The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory

If the demand for theory was, in Iris Murdoch's words, a cry for a house that could provide shelter from empiricism, it was also a political demand born of the realization that theories are never politically innocent. They express political prejudices and reproduce them, even when they deny it. To reveal those prejudices in order to neutralize them was the great ambition of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, of the Barthes who unmasked 'mythologies' with such sardonic glee, and of the feminist critics and historians who refused to go being hidden from history.