This introduction to the special section “Critical Theory after Frankfurt” reflects on recent demands to reorient Frankfurt School Critical Theory in the wake of its centennial toward the critique of political economy, capitalism, colonialism, militarism, and the climate crisis. It reviews concerns that critics have raised about Jürgen Habermas’s inheritance of Critical Theory, and it considers several of the alternative paths proposed for charting the Frankfurt School’s future. It argues that, in place of simply reviving the Critical Theory of the 1930s and 1940s, Critical Theory’s reorientation should also consider its diffuse receptions and trajectories among abolitionist, feminist, and left-wing activists and intellectuals in the United States, beginning with the student voices of 1968.
Fleming et al. (Fri,) studied this question.