Theological Journal -August 10 A Brief Primer in Critical Theory

 Since everyone seems to be talking about critical theory today, I thought a brief outline of ch.1 of Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction by Stephen Eric Bronner might be useful and clarifying for some.

Between WWI and WWII a way of thinking arose committed to challenging and changing the alienation, repression, and exploitation ingredient to Western civilization.

CT is more a way of thinking about the world than a dogmatic system of beliefs and axioms. “refuses to identify freedom with any institutional arrangement or fixed system of thought. It questions the hidden assumptions and purposes of competing theories and existing forms of practice.” (1) Its key themes cluster around this ethical focus of changing the world.

Built on the key Enlightenment figures like Kant (moral autonomy of the individual; scientific rationality) and Hegel (consciousness as motor of history), CT emerged out of Marxism. But they were not doctrinaire Marxists! More interested in its method or way of thinking, chiefly about alienation and reification (see below), the role of ideology and the deformation of the individual.

CT was institutionally based originally in the Frankfurt School led by a constellation of brilliant German thinkers.

“The Frankfurt School initially believed that its intellectual work would aid the practical prospects for revolutionary action by the proletariat. As the 1930s wore on, however, the revolution degenerated in the Soviet Union, and its prospects in Europe faded. Fascism had audaciously entered political life, and the humane hopes originally associated with modernity appeared increasingly naïve. The Frankfurt School registered this historical shift by subjecting long-standing leftist beliefs in the inherently progressive character of science and technology, popular education, and mass politics to withering interrogation.” (3)

Motivated by the unrealized deals of the Enlightenment and Marxism, CT developed a method of “negative dialectics” by which they recovered utopian and liberating images of resistance in situations where their realization seemed remote.

Two major obstacles CT saw in the Western way of approaching life were “phenomenolgy” (with its dogmatic claims about how we experience life) and “positivism” (using the natural sciences as framework for understanding society). Both, CT believed fostered an a-historical approach to society and the subversion of true subjectivity.

Alienation - the psychological effects of exploitation and the division of labor - and reification - with how people are treated instrumentally, as “things,” through concepts that have been ripped from their historical context – are, as mentioned above, two chief ideas of CT. How people are played off against themselves and their world are its major concerns. Or as Bronner puts it: “Alienation and reification were thus analyzed in terms of how they imperiled the exercise of subjectivity, robbed the world of meaning and purpose, and turned the individual into a cog in the machine.” (5)

The mass society of the West and its bureaucratic structures

-coopted all forms of resistance,

-obliterated true individuality,

-generated authoritarian personalities, 

-subverted autonomy by conformity, and

-to the degree capitalism aided and abetted these developments it was a regress not progress.

CT always had an anticipatory character – an eschatology the theologian might call it – consisting of “a new utopian sensibility devoid of cruelty and competition.” (6) It’s suspicion of universal claims, fixed narratives, and philosophical foundations all serve this “eschatology.”

A victim of its own success in a lot of ways, CT today struggles to articulate a fresh identity for our times. Critical theory itself needs to be critiqued just as it critiqued the doctrinaire Marxism out of which it came.