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“Critical theory” is dead, dead, dead, and Habermas killed it…

…and this review just confirms it.   The Rawls-Habermas normative theory mash-up that now constitutes so-called "critical theory" is so far removed from Horhkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse, not to mention Marx, that even associating this exercise in Kantian ethics with the Frankfurt School or Marxism should give rise to a defamation action (not sure who the plaintiff would be, though!).   Folks are free to do Kantian ethics, or Hegelian ethics, but it has nothing to do with diagnosing capitalist modernity or strategies for liberating human beings from its iron cage.  A real critical theory now needs to start with the political economy of the academy that produced this collapse of Marxism into bourgeois ethics, i.e., irrelevance.

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