Refiguring Critical Theory offers some thoughts about the nature of democracy and the possibilities of individual and collective self-determination. The text traces theories of the relationship between being and consciousness from Marx through Lukacs and the Frankfurt School to Habermas' recent work The Theory of Communicative Action. J.Craig Hanks argues that an analysis of Habermas' work will be incomplete if we do not understand it as growing out of a tradition of radical political thinking (from Hegel through Marx and the early Critical Theorists).