he takes a much keener interest in the concrete institutional structure of democratic society than either Horkheimer or Adorno.

According to Habermas, the concept of the public sphere is both an idea and an ideology.

Mündigkeit

for example, believes that economic laws exist naturally and independently of human beings, then workers are more likely to accept low wages in return for their labour, rather than to see this exchange as a structural injustice in need of reform.

For Adorno, though, Mündigkeit is linked to emancipation in an entirely negative way: emancipation in the current situation can only mean resistance to the established order, the capacity to say ‘no’, to refuse to adjust or adapt to current social reality. Habermas, by contrast, wants to identify the social and institutional conditions that foster

Or it may make an institution that in fact serves the interests of a narrow class of people appear to serve the interests of everyone.

The practical aim of Adorno’s critical theory is to equip individuals with the capacities that would enable them to resist integration into the fateful homogenizing institutions of capitalist society.

Adorno and Horkheimer claim that the industrialized and bureaucratized modern world is formed by a process of rationalization. The 20th-century social world is the result of the actions of human beings, whose faculty of reason has atrophied to a mere calculus of the most efficient means to a given end.

It may make what is in fact a social and man-made institution, and hence an institution that is in principle alterable, appear to be fixed and natural.