CRITICAL THEORY IN BERLIN

is the central announcement platform for the Centre for Social Critique and the Chairs of Social Philosophy at Humboldt University and Free University Berlin. The website features the most recent information on our events as well as a comprehensive archive of our past activities.

The Berlin-based Centre for Social Critique was founded in 2018 (originally as Humanities and Social Change Center Berlin) to analyze the intertwinement of crises in the fields of democracy and capitalism. Aiming to understand current processes of social erosion and spreading conflicts, we base our research of current developments on critical reflections of philosophical concepts in conjunction with background theories of social structures. On the search for alternatives capable of overcoming social blockades, we employ concepts such as “solidarity,” “socialism,” and “socialization” in the light of its often-problematic histories.

Our approach has its roots in Critical Theory. However, we take Critical Theory to be more than just a philosophical school or a line of research within social theory. To us, a social theory is critical if it uncovers why a society systematically fails to fulfill the promises of solidarity, participation, equality, and freedom that it makes. In order to see the connections bringing forth such failures, Critical Theory needs to develop an understanding of society that captures how normative and epistemological beliefs are tied to seemingly more material aspects like the economy and social reproduction. For Critical Theory questions of real democracy and political association are economic questions and vice versa. It explicates how a local rationality of concrete historical social practices can turn irrational without having to dispose of concepts such as rationality altogether.

Theory is to us a “self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age.” (Marx) It is the reflection of emancipatory processes and aims at overcoming social irrationality, i.e. ideologies. Therefore, our work at the Centre for Social Critique is necessarily informed by social struggles and contributes to public debates on social change and progress but does not exhaust itself by describing them. We aim to resuscitate basic critical vocabulary (such as emancipation, rationality, universalism, progress and alienation) by actualizing its content.