We, heirs of enlightenment: Critical theory, democracy, and social science

Abstract

Critical Theory has had a complex relation to the Enlightenment. On the one hand, it is clearly its continuation, as when Horkheimer takes as a constitutive aim of a critical theory to liberate human beings from all circumstances that enslave them. The aim of Enlightenment criticism is freedom, in which human powers and capacities are no longer put in the service of “idols” or constrained by “self-imposed tutelage” but can be brought to bear upon the comprehensive goal of human emancipation. These images of immaturity and progress are fraught with historical dangers. For this reason, many have rightly pointed out that Enlightenment can itself be a new source of domination. Thus, Critical Theory is reflexive and self-critical in endorsing human emancipation, deeply aware of the paradoxes of freedom and domination and their unresolved tensions, ones that cannot be resolved once and for all in some definitive theory, but rather must be rendered productive in practice.