Critical theory

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Critical theory has a motto of sorts, and Marx wrote it. The line reads: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."

  The school of thought that took up that challenge holds that knowledge, truth and social structures are shaped by power. In its view, the struggle between dominant and oppressed groups leaves its mark on what a society calls objective. It also claims a job most theories do not. It wants to help transform the society it studies, through praxis, which means theory joined to action.

  Who gave this approach its name, and what did they want it to do? How did one German tradition come to reach so many fields? And why do critics, on both the left and the liberal center, say it cannot prove its own case?

  3311473

• 2. Frankfurt Beginnings

  ›

  In the 1920s, a group of thinkers in the first generation of the Frankfurt School set out to stretch Marxism. Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse were among them. They wanted to move past pure economic determinism, so they brought psychology, culture and philosophy into the analysis.

  Marx had already supplied the raw material. In early works such as The German Ideology, he described false consciousness. He also described ideology as the interests of one section of society masquerading as the interests of society as a whole. Critique, in his hands, was tied to the practice of social revolution.

  The name arrived in 1937. Horkheimer defined kritische Theorie in an essay titled "Traditional and Critical Theory." Traditional theory, as he framed it, only tries to understand or explain society. Critical theory aims at society as a whole, and at changing it.

  Horkheimer wanted a radical, emancipatory form of Marxist philosophy. So he took aim in two directions. One target was the model of science put forward by logical positivism. The other was what he and his colleagues saw as the covert positivism and authoritarianism of orthodox Marxism and Communism. A theory counted as critical, he said, insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."

  Such a theory carries a normative dimension. It can judge society by some general theory of values, the "oughts" of a community. Or it can judge society by the values it professes for itself, a method called immanent critique. Two core demands follow. The theory should address the totality of society in its historical specificity, meaning how it came to be configured at a given moment. It should also pull together geography, economics, sociology, history, political science, anthropology and psychology.

  Behind the method sat Freud. His idea that a person's lived experience can differ dramatically from objective reality fitted the school's suspicion of positivism, science and pure rationality.

  6578143266

• 3. Domination Without Contradiction

  ›

  In 1947, Adorno and Horkheimer published Dialectic of Enlightenment, a book marked by doubt about where social domination comes from. That doubt fed what became known as the "pessimism" of the new critical theory about human emancipation and freedom.

  The doubt had a historical cause. Nazism, state capitalism and the culture industry had appeared as entirely new forms of domination. Traditional Marxist sociology could not adequately explain them.

  For the two authors, state intervention in the economy had erased a tension central to Marx. That tension ran between the relations of production and the material productive forces of society. The market, which they described as an "unconscious" mechanism for distributing goods, had given way to centralized planning.

  Marx, in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, had predicted "an era of social revolution." Instead, this shift produced fascism and totalitarianism. Habermas later described the resulting trap in blunt terms. Critique was left without "anything in reserve to which it might appeal." The forces of production had entered a "baneful symbiosis" with the relations of production they were supposed to blow wide open. As he put it, "there is no longer any dynamism upon which critique could base its hope."

  That left a puzzle. How could domination persist when the contradiction that was supposed to cause it had disappeared? Habermas, who described the trap, was unsatisfied with the book, and his own answer would take a different road.

  434373538

• 4. Habermas and Communication

  ›

  Knowledge and Human Interests, which Habermas published in 1968, raised the epistemological discussion to a new level. He argued that critical knowledge rests on principles that set it apart from both the natural sciences and the humanities. Its distinguishing marks are an orientation to self-reflection and to emancipation.

  He still agreed with Adorno and Horkheimer on one point. Under instrumental rationality, modernity turns away from the liberation promised by the Enlightenment and toward a new form of enslavement.

  Max Weber strongly shaped Habermas's thinking about modernity and rationalization. Habermas also dissolved the elements of critical theory inherited from Hegelian German idealism, though his epistemology remains broadly Marxist. In his hands the tradition moved beyond its roots in German idealism and closer to American pragmatism. He corresponded regularly with the philosopher Richard Rorty, and a pragmatist streak runs through his work as it crosses between sociology and philosophy.

  His two most influential ideas are probably the public sphere and communicative action. The second arrived partly as a reaction to the postmodern challenges to the discourse of modernity.

  In the 1970s and 1980s, Habermas redefined critical social theory as a study of communication. One side of that study dealt with communicative competence and communicative rationality. The other dealt with distorted communication. The change brought critical theory and communication studies into far greater overlap than before.

  Yet he was also one of the key critics of postmodernism, the movement that was reshaping the field around him.

  3581313214

• 5. Postmodern Turns

  ›

  Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida were reshaping academic discourse at around the same time as Habermas. Their critiques covered knowledge, meaning, power, institutions and social control. Their deconstructive approaches pushed further against assumptions about objectivity and truth. Neither belonged formally to the Frankfurt School, yet their work deeply influenced later versions of critical theory. They wove cultural and linguistic critique into its Marxian roots.

  The postmodern branch concentrates on language, symbolism, communication and social construction. It studies the fragmentation of cultural identities and challenges modernist-era constructs such as metanarratives, rationality and universal truths. Where the modernist branch tracked the authority and injustice that accompanied industrial and corporate capitalism, this branch sees meaning itself as unstable, because social structures change so fast. Its research therefore looks at local manifestations rather than broad generalizations.

  One feature of this research is the crisis of representation. It rejects the idea that a scholar's work is an "objective depiction of a stable other." Many postmodern scholars turned instead to alternatives that encourage reflection on the "politics and poetics" of their own writing. In those accounts, the embodied, collaborative, dialogic and improvisational sides of qualitative research are brought into the open.

  The label "critical theory" gets borrowed loosely in this territory. It often attaches to an author who works in sociological terms yet attacks the social or human sciences, and Foucault has been described this way. Jean Baudrillard is sometimes called a critical theorist too, because he was an unconventional and critical sociologist. That use is casual, with little or no link to the Frankfurt School.

  953558279

• 6. Recognition and Resonance

  ›

  Nancy Fraser offers a test for telling a critical theory from an uncritical one. A critical theory shapes its questions and models around the aims of oppositional social movements, with which it identifies in a partisan but not uncritical way. Her example is the subordination of women. If struggles over it were among the most significant of an age, a critical theory for that age would reveal relations of male dominance and female subordination. It would also expose rival approaches that obscured those relations as ideological. One standard for judging it, beyond the usual tests of empirical adequacy, would be how well it serves the self-clarification of women's struggles and wishes.

  Axel Honneth, known for Pathology of Reason and The Legacy of Critical Theory, tried to explain the purpose of critical theory in a modern setting. His own contribution is the theory of recognition. A person cannot become responsible for themselves and their identity unless peers and society also recognize them. Without that recognition, he argues, the individual cannot experience true freedom or reach self-actualization.

  Rahel Jaeggi is vocal about what capitalism costs society, and doubts how necessary it is. On how to read the economy through the theory's lens, she sits nearer to Honneth than to Habermas. Many of her works defend Honneth against criticism he has received. She also describes alienation as "a relation of relationlessness."

  Hartmut Rosa offers the dialectical opposite, a concept he calls resonance. It names moments when people in late modernity feel a brief sense of self-efficacy and a temporary relatedness to some part of the world. Rosa places himself in the Frankfurt School tradition and criticizes late modernity through his idea of social acceleration. Judith Butler, meanwhile, reads critical theory as a way to challenge oppression and inequality through rhetoric, with particular attention to gender.

  Some say Rosa has gone too far. His resonance theory has been questioned for drifting beyond the Adornoian habit of "looking coldly at society."

  4213474843

• 7. Classrooms and Beyond

  ›

  Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed is widely credited by critical theorists as the first application of the tradition to education. Freire drew on his own experience helping Brazilian adults learn to read and write. He built a detailed class analysis around the relationship between colonizer and colonized.

  He called traditional teaching the "banking model of education," because it treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled. He proposed that the learner be treated as a co-creator of knowledge. The teacher then becomes a participant who learns with and from the students, in conversation with them. The aim is to free the learner from the oppressive split between teacher and student, which Freire saw as analogous to colonizer and colonized. Recognizing imbalance is not enough, the argument runs. The learner must also be empowered to act on that reflection and challenge the status quo.

  Pedagogy was only one destination. When Herbert Marcuse emigrated, critical theory spread to the United States. Today it covers social critique in economics, ethics, history, law, politics, psychology and sociology. Its subjects include critical animal studies, critical criminology, dependency theory, feminist theory, queer theory, postcolonialism and critical terrorism studies.

  Some applications are narrow and concrete. Critical theory has been used to interpret the right of asylum and immigration law. It has been applied to environmental justice. Critical finance studies even turn it on financial markets and central banks.

  559605658

• 8. Objections

  ›

  Marxists themselves object to the label that is often pinned on critical theorists. Many of those theorists have abandoned dialectical materialism, class conflict and the base and superstructure model. Because the tradition also fused Marx with the post-structuralism of Derrida and Foucault, orthodox Marxists and Marxist-Leninists have accused it of revisionism.

  There is a sharper charge about identity. Acting on identity, the objection goes, requires treating it as a real essence rather than a social construct. Class position is a social relation that can be abolished by revising economic relations, but identity cannot be transcended in the same way. Marxists therefore find the theories particularist and anti-universalist. Some critics go as far as comparing the result to a left-wing version of Carl Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction.

  Martin Jay offered a gentler reading of the first generation, calling it "a gadfly of other systems" rather than a fixed ideology. Liberal critics see a different gap. Critical theory has been faulted for offering no clear road map to political action, and sometimes for repudiating solutions outright. Those objections mostly fit the first-generation Frankfurt School, while contemporary theory handles politics more assertively.

  Other critics question its standards. One charge is that it fails to give rational standards showing it is superior to rival theories of knowledge, science or practice. Rex Gibson calls it cliquish, conformist, elitist, immodest, anti-individualist, naive, too critical and contradictory. Hughes and Hughes say Habermas's theory of ideal public discourse tells us much about rational talkers talking but little about actors acting. Some feminists warn that it can be as narrow and oppressive as the rationalization and bureaucratization it seeks to unmask. Its language is often called too dense, though defenders reply that demanding plain language is itself anti-intellectual.

  Bruce Pardy, writing for the National Post, accuses the approach of circular reasoning. Any challenge to its legitimacy, he says, can be read as proof of its thesis, since appeals to reason and evidence become signs of privilege and power. A challenger then risks being branded a bigoted oppressor.

  Robert Danisch, writing for The Conversation, made the bluntest charge. In his view, critical theory and the modern humanities spend too much effort criticizing the current world and too little trying to make a better one. That is a test its defenders still have to meet.

  7071652524