What creates artificial barriers among humans and what works to sustain the legitimacy of relations of authority that are intrinsically unjust from this perspective is not the Inevitability of class, caste, or racial distinctions, but the opaqueness of language itself. Positivism can never be the sole mode of knowing for human beings. Critical theory attempts to give us knowledge not about means to fixed ends as positivism does, but about the ends of actions themselves. It other words, it tries to answer the question of how we should live. Such a theory competes not so much with science but with the dead Weight of tradition.
Critical theory is always a critique of authority.
Positivism is morally indifferent. Science cannot help people to secure the ends of action, that is, to tell them how to live. Comte, Durkheim, and Spencer were wrong to assume that it could. The rise of positivism in the West has done a great deal to undermine and destroy the traditions by which people used to live. Modern society leads to highly specialized, differentiated, and fragmented lives.