Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique? Critical Theory, Sociology of Memory, and Public Working Through-the-Past

The essay examines the Habermasian category of the “public use of history” at the intersection of Frankfurt School critical theory and the sociology of memory. After reconstructing the dissolution of the topos of historia magistra vitae and the sociological framework of collective memory, public memory, and social memory – from Halbwachs to contemporary memory studies – it traces the category’s Frankfurt School roots: Benjamin’s theses on the concept of history and Adorno’s reflections on working through the past. On this basis, it articulates the practical functions of knowledge and distinguishes the two forms of critical intervention in the public sphere that derive from that legacy: “Consciousness-Raising” and “Rescuing Critique”. Public memory thus appears as a solidaristic and never-completed practice of working through the past, whose normative core – the imperative of non-regression – binds democratic identity to the remembrance of the victims and stands opposed both to revisionism and to the ritual neutralization of commemoration. The essay’s distinctive contribution is to show that the two critiques are complementary rather than alternative, and that the public use of history is the normative obverse of collective memory as Halbwachs described it: a self-critical public memory does not arise spontaneously, but requires institutions, intel-lectuals, and public conflict, and is to be judged by its direction rather than by its intensity.