ABSTRACT
When in his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity Habermas argued that Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment was a dark chapter in the history of Critical Theory, he set terms for the debate about the very idea of critique that are with us to this day. 1 Habermas's view that Adorno and Horkheimer's critique of western rationality at best led to inconsistency and at worst led to political pessimism changed the status of critique from an account of the paradoxes of capitalist modernization to an account of the normative standpoint that can distinguish between the positive and negative developments of modernity. The legacy of Habermas's insistence on tackling first and foremost the problem of “normative foundations,” as he put it in his Theory of Communicative Action, continues today in the work of what is often considered as third generation Frankfurt School Critical Theory. 2 Exemplary here is Axel Honneth, who has developed his critical theory of society by reconstructing Hegel's notions of recognition and ethical life as the normative concepts that make possible a diagnosis and critique of the neoliberal present.
