ABSTRACT
The term ‘counterculture’ was coined in the 1960s, largely in response to the emergence of middle-class youth movements (such as the hippies), to refer to groups that questioned the values of the dominant culture. While centring on an opposition to the VietnamWar, the hippie counterculture also expressed its dissatisfaction with the values and goals of capitalism, such as consumerism, the work ethic and a dependence on technology. In general, the concept of counterculture may now be extended to the values, beliefs and attitudes of any minority group that opposes the dominant culture, but more precisely, does so in a relatively articulate and reflective manner. Thus, at its emergence, the Christian religion was a counterculture, in opposition to the dominant Jewish and Roman cultures. In the early period of British capitalism, the Quakers and the Methodists represented countercultures in opposition to the dominant values of Anglicanism.
‘Critical theory’ is something of an umbrella term, and has come to be associated in the Anglo-American academic world with a brand of textual analysis which has taken root predominantly in university English literature departments. The term itself, however, was first linked to the work of the Frankfurt School (e.g. Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin and Marcuse). In the hands of these thinkers, critical theory was envisaged as a rigorous critical engagement with social and philosophical issues which aimed at the cross-fertilisation of research methods derived from the social sciences with a Marxist theoretical framework for conceptualising social relations. However, as exemplified by Horkheimer and Adorno’s book Dialectic of Enlightenment, there always existed in the work of the Frankfurt School a tendency to question certain ideas that were central to Marxism (for instance, the traditional Marxist confidence in the politicisation of the proletariat leading to revolution, or an unproblematic affirmation of the Enlightenment ideal of rationality as providing the key to social progress).
