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Neo -Marxism

The Frankfurt school has become one of the most important proponents of Neo Marxism. It grew out of the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt Germany.Neo Marxism is also known as critical theory where class divisions under capitalism is viewed as more important than gender or sex divisions or issues of race and ethnicity. Neo Marxism encompasses a group of beliefs that have in common rejection of economic or class determinism and a belief in at least the semi autonomy of the social sphere. The Neo-Marxists after seeing the failure of working class revolutions in western Europe after World War I choose the parts of Marx's thought that might clarify social conditions that were not present when Marx was alive. They filled in what they perceived to be omissions in Marxism with ideas from other schools of thought.

Jurgen Habermas started his intellectual career in 1950s with a critique of Martin Heidegger's philosophy. In 1960s Jurgen Habermas raised the epistemological discussion to a new level in his knowledge and human interests by identifying critical knowledge as based on principles that differentiated it either from the natural sciences or the humanities through its orientation to self-reflection and emancipation. Jurgen Habermas considers his major contribution to be the development of the concept and theory of communicative reason or communicative rationality that distinguishes itself from the rationalist tradition by locating rationality in structures of interpersonal linguistic communication rather than in the structure of the cosmos. In 1981,Habermas published The Theory of Communicative Action in which he develops on the concept of an ideal speech situation and an accompanying ethics of discourse. Working with Frankfurt School colleague Karl Otto Apel, he proposes a model of communicative rationality that takes into account the effect power has upon the situation of discourse and opposes the traditional idea of an objective and functionalist reason. Within societal interactions is the performance of subjective and inter subjective duties that are determined by other capacities of reasoning. In sociology rationalization refers to the replacement of traditions, values and emotions as motivators for behavior in society with rational calculated ones the implementation of bureaucracies in government is a kind of rationalization as is the construction of high efficiency living spaces in architecture and urban planning. Jurgen Habermas has argued that to understand rationalization properly requires going beyond Weber's notion of rationalization and distinguishing between instrumental rationality which involves calculation and efficiency and communicative rationality which involves expanding the scope of mutual understanding in communication, the ability to expand this understanding through reflective discourse about communication and making social and political life subject to this expanded understanding. In Habermas notion rationality means removal of the barriers that distort communication systems in which idea are openly presented and defended against criticism, unconstrained agreement develops during argumentation.
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