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Wilson, James Q., and Richard Herrenstein 1985 Crime
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ROBERT D. CRUTCHFIELD
CHARIS KUBRINCRITICAL 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 representa-
tives such as Jurgen Habermas. Critical sociolo-
gists working in this tradition share several com-
mon 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 THEORYThe Institute for Social Research was founded in
1923 as a center for Marxist studies and was loose-
ly affiliated with the university at Frankfurt, Ger-
many. 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 insti-
tute (Jay 1973). Initially, institute scholars sought
to update Marxist theory by studying new social
developments such as the expanding role of the
state in social planning and control. The rise of
fascism and the collapse of effective opposition by
workers’ parties, however, prompted them to in-
vestigate new sources and forms of authoritarian-
ism in culture, ideology, and personality develop-
ment and to search for new oppositional forces. By
stressing the importance and semiautonomy of
culture, consciousness, and activism, they devel-
oped 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).
‘‘Immanent critique,’’ a method of descrip-
tion and evaluation derived from Karl Marx and
Georg W. F. Hegel, formed the core of the Frank-
furt School’s interdisciplinary approach to social
research (Antonio 1981). As Marxists, members of
the Frankfurt School were committed to a revolu-
tionary 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., ‘‘imma-
nent’’) 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 cri-
tique 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 be-
cause, 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), ‘‘indi-
cates 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