Description: The development of principles and practises of critical adult education, built on the foundations of different types of critical social science or philosophy, has been an ambition of many educationalists. One of them, Stepehen Brookfield, has recently given a comprehensive and penetrating overview of the contributions. In this paper I shall discuss the work of a contributor who is perhaps less known outside Germany and Scandinavia, the German social scientist Oskar Negt. Since the start of his career in the sixties, Negt has continuously studied, theorised and commented on the trends and contradictions of modern society, and the problems confronting individuals in this society. In his work he has drawn on and tried to integrate a number of inspirations. Politically he has roots in the German new left, but he has also had strong links to the trade union movement, especially to its educational activities and institutions. Theoretically he draws mainly on two sources: Marxism (not in the versions developed in the former Soviet Union, but rather the original work of Marx and Engels); and the Frankfurt school of critical theory, as developed by Horkheimer, Adorno and others. Negt's writings are mostly theoretical, but not in an axiomatic or formal way. He confronts and explores the content, the paradoxes and the ramifications of concepts and assumptions about contemporary society, but he does not waste too much energy on polishing definitions and constructing general frameworks. Much of his published work is based on papers and articles, often loosely fitted together to form books. Often his themes and arguments are closely tied to current social events and political debates. In the area of educational theory Negt has made important contributions in at least two areas, namely adult education (especially in the context of trade unions) and alternative school pedagogy. In the paper I shall discuss only the former area.Trade union education was a prominent theme in Negt's early work. For some years during the sixties he was affiliated with the educational division of the German metal-workers union, and led him to formulate a thorough criticism and revision of the principles of trade union education. This was presented in his book "Sociological imagination and exemplary learning" (Negt 1968). He argues that the learning processes in trade union education must integrate experience from everyday life at work or in other spaces with more general concepts of society. Everyday experience will be ripe with contradictions echoing the basic structures of capitalism. Negt uses Wright Mills' (1962) concept of sociological imagination to describe the ability to structure and generalize collective experience; this must be an overriding goal of trade union education. Curriculum and teaching must be designed to be exemplary; it is not a question of transmitting a certain "sum" of knowledge, but of choosing certain topics and problems which allow the linking of collective experience with scientific (but critical) knowledge about modern capitalist society. Negt developed the concept of experience-based exemplary adult education early in his career, before his major works on experience, public spaces, work and culture. In subsequent contributions to educational theory he maintained the basic principles, but gradually integrated them with his general work in social theory.Negt's concept of adult education has close ties with his ideas about work, experience and culture, and I present these in the first part of the paper. In the following sections I present his theory of exemplary adult learning, developed early in his career, and his later clarifications and restatements of this. Finally I give an assessment of Negt's contribution. Methodology: A theoretical discussion of the theories, concepts and analyses of a specific author Conclusions: Summary and assessment of the contribution of one specific author to the field; documentation of the relevance of Negt's approach to contemporary adult education