The Internal Logic of the Frankfurt School’s Critique of Technological Rationality: From Critique of Technology to Critique of Politics

技术理性在推动现代化进程的同时，亦导致人类文明面临结构性危机。法兰克福学派通过其技术批判理论系统阐释了技术理性异化的生成机理，深刻揭示资本主义制度下技术对人主体的支配机制。该学派指出，在发达工业社会语境中，技术体系已演化为维系资本主义政治统治的操控装置，并通过价值中立的表象异化为新型意识形态载体。相较于其他西方技术批判理论，法兰克福学派的独特贡献在于其揭示了技术理性与政治权力的共谋关系——二者通过精密耦合形成新型控制范式，并对此异化过程的内在生成逻辑进行了辩证唯物主义的系统解构。尽管存在理论局限性，但其对技术异化现象的批判性反思，仍为当代科技发展提供了重要启示。在人工智能与算法技术主导的第四次工业革命浪潮中，技术控制呈现出智能化与泛在化特征：智能算法重构社会规训机制，工业文明深化全球物化进程。倘若持续固守技术至上的单向度发展模式，将不可逆转地引发生态系统崩溃与人类本质异化的双重危机。我国正处于现代化建设的关键阶段，技术创新与理性建构仍是实现高质量发展的重要引擎。While technological rationality has propelled the modernization process, it has simultaneously led human civilization to face a structural crisis. The Frankfurt School, through its theory of technology criticism, systematically elucidates the generative mechanism underlying the alienation of technological rationality, profoundly revealing the mechanism by which technology dominates the human subject under the capitalist system. The school posits that, in the context of developed industrial society, the technological system has evolved into an apparatus of control that upholds capitalist political dominance and, through its semblance of value-neutrality, has been reified as a new ideological carrier. Compared to other Western theories of technology criticism, the unique contribution of the Frankfurt School lies in its exposure of the collusion between technological rationality and political power—whereby the two form a new paradigm of control through intricate coupling—and in its systematic deconstruction of the internal generative logic of this process of alienation through dialectical materialism. Although there are theoretical limitations, its critical reflection on the phenomenon of technological alienation still provides important insights for contemporary technological development. In the wave of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, dominated by artificial intelligence and algorithmic technologies, technological control exhibits characteristics of increased intelligence and ubiquity: intelligent algorithms are reconstructing the mechanisms of social discipline, while industrial civilization deepens the global process of reification. If the unidimensional, technology-supremacist development model is persistently maintained, it will irreversibly trigger a dual crisis of ecological system collapse and the alienation of human essence. Our country is currently at a critical stage of modernization; technological innovation and rational construction remain important engines for achieving high-quality development.