ABSTRACT
Critical theory has become influential in international relations since the mid-1980s, when, even before the end of the Cold War, Marxism fell out of favour because of its structuralist and economic biases. As a result, the debate turned to a number of new approaches that had been developed in other disciplines of the Humanities and Social Sciences, including feminism and postmodernism. For reasons that we will discuss in the following chapters, these can be labelled ‘critical’ as well, though in this chapter the term ‘Critical Theory’ (with a capital ‘c’ and ‘t’) refers specifically to a school of thought that has its intellectual roots in Marxism, but addresses some of Marxism's perceived shortcomings and so is sometimes also referred to as ‘post-Marxist’. Since Critical Theory and structuralism are both influenced by Marxist thought, you will find some similarities between, for example, critical conceptions of world order and institutions on the one hand and structuralist accounts as outlined in chapter 3 on the other. However, Critical Theory differs in important respects from structuralism and, hence, warrants separate treatment.
