Critical Theory Now

First Published in 1991. The first wave of North American critical theory was at once both academic and political. Interest in the works of the early Frankfurt School may have belonged to a more general renaissance of academic social theory that occurred in North America during the late 1960s and early 1970s. There is a new voice that comes through the historic political struggles of a student movement, of feminism, and of anti-racist and ecological social movements. It is a voice also schooled in a sensitivity to the theories of social disintegration or an ‘implosion’ that characterizes the post-modernist moment. The authors represented in this reader are neither scholastic nor dogmatic. They do not eschew postmodernism for hackneyed slogans, nor do they embrace theory as an aesthetic substitute for theory as a socially transformative practice. They are committed both to social theory and social practice, and it is this which unifies the papers which follow. The authors are a new generation of North American critical theorists who do not retreat to European humanism in the face of social, cultural and self transformation.