ABSTRACT
As articulated in social gerontology, critical theory incorporates both structural and hermeneutic perspectives on sociological analysis. The first of these deals with issues of political economy and distributive justice--of material inequality, its consequences, and the processes that sustain it; the second with human wholeness-with the relationship of consciousness and the symbolic apparatus to the material conditions of life, both at the individual level and at the sociocultural level. I contend that critical scholarship on aging has encountered tendencies toward co-optation in each of these domains, and this chapter supports that contention by presenting an example from each.
