Back in 2020 I wrote a Brief on Critical Theory. I said that it was a thread that started with Kant and his notion that we cannot know things-in-themselves but only appearances. Then there was Fichte that wrote that “All our thought is founded on our impulses,” meaning that conscious thought begins in the unconscious.
Hegel wrote about the “nightlike abyss” of the unconscious, and Schopenhauer called this unconscious drive “Will,” and Wagner wrote The Ring of the Nibelung to show that myth is a welling up of the unconscious out of the abyss to tell a story about how the world works and how it’s all about the girls, from the Rhine Maidens and the Valkyries to the heroine Brünnhilde.
Notice how Marx manipulates the unconscious to make a political point. Google Search:
Marx viewed the “unconscious” not as a psychological concept, but as a social and economic phenomenon where capitalist structures (”base”) shape consciousness (”superstructure”).
And, of course, the helpless workers have no idea how the bourgeoisie manipulate their unconscious. But the Marxists would take care of that.
Then came World War I and the workers unaccountably identified with their nations, not their class. So the Frankfurt School arose to construct a new critical theory based not on class but on all forms of repression: sexual and racial. To emancipate the world, the Frankfurt School proposed a
synthesis of the Marxist tradition, psychoanalysis, and empirical sociological research.
Frankfurt scholars-in-chief Horkheimer and Adorno felt that they should keep their distance from politics, and Jürgen Habermas in The Theory of Communicative Action proposed that humans should get together, all friendly like, to discuss their differences.
But Herbert Marcuse dove right in and encouraged the Sixties students to protest.
Marcuse saw agents of change that could supplement the quiescent working class and unite with third-world communist revolutionaries.
By the way, the code word for going beyond thinking to fundamental transformation is called “Praxis:”
the transformative union of reflection and action, where theoretical understanding of social injustices (like exploitation or oppression) drives practical, informed action to change the world.
But suppose your “theoretical understanding of social injustices” just does not align with the reality of “dispersed, subjective, and local knowledge”? What then?
Then you get to what we now actually call “Critical Theory.”
Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida… were reshaping academic discourse with critiques of knowledge, meaning, power, institutions, and social control with deconstructive approaches that further challenged assumptions about objectivity and truth.
Thus critical theory expands into
critical animal studies, critical criminology, dependency theory and imperialism studies, critical environmental justice, feminist theory and gender studies, critical historiography, intersectionality, critical legal studies, critical pedagogy, postcolonialism, critical race theory, queer theory, and critical terrorism studies.
And the critical theorists expand on
Marxism’s emphasis on analyzing how dominant groups and systems shape and control society through exploitation and oppression[.]
For some reason these devoted activists are blind to the fact that they are the agents of exploitation and oppression in today’s world.
In fact, I would argue that the critical theorists turn Kant’s original notion of our fundamental ignorance about things-in-themselves upside down. Instead of humbly wondering how the world works they are all determined that the world is nothing but hegemony and oppression all the way down and that their analysis is the truth that can inform a Praxis that can lead to a just and equal society.
Notice that the whole point of Kant is that we cannot know the truth-in-itself.
My critique of Critical Theory is a Real Simple collection of Four Laws.
Socialism cannot work, because prices. Prices are a social thing — dispersed, subjective, and local knowledge — and cannot be directed by government.
Administrative government cannot work because the “knowledge problem.” Society works through dispersed, subjective, and local knowledge that government and corporate administrators cannot grasp.
Regulation cannot work, because “regulatory capture.” Actors in the market have dispersed, subjective, and local knowledge that cannot be comprehended by government regulation.
Government programs cannot work, because every government program becomes institutional corruption.
Yes, dear lefties, there is injustice and domination and hegemony all over the place. But a single theory — or even a basket load of critical theory — of oppression just cannot comprehend the depth and complexity of human life and society. Because the way the world works is through dispersed, subjective, and local knowledge, and not through critical theory and Praxis.
Because how do you know that your critical theory is anything other than intellectual fantasy?
'terrific capsule summary.