Luis David Tapia

Critical theory is a type of thought that for a long time has been identified with a group of thinkers articulated around the Frankfurt school. It is a work that unfolds from the 30 s to the 70 s in what is considered its first generation, and there are developments made by new generations today. The notion of critique has been present since before, especially in two basic and important references: Kant’s critiques of reason and Marx’s critique of political economy.Kant’s critique is a question about the conditions of possibility of knowledge (which is an epistemological and ontological question) and in Marx the critique implies an analysis of the structure and content of economic theory and the social relations and history that generate it, showing its facet of legitimation of existing structures, its ideological function.In turn, critique consists in explaining a dimension of social reality, such as production and reproduction, in relation to the social totality in movement. Thus, the critique or reflexive analysis of theories becomes critique of societies. Twentieth-century critical theory continues and develops these intellectual concerns and tasks. It is within this broad intellectual and historical horizon that I situate the analytical presentation of the most important part of what can be called critical theory in Bolivia.During the twentieth century in Bolivia there was no theoretical production that identifies itself as critical theory, particularly in relation to the Frankfurt school, but critical theory has been made in a broader sense, in particular from the marxist thought. There are many forms of critiquue that have been deployed in the intellectual history of Bolivia and Latin America, particularly in relation to literature and culture, but what can be identified ex post with critical theory has to do with the formulation of reflexive and historical social theory, which in some cases asks about the historical and cognitive conditions of possibility of social knowledge. This has happened in the country and the continent around the national dimension and the colonial question.The critical theory of the Frankfurt school, like the Marxist matrix that inspires it, worked around the question of modernity, its genesis, development and contradictions, its rationality and the emergence of the authoritarian state in relation to the development of monopoly capitalism. They think about European and American modernity.