Abstract

Frustrated radicals who have managed, over the last 20 years of chaotic growth and revolutionary restructuring of higher education, to translate their “revolutionary rhetoric” only into tenured academic positions, tend to have an ambivalent relation to critical theory. On the one hand, they are irresistibly attracted to it. In a sophisticated scholarly fashion especially appropriate to their new professional status, critical theory addresses all those troublesome cultural questions that were becoming increasingly urgent but which traditional brands of Marxism could not readily tackle through standard materialist approaches. But, on the other hand, they were never able to digest critical theory's discouraging political implications which, for all practical purposes, effectively undermined most radical conventional wisdom and assumptions — assumptions that even such critical theorists as Adorno and Marcuse could not always do without