an paradigm, more so than recent theorists of the Frankfurt School have done. The critique of over-integrated images of society, developed by various sociologists in the 1970s and 1980s but not properly assimilated by the mainstream of the discipline and never taken on board by Frankfurt theorists, is an important source of reference, and it can be taken further in the light of Castoriadis’s reflections on the social–historical. The result is a definition of autonomy as a capacity of explicit and unlimited interrogation, confronted with its own hubristic temptations in the context of a multidimensional social world.

28:T530,

From its beginning, Critical Theory aimed to explore the laws governing social life as a formational totality and the forces shaping and driving its historical evolution. So the attempt to develop a comprehensive conception of ‘society’ encompassing both its structural as well as its cultural components can be considered one of the defining hallmarks of Critical Theory through all its theoretical and generational variations. But what, then, is Critical Theory’s conception of society? To answer this question, the authors make use of a three-tiered heuristic model distinguishing synthesis (what is society?), dynamis (what are the driving forces of social change?) and praxis ((how) can social change be motivated or influenced by social actors?). In this way, they are able to reconstruct not only the divergences and controversies between the different versions and approaches in Critical Theory across the four generations of authors writing in this tradition, but also four core points of convergence which can serve to differentiate between Critical Theory in the Frankfurt School tradition and other critical theories. These four points, we suggest, should be seen to form the backbone of any valid conception of society in contemporary Critical Theory.

29:T438,

What is critical theory – and what is it not? This essay attempts a new answer to this old question and examines which normative convictions immanent to social reality can be used to describe, analyse and criticise contemporary, global forms of domination that form blockades of social and political participation. The analysis proceeds in a double step, referring both to the critique of society and to the critique of theory that describes society. The basis of this parallel swing is an analysis in which the author makes revisions to Jürgen Habermas’s colonisation thesis and uses the example of housing to show how these revisions which refer to the global perspective, the demarcation between system and lifeworld, the language of critique and, finally, the theoretical mode of an inherent dialectical critique make possible an analysis of the financial and economic sectors as well as everyday interactions. Reading Habermas more dialectically than he probably would himself also allows the identification of potentials for transforming relations of oppression.

2a:T4d7,

The second-generation critical theory of Apel and Habermas was substantially built on the semiotic pragmatism of Charles Peirce. Along with critical theory generally, this variation requires a theory of society in which to embed its wide-ranging normative commitments. The article proposes re-orienting Habermas’s decades-old theory of communicative action, which contained essential pointers to a critical theory of society that has never been adequately taken up in either the critical social sciences or critical theory proper. Revising Habermas, Peirce is drawn upon to crystallize the preferred critical semiotic realist theory of society. Asemiotic social ontology of the necessary range and scope is accordingly put forward that centres on inferential communal reasoning within the wider contexts of social perception and social actuality. The resulting approach, overcoming established dichotomies, is realist and processual as well as substantive, critical as well as hermeneutic and phenomenological, transcendent as w