The article distinguishes between different forms of normative social critique: an external, an internal or immanent, and a disclosing form of critique. Whereas the external and internal critique appeal to or rely upon a certain standard or yardstick of critique, the disclosing form of critique aims at opening up our eyes to new ways of seeing social reality, and in the light of which our way of life can be seen as deficient or pathological. Depending upon the circumstances each form of critique may be a legitimate means to bring about a change.

Systemic Practice and Action Research, 1990

This paper is the first in a trilogy which intends to discuss the notion of critique within two different contexts: Modern Western Philosophy and Contemporary Systems Thinking. This first paper presents a phenomenological inquiry into the concept of "critique." The result of the inquiry is a model of the possibilities of critique which is used to interpret four "moments" of critique in Modern Western Philosophy.

Science in Context, 1997

Critique involves reflection, specifically self-reflection, and as such it is inherently linked with philosophy. Critique calls for change, awareness, liberation from false conceptions, and reshaping of spheres of action and belief. Consequently it is closely linked with the moral and the ...

Critique of Critique, 2023

What is critique? How is it used and abused? At a moment when popular discourse is saturated with voices confronting each other about not being critical enough, while academic discourses proclaim to have moved past critique, this book reawakens the foundational question of what 'critique' is in the first place. Roy Ben-Shai inspects critique as an orientation of critical thinking, probing its structures and assumptions, its limits and its risks, its history and its possibilities. The book is a journey through a landscape of ideas, images, and texts from diverse sources—theological, psychological, etymological, and artistic, but mainly across the history of philosophy, from Plato and Saint Augustine, through Kant and Hegel, Marx and Heidegger, up to contemporary critical theory. [Attached are the book's opening sections--Introduction and Overture].

This paper addresses the problem of how to identify a small and parsimonious set of principles or " postulates " that may help us understand the great theoretical foundations of the social sciences. From a philosophical point of view, it presents ten premises that are perhaps essential for any attempt at elaborating a social theory. When one tries to elaborate a theory of society based on the principles of reason and experience, first it is essential to examine the nature of the fundamental elements that should be included in such a model. As it happens with a great variety of frameworks in the natural sciences, it is inevitable for the social researcher to start with postulates, susceptible to improvement or elimination, but always latent in any statement. How to successfully combine the conceptual and the empirical dimensions represents one of the greatest challenges of the social sciences. The method employed by the natural sciences achieves an optimum in the relation between the conceptual and empirical realms: it gradually refines the first in interaction with the second, and enriches our possible knowledge of the second, thanks to the first. In this fruitful synthesis of reason, observation and experience lies one of the foremost intellectual conquests of the human mind, since it has provided us with a virtually infallible strategy to unravel the mysteries of nature. In the social and humanistic disciplines, it is legitimate to consider what indispensable postulates should appear in any successful attempt to subsume the vast heterogeneity of human phenomena under certain theoretical paradigms. Of course, a considerable number of models have addressed this issue from different perspectives, often diverging. I do not want to insist on this point, or analyze them with the historical and systematic prolixity that they would demand; I simply seek to sketch a brief and succinct list of postulates from which, in my opinion, no theoretical model can be exempted. Extracted from experience, deduced from pure reason or inferred from a combination of both faculties, many of these principles may seem obvious to everyone, but their evidence does not contradict their explanatory inexorability. Indeed, they can be conceived as heuristic rules that tentatively orient our understanding of human activity. First, any social science aims to understand the combined activity of human beings. Therefore, the inexcusable starting point is the human being as a biological entity in possession of cognitive abilities far superior to those of other animals in dimensions such as the power of abstraction, symbolism and inventiveness.

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Almost a quarter of a century has passed since the groundbreaking Hegemony and socialist strategy (1985) has seen the light of day, a work in which Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe for the first time had elaborated their distinguished post-Marxist approach in the analysis of political and theoretical practices, combining non-essentialist aspects of Marxist tradition with post-structuralist canon of Derrida, Foucault and Lacan. Since then, post-structuralist discourse theory (PDT) has established itself as one of the most prominent and active paradigms in social and political research, exceeding in scope as well as in reach its more modest beginnings tied to the "Ideology and Discourse Analysis" course at the University of Essex. But very soon Laclau and Mouffe's project provoked a extensive counter-discursive line, combining friendly, but nonetheless critical interventions of theoretically close philosophers, with openly antagonistic posture ranging from the classical Marxist left, proponents of liberalism, positivism or naturalism. For this quite colorful coalition, whose representatives would surely find it hard to agree on any kind of substantive claim about the nature of social formation or its analysis, the approach offered by Laclau and Mouffe was fundamentally, or in the case of more amicable reactions, tragically flawed. It is hopelessly affected either by idealism or reductionism; it is incapable of providing causal explanation, while (at best) it stops at bringing out "thick description" of observed phenomena; it is characterized by deeply flawed logic, a result of a process of (insufficient) abandonment of Marxist weltanschauung and its misdirected merging with postmodern ontologies; it is guilty of moral and scientific nihilism, brought up by persisting on "negative" description of PDT approach as "deconstructive genealogy", providing no foundations whatsoever for normative evaluation and critique of observed social phenomena etc. This "far and wide" collage of critique is not so surprising, since in its theoretical scope and implications, Laclau and Mouffe's project was far more ambitious than their initial attempt to work their way out from what was perceived as 80's "reality check" on Marxist theory. But as Laclau himself once remarked, most theoretical problems are often not worked upon, but rather replaced with a set of new ones. After abandoning radical political Marxist thought, Laclau and Mouffe had only gone some way in further construction of their approach; in their more recent, separately written works, they are more preoccupied with the set of abstract problems dominating contemporary political theory, rather than (explicitly) working on not-so-trifling problems of their own hegemonic approach to politics. It would hardly be considered a sign of prudence here to remind of Laclau's remark in his contribution to Laclau: A Critical Reader [2004], in which he states that "hegemony as form (…) is perfectly theorized in my work" (322).

> series offers a selection of concise introductions to particular traditions in socio-cal thought. It aims to deepen the reader's knowledge of particular theoretical roaches and at the same time to enhance their wider understanding of sociological arising. Each book will offer: a history of the chosen approach and the debates that z driven it forward; a discussion of the current state of the debates within the roach (or debates with other approaches); and an argument for the distinctive con-ution of the approach and its likely future value. 'dished