What is Immanent Critique?

Titus Stahl
What is Immanent Critique?

Traditionally, the form of social critique that proceeds in this way has been called immanent critique. In a nutshell, an immanent critique of society is a critique which derives the standards it employs from the object criticized, that is, the society in question, rather than approaching that society with independently justified standards...

Even though some of the critics of such context-free normative theorizing have taken this to be an occasion for endorsing a more relativistic, internal form of critique, others such as Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth have again turned to what in effect is the method of immanent critique.....
In contrast to hermeneutic immanent critique, practice-theoretic immanent critique does not (or at least does not only) draw on interpretations of the explicit self- understanding of some community...