The aim of this research is to study the existing relationships between “social criticism” and “normativity”. It has been inside the tradition known as Critical Theory of Society of the Frankfurt School, and especially from the “linguistic turn” operated by Jürgen Habermas, where these relationships has been analyzed with greater depth. Critical Theory operates with the theoretical instrument called “immanent critique”: the critique of society reconstructs, from within its own social reality whose structures it wants to criticize, the normative aspirations on which it is based. It could been differentiated four main moments in the history of this tradition: the critique of political economy of Marx and the first Frankfurt School; the radical self-criticism of reason carried out by Adorno and Horkheimer from Dialectic of the Enlightenment; the theory of the communicative action of Habermas; and the theory of recognition undertaken by Honneth. It is only from Habermas that the Critical Theory makes of the normativity the fundamental element of this philosophical analysis. This justifies that this work has a priority towards systematically reconstructing the fundamentals of the theory of communicative action. Although Habermas’s thought does not end in the framework of Frankfurtian neo-Marxism, the truth is that Habermas’s concern about the sources of normativity of criticism can only be understood if its project is considered as what it really is: the attempt to offer a theory of rationalization capable of overcoming the normative deficits of the old Critical Theory, immanently resorting to their own potentialities of Modernity. The work will start with a study on the various socio-historical contexts in which the different models of Critical Theory operated. The second chapter will expose the different forms of ideological criticism –and their underlying normative elements– that practiced some of the most important exponents of the first Critical Theory. Once this is done, it will be able to address the first Habermasian appropriations of the Critical Theory and its early attempts to solve some of the problems related to the employed normative standards. Although throughout all these discussions Habermas anticipates the project of a new critical theory based on the theory of communication, the fact is that it will not be until the publication of The Theory of Communicative Action that this project is systematized. The fourth chapter will address the fundamental ideas of the theory of communicative action. The fifth chapter will cover the reconstruction of the three broad products derived from the theory of discourse: consensual theory of truth, discourse ethics, and deliberative politics. Throughout these reconstructions, some problems will come to light that are hard to solve from discourse theory categories. The final chapter will put this theory in dialogue with other approaches that have addressed in a different way the same problems.