HIST 4227 Critical Theory and Post-Structuralism

This course charts the origins, development, and fate of two of the most significant tendencies of modern thought: Frankfurt School critical theory and French post-structuralism. From the 1930s to the 1990s, German critical theorists from Max Horkheimer to Jrgen Habermas analyzed modern alienation and domination in light of emancipatory possibility. Separately, beginning in the 1960s, French post-structuralists such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault radically questioned Western humanism and reason itself. After reconstructing these two schools and revisiting the celebrated Habermas-Foucault debate of the 1980s, we will examine the ongoing twenty-first-century legacies and limits of these traditions of critique.