Critical Theory retained a recognizable identity despite integrating endless outside influences

Evidence

The only way a book about the history of the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory can close is therefore simply to break off. More about the second generation of Critical Theorists can be found in Willem van Reijen’s Philosophy as Critique. A comprehensive sketch of the reception of the Frankfurt School is provided by Jürgen Habermas’s Three Theses on the Reception of the Frankfurt School', a lecture given at a symposium at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in December 1984. … Although Critical Theory was always highly receptive and willing to integrate outside influences; although the stimuli it provided, and still provides, were so varied during the many forms and phases it passed through; and although many of the boundaries have now become blurred between the theory and the surrounding scene in the social sciences and in philosophy, which have in turn taken on far greater varietynevertheless, Critical Theory still has a recognizable face, for which philosophers’ like Habermas and Negt, in their undogmatic but resolute ways and with all their differences, are models. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2760

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader Habermas / second-generation reception history the reader is building; also the bibliography-style pointer to van Reijen and the 1984 Humboldt lecture is reference-level material. — connects to: Critical Theory’s meaning shifted as different practitioners redefined it — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 7
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2760