ABSTRACT
Habermas, the most illustrious of the second-generation Frankfurt theorists, claims that Adorno, in rejecting identity logic, ‘surrendered to an uninhibited scepticism concerning reason’. Horkheimer was suspicious of Habermas from the start. Research in the vein of critical inquiry cannot escape the influence of Paulo Freire, whose best known work is Pedagogy of the Oppressed. As Freire has said, there is indivisible solidarity between humans and their world. No dichotomy can be made between the two. The solidarity between human beings and their world bridges the classical objective/subjective dichotomy. Critical forms of research call current ideology into question, and initiate action, in the cause of social justice. Critical inquiry may be as radical as Adorno’s negative dialectics or Freire’s movement towards conscientisation—or it may not. It is in this mood of critical reflection on social reality in readiness to take action for change that critical researchers come to the tasks of human inquiry.
