8 definitions
Critical theory (n.) is a materialism that refuses to treat any moment of existing reality as directly positive: the dialectical secret of true politics is a critical standpoint that never sets itself up as the positive one.
The Individual (n.) is itself "a history of class struggles" — an arena, which is what psychoanalysis at its most progressive helps us see.
Language (n.) holds, inextricably mixed, the power to suppress the particular and the strength to free it — to reconcile the particular with the universal.
Pessimism (n.) in theory can live alongside optimism in practice — Horkheimer's formula for defending what room for freedom remains inside a trend he thought irreversible.
Politics (n.) becomes, under monopoly, even more of an ideological category than market laws were under liberalism: the masses take big politics for fate and nature, as they once took the depression.
The Racket (n.) is, in Horkheimer's theory, any clique, board or committee whose social function has shrunk to keeping and growing its own power — protection traded for obedience, from medieval hierarchies to the working class itself.
The Word (n.) is never immune to its own history: the terms once used against totalitarian terror hardened, in the mouths of terror's new representatives, into a litany contradicting what they meant.