ABSTRACT
A critical social theory must explain how exploitative and oppressive social relations can be changed, how new norms can be established as the autonomous achievement of acting subjects, so that social relations lose their unconscious character and are transformed into relations of freedom and justice. One of the most important problems for a theory of revolution was the analysis of causal consequences of social acts in the context of a logic of social preconditions and revolutionary goals. In the concept of 'socialist' revolutions of the kind that was typical in the twentieth century, it almost went without saying that the establishment of central economic means was the 'precondition' for bringing about free social relations. Revolution is the process of transcending the coherence of systems that endanger values such as the preservation of social life, freedom, or solidarity. From Kant to Marx, revolution implies the transformation of the conditions of human life through praxis.
