaps we need to acknowledge that the theoretical choice presented by the binary critical theory-problem-solving theory is, at least, theory as engaged in a political contest.

Should Cox’s categories be preserved, critiqued, or abandoned? Would doing so lend a clearer (and practical) view of theory in the field? One way to extend the engagement with the practice of theory would be to read Cox’s categories alongside the other famous definition of critical theory, in Max Horkheimer’s essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” (Horkheimer 2014 [1937]). Though Cox did not explicitly cite Horkheimer, the latter’s efforts to distinguish critical theory from what he called “traditional theory” make him an obvious interlocutor. (There are, of course, many other serious contributions to the effort to situate theory socially and politically, from Bourdieu to Foucault, from Bruno Latour to Walter Mignolo. Many of these efforts are considered in the EJIR special issue and the Duck of Minerva symposium.) I focus on Horkheimer here in part due to the clear affinities between his approach and Cox’s and in part because Horkheimer, like Cox and as I would like to do, provides an explicit defence of the enterprise of critical theory.

While the scale of Horkheimer’s critique, engaged as he was with theory per se, is much grander than the stage Cox builds when he focuses on IR theory in the 1981 article, their accounts of “traditional” and “problem-solving” theory are remarkably similar. Cox notes how the power of problem-solving theory stems from its methodological “fixing” of the social and institutional parameters surrounding the variables it examines. For Horkheimer, this method, rooted in Descartes and predominant not only in social sciences but in science generally in his time, stems from the ability of the scholar to abstract him or herself from these social and institutional parameters in the production of theories and analyses. In other words, just as in any production process where a division of labour separates the subjective functions of planning, designing, interpreting, and analysing from the executive functions, traditional theory renders the world under study as objective and passive and the scientist an active, analysing subject.

In their conceptualisations of critical theory, however, Cox and Horkheimer differ slightly but in an important way. While both are concerned to defend theory as an approach to a dynamic and interconnected totality, Cox does not foreground the status of the theorist, while for Horkheimer the critical theorist must engage with theory as a productive process. Cox does take neorealism to task for neglecting the production process in the constitution of national interest (Cox 1981: 134-135) but Horkheimer goes further: it is not a matter of adding another parameter or variable to the theoretical enterprise; it is a matter of understanding the theoretical enterprise itself in relation to and as a part of a general production process and division of labour. When Cox wrote in 1981, the prevailing epistemology in IR and the epistemological commitment of problem-solving or traditional theory was realist: the world exists independently of our thoughts about it and the task of theory is to make thought adequate to reality. What Horkheimer shows is that there is no neat division between thought and reality that can justify the privileged position of the theorist in the social division of labour: our thoughts are part of reality, as real as the city you live in or the job you work at and they must be analysed as part of the general social division of labour and of social reproduction.

Thus the problem-solving theorist becomes a functionary in the maintenance of social order. The critical theorist must understand the role of theory in social reproduction in order to break down the divisions between theoretical reflection and the making of the world.

I am not suggesting that Horkheimer was right where Cox was wrong. Cox was certainly aware of the – explicit or implicit – political commitments of the theorist when he said, “theory is always for someone and for some purpose”. The question for me here is whether our common-sense taxonomy of International Relations theory as “problem-solving” or “critical” remains appropriate. Given how embedded it is in our ways of seeing ourselves and our field, and given that it can be quite useful for teaching theory, I don’t think it should necessarily be abandoned. Given the implicit, instinctual way IR theorists tend to treat the division as a contest, as in Chris Brown for whom problem-solving has produced better results than critical theory, I wonder if it would not be better to try to make the political stakes of that contest more evident.

For me, reading Cox with Horkheimer provides an interesting start on this task. The description of the first category as “problem-solving” or “traditional” points to a theoretical practice where expertise rules, where specialists take up their specific tasks and succeed or fail on the basis of how powerful their explanations are and the impact of their work. Cox and Horkheimer both acknowledge the importance of this approach in terms of method and results. And they both hint at the cost: politically, we might better describe this approach as technocratic theory. The enterprise is to uncover the timeless essences of things and relations and to keep things working by keeping them in their place.

The contrasting approach to theory, which Cox and Horkheimer both dub “critical theory”, seeks instead to enable the transformation of things. But critical theory is more than this, too; after all, as social constructivism suggests, the transformation of things is just the normal state of affairs as people make themselves and make their history. Critical theory does more: it disagrees. As Rancière suggests, it disrupts the order of the “distribution of the sensible.” Critical theory works by making visible the relationships and the things that International Relations refuses to recognise and qualify as relationships or things. It makes audible the voices of people not qualified to speak in International Relations. Against the technocratic barriers to international living and understandings, critical theory identifies the arbitrariness and artificiality of barriers and explains them in relation to their roles in the division of labour, social reproduction, or system maintenance. Politically, critical theory must be democratic theory – not a theory of democracy, posed externally to its object, but a theory that is democratic in its everyday practices. These are the political stakes in our theoretical choices.

Matt Davies lectures in International Political Economy at Newcastle University and is the Degree Programme Director for the MA in World Politics and Popular Culture . He is also a co-editor of the Popular Culture and World Politics book series , published by Routledge.

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Explained: Importance of critical thinking, problem-solving skills in curriculum

F uture careers are no longer about domain expertise or technical skills. Rather, critical thinking and problem-solving skills in employees are on the wish list of every big organization today. Even curriculums and pedagogies across the globe and within India are now requiring skilled workers who are able to think critically and are analytical.

The reason for this shift in perspective is very simple.

These skills provide a staunch foundation for comprehensive learning that extends beyond books or the four walls of the classroom. In a nutshell, critical thinking and problem-solving skills are a part of '21st Century Skills' that can help unlock valuable learning for life.

Over the years, the education system has been moving away from the system of rote and other conventional teaching and learning parameters.

They are aligning their curriculums to the changing scenario which is becoming more tech-driven and demands a fusion of critical skills, life skills, values, and domain expertise. There's no set formula for success.

Rather, there's a defined need for humans to be more creative, innovative, adaptive, agile, risk-taking, and have a problem-solving mindset.

In today's scenario, critical thinking and problem-solving skills have become more important because they open the human mind to multiple possibilities, solutions, and a mindset that is interdisciplinary in nature.

Therefore, many schools and educational institutions are deploying AI and immersive learning experiences via gaming, and AR-VR technologies to give a more realistic and hands-on learning experience to their students that hone these abilities and help them overcome any doubt or fear.

ADVANTAGES OF CRITICAL THINKING AND PROBLEM-SOLVING IN CURRICULUM

Ability to relate to the real world:  Instead of theoretical knowledge, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills encourage students to look at their immediate and extended environment through a spirit of questioning, curiosity, and learning. When the curriculum presents students with real-world problems, the learning is immense.

Confidence, agility & collaboration : Critical thinking and problem-solving skills boost self-belief and confidence as students examine, re-examine, and sometimes fail or succeed while attempting to do something.

They are able to understand where they may have gone wrong, attempt new approaches, ask their peers for feedback and even seek their opinion, work together as a team, and learn to face any challenge by responding to it.

Willingness to try new things: When problem-solving skills and critical thinking are encouraged by teachers, they set a robust foundation for young learners to experiment, think out of the box, and be more innovative and creative besides looking for new ways to upskill.

It's important to understand that merely introducing these skills into the curriculum is not enough. Schools and educational institutions must have upskilling workshops and conduct special training for teachers so as to ensure that they are skilled and familiarized with new teaching and learning techniques and new-age concepts that can be used in the classrooms via assignments and projects.

Critical thinking and problem-solving skills are two of the most sought-after skills. Hence, schools should emphasise the upskilling of students as a part of the academic curriculum.

The article is authored by Dr Tassos Anastasiades, Principal- IB, Genesis Global School, Noida. 

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