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social strain, or structurally based unequal opportunity, and that some of these adaptations can result in crime.

Subcultural explanations of crime are similar to both differential association and anomie theories. Like differential association, subculture theories have an important learning component. Both types of theories emphasize that crime, the behavior, accompanying attitudes, justifications, etc., are learned by individuals within the context of the social environment in which they live. And, as anomie and other versions of strain theory emphasize, subcultural explanations of crime tend to focus on lower-class life as a generating milieu in which procriminal norms and values thrive.

Cohen’s book Delinquent Boys (1955) describes delinquency as a product of class-based social strains, which lead to a gang subculture conducive to delinquency. Miller (1958) argued that a prodelinquency value system springs from situations where young boys grow up in poor, femaleheaded households. He felt that adherence to these values, which he called ‘‘the focal concerns of the lower class,’’ made it more likely that boys would join gangs and involve themselves in delinquency. This idea enjoys recurring popularity in explanations of behavior in poor, and especially urban, minority neighborhoods (Banfield 1968;

Murray 1984) even though it is notoriously difficult to test empirically.

A different version of subculture theory has been championed by Wolfgang (Wolfgang and

Ferracuti 1967). Wolfgang and his colleagues argued that people in some segments of communities internalized, carried, and intergenerationally transferred values that were proviolence. Accordingly, members of this subculture of violence would more frequently resort to violence in circumstances where others probably would not. Critics of this thesis have argued that it is difficult to assess who carries ‘‘subculture of violence values’’ except via the behavior that is being predicted.

Along with most other institutions and traditions, mainstream criminology was challenged in the 1960s. Critics raised questions about the theories, data, methods, and even the definitions of crime used in criminology. The early challenges came from labeling theorists. This group used a variant of symbolic interaction to argue that lawviolating behavior was widespread in the general

population, and the official labeling of a selected subset of violators was more a consequence of who the person was than of what the person had done

(Becker 1963). Consequently, crime should not be defined as behavior that violates the law, because many people violate the law and are never arrested, prosecuted, or convicted. Rather, crime is a behavior that is selectively sanctioned, depending on who is engaging in it. It follows then that when criminologists use data produced by the criminal justice system, we are not studying crime but the criminal justice system itself. These data only tell us about the people selected for sanctioning, not about all of those who break the law. And, labeling theorists argued, most of our theories have been trying to explain why lower-class people engage disproportionately in crime, but since they do not—they are simply disproportionately sanc- tioned—the theories are pointless. What should be explained, labeling theorists argued, is why some people are more likely to be labeled and sanctioned as criminals than are others who engage in the same or similar behavior. The answer they offered was that those with sufficient resourc- es—enough money, the right racial or gender status, etc.—to fend off labeling by the criminal justice system are simply less likely to be arrested.

A further contribution by labeling theorists is the idea that the labeling process actually creates deviance. The act of labeling people as criminals sets in motion processes that marginalize them from the mainstream, create in them the selfidentification as ‘‘criminal,’’ which in turn affects their behavior. In other words, the act of sanctioning causes more of the behavior the criminal justice system wishes to extinguish.

Marxist criminology actually began in 1916 with the publication of Bonger’s Criminality and Economic Conditions, but it became central to criminological discourse in the late 1960s and 1970s (Chambliss 1975; Platt 1969; Quinney 1974; Taylor, Walton, and Young 1973). The Marxist critique of mainstream criminology can be summarized by focusing on the argument that it tends to ask three types of questions: Who commits crimes? How much crime is there? Why do people break the law? The Marxist perspective argues that these may be important questions, but more important are those that do not reify the law itself.

Marxists argue that in addition to the above questions, criminologists should ask: Where does the

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law come from? Whose interest does the law serve?

Why are the laws structured and enforced in particular ways? Their answers to these questions are based on a class-conflict analysis. Power in social systems is allocated according to social class, and the powerful use the law to protect their interests and the status quo that perpetuates their superordinate status. So the law and criminal justice system practices primarily serve the interest of elites; while they at times serve the interests of other classes, their raison d’être is the interests of the powerful. Law is structured to protect the current status arrangements.

Both the labeling and Marxist perspectives experienced broad popularity among students of criminology. Many scholars responded to their critiques not by joining them, but by taking some lessons from the debate and moving forward to develop theories consistent with traditional directions and research methods that were not as dependent on data generated by the criminal justice system. Victimization surveys and self-report studies of crime have become more widely used, in part as a consequence of these critiques.

All of the theories mentioned so far have had significant empirical challenges. Most of the initial statements have been falsified or their proponents have had to revise the perspective in the face of evidence that did not support it. Several of these explanations of crime, or how societies control their members, are used today in a modified form, while others have evolved into contemporary theories that are being tested by researchers. No doubt when someone writes about criminology in the future, some or all of the more recent theories will have joined those that have been falsified or modified as a result of empirical analyses. Contemporary criminological theories tend to be in the control theory, rational choice, or conflict traditions. However, these are not mutually exclusive (e.g. some control theories are very much rational choice theories).

Control theorists begin by saying that we ask the wrong question when we seek to understand why some people commit crimes. We should instead seek to explain why most people do not violate the rules. Control theorists reason that we do not need to explain why someone who is hungry or has less will steal from those who have what they want or

need. We do not need to explain why the frustrated and angry among us will express their feelings violently. The interesting question is: Why don’t most people who have less or have grievances engage in property or violent crime? Other versions of control theory (Nye 1958; Reckless 1961) preceded his, but Hirschi’s (1969) classic answer to this question is that those who are ‘‘socially bonded’’ to critical institutions such as families, schools, conventional norms, etc., are less likely to violate the law. The bonds give them a ‘‘stake in conformity,’’ something they value and would risk losing should they violate important rules. Though not initially stated in rational choice terms of classical school ideas, one can see similarities between Hirschi’s notions of ‘‘stakes in conformity’’ and the Classical School of criminology’s concept of the ‘‘social contract.’’

Control theory has evolved in a number of directions. Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) have argued that crime and deviance are a consequence of the failure of some to develop adequate selfcontrol. Self-control is developed, if at all, early in life—by the age of eight or ten. Those who do not develop self-control will, they argue, exhibit various forms (depending on their age) of deviance throughout their lives. These people will commit crimes disproportionately during the crime-prone ages, between adolescence and the late twenties. Sampson and Laub’s (1993) ‘‘life-course’’ perspective argues that social bonds change for people at different stages of their lives. Bonds to families are important early, to schools and law-abiding peers later, and eventually bonds to spouses, one’s own children, and jobs and careers ultimately tie people to conventional norms and prevent crime and deviance. Tittle (1995) has offered a control balance theory of deviance. He believes that those who balance control exerted by self with control by others that they are subjected to are the least likely to commit acts of crime and deviance. Those whose ‘‘control ratio’’ is out of balance, with too much or too little regulation by the self or others, have a higher probability of breaking rules.

The contemporary rational choice perspective of crime has been most explicitly articulated by economists (Becker 1968; Ehrlich 1973). Becker described the choices people make in social behavior, including crime, as much like those made in economic behavior. Before a purchase we weigh

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the cost of an item against the utility, or benefit to be gained by owning that item. Likewise, before engaging in crime, a person weighs the cost— prison, loss of prestige, relationships, or even life— against the benefits to crime—pleasure, expression of anger, or material gain. Becker argued that when the benefits outweigh the cost individuals would be more likely to commit criminal actions.

Control theory can also be thought of as a rational choice theory. The ‘‘bonded’’ among us have a stake in conformity, or something to weigh on the ‘‘to be lost’’ side of a cost-benefit analysis. To engage in crime is to risk the loss of valued bonds to family, teachers, or employers. The bond in control theory, thought of in this way, is an informal deterrent. Deterrence theory (Geerken and Gove 1975) is ordinarily written of in terms of a formal system of deterrence provided by the criminal justice system. As originally conceived by Classical School criminologists, police, prosecutors, and the courts endeavor to raise the cost of committing crime so that those costs outweigh the benefits from illegal behavior. In the case of those convicted, the courts attempt to do this by varying the sentence so that those convicted become convinced that they must avoid crime in the future. This deterrence aimed at those already in violation is referred to as ‘‘specific’’ or ‘‘special’’ deterrence. The noncriminal public is persuaded by general deterrence to avoid crime. They perceive that crime does not pay when they see others sanctioned. So, when considering criminal options, they weigh the utility of illegal action against the potential cost in the forms of sanctions. According to deterrence theory, when those positive utilities are outweighed by the perceived cost—effective deterrence—they choose not to engage in crime.

A number of contemporary conflict theories of criminology are legacies of 1960s and 1970s-era critical perspectives. Most prominent among these is feminist criminological theory (Simpson 1989). Contemporary conflict theories, like earlier Marxist theory, address important questions about interest groups. They begin with the position that to understand social life, including crime and responses to crime, the social, political, and economic interests of contesting parties and groups must be taken into account (Marxists, of course, focus on economic conflict). Feminist criminology focuses on gender conflict in society. These

criminologists argue that to understand crimes by women, against women, and the reaction to both, we must consider the subordinate status of women. If poverty is one of the root causes of crime, then we should recognize first that the largest impoverished group in American society, and in most western industrialized societies, is children. Increasingly, children are raised in female-headed households whose poverty can be traced to the lower earnings of women, a consequence of gender stratification.

Other conflict analyses of crime focus on income inequality (Blau and Blau 1982), racial inequality (Sampson and Wilson 1994), and labormarket stratification (Crutchfield and Pitchford 1997). What these approaches share is the idea that to understand why individuals engage in crime, or why some groups or geographic areas have higher crime rates, or why patterns of criminal justice are the way they are, consideration of important social conflicts and cleavages must be brought into the analysis. Blau and Blau (1982) illustrated how income inequality, especially inequality based on race, is correlated with higher rates of violent crime. Those metropolitan areas with relatively high levels of inequality tend also to have more violence. Others (Williams 1984; Messener 1989) have argued that it is not so much relative inequality that leads to higher violent crime rates, but rather high levels of poverty. Sampson and Wilson (1994) argue that racial stratification is linked to economic stratification and this complex association accounts for higher levels of crime participation among blacks. Crutchfield and Pitchford (1997), studying a particular form of institutional stratification that was produced by segmented labor markets, found that those marginalized in the work force under some circumstances are more likely to engage in crime.

Hagan, Gillis, and Simpson (1985) developed what they call a ‘‘power control theory of delinquency.’’ They combine elements of social control theory and conflict theory to explain class and gender patterns of delinquency. They argue that because of gender stratification, parents seek to control their daughters more and because of class stratification, those in the higher classes have more capacity (because they have the available resources) to monitor (control) their children. Yet, children of the upper classes are actually free to commit

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more delinquency by virtue of their social-class standing. Consequently, upper-class girls will be more controlled than their lower-class counterparts, but their brothers will have minor delinquency rates resembling those of lower-class boys.

SOCIETY’S ATTEMPT TO CONTROL

CRIME

While the theories discussed above focus on the causes of crime, they are also important for describing how social systems control crime. Societies attempt to control the behavior of people living within their borders with a combination of formal and informal systems of control. Social disorganization theory and anomie theory are examples of how crime is produced when normative control breaks down. Differential association and subcultural explanations describe how informal social control is subverted by socialization that supports criminal behavior rather than compliant behavior. Control theories focus specifically on how weak systems of informal social control fail.

The obvious exception to this last statement is that portion of control theories that are also deterrence theory. Deterrence theory does consider informal systems of control, but an important part of this thesis is aimed at explaining how formal systems, or the criminal justice system in western societies, attempt to control criminal behavior. Most criminologists believe that informal systems of control are considerably more efficient than formal systems. This makes sense if one remembers that police cannot regulate us as much as we ourselves can when we have internalized conventional norms, and similarly, police cannot watch our behavior nearly as much as our families, friends, teachers, and neighbors can. The criminal justice system then is reduced to supporting informal systems of control (thus the interest in block-watch programs by police departments), engaging in community policing and patrol patterns that discourage crime, or reacting after violations have occurred.

CONCLUSION

Criminologists are interested in answering questions about how crime should be defined, why crime occurs, and how societies seek to control

crime. The history of modern criminology, which can be traced to the early nineteenth century, has not produced definitive answers to these questions. To some students that is a source of frustration. To many of us the resulting ambiguity is the source of continuing interesting debate. More importantly, the disagreement among criminologists captures the complexity of social life. Oversimpli-

fication to achieve artificial closure on these debates will not produce quality answers to these questions, nor will it, to the consternation of some politicians, lead to workable solutions to crime problems. Most criminologists recognize that the complex debates about the answers to these three seemingly simple questions will ultimately be a more productive route to understanding crime and to finding effective means to address crime problems.

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Sampson, Robert, and John Laub 1993 Crime in the Making. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Sampson, Robert, and William J. Wilson 1994 ‘‘Toward a Theory of Race, Crime and Urban Inequality.’’ In John Hagan and Ruth Peterson, eds., Crime and Inequality. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Sanchez-Jankowski, Martí 1992 Islands in the Street. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Shaw, Clifford, and Henry McKay 1931 Social Factors in Juvenile Delinquency. Washington, D.C.: National Commission of Law Observance and Enforcement.

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———, and Donald R. Cressey 1974 Criminology, 9th ed. Philadelphia: Lippincott.

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Tittle, Charles 1995 Control Balance: Toward a General Theory of Deviance. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.

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Williams, Kirk R. 1984 ‘‘Economic Sources of Homicide: Reestimating the Effects of Poverty and Inequality.’’ American Sociological Review 20:545–572.

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ROBERT D. CRUTCHFIELD

CHARIS KUBRIN

state in social planning and control. The rise of fascism and the collapse of effective opposition by workers’ parties, however, prompted them to investigate new sources and forms of authoritarianism in culture, ideology, and personality development and to search for new oppositional forces. By stressing the importance and semiautonomy of culture, consciousness, and activism, they developed an innovative, humanistic, and open-end- ed version of Marxist theory that avoided the determinism and class reductionism of much of the Marxist theory that characterized their era

(Held 1980).

CRITICAL THEORY

The term critical theory was used originally by members of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, after they emigrated to the United States in the late 1930s, following the rise of Hitler. The term served as a code word for their version of Marxist social theory and research (Kellner 1990a). The term now refers primarily to Marxist studies done or inspired by this so-called Frankfurt School and its contemporary representatives such as Jurgen Habermas. Critical sociologists working in this tradition share several common tenets including a rejection of sociological positivism and its separation of facts from values; a commitment to the emancipation of humanity from all forms of exploitation, domination, or oppression; and a stress on the importance of human agency in social relations.

THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL OF

CRITICAL THEORY

The Institute for Social Research was founded in 1923 as a center for Marxist studies and was loosely affiliated with the university at Frankfurt, Germany. It remained independent of political party ties. Max Horkheimer became its director in 1931. Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, and, more distantly, Karl Korsch and Walter Benjamin were among the prominent theorists and researchers associated with the institute (Jay 1973). Initially, institute scholars sought to update Marxist theory by studying new social developments such as the expanding role of the

‘‘Immanent critique,’’ a method of description and evaluation derived from Karl Marx and Georg W. F. Hegel, formed the core of the Frankfurt School’s interdisciplinary approach to social research (Antonio 1981). As Marxists, members of the Frankfurt School were committed to a revolutionary project of human emancipation. Rather than critique existing social arrangements in terms of a set of ethical values imposed from ‘‘outside,’’ however, they sought to judge social institutions by those institutions’ own internal (i.e., ‘‘immanent’’) values and self-espoused ideological claims. (An example of the practical application of such an approach is the southern civil rights movement of the 1960s, which judged the South’s racial caste system in light of professed American values of democracy, equality, and justice.) Immanent critique thus provided members of the Frankfurt School with a nonarbitrary standpoint for the critical examination of social institutions while it sensitized them to contradictions between social appearances and the deeper levels of social reality.

Immanent critique, or what Adorno (1973) termed ‘‘non-identity thinking,’’ is possible because, as Horkheimer (1972, p. 27) put it, there is always ‘‘an irreducible tension between concept and being.’’ That is, in any social organization, contradictions inevitably exist between what social practices are called—for example, ‘‘democracy’’ or ‘‘freedom’’ or ‘‘workers’ parties’’—and what, in their full complexity, they really are. This gap between existence and essence or appearance and reality, according to Adorno (1973, p. 5), ‘‘indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived.’’ The point of immanent critique is thus to probe empirically whether a given social reality negates its own claims—as, for example, to represent a

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‘‘just’’ or ‘‘equal’’ situation—as well as to uncover internal tendencies with a potential for change including new sources of resistance and opposition to repressive institutions.

Frankfurt School theorists found a paradigmatic example of immanent critique in the works of Karl Marx, including both his early writings on alienation and his later analyses of industrial capitalism. Best articulated by Marcuse (1941), their reading of Capital interpreted Marx’s text as operating on two levels. On one level, Capital was read as a historical analysis of social institutions’ progressive evolution, which resulted from conflicts between ‘‘forces’’ (such as technology) and ‘‘relations’’ (such as class conflicts) in economic production. Scientistic readings of Marx, however—espe- cially by the generation of Marxist theorists immediately after the death of Marx—essentialized this dimension into a dogma that tended to neglect the role of human agency and stressed economic determinism in social history. But the Frankfurt School also read Capital as a ‘‘negative’’ or ‘‘immanent’’ critique of an important form of ideology, the bourgeois pseudo-science of economics. Here, Marx showed that the essence of capitalism as the exploitation of wage slavery contradicts its ideological representation or appearance as being a free exchange among equal parties (e.g., laborers and employers).

Members of the Frankfurt School interpreted the efforts that Marx devoted to the critique of ideology as an indication of his belief that freeing the consciousness of social actors from ideological illusion is an important form of political practice that potentially contributes to the expansion of human agency. Thus, they interpreted Marx’s theory of the production and exploitation of economic values as an empirical effort to understand the historically specific ‘‘laws of motion’’ of marketdriven, capitalist societies. At the same time, however, it was also interpreted as an effort—motivat- ed by faith in the potential efficacy of active oppo- sition—to see through capitalism’s objectified processes that made a humanly created social world appear to be the product of inevitable, autonomous, and ‘‘natural’’ forces and to call for forms of revolutionary activism to defeat such forces of ‘‘alienation.’’

Members of the Frankfurt School attempted to honor both dimensions of the Marxian legacy.

On the one hand, they sought to understand diverse social phenomena holistically as parts of an innerconnected ‘‘totality’’ structured primarily by such capitalistic principles as the commodity form of exchange relations and bureaucratic rationality.

On the other hand, they avoided reducing complex social factors to a predetermined existence as shadowlike reflections of these basic tendencies (Jay 1984). Thus, the methodology of immanent critique propelled a provisional, antifoundationalist, and inductive approach to ‘‘truth’’ that allowed for the open-endedness of social action and referred the ultimate verification of sociological insights to the efficacy of historical struggles rather than to the immediate observation of empirical facts (Horkheimer 1972). In effect, they were saying that social ‘‘facts’’ are never fixed once and for all, as in the world of nature, but rather are subject to constant revisions by both the conscious aims and unintended consequences of collective action.

In their concrete studies, members of the

Frankfurt School concentrated on the sources of social conformism that, by the 1930s, had undermined the Left’s faith in the revolutionary potential of the working class. They were among the first Marxists to relate Freud’s insights into personality development to widespread changes in family and socialization patterns that they believed had weakened the ego boundary between self and society and reduced personal autonomy (Fromm 1941). After they emigrated to the United States, these studies culminated in a series of survey research efforts, directed by Adorno and carried out by social scientists at the University of California, that investigated the relation between prejudice, especially anti-Semitism, and ‘‘the authoritarian personality’’ (Adorno et al. 1950). Later, in a more radical interpretation of Freud, Marcuse (1955) questioned whether conflicts between social constraints and bodily needs and desires might provide an impetus for revolt against capitalist repression if such conflicts were mediated by progressively oriented politics.

Once in the United States, members of the Frankfurt School emphasized another important source of conformism, the mass media. Holding that the best of ‘‘authentic art’’ contains a critical dimension that negates the status quo by pointing in utopian directions, they argued that commercialized and popular culture, shaped predominantly by market and bureaucratic imperatives, is

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merely ‘‘mimetic’’ or imitative of the surrounding world of appearances. Making no demands on its audience to think for itself, the highly standardized products of the ‘‘culture industry’’ reinforce conformism by presenting idealized and reified images of contemporary society as the best of all possible worlds (see Kellner 1984–1985).

The most important contribution of the Frankfurt School was its investigation of the ‘‘dialectic of enlightenment’’ (Horkheimer and Adorno [1947] 1972). During the European Enlightenment, scientific reason had played a partisan role in the advance of freedom by challenging religious dogmatism and political absolutism. But according to the Frankfurt School, a particular form of reason, the instrumental rationality of efficiency and technology, has become a source of unfreedom in both capitalist and socialist societies during the modern era. Science and technology no longer play a liberating role in the critique of social institutions but have become new forms of domination. Dogmatic ideologies of scientism and operationalism absolutize the status quo and treat the social world as a ‘‘second nature’’ composed of law-governed facts, subject to manipulation but not to revolutionary transformation. Thus, under the sway of positivism, social thought becomes increasingly ‘‘onedimensional’’ (Marcuse 1964). Consequently, the dimension of critique, the rational reflection on societal values and directions, and the ability to see alternative possibilities and new sources of opposition are increasingly suppressed by the hegemony of an eviscerated form of thinking. One-dimen- sional thinking, as an instrument of the totally ‘‘administered society,’’ thus reinforces the conformist tendencies promoted by family socialization and the culture industry and threatens both to close off and absorb dissent.

The Frankfurt School’s interpretation of the domination of culture by instrumental reason was indebted to Georg Lukacs’s ([1923] 1971) theory of reification and to Max Weber’s theory of rationalization. In the case of Lukacs, ‘‘reification’’ was understood to be the principal manifestation of the ‘‘commodity form’’ of social life whereby human activities, such as labor, are bought and sold as objects. Under such circumstances, social actors come to view the world of their own making as an objectified entity beyond their control at the same time that they attribute human powers to things.

For Lukacs, however, this form of life was historically unique to the capitalist mode of production and would be abolished with socialism.

In the 1950s, as they grew more pessimistic about the prospects for change, Horkheimer and

Adorno, especially, came to accept Weber’s belief that rationalization was more fundamental than capitalism as the primary source of human oppression. Thus, they located the roots of instrumental rationality in a drive to dominate nature that they traced back to the origins of Western thought in Greek and Hebrew myths. This historical drive toward destructive domination extended from nature to society and the self. At the same time, Horkheimer and Adorno moved closer to Weber’s pessimistic depiction of the modern world as one of no exit from the ‘‘iron cage’’ of rationalization.

In the context of this totalizing view of the destructive tendencies of Western culture—the images for which were Auschwitz and Hiroshima—the only acts of defiance that seemed feasible were purely intellectual ‘‘negations,’’ or what Marcuse (1964) termed ‘‘the great refusal’’ of intellectuals to go along with the one-dimensional society. Consequently, their interest in empirical sociological investigations, along with their faith in the efficacy of mass political movements, withdrew to a distant horizon of their concerns. Marcuse, like Benjamin before him, remained somewhat optimistic. Marcuse continuted to investigate and support sources of opposition in racial, sexual, and Third World liberation movements.

Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk (Arcades project), originally titled Dialectical Fairy Scene, was an unfinished project of the 1930s that culminated in a collection of notes on nineteenth-century industrial culture in Paris. The Paris Arcade was an early precursor to the modern department store, a structure of passages displaying commodities in window showcases; it reached its height in the world expositions (e.g., the Paris Exposition in 1900).

Through an interpretation of Benjamin’s notes, Susan Buck-Morss (1995) has brought this unfinished project to life. Benjamin drew on allegory as a method for analyzing the content and form of cultural images. In contrast to Horkheimer and Adorno’s ‘‘iron cage’’ view of mass culture, his dialectical approach held out hope for the revolutionary potential of mass-produced culture.

Anticipating aspects of Symbolic Interactionism and feminist theories of performativity, Benjamin

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explored the relationship between mass production as form (e.g., montage as a form of film production) and political subversion. In contrast to Horkheimer and Adorno who lamented the loss of authority in art and the family, Benjamin welcomed the abolition of traditional sources of authority and hailed the rapidity of technological change in mass production as potentially positive. He interpreted mass production as a form of mimicry that reproduced existing relations of authority and domination while lending itself to potentially subversive reinterpretations and reenactments of existing social relations and social meanings (Buck-Morss 1995).

While retaining an analysis of instrumental reason as a source of domination, Benjamin’s allegorical approach worked to unveil the forces of contradiction that were crystallized as promise, progress, and ruin in mythical modern images. These images bore the revolutionary potential of the new to fulfill collective wishes for an unrealized social utopia contained in a more distant past. At the same time, they represented progress as the unrealized potential of capitalism to satisfy material needs and desires. For Benjamin, images of ruin represented the transitoriness, fragility, and destructiveness of capitalism as well as the potential for reawakening and a critical retelling of history (Buck-Morss 1995).

Even though some of the most prominent founders of the Frankfurt School abandoned radical social research in favor of an immanent critique of philosophy (as in Adorno 1973), the legacy of their sociological thought has inspired a vigorous tradition of empirical research among contemporary American social scientists. In large measure, this trend can be seen as a result of the popularization of Frankfurt School themes in the 1960s, when the New Left stressed liberation and consciousness raising, themes that continue to influence sociological practice. Stanley Aronowitz (1973), for example, along with Richard Sennet and Jonathan Cobb (1973), have rekindled the Frankfurt School’s original interests in workingclass culture in the context of consumer society. Henry Braverman (1974) has directed attention to processes of reification in work settings by focusing on scientific management and the separation of conception from labor in modern industry. Penetrating analyses also have been made of the

impact of commodification and instrumental rationalization on the family and socialization (Lasch 1977), law (Balbus 1977), education (Giroux 1988), advertising culture (Haug 1986), and mass media (Kellner 1990b), as well as other institutional areas. Feminist theorists have contributed a ‘‘doubled vision’’ to critical theory by showing the ‘‘systematic connectedness’’ of gender, class, and race relations (Kelly 1979) and by criticizing critical theory itself for its neglect of gender as a fundamental category of social analysis (Benjamin 1978; Fraser 1989). Among the most far-reaching and innovative contemporary studies are those of the contemporary German sociologist and philosopher Jurgen Habermas.

THE CRITICAL THEORY OF JURGEN

HABERMAS

Perhaps no social theorist since Max Weber has combined as comprehensive an understanding of modern social life with as deeply reflective an approach to the implications of theory and methods as Jurgen Habermas. Habermas has attempted to further the emancipatory project of the Frankfurt School by steering critical theory away from the pessimism that characterized the closing decades of Frankfurt School thought. At the same time, he has resumed the dialogue between empirical social science and critical theory to the mutual benefit of both. Further, he has given critical theory a new ethical and empirical grounding by moving its focus away from the relationship between consciousness and society and toward the philosophical and sociological implications of a critical theory of communicative action.

In sharp contrast to the Frankfurt School’s increasing pessimism about the ‘‘dialectic of enlightenment,’’ Habermas has attempted to defend the liberative potential of reason in the continuing struggle for freedom. While agreeing with the

Frankfurt School’s assessment of the destruction caused by instrumental rationality’s unbridled domination of social life, he nonetheless recognizes the potential benefits of modern science and technology. The solution he offers to one-dimensional thought is thus not to abandon the ‘‘project of modernity’’ but rather to expand rational discourse about the ends of modern society. In order to further this goal, he has tried to unite science and ethics (fact and values) by recovering the

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inherently rational component in symbolic interaction as well as developing an empirical political sociology that helps to critique the political effects of positivism as well as to identify the progressive potential of contemporary social movements.

From the beginning, Habermas (1970) has agreed with the classical Frankfurt School’s contention that science and technology have become legitimating rhetorics for domination in modern society. At the same time, he has argued that alternative ways of knowing are mutually legitimate by showing that they have complementary roles to play in human affairs, even though their forms of validity and realms of appropriate application are distinct. That is, plural forms of knowledge represent different but complementary ‘‘knowledge interests’’ (Habermas 1971).

‘‘Instrumental knowledge,’’ based on the ability to predict, represents an interest in the technical control or mastery of nature. ‘‘Hermeneutical knowledge’’ represents an interest in the clarification of intersubjective understanding. Finally,

‘‘emancipatory knowledge’’ is best typified in the self-clarification that occurs freely in the nondirective communicative context provided by psychoanalysis. In the context of a democratic ‘‘public sphere,’’ such self-clarification would have a macro-social parallel in the form of ideology critique had this space not been severely eroded by elite domination and technocratic decision making (Habermas

1989). Emancipatory knowledge thus has an interest in overcoming the illusions of reification, whether in the form of neurosis at the level of psychology or ideology at the level of society. In contrast to testable empirical hypotheses about objectified processes, the validity of emancipatory knowledge can be determined only by its beneficiaries. Its validity rests on the extent to which its subjects find themselves increasingly free from compulsion. Thus, a central problem of modern society is the hegemony of instrumental knowledge that, though appropriate in the realm of nature, is used to objectify and manipulate social relations. Instrumental knowledge thus eclipses the interpretive and emancipatory forms of knowledge that are also essential for guiding social life.

When sufficient attention is paid to interpersonal communication, Habermas (1979) contends that every act of speech can be seen as implying a

universal demand that interpersonal understanding be based on the free exchange and clarification of meanings. In other words, an immanent critique of language performance (which Habermas terms ‘‘universal pragmatics’’) reveals the presumption that communication not be distorted by differences in power between speakers. Thus, human communication is implicitly a demand for freedom and equality. By this form of immanent cri- tique—consistent with the methodological standards of the Frankfurt School—Habermas attempts to demonstrate the potential validity of emancipatory knowledge so that it can be seen as a compelling challenge to the hegemony of instrumental knowledge. The purpose of Habermas’s communication theory is thus highly partisan. By showing that no forms of knowledge are ‘‘value free’’ but always ‘‘interested,’’ and that human communication inherently demands to occur freely without distortions caused by social power differentials, Habermas seeks politically to delegitimate conventions that confine social science to investigations of the means rather than the rational ends of social life.

In his subsequent works, Habermas has tried to reformulate this philosophical position in terms of a political sociology. To do so, he has profoundly redirected ‘‘historical materialism,’’ the Marxist project to which he remains committed (see

Habermas 1979). Habermas contends that Marx gave insufficient attention to communicative action by restricting it to the social class relations of work. This restriction, he argues, inclined the Marxist tradition toward an uncritical attitude toward technological domination as well as toward forms of scientism that contribute to the suppression of critique in regimes legitimated by Marxist ideology. Habermas relates his immanent critique of language performance to historical materialism by showing that sociocultural evolution occurs not only through the increasing rationality of technical control over nature (as Marx recognized) but also through advances in communicative rationality, that is, nondistorted communication. Thus, instrumental rationality and communicative rationality are complementary forms of societal ‘‘learning mechanisms.’’ The problem of modernity is not science and technology in and of themselves, because they promise increased control over the environment, but rather the fact that instrumental rationality has eclipsed communicative rationality in social life. In other words, in

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