Critical Theory and the Sociology of the Subject

Abstract

One of the most interesting, influential, and erudite social thinkers in the world, Jürgen Habermas has been credited with rescuing Critical Theory from the brink of nihilism. Prior to Habermas’s theoretical intervention, the first generation of critical theorists, notably Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse, had advanced a Marxist critique of capitalism which was heavily influenced by Max Weber’s much more pessimistic account of the world-historical process of rationalisation. While for Marx capitalist social relations constituted a fetter on the full rationalisation of the productive forces, for Weber the capitalist economy and the modern state were in fact the full societal embodiments of a purposive-rational action set loose from its original value orientations and institutionalised in soulless bureaucracies. For Marx, capitalism would eventually become an obstacle to the rational development of productive organisation and technology, and science would serve as a weapon wielded by the working class against the mystifying forces of bourgeois law, culture, and morality. For Weber, on the other hand, scientific and technical progress led to structurally differentiated social orders, subsystems of purposive rationality which, divorced from moral considerations and requirements of justification, became self-regulating mechanisms subjecting human beings to an ‘iron cage’ of bondage.