ity (in the traditional family, community, church, gov-
ernment, and business) led to the radical FEMINIST, stu-
dent, workers, gay/lesbian/transsexual, and modern art
and theater movements of the 20th century. Sometimes
call Humanist Marxism, it was equally critical of Soviet
or “orthodox” communism for its overemphasis on
economics and its AUTHORITARIANpolitics. Critical the-
ory appealed to intellectuals rather than proletarian
workers and influenced many Western academics, giv-
ing the European and American university its radical
character after World War II.
Associated with the philosophers Max Horkheimer,
Theodor Adorno, Herbert MARCUSE, and Walter Ben-
jamin, the critical theory school came to the United
States in the 1930s when the Frankfurt Institute for
Social Research was closed in 1935.
Critical theory focused on the “domination” of all
societies (LIBERAL CAPITALIST, communist, and FASCIST)
and claimed to have a program of “liberation” through
dialectical reason, sexual experimentation, and alter-
native economics. The “new morality” of sexual libera-
tion, challenging traditional gender roles and the
CHRISTIANfamily, led relatively quickly into ABORTION
on demand and gay/ lesbian/transsexual movements.
The rejection of historical Western religions led to
such alternative spiritual movements as New Age,
occult, and Zen Buddhism in Europe and America.
Although critical theory was not a large-scale
political movement (except possibly for the radical
counterculture student movements in France and
America in the 1960s), it influenced various Leftist
and liberal wings of major political parties (such
as the Labour Party in Britain, the Green Party in Ger-
many, and the DEMOCRATIC PARTYin the United States).
Further Readings
Bottomore, T. B. The Frankfurt School.London: Tavistock, 1984.
Held, D. Introduction to Critical Theory.Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1980.
Horkheimer, M., “Traditional and critical theory” (1927). In
Critical Theory.1972.
———and Adorno, T. Dialectic of Enlightenment.New York:
Herder & Herder, 1972.
Croce, Benedetto (1866–1952) Italian philo-
sopher
Croce was a Hegelian idealist who applied this view to
aesthetics, history, politics, and ETHICS. His philosophy
of art has had the most influence outside his native
Italy, although he makes important contributions to
both historical understanding and the political and
ethical. Croce distinguishes four aspects, or distinct
moments, of human understanding: the True, the
Beautiful, the Useful, and the Good. These moments
are analogous to the Hegelian idea of Spirit and like
HEGEL’s Spirit, they are manifest in history. They are
also pure concepts in that they have no content inde-
pendently of human history, thought, and actions. We
read their content and arrive at understanding by
attending to our present and past circumstances.
Croce’s aesthetics begins with the idea that the aes-
thetic experience is cognitive. Its form of cognition is
intuition, which Croce understands in the KANTian
sense of preconceptual perception. Art, particularly
poetry, aims at eliciting emotion, and our appreciation
of art consists in our intuitive understanding and com-
prehension of these emotions. What is important for
Croce is not to intellectualize the aesthetic experience
and not to reduce it to mere sensations. “Cosmic intu-
itions” are the awareness of the universal character of
art (the Beautiful), provoked by a particular manifesta-
tion of it. Finally, for Croce, art aims only at the Beauti-
ful, and so art properly understood is never concerned
with the True, the Useful, or the Good. Work that aims
to be instructive, pleasurable, or moralistic is not art.
Croce’s work on history, politics and ethics is con-
tained in a number of works beginning early in his
career with work on MARX(Historical Materialism and
the Economics of Karl Marx) and Hegel (What is Living
and What is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel) and mov-
ing through publications on history (Theory and His-
tory of Historiography) and VICO (The Philosophy of
Giambattista Vico) and the ethicopolitical text, History
as the Story of Liberty,which was published toward the
end of his life. Croce’s political philosophy was heavily
influenced early in his career by his friend and collabo-
rator Giovanni GENTILEand later by the advent of fas-
cism in Italy. Following his Hegelian inclinations,
Croce makes no distinction between philosophy and
history and between theory and practice, arguing that
the philosophical comes to us through our encounters
with the historical. This identification of the normative
with the actual allowed Croce’s views to oscillate
between a form of historical inevitability and, later,
during and after FASCISM, an account allowing for LIB-
ERALforms of political agency. This tension in Croce’s
work is also apparent in his discussions of the rela-
tions between the political and the ethical. Here, Croce
wants to keep distinct the pure concepts of the Useful
and the Good, assigning the political to the former andCroce, Benedetto 75