Petrucciani, Stefano. "Rethinking Critical Theory." KRITIKOS 6 (2009).

The philosophical reflections developed by the first and the second generation of the Frankfurt School (through the work of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and Habermas) constitute, in my opinion, a contribution of vital importance to the construction of a critical theory capable of responding to the current challenges of society and politics. However, in order to reconstruct a critical theory for the present times, it is necessary to start from the problems that the Frankfurt tradition left open. With regard to this, my thesis is that the evolution from the first to the second generation of the Frankfurt School, in particular from Adorno to Habermas, can be framed as a passage from a social theory of domination to a normative theory of democracy. I am convinced that, if isolated from each other, both perspectives are insufficient. In my view, Habermas was right in underlining the normative deficit of the critical theory of the first generation, but his normative theory of democracy – developed in Between Facts and Norms and in the following books – lacks a conceptualization of the reality of power as social domination. Despite his awareness of the problem, Habermas failed to embed it into an adequate theoretical framework. Apparently Habermas has also abandoned the attempt, developed in Theory of Communicative Action, of conceptualizing the pathologies of modernity in terms of a “colonization of the life-world.” This account was meant to be a viable alternative to Adorno’s totalizing account of domination, but it seems that Habermas took no interest in developing it further. In my view the separation between a theory of domination and a normative theory of democracy reveals a theoretical problem. Hence, a reconstructed critical theory should aim at the reconciliation of these two dimensions (theory of power and theory of democracy), both fundamental for a critical understanding of the present. However, a concrete development of this theoretical proposal requires broader conceptual tools than those of the critical theory of the Frankfurt school. As far as the theory of power is concerned, it is necessary to undertake a critical confrontation not only with the Marxist tradition, in particular with some neo-Marxist approaches, like the one proposed in recent years by the French scholar Jacques Bidet, but also with other aspects of the contemporary research on power. As far as the normative perspective is concerned, it is important to critically consider the revitalization of normative political theory put forward by John Rawls and by many other scholars. . . . Read the rest here: http://intertheory.org/petrucciani.htm.