Critical theory now

The first wave of North American critical theory was at once both academic and political. Interest in the works of the early Frankfurt School may have belonged to a more general renaissance of academic social theory that occurred in North America during the late 1960s and early 1970s. But the passion for critical theory came out of a particular historical political moment of self- and collective transformation. Critical theory best gave voice to the New Left understanding of politics as psychological and cultural transformation, and as an unbridgeable difference and dissent from a European and American Marxism that seemed irrelevant to the historical experience of an emergent, socially critical new class.