L’unità della Teoria critica nella molteplicità delle sue voci? Proposte e lineamenti per una ricerca collettiva

Starting from the fact that “Critical Theory” today shows a unity only in a multitude of voices, the essay aims to outline a research programme on the Paradigm-core of “Critical Theory” and its transformations – taking Hauke Brunkhorst (1983/1984) as a starting point. From a reconstructive point of view, this task should first of all carry out a periodization of the critical models. This requires both analyses of the extrinsic events that have conditioned the history of an intergenerational community of scholars (“evolutionary dynamics”) and analyses of the intra-paradigmatic changes of that thought tradition (“evolutionary logic”). It is a matter of proving how, in certain socio-historical situations, internal theoretical contradictions have first turned into “anomalies” and then become real “crises”. These have made the continuation of the programme impossible, if not through a paradigmatic re-foundation. As first provisional case studies, we consider Axel Honneth’s, Rainer Forst’s and Hartmut Rosa’s post-Habermasian theories.