Neal Harris
Frankfurt School critical theorists have said remarkably little about climate change. This is curious, because the project of a critical theory of society, as outlined by Horkheimer, would seem intuitively useful for exploring society’s collective failure to address global warming. As per Horkheimer’s famous essay, “Traditional and Critical Theory”, a critical theory of society sought to disclose how unsustainable and contradictory social structures were normalised and perpetuated. In this paper I track changes that have taken place within the philosophical foundations of more recent Frankfurt School critical theory, focusing especially on the “intersubjective turn” and the work of Habermas, Honneth, and Forst. My argument is that, while first-generation critical theory provides meta-methodological foundations capable of theorising the societal mechanisms driving climate change, the intersubjective turn in critical theory has eroded critical theory’s explanatory-diagnostic potential.