History, power and critique · 1937 onward
Critical theory
Overview
Examine how culture, common sense and expert categories keep people accepting arrangements that do not serve them, so something better can be imagined.
Critical theory began with the Frankfurt School, a circle of German thinkers around the Institute for Social Research. Max Horkheimer, its director, defined a critical theory in 1937 as one that aims not only to describe society but to help free people from the conditions that limit them. With Theodor Adorno he wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment, which described a culture industry producing films, radio and music like factory goods and training audiences to accept the familiar.
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The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, writing in Mussolini’s prisons, asked why workers had not risen up and answered with hegemony: ruling groups hold power mostly by consent, built into schools, churches, newspapers and common sense. Michel Foucault, who rejected the label but is often read alongside these thinkers, traced how institutions define what is normal and argued that power produces knowledge and identities rather than only forbidding. Herbert Marcuse, of the same first generation, carried the work into consumer culture, and Jürgen Habermas, of the next, into the conditions of public reasoning.
Critics call parts of the tradition elitist or ask what standpoint it leaves for judging some uses of power as wrong. The habit worth keeping is to ask whose choices our tastes and common sense really are, and how consent is built before it is given.
Where it answers
Who should govern?
Ask whose interests the common sense of an age quietly protects.
Key terms
- Culture industry
- Adorno and Horkheimer’s term for mass-produced entertainment that breeds conformity.
- Hegemony
- Gramsci’s term for rule by consent, through culture and common sense, not only by force.
- War of position
- Gramsci’s strategy of slowly winning cultural ground before seeking power.
- Normalization
- Foucault’s term for how institutions define and enforce what counts as normal.
- Power/knowledge
- Foucault’s claim that power and knowledge produce and support each other.
Further reading
- Dialectic of Enlightenment · Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno
- Prison Notebooks · Antonio Gramsci
- One-Dimensional Man · Herbert Marcuse
- History of Madness · Michel Foucault
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A plain reference you can paste into notes or an essay:
Quest2Reason. “Critical theory.” https://quest2reason.com/learn/ideas/criticaltheory. Accessed 13 November 2026.