Abstract
Critical theory has usually been regarded as a unique amalgamation of ideas drawn from Marx, Weber, and Freud, among other sources. What this view tends to minimize or overlook is the unique role of the critical theorists, beginning with Georg Lukács (a critical theorist “before the fact”), in reviving, interpreting, and further developing a distinctively Hegelian approach to the problems of knowledge, culture, and politics. This chapter first demonstrates the role of critical theorists in reviving Hegelianism in the early twentieth century. Then, it outlines the role of Hegelian philosophy as the basis for concepts of totality in the thought of Georg Lukács and Max Horkheimer, and of rationality in the thought of Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno. The critique of, and then return to, Hegel in the work of Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth is also considered. The chapter concludes with an evaluation of three historical interpretations of the significance of the Hegelian element in critical theory, a consideration of the limits of Hegelianism for critical theory, and a suggestion of a fourth interpretation.
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Notes
- 1.
For 50 years (approximately 1875–1925), the British Hegelians opposed the predominantly empiricist and utilitarian tendencies of British philosophy (Robbins 1982). Leading figures counterposed to these tendencies concepts of ontological monism (F.H. Bradley), recognitive ethics (T.H. Green), and political constitutionalism (Bernard Bosanquet). Yet, by the end of World War I, the new logical and linguistic ideas of Russell and Moore had made these idealist conceptions seem old-fashioned. In fact, Russell argued that they were founded on logical errors that vitiated any insights gained (Hylton 1990). Moore’s moral intuitionism assumed a “social detachment” that made neo-Hegelian conceptions of an ethical life seem unsubstantiated by any discernible moral psychology (Robbins 1982: 105). And an intellectual result of the war was to make any German-influenced philosophy appear vaguely antipatriotic.
- 2.
Lukács’ Young Hegel was a companion piece to his earlier Destruction of Reason—an attack upon the current of German thought leading through Nietzsche that was generally characterized as “irrationalist” (Lukács 1981). Lukács claimed that The Young Hegel “contains a positive vision to contrast with the classical age of irrationalism” (Lukács 1975: xi). But this “vision” no longer leads to something identifiable as a “critical theory.”
- 3.
What an odd coincidence it was that Marcuse’s view of Hegel as a liberal rationalist should contrast so sharply with that expressed in a similar work appearing at this time—The Open Society and Its Enemies, by Karl Popper. Popper was an Austrian émigré to Britain, with a rather shaky grasp of German philosophy. In the book, which was influential after the end of the war, Popper counted Hegel among the enemies of the “open [i.e., liberal] society”—a view that would have surprised Marcuse (not to speak of the British Hegelians) (Popper 1962)!
- 4.
See, especially, Frederick Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).
- 5.
An indication of this connection is one of Marcuse’s last writings, based on a talk he gave a year before his death in 1980 (Marcuse 1992).
- 6.
Interestingly, the most authoritative source on the history of critical theory, Rolf Wiggershaus, is agnostic on this interpretive debate about the long-term failure or success of the Hegelian–Marxist element in critical theory (and whether a “return to Kant” is warranted) (Wiggershaus 1994).
- 7.
One scholar who points this out is Christopher Lasch, referring to their work on the “authoritarian personality,” with which he contrasts Hannah Arendt’s more historically informed approach in her Origins of Totalitarianism (Lasch 1991: 445–50).
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Dahbour, O. (2017). Totality, Reason, Dialectics: The Importance of Hegel for Critical Theory from Lukács to Honneth. In: Thompson, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55801-5_5
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