SOME RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN CRITICAL THEORY.

On November 27, 1972, Der Spiegel published an article on the theme of the "Frankfurt School in a Crossfire." The executioners cited in the Spiegel piece came from both ends of the political spectrum. The most frequent of these charges was against the Frankfurt's School's inability to generate a practical imperative from its theory, a posture best symbolized by Theodor W. Adorno. All that the Frankfurt School could offer to the committed revolutionary was a form of "negative theology," which could only lead to the kind of infantile leftism associated, in the minds of the more orthodox Communists, with the failures of the German "extra-parliamentary opposition." Because so many of the student Left in the late 1960s had been seduced by this siren call, the Czech party paper at the time of the Marienbad conference was moved to sound the solemn warning that "the struggle against the teaching of the "third way" is the most pressing current task of Marxist-Leninist philosophy." To someone with a certain distance from the overheated atmosphere of recent leftist politics in Germany, this judgment seems somewhat premature, to say the least.