Critical Theory
Marx's work inspired the 'Frankfurt School' of critical theory, now best exemplified in the work of Jürgen Habermas. This, in turn, helped inspire the cultural studies form of social critique, which treats cultural products and their reception as evidence of wider social ills such as racism or gender bias. Social critique has been further extended in the work of Michel Foucault and of Alasdair MacIntyre. In their different and radically contrasting ways, MacIntyre and Foucault go well beyond the original Kantian meaning of the term critique in contesting legitimatory accounts of social power.
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Famous quotes containing the words critical and/or theory:
“I know that I will always be expected to have extra insight into black texts—especially texts by black women. A working-class Jewish woman from Brooklyn could become an expert on Shakespeare or Baudelaire, my students seemed to believe, if she mastered the language, the texts, and the critical literature. But they would not grant that a middle-class white man could ever be a trusted authority on Toni Morrison.”
—Claire Oberon Garcia, African American scholar and educator. Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B2 (July 27, 1994)
“It is not enough for theory to describe and analyse, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes. In order to do this theory must partake of and become the acceleration of this logic. It must tear itself from all referents and take pride only in the future. Theory must operate on time at the cost of a deliberate distortion of present reality.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)