This chapter argues that the critical project in social theory can revitalize its critical potential if it aligns with a theory of society and its institutions seen as social systems. The first generation of critical theory repelled the project of normativity as it had been pursued in Hegel's The Philosophy of Right or in functionalist exponents of classical sociological theory. Yet, the recent turn toward the paradigm of recognition embraces a theory of justice fashioned after the ethical demands of the Hegelian project. This chapter discusses the subsumption of a theory of normative social institutions to the forces of reification and of one-dimensionality in the writings of Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse; Habermas's critical reconstruction of systems theory that salvages the unnoticed normativity of social institutions in modernity and reexamines social systems as value-laden entities; and the project of fortifying the value of freedom in institutional arrangements in the work of Axel Honneth. The chapter concludes with some thoughts on the systemic anomalies that Honneth's research program for critical theory seems to accommodate.