In his well-known programmatic article of 1937, Horkheimer established a distinction between two different concepts of" theory."'The first refers to a set of propositions whose legitimacy lies in their correspondence to an object already formed prior to the act of its rep-resentation. This radical separation between the subject and the object of cognition turns theory into an act of pure thought and the theoretician into an unbiased spectator who limits himself to describing the world" as it is." This notion of theory, which considers the object