Although Critical Theory represents a reconstruction of historical materialism in general, it is particularly focused on reactivating the legacy of Frankfurt School Marxism, albeit under dramatically altered historical and intellectual circumstances. This situation has mandated a thorough critique of their predecessors, so that despite sometimes being described as the “second generation of the Frankfurt School”, influential thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Albrecht Wellmer, Claus Offe and Seyla Benhabib are best thought of as embodying a distinctive new approach.

• The historical circumstances concern preserving the emancipatory impulse of Western Marxism in the context of, initially, the post-war reconstruction of liberal capitalism, and now, neoliberal forms of globalization with illiberal implications. The experience of the fascist dictatorships in Europe had made abundantly clear just how limited the left-wing dismissal of human rights and parliamentary democracy, as the superficial, ideological façade of the bourgeois state, really was. The new Critical Teorists in the 1960s, beginning with Habermas's groundbreaking analysis of the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere ([1962] 1991b), initiated a retrieval of democratic theory for progressive ends, with a strong normative component. Critical of the social-democratic welfare state for its bureaucratization and commodification of social relationships, they have tended to advocate a civic republicanism based on political participation through “deliberative democracy”. This approach, which stresses public debate and democratic will-formation, positions contemporary Critical Theory as a vigorous critic of imperialist aggression, authoritarian governance and social exclusion. […]