Is there an emancipatory interest? An attempt to answer critical theory's most fundamental question

The idea that human beings have a deep‐seated interest in overcoming dependencies and heteronomy has always been a hallmark of the tradition of critical social theory deriving from Marx. Some of the Left Hegelians already held that in the absence of such an emancipatory interest on the part of the entire species, the demand for social progress would remain a merely moral “ought,” lacking any support in historical reality. Marx was convinced that under capitalism, this interest was represented by the proletariat, forced by its particular situation to fight on behalf of all of humanity for fully noncoercive and nondominating social relations. When Georg Lukács took up this thought in the early 1920s, even surpassing its original ambitions through a bold appropriation of Fichtean ideas, the revolutionary ethos of the working class had already been in decline to such an extent that his construction received little acclaim even from those sympathetic to it. Max Horkheimer was therefore cautious enough to rely in his development of a critical social theory only on the claim that such an emancipatory interest was revealed in the ineradicable human tendency to revolt against structures of domination. Without attempting to provide a more detailed argument for this assumption, he thereby reiterated on a more abstract level the Marxian thesis that the epistemological foundation of his theory would have to lie in its connection with “critical conduct.” It was only with Jürgen Habermas's path‐breaking monograph Knowledge and Human Interests that new life was breathed into this century‐old idea. Through original re‐interpretations of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, Habermas develops the thesis that we as human beings have an interest in dissolving previously unrecognized dependencies and “pseudo‐objectivities,” and he finally draws on Freud to fully rehabilitate the thesis as amounting to an anthropology of knowledge. Even though Habermas has in the meantime distanced himself from some of the book's central assumptions, it is still a good point of departure for thinking through the theoretical intentions associated with the idea of an “emancipatory interest” and for understanding what is at stake in dispensing with this idea. In what follows, I will therefore start out from this book and recapitulate its central argument. In a second and third step, I will endeavor to salvage its fruitful central idea by supplying it with a new and less vulnerable foundation.