The Frankfurt School's work cannot be fully comprehended without equally understanding the aims and objectives of critical theory. Initially outlined by Max Horkheimer in his Traditional and Critical Theory (1937) [...] The original aim of critical theory was to analyze the true significance of "the ruling understandings" generated in bourgeois society, in order to show how they misrepresented actual human interaction in the real world [...]
Horkheimer opposed it to "traditional theory", which refers to theory in the positivistic, scientistic, or purely observational mode - that is, which derives generalizations or "laws" about different aspects of the world. Drawing upon Max Weber, Horkheimer argued that the social sciences are different from the natural sciences, inasmuch as generalizations cannot be easily made from so-called experiences, because the understanding of a "social" experience itself is always fashioned by ideas that are in the researchers themselves. What the researcher does not realize is that he is caught in a historical context in which ideologies shape the thinking; thus theory would be conforming to the ideas in the mind of the researcher rather than the experience itself [...]
For Horkheimer, approaches to understanding in the social sciences cannot simply imitate those in the natural sciences.Although various theoretical approaches would come close to breaking out of the ideological constraints which restricted them [...] Horkheimer would argue that they failed [...]
Critique, in this Marxian sense, meant taking the ideology of a society - e.g. the belief in individual freedom or free market under capitalism - and critiquing it by comparing it with the social reality of that very society - e.g. social inequality and exploitation.