Volume 16, Issue 1, 2013
Critical Refusals, Part 1
Lucius T. Outlaw Jr.
Pages 223-235
"Critical Social Theory"--Then and Now
The Personal and the Political in an Intellectual Life
The essay is a reflective reconstruction of encounters with persons, writings, and discursive communities involved with “critical social theory” across a decades-long quest for a comprehensive synchronic and diachronic understanding of significant aspects of the social whole of the United States of America, in particular, which understanding was to be the resource for guiding efforts in “emancipatory social transformation”: the overcoming of impediments to the enjoyment by Black people of flourishing lives without invidious racial discrimination and economic exploitation.