In 1937, Max Horkheimer published a seminal essay titled Traditional and Critical Theory, a text that would mark a profound turning point in the intellectual history of the Frankfurt School. More than a critique of certain academic habits, Horkheimer’s argument raised a fundamental question: what is the purpose of theory itself? Is knowledge a neutral mirror of reality, or is it inevitably entangled in the structures of power and domination it seeks to understand?
For Horkheimer, much of what passed for theory in modern society—especially in the natural and social sciences—belonged to what he called "traditional theory." This mode of thought treated facts as given, methods as value-free, and the task of knowledge as the objective description of an independent reality. Traditional theory, in other words, mirrored the epistemology of the natural sciences: precise, technical, detached.
But in doing so, Horkheimer argued, it concealed its own social conditions. It ignored the ways in which knowledge production itself was embedded within historical processes, serving particular interests and helping to reproduce the status quo.
The Features of Traditional Theory
Traditional theory presumed a strict separation between subject and object, between the knowing mind and the world it observed. It imagined that with sufficient methodological rigor, truth could be discovered independently of the knower’s position within society.
In the natural sciences, this assumption had produced enormous technological advances. Yet in the human and social sciences, Horkheimer warned, it became deeply problematic. By focusing on isolated facts, traditional social theory often lost sight of the historical totality—the relations of domination, inequality, and alienation that shaped modern life. It risked becoming merely a tool for administration, prediction, and control, rather than a force for emancipation.
Thus, even when traditional theorists believed themselves neutral, they often unwittingly reinforced existing power structures by failing to question the foundations upon which society rested.
Toward a Critical Theory of Society
In contrast, Critical Theory—as Horkheimer envisioned it—would refuse this neutrality. It would recognize that knowledge is always situated, that theory is never simply contemplative but is itself a form of social practice.
Critical Theory seeks not only to understand society but to transform it. It begins from a normative commitment: the recognition that society, as it exists, is marked by injustice, domination, and preventable suffering. Its aim is to uncover the hidden structures that sustain these conditions and to open up the possibilities for human emancipation.
This does not mean abandoning rigor or embracing utopian fantasies. On the contrary, Critical Theory demands a more profound and self-reflexive rigor: one that interrogates not only the objects of inquiry but the position, methods, and interests of the inquirer. It seeks a dialectical understanding of society as a dynamic, contradictory totality—a world that is made by human beings and thus, in principle, capable of being remade.
The Political Stakes of Theory
For Horkheimer and his colleagues, this shift from traditional to critical theory was not a merely academic matter. It was, at its heart, political. In an age when reason itself had been co-opted by systems of domination—whether in the form of instrumental rationality, mass culture, or authoritarian bureaucracy—maintaining a merely descriptive stance amounted to complicity.
Critical Theory insisted that thought must retain its capacity for negativity: its ability to question, to negate what exists, to imagine that things could be otherwise. Without this critical edge, theory would become another instrument of adaptation, smoothing over the fractures of society rather than exposing and addressing them.
Thus, the transition from traditional to critical theory was nothing less than a redefinition of the intellectual vocation. It called on theorists to abandon the illusions of neutrality and to embrace their role in the unfinished project of human emancipation.
A Legacy Still Unfolding
The distinction Horkheimer drew between traditional and critical theory remains one of the Frankfurt School’s most enduring contributions. It challenges every generation anew to ask: What is the point of thinking? Is it to adapt to the world as it is, or to participate—however modestly, however uncertainly—in the struggle to make it better?
In an age once again marked by the instrumentalization of knowledge and the narrowing of critical imagination, the call of Critical Theory remains as urgent as ever.
Next article: Adorno and Horkheimer on the Dialectic of Reason and Myth
