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.

Rahel Jaeggi, Center Director, Berlin

The crises and struggles of our present have to be the starting point of Critical Theory. Our task, then, is to probe their emancipatory potential, their limitations, convergences and tensions. That is why in thinking about migration and solidarity today we have to take migrants and their practices of critique and resistance seriously.

Robin Celikates , Center Deputy Director, Berlin
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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.

Christian Schmidt, Fellow, Berlin
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To promote Social Change it is crucial to unmask and analyze the hidden social structures in individual psychic suffering.

Sabine Flick, Fellow
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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.

Jonathan David Klein, Fellow
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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.

Andreas Malm, Fellow, Berlin
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Isette Schuhmacher

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.

Isette Schuhmacher, Research Assistant, Berlin
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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.

Lea-Riccarda Prix, Doctoral Candidate, Berlin
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The economical constellation of our time should be evaluated through its immanent contradictions.

Aldo Beretta, Fellow, Berlin
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Charles Taylor, Benjamin Chair 2019
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Andrew Arato, Fellow
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Jean Louise Cohen, Fellow
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Theoretical thinking has always been an indispensable moment within the efforts to change social reality.

Zhang Shuangli, Fellow, Berlin
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Allison Weir, Fellow
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Nikolas Kompridis, Fellow
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Subaltern communities have often developed highly effective strategies to respond to the multiple current crises. The rest of the world can learn from them – not the other way around.

Daniel Loick, Fellow, Berlin
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Law coins our social grammar. Social change needs legal utopianism.

Bertram Lomfeld, Fellow, Berlin
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Eva von Redecker

My thirst for theory has always been driven by a desire to see more, and with more than my own eyes: multiple perspectives, complex interconnections, and revolutionary possibilities.

Eva von Redecker, former Deputy Director, Berlin
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The actual importance of a topic often appears more clearly when it is not shown in full light, but illuminated from the side or from oblique angles. This is what I try to do in my writing.

Andrea Roedig, Arts & Media Fellow, Berlin
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Everyday critique can be seen as an attempt to regain a sense of order in an otherwise uncertain or irritating social reality. Understanding critique thus means uncovering the shared images of a normative social order that form its basis.

Frank Schumann, Fellow, Berlin
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Karen Ng

The humanities help us understand and explore the potentialities of the human form of life. How can we transform human societies such that the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all?

Karen Ng, Fellow, Berlin
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Democracy is in peril. The scope and severity of the present predicament has reached an unforeseen level. We need proper theories to grasp this multi-layered crisis adequately.

Ulf Bohmann, Berlin
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Volkan Çıdam, Berlin
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If history is valuable for understanding fascism, it is not because it enables us to describe what happened, but rather because it allows us to deduce from a specific combination of elements the effects that similar constellations are likely to produce today.

Zeynep Gambetti, Senior Fellow, Berlin
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