Assessing critical theory today, Emancipation and History focuses on the connection between history and emancipation, centering on the trends that structure modernity and may lead us beyond it. Classical and contemporary sociology and social theory are mobilized to recover a robust theory capable of going beyond recurrent empirical, and therefore weaker, perspectives in emancipatory thought. Everything from topics such as collective subjectivity and social creativity, history and sociology, analytical concepts and trend-concepts, social existential questions, the role of equal freedom and of immanent critique, secularization, capitalism, the modern state, 'populism' and the family, and the meaning of citizenship, to authors such as Marx, Weber, Bhaskar, Habermas, Laclau, Sousa Santos and Negri, is discussed.