ABSTRACT

The bipolarity found in Max Weber's two forms of ethics is to be understood as an alternative to the sheer and unbridgeable dualism of other configurations given by philosophers and theologians to the relationship of politics and morality – though Weber's two poles do not overlap with their traditional counterposition, as in Niccolo Machiavelli's or Immanuel Kant's design. The old Critical Theory has been relevant to social movements, being a large part of the background for the student and protest movement in the 1960s in Europe and North America, here mainly in the wake of Marcuse's radical theory of civilisation as formulated in Eros and Civilization and The One-Dimensional Man. In a still thinner sense, 'critical' has become a fairly fuzzy adjective, applied to whatever is or pretends to be against the mainstream in philosophy or politics or literary criticism; this attitude has thus become itself a part of the mainstream on the market of ideas.