Afinal de contas, o que é teoria crítica?

Abstract

The project of the critical theory of society has been defined in different ways: through the description of its genesis, of its methodology or of its institutional history. This paper analyzes each of these possibi-lities and suggests an alternative to them, namely, that critical theory can be understood as the attempt to deal with a problem: that of the ongoing division and compartmentalization of scientific work. This alternative also makes it possible to understand in another way the rupture operated by the epistemic turn of the late 1960s.