Against Alienation: The Emancipative Potential of Critical Pedagogy in Fromm

ritical theory generally refers to a series of pathways for Marxistinspired intellectual inquiry that first emerged with the end of the 18th century European Enlightenment and in particular with the initial widespread waning of intellectual confidence that the newly hegemonic bourgeois society would succeed in realizing Enlightenment ideals. In short, it represents the intellectual articulation of the conviction that modern capitalist society cannot—at least not without significant reformation or substantial transformation—realize the Enlightenment ideal of an enlightened society. According to Enlightenment consensus, this (ideal) society is to be one which will genuinely embody the highest values of human civilization, and which will thereby insure steady progress in the attainment of liberty, justice, prosperity, and contentment for all of its citizens. In a more focused sense, critical theory designates several generations of German philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School, which is particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main. In order to fill in the perceived omissions of traditional Marxist thought, the Frankfurt School theorists sought to draw answers from other schools of thought, hence using the insights of psychoanalysis, Weberian theory, aesthetic modernism and other disciplines. The school’s main figures attempted to overcome the limits of positivism, materialism and determinism by returning to Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy and its successors in German idealism, principally G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy, with its emphasis on dialectic and contradiction as inherent properties of reality. In a nutshell, the theorists of the Frankfurt School aimed not at a cool description but a radical transformation of the social world of advanced capitalism that will bring freedom for all from features of modern society that restrict or constrain individuals from living in freedom. It does not aim to bring about social change through revolutionary means, through confronting the practical and economic arrangements with political opposition. In a major development from Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism, it recognizes that culture is as much a