The Limits of Critical Theory, Critique and Emancipation in Habermas’ critique of Horkheimer and Adorno Fasil Merawi Abstract Habermas’ critical theory is partly an attempt to identify the limitations of critique and emancipation as espoused in the first generation critical theory of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. In their attempt to develop an interdisciplinary, reflexive, emancipatory and dialectical reason that is critical towards accepted realities, Horkheimer and Adorno in their monumental work The Dialectic of Enlightenment pictured a world trapped in instrumental rationality. Taking and revolutionizing traditional critical theory, Habermas argues that reason entails both emancipator as well as instrumental possibilities. Through an exposition of Habermas’ critique of Horkheimer and Adorno in his discourse of modernity, this article argues that although Habermas successfully identifies the equation of the rational with the instrumental and offers an emancipator model in return; still he ends up not paying sufficient attention to aesthetic truth. Key words; Enlightenment, Myth, Communicative Reason. Introduction The philosophy of Habermas involves a general venture into the contradictions of the modern world which in its emancipatory intent to realize linguistic validation came to be interspersed with the fate of instrumental reason. As such, working under the guiding spirit of the critical theories of Horkheimer and Adorno that any serious intellectual form of discourse must enclose both deconstructive and emancipatory elements, Habermas introduces his own unique communicative paradigm. Here resisiting the equation of the rational with the instrumental as developed in the monumental The Dialectic of Enlightenment ; Habermas introduces a 1