This book shows why Critical Theory - as first developed in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung - must be updated to enable us tackling today's capitalist polycrisis, from economic via political to ecological crises. Yet, following the death of Adorno in 1969 and the death of Marcuse almost exactly ten years later, there has been a 'domestication' of the main strands of the Frankfurt School. To better understand and overcome this domestication, the book traces, with the means of philosophy and sociology, its two affirmative steps in a liberal and in a postmodern turn. As an alternative to both, it defends Habermas' project of modernity, yet only by disentangling it - in Marxian fashion - from the capitalist process of modernisation. This disentanglement is at the same time a political radicalisation which is necessary since the cultural ideal(s) of the project of modernity - from human autonomy via rational society to qualitative individuality - can only be realised beyond the framework of capitalism. On this basis, the book proposes political autonomy as a concept confined neither by Kantian or liberal approaches nor by autonomist or operaist traditions. Rather, it draws on thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and Martin Hägglund to rephrase Marxist concepts such as social freedom, democratic socialism, and the end of prehistory. In this way, political autonomy is developed both as a legit criterion for justified critique and as the philosophical foundation and emancipatory goal of a pluralist yet transcapitalist Critical Marxist Theory.

Lukas Meisner is fellow at the Berlin Institute of Critical Theory (InkriT), the Institute for International Political Economy (IPE) and the collaborative research centre Structural Change of Property at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. He is the author of  Wrackmente. Novelle  (2024), Medienkritik ist links. Warum wir eine medienkritische Linke brauchen (2023) and coauthor of Capitalist Nihilism and the Murder of Art (2020, with Eef Veldkamp).