| This dissertation makes the claim that the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory's most consistent underlying principle is the articulation of individual autonomy as a socially guaranteed possibility. Indeed, Critical Theory, from Horkheimer to Habermas, has had the audacity to take the promises of liberalism regarding individual autonomy at face value, only put the lie to their supposed realization under terms of neo-liberal capitalist democracy. In so doing, it gestures towards a future in which not only a different form of social organization emerges, allowing the emancipation of the subject from domination, but in which such emancipation has changed the very terms in which autonomy is experience: "forms of living together," to quote Habermas, "in which autonomy and dependency can enter into a non-antagonistic relation".;And yet, such an conceptualization of social autonomy has never been fully explored and articulated by the Frankfurt School, in part because of the pessimism of the first generation and in part because of the movement of Habermas's subsequent work towards reconciliation with capitalist democracy, which sacrifices the material possibility of social autonomy to its ideal projection in a purely linguistic and public/political conception of the public sphere. Therefore, we propose, in this dissertation, to carry out the "careful analysis of the connection between the realization of autonomy and forms of social interaction" that Axel Honneth recently called for as a basic task of a renewed critical theory of society, and to do so in terms that restores to Critical Theory both a utopian orientation to the future and a political orientation toward the potentials for radical social transformation immanent in contemporary society.;This work is therefore structured dialectically around an analysis of both the prospects for social autonomy and the obstacles to its realization under present historical circumstances. It is organized around a constellation of thinkers and approaches including not only those of Habermas, but T.W. Adorno, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Cornelius Castoriadis and Axel Honneth. We proceed therefore not only by means of immanent critique but also by bringing to bare multiple and irreducible points of view on the concept of social autonomy. |
