Understanding Society Through the Lens of Critical Theory

Most theories of society ask: what is happening? Critical theory asks something harder – why is it happening, who benefits, and what should change? This distinction is not merely academic. It reflects a fundamental disagreement about what society is, how it should be studied, and what role knowledge plays in either sustaining or transforming it. Developed primarily by thinkers of the Frankfurt School – Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and later Jürgen Habermas – critical theory offers a conception of society that is at once analytical, normative, and emancipatory. Understanding this conception is essential to grasping what makes critical theory distinctive as a mode of social inquiry.

Society as a totality, not a collection of parts 🔗

At the center of the critical theory view of society lies one foundational idea: society is a totality. This does not simply mean that society is large or complex. It means that every part of social life – the economy, politics, culture, law, education, family – is internally connected to every other part, and none can be fully understood in isolation.

Critical theory holds that it should be directed at the totality of society in its historical specificity – that is, how it came to be configured at a specific point in time – and that understanding society requires integrating all the major social sciences, including economics, sociology, history, political science, psychology, and geography. This integrative demand is not a methodological preference; it follows directly from the claim that social reality is a structured whole, not a loose aggregate.

The concept of totality, as used by critical theorists, has a particular meaning. Critical theorists use the term “totality” to refer to the structure of society – defined through political economy – which provides the framework and context of inquiry and constitutes many social facts. Yet this totality is not a closed, harmonious system. Even when society is viewed as a whole, it must be understood not in terms of homogeneity or frozen stability but in terms of structural antagonisms, conflict, and process. Society is always in motion, shaped by contradictions and tensions between what it claims to be and what it actually is.

This is why the Frankfurt School’s social philosophy aimed at providing an encompassing interpretation of social reality as a whole – as “social totality” – a concept central to its intellectual project. What makes this different from systems theory or functionalism is that the critical conception of totality is not about consensus or equilibrium; it is about diagnosing the tensions and contradictions that drive social change, and that reveal the gap between social ideals and social reality.

The role of beliefs, values, and ideology in shaping social reality 🔗

One of the most important and distinctive features of critical theory’s conception of society is the insistence that social reality is not simply given – it is partly constituted by what people believe, value, and expect. This is not idealism in the philosophical sense; critical theorists do not deny the material dimensions of social life. Rather, they insist that ideas and material conditions are inseparable.

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy makes this precise: every society is a “totality” in which each feature is essentially connected with all others, and social reality is partly constituted by the forms of belief, understanding, and evaluation that exist in that society. This means that to understand a social institution – say, the legal system or education – one must understand the beliefs and values it embodies, the hopes and aspirations historically associated with it, and the ways in which it either realizes or betrays those ideals.

This insight has a critical edge. Because social reality is partly constituted by beliefs and values, those beliefs can distort as well as illuminate. The Frankfurt School concept of ideology refers precisely to this: systems of belief that represent the existing social order as natural, necessary, or rational – when in fact they serve the interests of dominant groups. Critical theory takes the view that society is a totality continuously restructuring itself, with an ever-present tension between the “object as known” and the “object’s actuality and development.” The world as it appears and the world as it is are not always the same.

This also means that praxis – the unity of theory and practice – is central to the critical project. Critical theory is an interdisciplinary approach that attempts to link theory with revolutionary practice. Knowledge is not neutral; it is always embedded in social interests, and a theory that does not grapple with this is, for critical theorists, not genuinely objective but merely complicit.

Rejecting positivism: why facts are never enough 🔗

The critical theory conception of society stands in sharp opposition to positivism – the view that social science should model itself on the natural sciences, confining itself to observable facts, measurable variables, and law-like regularities while remaining neutral on questions of value.

Max Horkheimer first defined critical theory in his 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” as a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only toward understanding or explaining it. He critiqued both the model of science put forward by logical positivism and the covert positivism of orthodox Marxism, describing a genuinely critical theory as one that seeks to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.

What is wrong with positivism, from the critical theory standpoint? Traditional theories fail to analyze the broader social context in which they are embedded. This form of “positivism” views science as a purely theoretical undertaking divorced from practical interests – even while it actually reinforces dominant ideologies and power structures by treating established categories as neutral. In other words, by claiming to be value-free, positivism inadvertently serves the status quo.

Horkheimer was especially critical of the way positivism severed facts from values. The social sciences wasted their energies by unreflectively chasing “facts,” and their reliance on positivism and suspicion of values frequently resulted in data that bore little relevance to genuine human needs. By treating observable data as the only admissible evidence, positivism misses the deeper social forces – class, ideology, power, history – that actually shape the phenomena it studies.

Horkheimer, by use of dialectical mediation, attempted to rejoin all dichotomies including the divide between consciousness and being, theory and practice, fact and value. This dialectical approach is the methodological expression of the conception of society as a totality: if society is genuinely interconnected, then methods that break it into isolated, measurable fragments will inevitably distort it.

Evaluating institutions in relation to societal ideals 🔗

Perhaps the most practically significant dimension of the critical theory conception of society is the method it generates for evaluating social institutions. If social reality is partly constituted by beliefs and values, and if every institution is embedded in a social whole oriented toward particular ideals, then institutions can be judged against those ideals. This is the method of immanent critique.

As the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, the actual practices and institutions in a society would make no sense unless seen as inherently oriented toward the realization of some socially specified conception of the good life. Each institution in a society must therefore be seen in relation to its “concept” – an ideal form of itself – which it at once embodies and falls short of. A critical theory elicits the concept of a given institution, formulates it, and then confronts actual reality with this ideal, pointing out and analyzing the discrepancy.

The method is powerful because it does not impose external standards on a society. Immanent critique evaluates social institutions and ideologies by appealing to norms and promises they already invoke – such as democracy, freedom, or equality – rather than standards imported from outside. A democratic society that restricts meaningful political participation to a narrow elite is not judged by some abstract utopian blueprint; it is judged by its own declared commitment to democracy. This internal form of criticism is both more rigorous and more persuasive, because it holds society accountable to itself.

This is closely connected to the distinction between a “true totality” and a “false totality.” A democratic society would be rational because individuals could gain conscious control over social processes that affect them – becoming, in Horkheimer’s phrase, producers of their own social life in its totality. Such a society would be a “true” or expressive totality, one in which genuine social needs and interests can be expressed and developed. The existing order, by contrast, is a “false totality” – a whole that suppresses the very needs and possibilities it claims to serve.

The interconnectedness of social features: a dialectical view 🔗

Critical theory’s insistence on viewing society as a totality implies a particular account of how social change occurs and why social problems are so persistent. Because every social feature is connected to others, no institution or practice can be adequately reformed in isolation. Economic inequality reproduces itself through the education system; the education system is shaped by cultural norms; cultural norms are reinforced through media and politics; and media and politics reflect economic power. These are not separate problems – they are aspects of a single, interconnected social configuration.

This is what gives the critical method its characteristic scope. The first generation of the Frankfurt School used their model to analyze a wide range of phenomena – from authoritarianism as a political formation to the effects of capitalism on psychological, social, cultural, and political formations, as well as on the production of knowledge itself. The breadth of these inquiries was not intellectual diffuseness; it reflected the genuine interconnectedness of the phenomena being studied.

Social institutions are both a product of, and yet crucially also bring forth, primary generative social processes. They do not merely reflect social values; they actively produce and reproduce the conditions of social life. This is why understanding society requires not just describing institutions but tracing their generative role in the whole – how they maintain, or could transform, the social configuration of which they are part.

From understanding society to transforming it 🔗

The critical theory conception of society is not merely descriptive. It has an explicitly normative and transformative dimension. Any truly critical theory of society, as Horkheimer defined it, has as its object human beings as producers of their own historical form of life. The goal is not simply to understand social reality but to contribute to its rational transformation – a society in which human beings can consciously shape the conditions of their collective existence.

Critical theory involves a normative dimension, either by criticizing society in terms of some general theory of values or norms, or by criticizing society in terms of its own espoused values – immanent critique. It not only conceptualizes and critiques societal power structures but also establishes a model that links society to the human subject – that connects the structural analysis of social forces to the lived experience of individuals within them.

This is what distinguishes critical theory from both pure philosophy and conventional social science. It rejects the detachment of the scholar who describes the world from a position of supposed neutrality. It also rejects the dogmatism of prescriptive ideologies that apply fixed blueprints regardless of social context. Instead, critical theory adopts immanent critique as a method of description and evaluation of social institutions by those institutions’ own internal values and ideological claims, and combines it with the notion of totality. The result is a form of social inquiry that is simultaneously rigorous, critical, and committed – one that takes seriously both the complexity of social reality and the possibility of a more rational and just social order.

What do you think? If social reality is partly constituted by beliefs and values, does that mean changing society requires changing how people think – or do deeper structural and economic forces ultimately determine what people are able to believe? And when critical theory holds institutions accountable to their own stated ideals, does that make it a genuinely radical method, or does it risk simply reinforcing the terms set by existing social arrangements?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory
3. https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/Illumina%20Folder/kell5.htm
4. https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/critical-theory/v-1/sections/internal-or-immanent-criticism
5. https://www.qualityresearchinternational.com/socialresearch/criticaltheory.htm
6. https://iep.utm.edu/critical-theory-frankfurt-school/
7. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/socp2/chapter/critical-theory-the-frankfurt-school-contributions-of-max-horkheimer/
8. https://philopedia.org/periods/critical-theory-movement/
9. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/critical-theory/
10. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/07255136211002055
11. https://sociopedia.co/post/critical-theory-frankfurt-school