A Critical Theory of Social Domination

A Critical Theory of Societal Domination offers a major reinterpretation of Frankfurt School Critical Theory and its relation to Marx’s critique of political economy. Challenging the dominant Anglophone narrative that portrays early Horkheimer and late Adorno as pessimistic cultural critics superseded by Habermasian theory or contemporary “Marxism as Critical Theory,” Chris O’Kane reconstructs their work as the foundation of a distinctive, heterodox Marxian critical theory of capitalist social domination. At the centre of the book is the argument that Horkheimer and Adorno developed an immanent, self-reflexive critique of capitalism grounded in Marx’s critique of political economy. Far from abandoning political economy or praxis, their critical theory understands capitalist society as a historically specific concrete negative totality in which economy, state, culture, family, and subjectivity are internally mediated by the exchange relation. Capitalist domination is thus conceived not as an external force imposed on otherwise emancipatory social spheres, but as a form of objective and subjective domination reproduced through free and equal capitalist social practice itself. Moreover the book challenges the view that Horkheimer and Adorno's critical theory was superseded, underlining their influence on the twentieth century's resurgence in Marxian thought by mapping their influence on the work of Alfred Schmidt, Hans-Georg Backhaus, Helmut Rechelt, Moishe Postone and Werner Bonefeld – all thinkers who critically developed this approach into an active research programme in critical theory. Finally, O’Kane outlines this further development of the critical theory of capitalist social domination and demonstrates its central importance for a critical theory of capitalism today by drawing thon the work of these figures and other contemporary critical theorists.