Communication technology could help humanity collectively mitigate the onrushing environmental catastrophes, but it is being used to distort information and increase division. We need to release its potential for beneficial societal change.
Responding to social change inevitably involves deferring to experts with specialist knowledge and experience. But who counts as expert, on what, and to what extent, are questions squarely in the province of humanities.
Critical Theory, according to Max Horkheimer’s statement in 1937, forms the intellectual side of emancipation. To keep it alive, we have to relentlessly analyze the crises which shape our present and inform our emancipatory hopes.
Consciously to effectuate social change is the modern ambition. But after nearly 250 years, we still need to understand better what possibilities and perils are involved in transmuting fundamental institutions.
To promote Social Change it is crucial to unmask and analyze the hidden social structures in individual psychic suffering.
What appears in modern society as atomisation is at the same time the creation of all-sided dependency. Social theory is indispensable for shedding light on this contradictory social constitution.
The founders of critical theory taught that the domination of nature implies the domination of people and vice versa. Understanding how this works concretely, in the past and the present, should be the task of a massive research effort.
Historical change in line with a hegelian-marxian tradition comes about and runs through contradictory processes and crises. Given that currently emancipatory transformation is in a crisis, we need to uncover the inconsistencies, debris and hardenings that block its proceeding.
What we need today is to take a closer look at the bigger picture. The humanities provide the lense for recalibrating our perspective on the crises we currently face.
The economical constellation of our time should be evaluated through its immanent contradictions.
