Does Critical Theory have a Future? The Elizabethtown Telos Conference (February 23-25, 1990)

Abstract

Abstract At the close of the 1960s, when it became clear that the social upheaval of the previous years had gradually degenerated either into moribund Marxist-Leninist cults or a myriad of new particularistic interest groups with no immediately obvious universal emancipatory goals, Rudi Dutschke announced his famous default strategy: “the long march through the institutions.” Allegedly, this gradual infiltration of the structure of power would allow radical “moles” to redirect those institutions in such a way as to create the objective conditions for the qualitative social changes that had been impossible to bring about through more direct confrontations. The history of the next two decades proved this latter strategy even less viable than the earlier one.