Imagination and Reason in Critical Social Theory

"In the following I shall be speaking about imagination and reason in critical social theory. I use the term “critical social theory” in a broad sense. Rather than restricting it to the “Left-Hegelian” tradition commonly associated with the Frankfurt School (that is, with theorists such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and their successors), I use it to refer to any theory that looks critically at social arrangements from the point of view of the obstacles they pose to human flourishing (or that reflects on what it means to do so). Thus, my definition of critical social theory includes, for example, not just the theories of Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, who position themselves in the Frankfurt School tradition, but also the poststructuralist social criticism of Judith Butler, or of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, and metatheoretical reflections on social theory such as those to be found in the work of Charles Taylor."

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