  In its initial phases Critical Theory attempted to develop a normative notion of “real democracy” that was contrasted with actual political forms in liberal societies. A democratic society would be rational, because in it individuals could gain “conscious control” over social processes that affect them and their life chances.  To the extent that such an aim is possible at all, it required that human beings become “producers of their [social life] in its totality” (Horkheimer 1972b [1992, 244]). Such a society then becomes a “true” or expressive totality, overcoming the current “false totality,” an antagonistic whole in which the genuine social needs and interests cannot be expressed or developed (Jay 1984).  Such a positive, expressivist ideal of a social whole is not, however, antiliberal, since it shares with liberalism the commitment to rationalism and universalism. The next phase in the development of Critical Theory took up the question of antidemocratic trends. This development of the Frankfurt School interpretation of the limits on democracy as an ideal of human freedom was greatly influenced by the emergence of fascism in the 1930s, one of the primary objects of their social research. Much of this research was concerned with antidemocratic trends, including increasingly tighter connections between states and the market in advanced capitalist societies, the emergence of the fascist state and the authoritarian personality.  Horkheimer came to see that these antidemocratic trends gradually undermined the realization of an expressive whole, with the consequence that “the situation of the individual is hopeless,” that the subjective conditions for exercising freedom and achieving solidarity were being eroded by an increasingly totalizing social reification.