ABSTRACT
Habermas Jürgen Habermas was a product of the radical European politics of the twentieth century. A citizen of Germany, Habermas grew up seeing the rise and fall of Hitler and the emergence of a Europe and a Germany divided into regions aligned with the ‘democratic’ West and the Communist Soviet Union. Habermas was educated in the critical theory developed by the Frankfurt School, and his own theoretical work is a direct development of the postMarxist account of modernity in critical theory. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer (1944) argued that modernity had resulted in the loss of individual freedom,
the loss of agency and the victory of modern capitalism. Popular culture had been appropriated by fascism and capitalism in order to keep the masses enslaved and ignorant of their exploited situation – a situation described as hegemony in the writings of Gramsci (1971). For Adorno (1947; 1967), modern, commercialized sports and leisure forms were simply capitalist tools of oppression, with no redeeming value. Critical theory took Marxist critiques of capitalism and extended the arguments to their logical end: modern nationstates, universities, political parties and culture all operated to serve the interests of capitalism as eciently as possible.
