ABSTRACT
The principal argument of this book, the argument regarding contemporary Critical Theory’s methodology, is a response to a significant development internal to Critical Theory as well as to demanding contextual pressures exerted upon it. Both the internal development and the contextual change can be dated to roughly the same period. From the late 1980s, it became increasingly evident that a new concept, the concept of ‘immanent transcendence’, has emerged to take the place of Critical Theory’s key concept. It brought Critical Theory’s left-Hegelian heritage into much sharper focus than ever before, highlighting in particular the relation between Critical Theory and pragmatism. At about the same time, the international debate about critique, which was earlier marked by the clash between Habermas and Gadamer, was rekindled by a wave of both direct and indirect assaults on Critical Theory from a variety of vantage points, some of an interpretative kind and others representing concepts of critique differing from that of Critical Theory. These attacks did not just call forth predictable defensive reactions from Critical Theory, but more productively also stimulated reflection, self-examination and efforts aimed at self-clarification and elaboration. The confluence of the internal development and contextual pressures pointed towards the need for the specification of Critical Theory’s methodology in terms of its left-Hegelian heritage as encapsulated by the new concept of immanent transcendence.
