User:Mimilea1991/proposed changes

Critical Theory

Take Out Sigmund Freud as an early influencer of the Frankfurt School and instead, add in:

Immanuel Kant and Hegel alongside Karl Marx are the major philosophical influencers of critical theory.

"Modern critical theory has additionally been influenced by György Lukács and Antonio Gramsci, as well as the second generation Frankfurt School scholars, notably Jürgen Habermas ." (Add in Karl Korsch to this group)

"Concern for social "base and superstructure" is one of the remaining Marxist philosophical concepts in much of contemporary critical theory." change to

Critical theory is concerned less with the economic base of Marxist philosophical concepts, and more focused on the superstructure for political and cultural reasoning.

Following this sentence: "Martin Jay has stated that the first generation of critical theory is best understood as not promoting a specific philosophical agenda or a specific ideology, but as "a gadfly of other systems"."

add: In other words, this form of Marxist inspired theory is interdisciplinary, experimental, and skeptical of any absolute claims including those in Marx's work.

The Frankfurt School stemmed from the Institute for Social Research which was founded by Hermann Weil in 1923. Through the development of this institute, a new inner circle developed which then became the Frankfurt School in 1930. Founded in Frankfurt, beginning in 1933, the school was relocated to Geneva, then Paris, and lastly to Columbia University in New York.

I'd also like to edit this sentence and give it a little more specificity: "Critical theory is a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only to understanding or explaining it." change it to: Critical theory is oriented towards understanding societal "imbalances of power that mark the economy, the state, the public sphere, law, and global life" as compared to traditional theory which seeks to only understand or explain society.

To add to the Communication section:

In the same time period (of the 1970s and 1980s) Stuart Hall was building critical theory of encoding/decoding, expanding on the works of Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco.

"When, in the 1970s and 1980s, Jürgen Habermas redefined critical social theory as a theory of communication, i.e. communicative competence and communicative rationality on the one hand, distorted communication on the other." Habermas was a student of Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, and grew up under Nazism, unlike other members of the Frankfort School. He was most concerned with "the manipulation of discourse and the importance of 'undistorted communication'". In the same time period, Stuart Hall was building critical theory of encoding/decoding, expanding on the works of Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco.