From struggle to despair and back again: on the (lost) link between radical politics and Frankfurt School’s critical theory

Within the tradition of critical theory, and among different generations of scholars, there is today a theoretical opposition between those who favour a neo-idealist approach, dominant today, of Kantian (as in the case of Habermas) or Hegelian (the case of Honneth) inspiration, and those who argue that Frankfurt School critical theory has been ‘domesticated’ and has lost its subversive charge of critique of capitalism and transformative energy in the direction of a ‘future society as a community of free men’, as Horkheimer wrote. The former criticise (or, rather, ignore) the latter for being too Marxist and unnecessarily economistic even when they are not, the latter reproach the former for underestimating ‘the power of capital’ and being apologists for neoliberal capitalism. By simplifying to the extreme: revolutionary radicalism, anti-capitalism and materialism on the one hand; conservatism, reformism and idealism on the other. Neo-Marxists versus post-Marxists. Needless to say, the losers are those most faithful to Marx.