Modelos críticos e teoria social tradicional A dialética entre pesquisa e apresentação em Georg Lukács e Max Horkheimer

What is it that makes a social theory a critical theory of society? What distinguishes it from other (“traditional”) attempts to theoretically depict, understand and evaluate social reality? And how do they relate to each other? Such issues appear as central, in the development of critical theory, to the definition of its peculiarity as a theory of society. Despite the diversity of responses presented by different authors in the critical field to these questions, it is possible to conceive them in a unified way to the extent that they are considered as various formulations of the same basic idea concerning the ruptures and continuities between critical thought and traditional science: the historical character the first recognizes in relation to itself, as well as in relation to every form of theoretical thinking, leads to the fact that the second is, within critical thought, at the same time affirmed (in its partiality) and denied (in its unreflected claim to have grasped the social whole). This paper aims to present the general outlines of this idea and its practical application in the work of two authors that are decisive for the early establishment of critical theory, Georg Lukács and Max Horkheimer, with particular regard to the problem of the appropriation of specialized empirical sciences. From this analysis and from a brief critical review of Jürgen Habermas’s position on the matter, this article seeks to assess the limits and possibilities of actualizing the lukácsian and horkheimian models towards a critical theory that has the dialectics between research and presentation, initially developed by Marx, as a fundamental reference.