The Antipositivism of Critical Theory

Abstract

I have already briefly mentioned that, in the context of the social sciences, the antipositivism of critical theory has taken on a twofold character: it is at once epistemological and sociological. This dual character can be identified through the two separate meanings of the term ‘critique’ which plays such an important role in the thought of the critical theorists.¹³ In the first place critique derives its sense from the meaning it had in Kant’s ‘critical philosophy’, the attempt to determine the conditions of possible knowledge by reflection of the knowing subject’s own cognitive faculties: this is the dimension of epistemological critique, or critical epistemology. In the second place, critique

denotes reflection on a system of constraints which are humanly produced: distorting pressures to which individuals, or a group of individuals, or the human race as a whole, succumb in their process of self-formation. Critique in this sense has its root in Hegel. In the Phenomenology of Mind Hegel developed a concept of reflection which presents the idea of a liberation from coercive illusions (Connerton, 1976, p. 18).