ABSTRACT
Critical theory is concerned with the ability of human beings to reflect on their social life for the purpose of discovering, as Tolstoy once put it, ‘what we should do and how we should live.’ For this reason it has devoted a good deal of attention to the institutions of what Habermas calls the public sphere: the arena, formed as the liberal political order was replacing the feudal, in which private individuals come together to discuss the public affairs of the community. 1 At the heart of the critique of contemporary capitalism advanced by Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas, and others is the thesis that the capitalist form of social organization that brought the public sphere into being nevertheless distorts and limits its development to the point that the society is unable to establish the process of dialogue and collective self-reflection that the advent of liberal institutions seemed to promise.
