I am daily ever more convinced that theoretical work accomplishes more in the world than practical work. Once the realm of representation is revolutionized, actuality will not hold out. It is a sheer obstinacy, the obstinacy which does honor to mankind, to refuse to recognize in conviction anything not ratified by thought.

Hegel

Both Marx, the founding father of what later came to be known as critical theory, and those who follow in his footsteps, regard critical theory as distinctive in that it will combine the critically normative dimension of traditional philosophy with the strict attentiveness to given facts (to “the real … material world”) definitive of modern empirical science. Critical theory contends that its unique fusion of science and philosophy will overcome their respective defects, correcting both the uncritical passivity of natural science and the speculative utopianism of philosophy. By so doing, it promises to give birth to a new kind of theory with emancipatory power.

Critical theorists from Marx to Habermas also see a thoroughgoing critique of Hegel as decisive for a critical theory. In their view, whatever insights Hegel may otherwise have provided, his philosophy is irreparably flawed because of its methodological commitment to a speculative method which cuts theory loose from reality and leads it to a distorted, mystically idealistic view of the human condition which is at once both Utopian and quietistic. According to critical theorists, Hegel's fundamental theoretical error lay in privileging the ideal over the real; because he does that, he is unable to get reality right. Consequently, he can neither comprehend freedom properly, as a normatively critical concept, nor understand the real conditions for freedom inherent in the status quo.