ABSTRACT
The tradition of critical theory finds its meaning clustered around the idea of ‘critique’ and its many ramifications in a matrix of humanistically inspired disciplines. In a widely respected programmatic essay, Max Horkheimer deferentially cited Karl Marx’s Critique of Political Economy as the model for a critical theory of society, but the pre-history of Marx’s concept of critique remains of central and crucial importance for the tradition. The process of critique claimed to subject to its judgments all domains of life which were accessible to reason, but it renounced any endeavor to dwell on the polity. Critique is grounded in a specific experience, which is set down in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, and in Marx’s critique of ideology. The specific tenets propounded by the Frankfurt School are best presented negatively by locating the spheres in which they diverge from their selected paradigm, Marx’s Critique of Political Economy.
