One of the ironies of critical theory in the 1970s is that, although practically defunct in Germany, its birthplace, it is alive and well in the English-speaking world. I This is all the more striking since during their American exile the founding fathers were skeptical about the possibility of their work ever taking root in America that they rarely wrote in English, and their journal, the Zeitschrift fizr Sozialforschung, continued to appear in German almost up to the time when it ceased publication in 1941. What is even more ironic is that, while critical theory is catching on in North America and England with a whole new literature developing in the wake of the translation of most of Critical Theory's classical texts into English, in Germany it is precisely the American social science rejected by the new converts that increasingly reigns supreme. Obviously, the grass is always greener on the other side. Yet, it would be a mistake to seek an explanation of this phenomenon merely in terms of shifting intellectual fads: more substantial political and socio-economic conditions account for this seemingly abnormal state of affairs. An investigation of its historical roots, moreover, will throw considerable light on the very character of critical theory now practically in its third generation of theoreticians. The question concerning the differences in the development of political consciousness and Marxist theory in Europe and in North America is, of course, still very much an open one. Whatever the reasons for these historical differences, they certainly have nothing to do with America being so barren of theoreticians that it is under the illusion that it has escaped Marxism. 2 As Camporesi has convincingly shown, the theoretical contributions of Louis B. Boudin, Ernest Untermann, Robert R. LaMonte and other American Marxists at the beginning of the century are no less rigorous than those of Kautsky, Luxemburg and Labriola, while the debates and discussions in Charles H. Kerr's International Socialist Review are not much below those