TY - JOUR A1 - Smith, David Norman T1 - Introduction to Herbert Marcuse, >On the Critique of Sociology< JF - Mid-American Review of Sociology, Vol. 16, No. 2 (1992), pp. 1-13. [ISSN 0732913X] [jstor.org/stable/23254542] N2 - Critical Theory was born at a dark moment in world history. The Weimar Republic in Germany had given way to National Socialism, fascism reigned in Italy, and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia had begun its descent into the whirlpool of Stalinism. It became clear that >class consciousness< does not spring fully formed from economic crisis, as many Marxists had imagined, and that socialist democracy is far more difficult to achieve than even its enemies had believed. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Germany, wherein 1933 the proudest and strongest labor movement in history fell victim to a grotesquely reactionary regime. Democracy in every form seemed alarmingly fragile, too feeble and embattled to resist the >dictatorship of the corporals< that Max Weber had feared. This was the context in which the renowned >Frankfurt Institute< began its odyssey from traditional to critical theory. Y1 - 1992 ER -