Max Horkheimer’s Critical Theory

Abstract

The New Left of the early 1960s was no less imbued with the habits of thought characteristic of the American celebration than its elders. At first it was optimistic about the chances to change society through the application of consistent pressure on the institutions to live up to their pluralistic claims. The crisis of late capitalism was seen as the conflict between the ideology of bourgeois individualism and the reality of the concentration of power in the hands of a few large corporations, the military, and the government that they controlled. Since the myth of popular participation was a necessary presupposition of corporate domination, the politics of confrontation were employed to expose the existence of a power nexus, which was essentially unresponsive to popular needs. Curiously, the New Left believed in the viability of democratic institutions. The underlying basis of its politics was the transformation of the content of social life while retaining its ideological and institutional forms. If many radicals had been disabused of the possibility of piecemeal reform, they were firmly wedded to a symbolic politics whose foundation was moralistic rather than Marxist.