Critical Theory is a social theory that aims to critique and change society as a whole. Critical theories attempt to find the underlying assumptions in social life that keep people from fully and truly understanding how the world works.
These underlying assumptions create what critical theorists call “false consciousness”: people accepting, or even defending, ideas that work against their own interests.
They rarely notice it happening. The result is a society that feels natural rather than one blocking real progress toward democracy.
Critical Theory, first emerging from Horkheimer at the Frankfurt School, bridges its reach to ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of history.
Philosophy matters to critical theorists. They fold it into social-science methods, making research practical enough to advance the moral cause of freeing people from domination and oppression (Horkheimer, 1993).
Critical Theory is most associated with the Frankfurt School, beginning with Horkheimer and Adorno and continuing through Marcuse and Habermas.
Critical Theory has extended to many other disciplines, such as feminism, critical race theory, and critiques of colonialism.
Key Points
- Core Aim: Critical theories aim to change and critique society as a whole by finding the underlying assumptions in social life that prevent people from participating in a “true democracy.”
- Frankfurt School Origins: Critical Theory developed in the Frankfurt school from scholars such as Horkheimer and Adorno with an emphasis on examining and deconstructing fascism and mass media.
- Habermas’s Lifeworld: Habermas continued the tradition of Critical Theory through his notion of the lifeworld and the public sphere. He theorized that political and economic institutions had invaded public life, leading to a lack of nuance in discourse and preventing people from participating in a “real democracy.”
- Later Branches: Critical Theory morphed into critical legal theory in the latter 20th century, which eventually gave rise to branches such as critical race and critical gender theory.
Types of Critical Theory: Gender, Race, and Globalization
Critical Theories of Gender
Critical theories of gender ask a specific question. How do literature and other cultural media reinforce, or undermine, the economic, political, social, and psychological oppression of different genders?
Critical feminist theories focus especially on power. They explain the origins and consequences of gender relations, particularly those that privilege men.
These theories study how gender assumptions get produced and reproduced. They also study how such assumptions are resisted and changed. That happens through the everyday experiences of men and women (Coakley & Pike, 2014).
Critical theories of gender share something with critical theories of race. Both trace their roots to critical legal studies.
Critical Theories of Race
Racism is prevalent in everyday life. Critical Theory scholars agree that its ideology and assumptions are so deeply built into political and legal structures that they become nearly invisible (Parker & Roberts, 2005).
The critical study of race and ethnicity centers on the experiences of racial oppression. It challenges existing assumptions about how race itself gets constructed.
Critical theories of race can also trace their roots to philosophical, historical, and sociological critiques of oppression, such as Marxism, feminist theory, and postcolonialism (Parker and Roberts, 2005).
Critical Race Theory emerged from the critical legal studies movement. It originated at Harvard Law School in the early 1980s.
Law professors and students there criticized the law itself. It served, they argued, to privilege the wealthy and powerful in US society while blocking the poor from using the courts to right their own wrongs (Parker & Roberts, 2005).
One core tenet of critical race theory is this: classical racism has subsided, but everyday racism has not.
It survives in mundane practices and events, including “microaggressions” and other subtle, automatic, non-verbal exchanges.
A microaggression can be small. An educational institution commits one, for example, by treating black male students’ engagement with black youth culture as predatory. That framing creates a hostile environment for African American students (Parker & Roberts, 2005).
Globalization
One criticism of the Frankfurt School is straightforward. It lacked a solid grounding in social reality, Kozlarek (2001) argues.
Kozlarek (2001) argues that Horkheimer and Adorno take an overly Eurocentric stance. Eurocentrism, in his view, is a crucial impediment to Critical Theory, and he suggests alternatives for modern Critical Theory research.
Kozlarek rejects that approach entirely. He rejects philosophically constructing ideas of what should be “normal” or an “ideal society.” Instead, one should ask where Critical Theory’s underlying assumptions come from, and what sociocultural functions they served, and still serve.
Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School
Critical Theory has passed through many distinct historical phases. All of them, however, trace back to the Frankfurt School.
The Frankfurt School opened as the Institute for Social Research in the 1920s. Fascism was rising across Germany and Italy at the time. The theorists then went into exile, first in Switzerland and later in the United States. They returned to Frankfurt in 1953.
According to the Frankfurt School theorists, a “Critical Theory” differs from a “traditional” theory in one key way: it has a specific practical purpose.
That purpose is to promote an understanding of the world that leads to human “emancipation from slavery” (Horkheimer, 1972).
In order for a Critical Theory to be a Critical Theory in Horkheimer’s view, it must be explanatory, practical, and normative.
By this, Horkheimer means the theory must explain what is wrong with the current social reality. It must also identify who can change that reality. It must also provide achievable, practical objectives for social transformation, along with ways of criticizing those objectives (Horkheimer, 1972).
Critical Theory calls this method immanent critique. It holds societies to their own declared ideals, asking whether a society that proclaims freedom and equality actually delivers them in its laws, media, and economic life.
Research that furthers Critical Theory must, in this view, combine psychological, cultural, and social dimensions, as well as an examination of institutional forms of domination.
Horkheimer’s Critical Theory was heavily influenced by Marxism. It aimed to transform capitalist society into a more consensual one.
By this, Horkheimer meant something simple. A capitalist society could only be transformed by becoming more democratic. Every controllable condition of social life would then be determined by the consensus of the people living in that society (Horkheimer, 1972).
The Frankfurt School theorists extended the work of Marx, Weber, and Freud. They also weighed the pull of authoritarian regimes. And they traced the ties between art, technology, mass society, and social psychology.
Initial Concerns of the Frankfurt School
Herbert Marcuse, another key Frankfurt School theorist, argued that advanced industrial societies had become “one-dimensional.” He meant that consumer culture had saturated everyday life with manufactured needs and false satisfactions. People, as a result, lost the capacity to imagine, or even desire, a genuinely different way of living (Marcuse, 1964).
Two more concerns follow. The sections below cover the erosion of real democracy, and the critique of ideology through mass culture.
Democracy
Critical Theory’s early phases had one central goal. They tried to separate “real democracy” from the forms of government then common in Western societies.
Real democracy, critical theorists argued, is rational. It lets individuals control the social processes that shape their own lives and choices.
Later phases turned to anti-democratic trends, such as the rise of fascism in the 1930s. Fascist states and authoritarian personalities became the focus.
Horkheimer treated these anti-democratic trends, and a process he called reification, as forces undermining people’s control over their own social circumstances.
Reification is a complex idea. Something immaterial, such as happiness, fear, or evil, gets treated as though it were a material thing.
Applied to Critical Theory’s early worries about authoritarianism, this meant something specific. Abstract but fascist social principles spread, and societies grew more fascist in concrete, everyday ways.
Reification, 1940s critical theorists argued, happened at two levels. At the small scale, theorists could examine the psychological conditions that led people to support democracy or authoritarianism.
At the larger scale, reification worked differently. People explained enduring societal trends by projecting their own democratic or authoritarian principles onto retellings of history (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
Habermas wanted an intermediate level of analysis, between the individual and the whole of society. He called it the “public sphere,” or Offentlichkeit.
Ideology Critique
One of the Frankfurt School’s main concerns was the rise of “mass culture.” New technology let cultural products, such as music, movies, and art, reach audiences on a massive scale.
Horkheimer and Adorno named this phenomenon the culture industry.
It meant the manufacture of standardised entertainment that turns even leisure into a site of manipulation and passive consumption, rather than genuine liberation (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1973).
Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse speculated that this technology let audiences consume content passively instead of engaging with one another. The result, they argued, was a public grown intellectually inactive and politically passive.
Contemporary Critical Theory: Habermas
Habermas belonged to Critical Theory’s second generation. His version of Critical Theory moved beyond the Frankfurt School’s original roots toward something closer to American pragmatism. Pragmatism holds that the meaning and truth of an idea are functions of its practical outcome.
Habermas’s work in Critical Theory tackled two main issues. One was justifying the normative dimension of critical social theory. The other was connecting that theory to political practice.
These problems were carried over from the Frankfurt school (Roderick, 1986).
The first problem asked what counts as rational criticism of society. The second asked how such criticisms could help build a more rational society.
Habermas identified three kinds of knowledge. Empirical knowledge is technical or scientific. Hermeneutic, or interpretive, knowledge is concerned with human understanding and cooperation. Critical knowledge, the third kind, is focused on freeing humans from societal assumptions.
Habermas acknowledged that science cannot be value-free. Those who study society are themselves part of its subject matter. Critical Theory, to Habermas, unmasks the distortions, representations, and politics embedded in our knowledge and speech.
The Lifeworld
Habermas focused on the idea of the lifeworld, which is a person’s everyday life and experiences. The lifeworld encompasses culture, social relations, and everyday communication.
Habermas’s theory is that the lifeworld is increasingly being taken over by political and economic systems. Politics is about power. So attempts by politicians and parties to gain power end up affecting everyday life.
Capitalism shapes people’s lives too. People talk about companies, work at them, and consume constantly, Habermas observed.
He believed the lifeworld could not be reduced to what he called “media,” meaning the power of the state and of money.
Yet reality proved different. The modern state and economy imposed their own media on the lifeworld anyway. As money and politics dominate people’s local lifeworld, they block the path to a “true democracy.”
Value rationality is tied to the lifeworld. It means pursuing value-based goals that make life meaningful, such as being a good father. Instrumental rationality, by contrast, belongs to the state and economy. It means calculating the means needed to reach a particular end.
Modern social structure has overtaken everyday relationships. Money and power now function as the keys to success, and even to what counts as morally right.
Habermas stressed that money and power cannot be the sole foundation for consensus and communication. The instrumental relationships people form while chasing them are not enough.
The Colonization of the Public Sphere
Habermas also wrote about the colonization of the public sphere. News driven by profit, entertainment, and oversimplification, he believed, had come to dominate public life.
These forces rarely explored the nuances of an issue through lengthy public debate. Instead, they pushed people toward simplified arguments.
Habermas set an ideal for public discourse: the ideal speech community. He distinguished communicative action, meant simply to communicate, from strategic speech. Strategic speech is instrumentally based, and it permeates the lifeworld under capitalist societies.
Strategic speech is not really about communicating. Instead, those who use it are trying to manipulate people toward a chosen end.
Habermas believed enlightenment and modernity promised something specific. A society where people could talk to reach consensus and make reasoned decisions.
That requires real conditions. Everyone needs an equal chance to speak without coercion, the freedom to discuss any topic, and speech kept free from ideology.
Such a situation is the ideal speech community, and it is the basis of civil society. That civil society, in turn, needs a liberal political culture, one that promotes equality and draws firm boundaries between large institutions and the lifeworld.
In a real democracy’s public sphere, state power stays limited. People can use persuasion, but they cannot seize political power there (Roderick, 1986).
Critical Evaluation
As a broad-ranging philosophical project, Critical Theory has faced sustained tension between theorists, both within a single generation and across the tradition’s different generations.
Critical Theory has also drawn criticism from outside.
Four objections stand out:
- No Rational Standards: Critical Theory struggles to justify why its account of society beats rival theories of knowledge, science, or practice, and even sympathetic critics list traits such as cliquishness and elitism that narrow its reach.
- Feminist Critique: Feminist scholars argue that Critical Theory’s own totalizing claims about truth can become another form of domination rather than liberation.
No Rational Standards
Perhaps the most significant criticism of Critical Theory is that it fails to provide rational standards for showing itself superior to rival theories of knowledge, science, or practice. Even sympathetic critics agree the tradition has real weaknesses.
Gibson (1986) lists cliquishness, conformity, elitism, immodesty, anti-individualism, contradictoriness, criticalness, and naivety among the traits that limit critical theories’ reach. A related worry concerns lived experience.
Hughes and Hughes, writing of Habermas’s theory of ideal public discourse, argue it “says much about rational talkers talking, but very little about actors acting.” Felt, perceptive, and bodily experience, they suggest, does not fit neatly into these theories (Hughes & Hughes, 1990).
Feminist Critique
Critical Theory has also drawn criticism from a feminist perspective.
This critique holds that critical theories can become as narrow and oppressive as the rationalization, bureaucratization, and cultures they set out to unmask and change.
Ellsworth (1989) makes the point directly. Critical theories, she argues, are often so tied to their own vision of the truth that they fail to see themselves as merely one voice among many.
Enlightening others about their false consciousness, she suggests, may become a form of domination rather than liberation.
References
Coakley, J., & Pike, E. (2014). EBOOK: Sports in Society. McGraw Hill.
Critical Theory. (2005). In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/
Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard educational review, 59(3), 297-325.
Gibson, R. (1986). Critical Theory and education. Hodder and Stoughton.
Habermas, Jürgen (1990a): Moral consciousness and communicative action. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (trans.). Maldon, MA: Polity Press.
Horkheimer, M. (1972). Critical Theory: Selected essays (Vol. 1). A&C Black.
Horkheimer, M. (1993). The present situation of social philosophy and the tasks of an institute for social research. Between philosophy and social science: Selected early writings, 11.
Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. (1973). The Dialectic of Enlightenment (London, Allen Lane).
Kozlarek, O. (2001). Critical Theory and the challenge of globalization. International Sociology, 16(4), 607-622.
Parker, L., & Roberts, L. (2005). Critical theories of race. RESEARCH METHODS, 74.
Roderick, R. (1986). Habermas and the foundations of Critical Theory. Macmillan International Higher Education.
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