What remains of critical theory?

“What do those who still talk about revolution have in mind?” Axel Honneth, current representative of the “third generation” of Critical Theory, recently asked. Stathis Kouvélakis intends to respond to this question through a vast work of reconstruction of the trajectory of the Frankfurt School, by striving to reconnect with the revolutionary ambition that originally animated this theoretical project. A dual ambition therefore motivates this work: on the one hand, it is a question of understanding the progressive abandonment of the project of developing a radical critique of capitalist societies within the Frankfurt School and, on the other hand, of thinking about the conditions for a contemporary revival of this original project. By thus articulating “the history of ideas” with a “work on concepts”, it is ultimately the relevance of a “theory linked to the project of social emancipation” (p. 26) that the author aims to demonstrate.

Historicity of the “critical theory of society”

Developed in the early 1930s by a small group of Marxist intellectuals within the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Critical Theory intended to break with “traditional theory” by claiming its articulation with the historical dynamic that it aimed to grasp: “the influence of social evolution on the structure of theory is part of its very theses”, wrote Horkheimer in his founding text of 1937. To analyze the history of this theoretical tradition without breaking with its constitutive principle, the author proposes to examine its conceptual evolutions based on the different socio-historical configurations within which they were developed. It is this attention to the specificity of a theory claiming its historicity that undoubtedly constitutes the major contribution of this richly documented work: by placing Horkheimer’s theoretical and practical positions in the broader context of anti-fascist intellectual mobilizations (pp. 121-161), or by analyzing the complex role played by the Institute for Social Research in the enterprise of “democratic re-education” led by the Federal Republic of Germany (pp. 250-270), this book provides essential elements for understanding a theoretical discourse that claims its place within the dynamic reality that it aims to illuminate.

As the author convincingly explains, it is only on the basis of this renewed understanding that the critique of contemporary developments in this theoretical tradition can be effectively conducted. By showing, for example, that Habermas’ critique of the bureaucratic tendencies of the welfare state was developed in parallel with its destructuring by ordo-liberal policies, the work demonstrates a mismatch between theoretical discourse and the transformations of social reality, which directly threatens its claim to adequately grasp its object. Given the interest of this approach, one can nevertheless regret that the desire to demonstrate a “domestication of Critical Theory” sometimes leads the author to focus on the sole criterion of “radicality” to evaluate the relevance of the discourses examined. From the point of view of Critical Theory itself, this criterion remains abstract, formal, or “non-dialectical”, if it is not constantly articulated with the requirement to maintain a hold on the reality that is to be criticized. The question then obviously becomes how to develop a description of contemporary reality that is an alternative to that proposed by current Critical Theory: from what type of theoretical work can we develop this “concrete analysis of concrete situations” that the author describes as the main task of materialist discourse (p. 529)?

Critical Theory as Overcoming the Opposition Between Philosophy and Social Sciences

From the point of view of the first “critical theory of society”, whose relevance the work seeks to demonstrate, theoretical discourse can only identify concrete trends (and obstacles) to emancipation on the condition of renouncing the solitude of philosophical reflection. Only a theory capable of “organizing on the basis of philosophical questioning” empirical investigations attentive to the diversity of socio-historical phenomena can succeed in identifying, within social reality itself, trends towards emancipation that would allow criticism to be anchored in the reality of historical processes. From then on, the whole challenge of the interdisciplinary work carried out within the Institute directed by Horkheimer was to conceive of a “dialectical imbrication of philosophical theory and scientific practice” (sociological, economic, psychoanalytic, etc.). From this perspective, philosophical discourse could therefore only guide the development of reflexivity produced by the social sciences on the condition of constantly revising its own conceptuality in the light of the specificity, revealed by the investigation, of the phenomena examined. However, it is precisely this “dialectical imbrication” between conceptual reflection and empirical investigation that contemporary Critical Theory – by devoting itself to the rational foundation of norms of action and thought – has finally abandoned.

To describe this return to traditional philosophical practice, the author traces with precision the way in which the critique of political economy was progressively abandoned in favor of an idealized description of the principles of the market economy. In light of the interdisciplinary ambition that had animated it, the analysis of the evolution of this school of thought nevertheless requires to be completed. As indicated by the way in which sociological and psychoanalytic discourse is integrated into the framework of theories of communication (Habermas) or recognition (Honneth), the abandonment of Marxist conceptuality must be considered as an indication of a more general tendency of contemporary Critical Theory to neglect the critique of the cardinal concepts of classical political philosophy carried out by the social sciences. And for good reason: in order to be able to describe modern institutions as the expression of a deliberation between autonomous individuals, these theories seem to have been forced to postulate the existence of a free subjectivity that would precede its own socialization. Yet it is precisely this fiction of an always-already-given subject that discourses centered on the social production of individuality invite us to question. Far from having only abandoned the Marxist analysis of capitalist structures, contemporary Critical Theory has also neglected the sociological and psychoanalytical analysis of the social instances of the formation of subjectivities. Despite their diversity, all the discourses mobilized by the founders of the Frankfurt School (Freudian theory, classical sociology, etc.) agree in analyzing the way in which the practices and representations that structure subjectivities impose themselves on the will of socialized individuals in a given socio-historical configuration. It is this tension between the ideal of autonomy and its own social conditions of possibility – linked to the “contradictory form that collective activity takes” in modernity – that constituted the central object of the first “critical theory of society.”

The conditions for an update of Critical Theory

Having reached this conclusion, the question – raised by the work – of the conditions for an update of this project can finally be posed. If it is true that Horkheimer’s aim was to analyse not only capitalist structures, but above all the “relationship between the economic life of society, the psychological development of individuals and cultural transformations”, it is important to ask from which concrete object of analysis such a relationship can be examined. Is it a question of resuming today the analysis of the link between the modalities of exercising authority and the structural transformations of the family institution, which constituted the central object of the Institute’s interdisciplinary research? Concerning the discourses that would allow us to “reconnect today with the founding questioning of Critical Theory”, the work concludes by evoking the fruitfulness of “other leading figures of ‘Western Marxism'” (p. 552), emphasizing in particular the contribution of Lukàcs and Gramsci. But it seems difficult to demonstrate the relevance of a return to these alternative paths of historical materialism without indicating through what type of investigation these theoretical frameworks would allow us to renew the analysis of the economic and cultural determinations of the processes of subjectivation. This question is indeed necessary, to the extent that a break with what the work calls “domesticated critical theory” was recently made in Frankfurt, based on a theoretical tradition foreign to the critique of political economy. In the perspective opened up by these works, the critique of the philosophical idealization of modernity must rather be conducted based on genealogical investigations into the instances of formation of subjectivities. The debate on the conditions for a re-actualization of the “critical theory of society” is therefore only just beginning.

To contribute to this debate, we can finally ask ourselves whether the interest of the interdisciplinary project of the founders of Critical Theory today does not lie in its capacity to displace the traditional question of the role of theoretical practices in relation to movements and practices of emancipation. In France, the debate still seems polarized by the opposition between the figure of the “total intellectual” – embodied above all by Sartre -, which consists of mobilizing philosophical reflection to enlighten subjects on their own practices, and the figure of the “specific intellectual” – theorized by Foucault -, which aims rather to intervene locally to free the multiple practices of struggle from the structures of power that monopolize “consciousness as knowledge”. In the context of this opposition, it seems difficult to maintain the ambition of grasping a social totality that escapes the immediate grasp of the actors, without returning to the classic posture of a philosophical discourse claiming to order reality by its enlightened consciousness. Now, it is precisely this alternative that the interdisciplinary ambition contained in the idea of ​​a “critical theory of society” allows us to go beyond: by proposing to develop, through collective research work, a dynamic understanding of the totality renewed by the analysis of the diversity of historical situations, Critical Theory manifests, in action, the possibility of a new articulation between theoretical activity and practices oriented towards emancipation.