ABSTRACT
This chapter takes up a topic that must be negotiated by normatively guided critical social theory today. The diagnostic tasks of critique require some way of measuring historical progress, and yet this arbitrating judgement appears to be radically at odds with the historicizing sensitivities that are also claimed by contemporary critical theory. My argument that a radical rethinking of a social democratic project might normatively underpin ideology critique in a neoliberal age appears to have a particular case to answer here. Following an exploration of what Peter Wagner and Theodor Adorno have to offer in competing, but mutually illuminating, accounts of the dialectic of progress and critique, I will use the results to reflect upon some major attempts to respond to the hold of Eurocentric bias in critical social theory.
