Commentary: The Origins and Destiny of Critical Theory

by Carl R. Trueman

Karl Marx once famously commented that Hegel wrote that history repeats itself. Marx then supplemented this by noting that this happens the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. And it is perhaps ironic that this is nowhere more true than among some of Marx’s own progeny, the critical theorists. Critical theory’s first coming was as a sophisticated reappropriation of Hegel for Marxist thought in response to the tragedies of the early 20th century — the Russian Revolution, the failure of the German Spartacist uprising, and the rise of Nazism and Stalinism. Its founding fathers were deeply immersed in the Western philosophical tradition and men of substantial intellect. Its second coming — that of our own day — is as the theoretical part of the farce that is postmodern identity politics, often in a form that feminist philosopher Kathleen Stock has declared to be “adolescently, simplistically monotonic.” From tragedy to farce, as Marx would say.

The problem that gave birth to critical theory was the obvious failure of the narrowly economic Marxism of the Second International, which was the focal point for international socialist thinking and action from 1889 to 1916. For Second International Marxists, the development of capitalism was meant to lead inevitably to revolution and a communist society as the capitalist system collapsed under its own contradictions. The problem was the success of a Marxist revolution in Russia (which was not an advanced industrial capitalist society and therefore lacked a significant industrial working class) and the failure of the same in Germany (which was the most advanced industrial nation in the world, had a well-developed proletariat, and had just lost a war — ideal conditions in theory for a workers’ revolution). The fate of these two nations cast significant doubt on the ability of economic development alone to deliver the revolution. In this context, a number of thinkers, most notably the German Karl Korsch and the Hungarian György Lukács, turned their thoughts to issues of consciousness.

To do so, they revisited the roots of Marx’s own thinking in the thought of Hegel. Marx famously declared that he had turned Hegel upside down (and therefore the right way up) by moving from Hegel’s focus on ideas to focusing on material conditions. Put simply, where Hegel had seen thought as foundational to the material conditions and relations of society, Marx saw material/economic conditions as foundational to the way people think. This materialist revolt against idealism was an article of faith for Marxists in the early 20th century.

In his important work, History and Class Consciousness, Lukács made a number of claims that were to be developed in later critical theory. First, he identified “ideology” as the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie projected onto the proletariat. In layman’s terms, this meant that the values, practices, and claims about reality that the middle class needed to maintain its status were effectively made normative for all and not simply by imposition. The working class internalized these values and thus were willing, if unwitting, instruments of their own oppression. Marx had made a similar point about religion in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and had thus demanded that critique of religion be the foundation of revolutionary politics: stripping away false hope being a necessary prerequisite to workers understanding and embracing true hope. Lukács’ second point referred to reification, a term he used to refer to the way in which social and economic relations took on lives of their own in the consciousness of the people and thus came to drive how such relations were understood. Again, building on Marx — this time the latter’s notion of the commodity fetish, the attribution of power to something that had no intrinsic power — he pointed to the way in which socially constructed conventions and arrangements took on a life and power of their own and to which the individual was then subordinated in status and importance. We see this today in how we speak of “the economy,” as if there was some entity that existed independently of the individuals involved in economic production.

The kind of Marxism that Lukács represented might be termed “critical Marxism.” Its task was the unmasking of the socially constructed ideas and institutions that presented themselves as real, solid, natural, and thus irresistible facts of life but were really keeping the corrupt system in place. It was this mantle that a group of thinkers at the Institute for Social Research at Goethe University in Frankfurt assumed.

Founded in 1929, the Institute became home to what is known as the Frankfurt School. As with Lukács and Korsch, its leading lights sought to reconstruct Marxism by drawing upon the earlier Hegelian tradition out of which the later Marx emerged. In so doing, they developed a rich and variegated tradition of a revolutionary criticism of modern Western society that ranged from discussion of aesthetics to sexual morality and psychology to photography. While the range of critical theory produced by the Frankfurt School is vast, a number of influential themes can be easily identified.

First, and most basically, they saw critical theory as revolutionary. The early Frankfurt School took very seriously the spirit of the 11th of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach. This declared that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various way; the point is to change it.” Philosophy was thus not to be a merely descriptive discipline, but a transformative one. As Max Horkheimer declared in an early programmatic essay, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” its goal was the achievement of social justice.

The connection between theory and practice in Marx had always been vexed, struggling with the obvious logical problem inherent in a theory that itself claimed to prioritize practice over theory. But for the Frankfurt School, theory was practice. It was not just theory but critical theory. And this theoretical critique of society was a key element in the revolutionary transformation of society.

The Frankfurt School saw exposing false consciousness as one of its central tasks. In perhaps the most important book ever to emerge from its faculty, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno offered a critique of the modern society to which the philosophical Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, and the rise of industrialization had given birth. They argued, for example, that the language of liberty had been used to dethrone the old religious and feudal hierarchies but had also been a manipulative means of keeping the new, bourgeois order in place by couching its class domination in the rhetoric of universal liberation. Reason too was much the same: it provided an apparently objective (and thus irrefutable) basis for the rise of…