critical essays on marxist theory

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32 Student Example: Marxist Criticism

The following student essay example of Marxist Criticism is taken from Beginnings and Endings: A Critical Edition . This is the publication created by students in English 211. This essay discusses Raymond Carver’s short story, “A Small, Good Thing.”

“A Small, Good Thing” by Raymond Carver and the 1980s AIDS Epidemic

By Jasper Chappel

Raymond Carver’s short story “A Small, Good Thing” was published in 1983, in his collection Cathedral. In 1983 in the United States, the AIDS epidemic was barely beginning to be understood by the CDC and the general public. Under President Ronald Reagan since 1981, anti-communist and pro-capitalist sentiment was expected of Americans because of tense relations with the USSR. This political climate informed Carver’s writing of “A Small, Good Thing,” and the previous version of the same story published in 1981, titled “The Bath;” Carver’s personal life partially influenced the drastic changes between each story, and so did the emerging political tensions caused by the AIDS epidemic and relations with the USSR. “A Small, Good Thing,” despite being written in a turbulent time, encourages people to value each other, put less trust in institutions such as government and healthcare, and ultimately come together in times of hardship.

The baker is a criticism of capitalism and excessive labor with unfair pay. He has lost part of his humanity to his work, because maintaining financial security is a more immediate concern than forming relationships; he and other unnamed employees represent the proletariat. His behavior throughout the story shows his lack of feeling towards other people, and at the end, he admits as much, saying, “I’m just a baker. I don’t claim to be anything else… [M]aybe years ago I was a different kind of human being” (page 26). Industry has forced the characters to lose their individuality – none of the nurses are named or physically distinguishable from each other, and they do not offer Ann and Howard comfort or answers. When asked questions about Scotty’s condition, they simply say, “Doctor Francis will be here in a few minutes,” (page 6). Doctor Francis has reached a high enough class that he can retain some humanity while still doing his job, which is why he is afforded a name. However, he is nearing the status of the bourgeoisie, which is ultimately why he fails to give Scotty the correct diagnosis and treatment. He and Howard are somewhat similar in this regard; because Howard has the privilege to leave his job in the middle of a work day, and for an indefinite amount of time when Scotty is hospitalized, the audience can assume Howard is nearing a high-class position. He is not expendable, like a nurse or a baker would be.

Ann appears to be a full-time mom, and while this is unpaid labor, the reader is led to understand her emotions the most because she retains the most humanity in her job; she simply has the privilege to not work for a company. Her trade is motherhood, and when this is stripped from her, she feels more aimless than the others; just like if the nurse or the baker lost their positions, Ann forms her identity around the job of being a mom. The difference is that it is her job to empathize with others, to care for others, and she can find another niche to fill without sending in an application first. Her grief manifests in being unable to care for her son, despite her skills; she knows Scotty is in a coma and that something has gone horribly wrong, but because the bourgeoisie does not value self-employed, unpaid labor, her concerns are brushed aside.

From one perspective, Ann benefits from being a mother. From another, her characterization has reduced her to being only a mother. The only outside information we have for another main character is what Howard and the baker tell us about their lives. While Howard is driving home from the hospital, he reflects on his life and his good fortune, or his privilege. Ann does not do the same – the audience is unsure of whether Ann thinks the marriage is successful, if she went to college, or if she gave anything up to become a mother. She is only a mother and wife – a loving one, but a one-dimensional character. It seems that Ann is defined only by the fact she has a son. Ann’s designated role to help the men in the story remember their humanity is a stereotypically feminine role that is largely informed by Raymond Carver’s identity and life experiences, but is also in line with the idea that motherhood is a full-time job unrecognized by capitalism.

The bourgeoisie in this story are best represented by the hospital and doctor, and the situation with Scotty exposes the flawed system the proletariat have to live under. Scotty represents its most vulnerable victims, and the family Ann meets in the lobby of the hospital represents how tragedy can touch all our lives regardless of class or race. Ann and Howard learn through the events of the story, despite being middle-class and white, that certain tragedies touch all lives; this is a translation of the AIDS epidemic into literature. Disease does not discriminate based off class, sexuality, or race, but institutions and governments do.

Scotty has no speaking lines–the narrator only supplies information on what he saying, so the audience doesn’t have access to his exact words. All we know about him is that he probably likes aliens, has one friend he used to walk to school with, and “howls” before he dies, a very inhuman noise. Even though the story revolves around his injury, he only serves as a character who affects other characters. His injury allows the audience to see the contrast between employees who take care of people as a job, and people who take care of others free from industry interference. He also serves to bring the baker and Ann together; the baker needed to be reminded of his humanity and have a reason to turn his back on the capitalist system for a while. Ann is the most likely character to help him reconnect with his humanity, and in her grief she is more human than any other character. Although Howard also shows his humanity in his grief, it is Ann who helps him along, “’There, there,’ she said tenderly. ‘Howard, he’s gone. He’s gone now and we’ll have to get used to that. To being alone” (page 22). When Scotty’s death makes his parents feel alienated, just as capitalism alienates people from each other to prevent an uprising, they start to accept this; then the baker calls again, and Ann’s anger at his behavior pushes them into action, and eventually reconciliation and comfort.

When Ann encounters the black family in the waiting room, they serve as a mirror for her situation, and represent understanding each other’s humanity despite differences. There is a previous version of this short story called “The Bath,” which does not specify the race of the family, does not include the two dark-skinned orderlies, and lacks the reconciliation with the baker. Part of the fear around AIDS was due to the uncertainty about how it spread, but there was also an element of stigma around African-American populations and their inaccurate image in the media as drug users (therefore, re-use needles and spread AIDS). Early on, it became clear that AIDS was spreading through bodily fluids, but more information than that tended to be conflicting.

In 1985, according to the article “Save Our Kids, Keep AIDS Out” by Jennifer Brier, black and white families would unite in Queens to protest the CDC regulations stating that children diagnosed with AIDS should be allowed in public schools. We can see this sentiment represented before this occurrence in Ann’s desire to connect with the black family in the waiting room. Just like the mothers in the article fear their children being exposed to AIDS at school, a hospital must have been a nightmare for a mother in this time period. Seeing Scotty have his blood drawn, and other needles inserted into his veins, probably caused her panic each time; not only because his condition was not improving, but also for the risk of contracting AIDS the longer he stayed in the hospital. Scotty’s hospital stay can be considered a metaphor for how AIDS was considered during the time of publication. It comes out of nowhere, just like the car that hit Scotty, then disappeared without a trace. Those who are hit seem fine at first, but progressively, their condition declines. The doctors and nurses do not know enough about the disease, and sometimes, their intuition is wrong, causing tragic deaths. The message the audience is left with is this: a mother knows best for her child. This is echoed in the later movement in Queens, “Thus, parents and local communities, not a dishonest city bureaucracy or out-of-touch scientific establishment, were better able to make decisions about local children” (Brier 4).

In “A Small, Good Thing,” instead of exploiting the fear people had around the AIDS epidemic, Carver encourages people to find common ground and come together. Doctor Francis expresses his regrets in not being able to save Scotty, the family in the waiting room symbolizes connecting with each other despite differences, and the baker is able to acknowledge his loss of humanity over the years after witnessing Ann and Howard’s grief. This short story is a touching addition to the literary time period, and handles each political undertone with care and empathy.

Works Cited

Brier, Jennifer. “‘Save Our Kids, Keep AIDS out:” Anti-AIDS Activism and the Legacy of Community Control in Queens, New York.” Journal of Social History, vol. 39, no. 4, 2006, pp. 965–987. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3790237 . Accessed 14 May 2021.

Carver, Raymond. “A Small, Good Thing.” Ploughshares, vol. 8, no. 2/3, 1982, pp. 213–240. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40348924 . Accessed 14 May 2021.

Carver, Raymond. “The Bath.” Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, no. 6, 1981, pp. 32–41. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42744338 . Accessed 14 May 2021.

McCaffery, Larry, et al. “An Interview with Raymond Carver.” Mississippi Review, vol. 14, no. 1/2, 1985, pp. 62–82. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20115387 . Accessed 14 May 2021.

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Marxist Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reading Guide

Daniel Hartley

(First published in French at: http://revueperiode.net/guide-de-lecture-critique-litteraire-marxiste/ )

Marxist literary criticism investigates literature’s role in the class struggle. The best general introductions in English remain Terry Eagleton’s Marxism and Literary Criticism (Routledge, 2002 [1976]) and, a more difficult but foundational book, Fredric Jameson’s Marxism and Form (Princeton UP, 1971). The best anthology in English remains Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne’s Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (Blackwell, 1996). The bibliographic essay that follows does not aim to be exhaustive; because it is quite long, I have indicated what I take to be the major texts of the tradition with a double asterisk and bold font: ** .

From Marx to Stalinist Russia

It is well-known that Marx himself was a voracious reader across multiple languages and that, as a young man, he composed poetry as well as an unfinished novel and fragments of a play. S.S. Prawer’s Karl Marx and World Literature (Verso, 2011 [1976]) is the definitive guide to all literary aspects of Marx’s writings. Marx and Engels also expressed views on specific literary works or authors in various contexts. Three in particular are well known: in The Holy Family (1845), Marx and Engels submit Eugène Sue’s global bestseller The Mysteries of Paris to a rigorous literary and ideological critique, which became important for Louis Althusser’s theory of melodrama (see ‘The “Piccolo Teatro”: Bertolazzi and Brecht’ in For Marx (Verso, 2005 [1965])); both Marx and Engels sent letters to Ferdinand Lassalle, a German lawyer and socialist, expressing reservations about his play Franz von Sickingen (1858-9), which they felt had downplayed the historical role of plebeian and peasant elements in the 1522-3 uprising of the Swabian and Rheinland nobility, thereby diminishing the tragic scope of his drama and causing his characters to be two-dimensional mouthpieces of history; finally, Marx planned but never actually wrote a whole volume on Balzac’s La Comédie humaine , of which Engels said that he had ‘learned more [from it] than from all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period together.’ Marx and Engels’ interest in Balzac is particularly important since it suggests that literary prowess and a capacity to represent the fundamental social dynamics of a given historical period are not dependent upon an author’s self-avowed political positions (Balzac was a royalist). This point would become important for theories of realism developed by György Lukács [1] and Fredric Jameson. Various fragments of Marx and Engels’ writings on art and literature have been collected by Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski in Marx and Engels on Literature and Art: A Selection of Writings (Telos Press, 1973). Marx and Engels’ ultimate influence on what became ‘Marxist literary criticism’ is less a result of these isolated fragments than the historical materialist method as such.

A useful, if overly simplistic, periodisation of Marxist literary criticism has been proposed by Terry Eagleton in the introduction to his and Drew Milne’s Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (Blackwell, 1996). Eagleton divides Marxist criticism into four kinds: anthropological, political, ideological, and economic (I shall focus on the first three). ‘Anthropological’ criticism, which he claims predominated during the period of the Second International (1889-1916), asks such fundamental questions as: what is the function of art within social evolution? What are the relations between art and human labour? What are the social functions of art and what is its relation to myth? This approach obtained (partially) in such works as G.V. Plekhanov’s Art and Social Life (Foreign Languages Press, 1957 [1912]) and Christopher Caudwell’s Illusion and Reality (Macmillan, 1937). ‘Political’ criticism dates to the Bolsheviks and their preparation for – and defence of – the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and, especially, 1917. Lenin’s essays on Tolstoy from 1908-11, collected in On Literature and Art (Progress Publishers, 1970), argue that the contradictions in Tolstoy’s work between advanced anti-capitalist critique and patriarchal, moralistic Christianity are a ‘mirror’ of late nineteenth-century Russian life and the weakness of residually feudal peasant elements of the 1905 revolution. (This argument was famously revisited by Pierre Macherey in his major Althusserian work of literary theory, Towards a Theory of Literary Production (Routledge Classics, 2006 [1966])). The most important text of this period, however, is almost certainly Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution** (Haymarket, 2005 [1925]). A landmark survey of the entire Russian literary terrain, it provides a unique record of the literary and stylistic upheavals brought about by social revolution. The book locates in literary forms and styles the ambiguous political tendencies of their authors, and is driven by the ultimate goal of producing a culture and collective subjectivity adequate to the construction of socialism.

This period of revolutionary ferment also gave rise to one of the most powerful and sophisticated intellectual schools in the history of Marxist literary criticism: the Bakhtin Circle. Led by Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (whose own relation to the Marxist tradition is ambiguous), the Circle produced subtle philosophical analyses of the social and cultural issues posed by the Russian Revolution and its degeneration into Stalinist dictatorship. Centred around the key idea of dialogism , which holds that language and literature are formed in a dynamic, conflictual process of social interaction, the Circle distinguished between monologic forms such as epic and poetry (associated with the monologism of Stalinism itself), and the novel whose heteroglossia (a polyphonic combination of social and literary idioms) and dialogism imbue it with a critical, popular resistance. Key works include Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (University of Minnesota Press, 1984 [1929/ 2 nd revised edition 1963]), his four key articles on the novel (anthologised in English as The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays** (University of Texas Press, 1981 [1934-41])), and Rabelais and His World (MIT Press, 1968 [1965]). Often overshadowed by Bakhtin, but of equal importance, are P.N. Medvedev’s masterly book-length Marxist critique of Russian formalism (which is also a social theory of literature in its own right), The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship** (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978 [1928]), and V.N. Voloshinov’s Marxist theory of language: Marxism and the Philosophy of Language** (Harvard UP, 1986 [1929]). The latter was important to Raymond Williams’ later work (he discovered it by chance on a library shelf at Cambridge) and has informed Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s seminal A Marxist Philosophy of Language (Haymarket, 2004).

‘Western Marxism’ and Beyond

Eagleton dates his third category, ‘ideological criticism,’ to the period of ‘Western Marxism.’ The latter is a much-contested notion that became influential in the Anglophone world following the publication of Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism (Verso, 1976), a study of intellectuals including György Lukács, Karl Korsch, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, Galvano Della Volpe, and Lucio Colletti. Anderson claims that, in contradistinction to previous generations of Marxists, Western Marxism is characterised by a period of political defeat (to fascism in the 1930s), a structural divorce of Marxist intellectuals from the masses, and – consequently – a written style that is often complex, obscure or antithetical to practical political action. Whether or not one endorses Anderson’s account, it is a useful periodising category.

If Lenin and Trotsky were concerned with literature primarily as an extension of immediate political struggles, critics of the mid-century were far closer to the preoccupations of the Bakhtin Circle, understanding literature as indirectly political – not least through the ideology of form . If Soviet socialist realism, the definitive study of which is Régine Robin’s Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic (Stanford UP, 1992 [1986]), was largely indifferent to form and style and fixated on ‘transparent’ heroic-proletarian content, critics such as Adorno and Lukács focused far more on literary form and the manner in which it crystallises ideologies. In many works, this attention to form is coextensive with a dialectical approach to criticism, partly inspired by the Hegelianised Marxism of Lukács and Korsch. Such an approach is characterised by an emphasis on reflexivity and totality: it stresses the way in which ‘the [critic’s] mind must deal with its own thought process just as much as with the material it works on’ (Fredric Jameson); it holds that literary works internalise social forms, situations and structures, yet simultaneously refuse them (thereby generating a critical negativity that resists vulgar economic or political reductionism); and it takes the mediated (not external or abstract) social totality as its ultimate critical purview. As Adorno put it in an introductory lecture on the dialectic in 1958:

on the one hand, we should not be content, as rigid specialists, to concentrate exclusively on the given individual phenomena but strive to understand these phenomena in the totality within which they function in the first place and receive their meaning; and, on the other hand, we should not hypostatize this totality, this whole, in which we stand, should not introduce the whole dogmatically from without, but always attempt to effect this transition from the individual phenomenon to the whole with constant reference to the matter itself.

The pinnacle of such dialectical criticism is to be found in the work of Adorno himself. See especially: Prisms (MIT Press, 1955) and Notes to Literature I & II** (Columbia UP, 1991 & 1992 [1958 & 1961]), which contain a range of extraordinary essays, as well as the posthumously published Aesthetic Theory (Continuum, 1997 [1970]) – the definitive philosophical statement on art and the aesthetic in the immediate postwar period.

Adorno was profoundly influenced by Walter Benjamin, eleven years his senior. The pair first met in Vienna in 1923 and continued a lifelong friendship of lively intellectual debate (thoroughly analysed by Susan Buck-Morss in The Origin of Negative Dialectics (Free Press, 1977)). Benjamin’s profoundly original and essayistic work, which combines historical materialism with Jewish mysticism, ranges across a multitude of topics, with highlights including: a Kantian yet Kabbalist-influenced theory of cognition, Baroque drama and allegory, Baudelaire (a pivotal figure in Benjamin’s lifelong obsession with Paris as ‘Capital of the Nineteenth Century’), Kafka, Proust (whose mémoire involontaire he associates with surrealist shocks), Brecht (with whom he also shared a lifelong friendship), surrealism, language, and translation. In English, readers new to Benjamin might wish to consult the relevant essays in Illuminations** (Fontana, 1970) and Reflections (Schocken, 1978) as well as the theory of Baroque drama and allegory in The Origins of German Tragic Drama (Verso, 1998 [1928]). Those with a taste for completism may also wish to take on Benjamin’s enormous study of nineteenth-century Paris, consisting solely of fragments: The Arcades Project (Harvard UP, 2002 [1982]). Harvard University Press have published 4 volumes of Benjamin’s Selected Writings (2004-6).

Another towering figure of twentieth-century Marxist criticism is the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács. His 1923 work History and Class Consciousness (Merlin Press, 1971 [1923]) was hugely influential: it broke with the Second International emphasis on Marxism as a doctrine, stressing instead that Marxism is a dialectical method premised upon the category of totality, and made ‘reification’ a fundamental Marxist concept. Prior to his Marxist radicalisation, Lukács wrote two major works of literary criticism: the first, Soul and Form (Columbia UP, 2010 [1910]), is a (criminally) neglected set of passionate, tormented essays on the relation between art and life, the perfect abstractions of form versus the myriad imperfect minutiae of the human soul. These oppositions become connected to larger social contradictions between life and work, concrete and abstract, artistic fulfilment and bourgeois vocation; what Lukács is clearly seeking is a way of mediating or overcoming these oppositions, yet the tormented style is a sign that he has not yet located it. He continued these reflections in one of the truly great literary-critical works of the twentieth century: The Theory of the Novel** (MIT Press, 1971 [1920]). Contrasting the novel with the epic, Lukács argues that where the latter is the form that organically corresponds to an ‘integrated’ (i.e., non-alienated, non-reified) civilisation in which the social totality is immanently reconciled and sensually present, the novel is ‘the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality.’ The second half of the book expounds a typology of the novel, concluding with a vaguely hopeful sign that Dostoevsky may offer a way out of the impasses of bourgeois modernity.

Through the experience of World War I and the Russian Revolution, Lukács ultimately arrived at the Marxist positions of History and Class Consciousness . Crucially, his later highly influential theory of realism should be read in the context of this book’s central essay on reification, since realism for Lukács is in many ways the narrative equivalent of the de-reified (and potentially dereifying) standpoint of the proletariat. In Studies in European Realism ** (Merlin Press, 1972) and Writer and Critic (Merlin Press, 1978) (see especially the essay ‘Narrate or Describe?’), Lukács argues that the great realists (Balzac, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann) penetrate beneath the epiphenomena of daily life to reveal the hidden objective laws at work which constitute society as such. In other works, however, this attachment to realism descends into anti-modernist literary-critical dogmatism (see, e.g., The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (Merlin Press, 1963 [1958])). The other major critical work by Lukács is The Historical Novel ** (Penguin, 1969 [1937/1954]), a foundational study of the genre of the historical novel from its explosion in Walter Scott to its twentieth-century inheritors such as Heinrich Mann.

In France, the work of Sartre on committed literature is well-known. Situations I (Gallimard, 1947) collects his early texts on Faulkner, Dos Passos, Nabokov and others (recently translated as Critical Essays: Situations 1 (University of Chicago Press, 2017)). Notable here is the manner in which Sartre deduces an entire personal metaphysics from the styles and forms of these works, which he then judges against his own existentialist phenomenology of freedom and what Fredric Jameson has called his ‘linguistic optimism’ (for Sartre, everything is sayable – a position the French philosopher Alain Badiou would radicalise and mathematise). Styles like Faulkner’s, which implicitly deny this freedom, are held up for censure. The masterpiece of this period and approach is What Is Literature?** (Routledge Classics 2001, [1947]), which includes not only the well-known (and much criticised) passages on the supposed transparency of prose versus the potentially apolitical opaqueness of poetry, but also a rich and subtle history of French writers’ relations to their (virtual or actual) publics: a relation which, after the failed revolution of 1848, becomes one of denial. It concludes with a rallying cry for a ‘actual literature’ [ littérature en acte ] that would strive for a classless society in which ‘there is no difference of any kind between [a writer’s] subject and his public .’ Sartre’s work came under criticism in Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero (Hill & Wang, 2012 [1953]); for Barthes, commitment occurs not at the level of content but at that of ‘writing’ [ écriture ] (or form) – though one might contest the simplistic understanding of Sartre’s argument on which this is based. More recently, these problematics have been resurrected – and challenged – by Jacques Rancière in The Politics of Literature (Polity, 2010 [2007]), which argues that the politics of literature has nothing to do with the personal political proclivities of the author; rather, literature is political because as literature it ‘intervenes into this relationship between practices and forms of visibility and modes of saying that carves up one or more common worlds .’ Readers might also consult Sartre’s major studies of individual writers, including Baudelaire (Gallimard, 1946), Saint Genet (Gallimard, 1952), and – a three-tome magnum opus – L’Idiot de la Famille (Gallimard, 1971-2).

Lucien Goldmann, a Romanian-born French critic, developed an approach that became known as ‘genetic structuralism.’ He examined the structure of literary texts to discover the degree to which it embodied the ‘world vision’ of the class to which the writer belonged. For Goldmann literary works are the product, not of individuals, but of the ‘transindividual mental structures’ of specific social groups. These ‘mental structures’ or ‘world visions’ are themselves understood as ideological constructions produced by specific historical conjunctures. In his best-known work, The Hidden God (Verso, 2016 [1955]), he connects recurring categories in the plays of Racine (God, World, Man) to the religious movement known as Jansenism, which is itself understood as the world vision of the noblesse de robe , a class fraction who find themselves dependent upon the monarchy (the ‘robe’) but, since they are recruited from the bourgeoisie, politically opposed to it. The danger of Goldmann’s work is that the ‘homologies’ he draws between work, world vision and class, are premised upon a simplistic ‘expressive causality’.

Such expressive theories of causality were, famously, one of Louis Althusser’s philosophical and political targets. Proposing a theory of the social totality as decentred, consisting of multiple discontinuous practices and temporalities (in For Marx (Verso, 2005 [1965]) and Reading Capital (Verso, 2016 [1965])), Althusser’s fragmentary writings on art and literature unsurprisingly emphasise art’s discontinuous relation to ideology and the social totality. In his 1966 ‘Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre,’ Althusser argues that art is not simply an ideology like any other but neither is it a theoretical science: it makes us see ideology, makes it perceivable, thereby performing an ‘internal distanciation’ on ideology itself. Pierre Macherey developed this insight into an entire, extremely sophisticated theory of literary production in Towards a Theory of Literary Production** (Routledge, 2006 [1966]). For Macherey, ideology is both inscribed in and ‘redoubled’ or ‘made visible’ by literary texts just as much by what they do not say as by what they overtly proclaim: they are structured by eloquent silences . As Warren Montag has written of Macherey and Étienne Balibar’s work of this time: ‘these texts are intelligible, that is, become the objects of an adequate knowledge, only on the basis of contradictions that may be understood as their immanent cause.’ Alain Badiou published an important critique and further development of Macherey’s argument in ‘The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process’ (1966) (appears in Badiou’s The Age of Poets (Verso, 2014)), and Terry Eagleton’s Criticism and Ideology (New Left Books, 1976) – a major Althusserian intervention in the British literary critical scene – was strongly influenced by Macherey’s work. For Badiou’s later writings on literature, see Handbook of Inaesthetics (Stanford UP, 2004 [1998]), On Beckett (Clinamen Press, 2002), and The Age of the Poets (Verso, 2014); Jean-Jacques Lecercle has traced these developments in Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature (Edinburgh UP, 2012). Macherey continued his own literary critical trajectory in À quoi pense la littérature? (PUF, 1990), Proust. Entre littérature et philosophie (Éditions Amsterdam, 2013), and Études de philosophie littéraire (De l’incidence éditeur, 2014).

British and US-American Marxist Literary Criticism: Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson

Raymond Williams was perhaps the most important British literary critic of the twentieth century. For a sense of his entire career, see the book-length interviews conducted by the editorial board of the New Left Review in Politics and Letters (Verso, 2015 [1979]). Of the vast range of his writings on literature, Marxism and Literature** (Oxford UP, 1977) is the most important from the perspective of literary criticism. It is the culmination of Williams’ increasing engagement, through the rise of the New Left from the mid-1950s, with the whole range of ‘Western Marxist’ texts discussed above, many of which were slowly being translated into English throughout the 1960s and 70s. Williams’ consistent manoeuvre in this book is to suggest the ways in which traditionally ‘Marxist’ theories of culture and literature remain residually idealist. Williams here formulates his mature positions on several of his key conceptual innovations: selective tradition, ‘dominant, residual and emergent’ (the three-fold temporality of the historical present), structure of feeling, and alignment. Yet the book must also be read in the context of the previous ground-breaking literary critical works that made it possible: The Long Revolution (Chatto & Windus, 1961), a theory of modernity as viewed from the perspective of the sociology of literature and artistic production; Modern Tragedy (Verso, 1979 [1966]), which combines a Marxist theory of tragedy with a powerful justification of revolution as our modern tragic horizon; Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (Penguin, 1973 [1952/ 1964]), a materialist theory of modern drama; The English Novel From Dickens to Lawrence (Chatto & Windus, 1970), a social history of the English novel (designed, in part, to challenge the hegemony of F. R. Leavis’ The Great Tradition (Chatto & Windus, 1948)); and – most importantly – The Country and the City ** (Oxford UP, 1973), a majestic literary and social history of urbanisation and the capitalist development of town and country relations. In his later work, Williams also wrote much to challenge prevailing idealist theories of modernism: see The Politics of Modernism (Verso, 1989).

Terry Eagleton was Williams’ student at Cambridge. Coming from a working-class Catholic background, Eagleton’s early writings were primarily concerned with Catholic theories of the body and language. A turning point came with the publication of Criticism and Ideology** (New Left Books, 1976), which signalled Eagleton’s conversion to Althusserianism and his intellectual break with Williams (it contains a now notorious chapter in which he accuses Williams of being a romantic, idealist, empiricist, populist!), though it had been preceded by the Goldmannian Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës (Palgrave, 2005 [1975]). In the 1980s, Eagleton became increasingly interested in the revolutionary potential of criticism itself, partly by way of Walter Benjamin’s readings of Brecht (see Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (Verso, 1981)), and partly via feminism ( The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality, and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson (Blackwell, 1982)). He has written a wide-ranging trilogy on Irish cultural history, but his most important mid-to-late works are arguably The Ideology of the Aesthetic ** (Blackwell, 1990), a detailed critical history of the entire aesthetic tradition, and Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Blackwell, 2002), a major Marxist reconceptualisation of tragic theory and literature. An overview of his life and work can be found in the book-length interview The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (Verso, 2009).

Fredric Jameson, perhaps best-known for his theory of postmodernism ( Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham UP, 1991), was integral in the dissemination of ‘Western Marxist’ ideas in the Anglophone world. As mentioned at the outset, Marxism and Form** (Princeton UP, 1971) is a key introduction to many of these ideas. It includes detailed chapters on Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Lukács, and Sartre, as well as a major methodological essay on ‘dialectical criticism’. Jameson tested many of these ideas in a highly unusual work of ideological recuperation: Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (University of California Press, 1979). Perhaps Jameson’s most enduring work, however, is The Political Unconscious** (Cornell UP, 1981). Based on a modernised version of the medieval system of allegory, it develops a model of reading based on three levels: the text as symbolic act, the text as ‘ideologeme’ (‘the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes’) and the text as ‘ideology of form’. Its ultimate claim is that every literary text, via a system of (non-expressive) allegorical mediations, can be linked back to the non-transcendable horizon of History as class struggle. Jameson is also an important theorist of modernism, as witness his major work A Singular Modernity** (Verso, 2002) and the essay collection The Modernist Papers (Verso, 2007). His most important recent literary critical work is The Antinomies of Realism (Verso, 2013). Jameson also published a highly controversial article, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ ( Social Text , 1986), which alone has given rise to a vast secondary literature (the best-known critique of it being Aijaz Ahmad’s in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (Verso, 1992)). Jameson is undoubtedly the most important cultural critic of the late twentieth century.

Contemporary Criticism

It is impossible to do justice to the range and richness of contemporary Marxist criticism, so I can only hope to indicate a few important works. Franco Moretti has been an influential figure in the field. His work on the Bildungsroman foregrounded the way in which the symbolic form of ‘youth’ mediated the contradictions of modernity and effected the transition from the heroic subjectivities of the Age of Revolution to the mundane and unheroic normality of everyday bourgeois life ( The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture** (Verso, 1987)). His study of the ‘modern epic,’ meanwhile, focused on such texts as Goethe’s Faust , Melville’s Moby Dick and Gabriel García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude , arguing that they are ‘ world texts, whose geographical frame of reference is no longer the nation-state, but a broader entity – a continent, or the world-system as a whole’ ( The Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez (Verso, 1996)). In a move that would prove influential for materialist theories of ‘world literature’ (including his own), Moretti employs the categories of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis to suggest that such ‘world texts’ or ‘modern epics,’ whilst unknown to the relatively homogeneous states of the core are typical of the semi-periphery where combined development prevails. [2] Moretti has since extended this ‘geography of literary forms’ in ‘Conjectures on World Literature’** ( New Left Review , 2000). Taking its cue from Goethe and Marx’s remarks on Weltliteratur , and combining these with insights drawn from the Brazilian Marxist critic Roberto Schwarz, ‘Conjectures’ holds that world literature is ‘[o]ne, and unequal: one literature … or perhaps, better, one world literary system (of inter-related literatures); but a system which is different from what Goethe and Marx had hoped for, because it’s profoundly unequal.’ Moretti’s most important work, though, is arguably his most recent publication: The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature** (Verso, 2013), a socio-literary study of the figure of the bourgeois, whose true ‘hero’ is the rise of literary prose.

The most significant of Moretti’s inheritors is the Warwick Research Collective (WReC), whose book Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool UP, 2015) aims to ‘resituate the problem of “world literature,” considered as a revived category of theoretical enquiry, by pursuing the literary-cultural implications of the theory of combined and uneven development.’ Fusing Fredric Jameson’s ‘singular modernity’ thesis with a Moretti-inflected world-systems analysis and Trotsky’s theory of combined and uneven development, the Warwick Research Collective defines world-literature as ‘ the literature of the world-system ’. World-literature (with a hyphen to show its fidelity to Wallersteinian world-systems analysis) is that literature which ‘registers’ in form and content the modern capitalist world-system. The book is also an intervention into debates on the definition of modernism. If ‘modernisation’ is understood as the ‘imposition’ of capitalist social relations on ‘cultures and societies hitherto un- or only sectorally capitalised’, and ‘modernity’ names ‘the way in which capitalist social relations are “lived”’, then ‘modernism’ is that literature which ‘encodes’ the lived experience of the ‘capitalisation of the world’ produced by modernisation.

Individual members of the Warwick Research Collective have also made important contributions to what might (problematically) be termed ‘Marxist postcolonial theory’. Benita Parry’s Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (Routledge, 2004) brings together a series of sophisticated essays which, whilst recognising the significance of much work done under the emblem of postcolonial studies, suggest that the material impulses of colonialism – its appropriation of physical resources, exploitation of human labour and institutional repression – have been omitted from mainstream postcolonial work (by Subaltern Studies, Edward Saïd, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakracorty Spivak). Neil Lazarus’ The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge UP, 2011) not only extends this critique but attempts to reconstruct the entire field of postcolonial studies by developing new Marxist concepts attentive to the insights of postcolonial theory. Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee has likewise charted new terrain for Marxist postcolonial studies, but has done so with increased sensitivity to ecology (see Postcolonial Environments Nature: Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English (Palgrave, 2010)). This approach has been strengthened by Sharae Deckard’s ambitious research project on ‘world-ecological literature’ (for a programmatic summary, see her forthcoming ‘Mapping Planetary Nature: Conjectures on World-Ecological Fiction’).

In other recent work:

Alex Woloch has developed a theory of minor characters and protagonists in the realist novel that connects the ‘asymmetric structure of characterization – in which many are represented but attention flows to a delimited center’ to the ‘competing pull of inequality and democracy within the nineteenth-century bourgeois imagination’ ( The One vs. the Many , Princeton UP, 2003).
Anna Kornbluh has offered a nuanced materialist account of realism’s formal mediations and ‘realisations’ of finance in Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (Fordham University Press, 2014).
Joshua Clover has argued that the period from the 1970s to the economic crisis of 2007-8 should be understood as the (Braudelian) ‘Autumn of the system.’ His fundamental thesis is ‘that an organizing trope of Autumnal literature is the conversion of the temporal to the spatial ’. It is this conversion that non -narrative forms such as poetry are better able to grasp and figure forth’ (‘Autumn of the System: Poetry and Financial Capital.’ JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory , 2011).
In The Matter of Capital (Harvard UP, 2011) Christopher Nealon emphasises the ubiquity and variety of thematic, formal and intertextual poetic reflections upon capitalism across poetry of the ‘American century.’ He shows that poets as diverse as Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, John Ashbery, Jack Spicer, the Language poets, Claudia Rankine and Kevin Davies ‘have at the center of their literary projects an attempt to understand the relationship between poetry and capitalism, most often worked out as an attempt to understand the relationship of texts to historical crisis’.
Ruth Jennison’s The Zukofsky Era (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012), argues that ‘the Objectivists of the Zukofsky Era inherit the first [modernist] generation’s experimentalist break with prior systems of representation, and … strive to adequate this break to a futurally pointed content of revolutionary politics.’
Sarah Brouillette has published a range of important work on the history of the book market and creative industries. See especially, Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford UP, 2014).
My own book, The Politics of Style: Towards a Marxist Poetics (Brill/ Haymarket, 2017), develops a materialist theory of style through an immanent critique of the work of Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson.

[1] Sometimes rendered in English as ‘Georg Lukács’.

[2] For explanations of these complex terms (world-systems analysis, core, semi-periphery), see Wallerstein’s World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Duke UP, 2004).

Image derived from “Marxism” by rdesign812 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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Marxism by Wendy Lynne Lee LAST REVIEWED: 26 July 2017 LAST MODIFIED: 26 July 2017 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0031

Marxism encompasses a wide range of both scholarly and popular work. It spans from the early, more philosophically oriented, Karl Marx of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the German Ideology , to later economic works like Das Kapital , to specifically polemical works like The Communist Manifesto . While our focus is not Marx’s own contributions to philosophy or political economy, per se, it is important to note that the sheer breadth of scholarship rightly regarded as “Marxist” or “Marxian,” owes itself to engagement with texts ranging across the works of a younger, more explicitly Hegelian, “philosophical Marx” to those of the more astute, if perhaps more cynical, thinker of his later work, to the revolutionary of the Manifesto’s “Workers unite!” Hence, while it is not surprising to see an expansive literature that includes feminist, anti-racist, and environmental appropriations of Marx, it is also not unexpected to see considerable conflict and variation as a salient characteristic of any such compilation. Indeed, it is difficult to capture the full range of what “Marxism” includes, and it is thus important to acknowledge that to some extent the choice of organizing category is destined to be arbitrary. But this may be more a virtue than a deficit since not only have few thinkers had more significant global impact, few have seen their work applied to a broader range of issues, philosophic, economic, geopolitical, environmental, and social. Marx’s conviction that the point of philosophy is not merely to know the world but to change it for the good continues to infuse the essential bone marrow of virtually every major movement for economic, social, and now environmental justice on the beleaguered planet. Although his principle focus may have been the emancipation of workers, the model he articulates for understanding the systemic injustices inherent to capitalism is echoed in Marxist analyses of oppression across disciplines as otherwise diverse as political economy, feminist theory, anti-slavery analyses, aesthetic experience, liberation theology, and environmental philosophy. To be sure, Marxism is not Marx; it is not necessarily even a reflection of Marx’s own convictions. But however far flung from Marx’s efforts to turn G. F. W. Hegel on his head, Marxism has remained largely true to its central objective, namely, to demonstrate the dehumanizing character of an economic system whose voracious quest for capital accumulation is inconsistent not only with virtually any vision of the good life, but with the necessary conditions of life itself.

For a general overview of Karl Marx, look to Sidney Hook’s Toward the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation (1933), Isaiah Berlin’s Karl Marx (1963), Louis Dupré’s The Philosophical Foundations of Marxism (1966), Frederic Bender’s Karl Marx: The Essential Writings (1972), or David Mc’Lellan’s Karl Marx: Selected Writings (1977). General overviews of Marxism present, however, a more daunting challenge. These range not only over an expansive array of subject matter, but also across a wide and diverse span of application. A distinctive feature of Marxist scholarship is the effort to include interpretation of Marx’s original arguments and their application to a range of issues. Georg Lukacs offers an example of this strategy in History and Class Consciousness ( Lukacs 1966 ). Louis Althusser takes a similar tack in Reading Kapital ( Althusser 1998 ) and For Marx ( Althusser 2006 ) arguing for an important philosophical transition between the young Marx and the Marx of Kapital —that Marxism should reflect this “epistemological break.” Throughout a career which included Marx and Literary Criticism ( Eagleton 1976 ), Why Marx was Right ( Eagleton 2011 ), and Marx and Freedom ( Eagleton 1997 ), Terry Eagleton demonstrates why Marx and Marxism remain relevant to our reading of literature. In On Marx ( Lee 2002 ), Wendy Lynne Lee endeavors to bridge the gap between general introduction and application via contemporary examples relevant to Marxist scholars and civic activists across a range of disciplines and accessibility. John Sitton’s Marx Today ( Sitton 2010 ) takes a historically contextualized approach to contemporary socialist theorizing via The Communist Manifesto . Through a diverse selection including Albert Einstein’s “Why Socialism?,” John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney’s “Monopoly-Finance Capital and the Paradox of Accumulation,” and Terry Eagleton’s “Where Do Postmodernists Come From?,” Sitton demonstrates the continuing relevance of the Marxist commitment to make philosophy speak to real world issues. One of the best general works, however, is Kevin M. Brien’s Marx, Reason, and the Art of Freedom ( Brien 2006 ). Brien argues that Marxism can and should proceed from the assumption that, contrary to Althusser, Marx can be read as a coherent whole. As Marx Wartofsky puts it, Brien’s reading of Marx creates opportunities to theorize an internally consistent Marxism, but also incites “lively criticism.” Lastly, though perhaps less a general introduction to Marxism than to a Marxist view of political/economic revolution, the Norton Critical Edition of The Communist Manifesto ( Bender 2013 ) includes essays situating Marx’s incendiary pamphlet in the history of Marxist scholarship. It includes a rich selection of pieces devoted to themes including the revolutionary potential of Marx’s critique of capitalism (Mihailo Markoviç), his theory of wage labor (Ernest Mandel), Marxist ethics (Howard Selsam), and the applicability of Marxist analyses to contemporary dilemmas (Slavoj Zizek, Joe Bender).

Althusser, Louis. Reading Kapital . London: New Left Review/Verso, 1998.

In Reading Kapital Althusser argues for an epistemological break between the young Marx and the Marx of Kapital . Marxist analyses, according to Althusser, should not only reflect this maturation in Marx’s thinking, but should seek to understand and capitalize on the important changes in Marx’s view of capitalism.

Althusser, Louis. For Marx . London: New Left Review/Verso, 2006.

In For Marx Althusser continues his argument for an epistemological break between the young Marx and the Marx of Kapital utilizing specifically Freudian and Structuralist concepts to support his analysis. The focus here is on the “scientific” Marx as opposed to the younger, more Hegelian thinker. But, as Althusserlater acknowledged, more attention needed to be paid to class struggle.

Bender, Frederic, ed. The Communist Manifesto: A Norton Critical Edition . New York: Norton, 2013.

The Norton Critical Edition of The Communist Manifesto includes essays situating Marx’s incendiary pamphlet in the history of Marxist scholarship. It includes a rich selection of pieces devoted to themes including the revolutionary potential of Marx’s critique of capitalism (Mihailo Markoviç), his theory of wage labor (Ernest Mandel), a socialist feminist interpretation (Wendy Lynne Lee), a Marxist-inspired ethics (Howard Selsam), and an analysis of the applicability of Marxist work to contemporary dilemmas (Slavoj Zizek, Joe Bender).

Brien, Kevin M. Marx, Reason, and the Art of Freedom . Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2006.

In Marx, Reason, and the Art of Freedom Brien argues that Marxism can and should proceed from the assumption that Marx can be read as a coherent whole, that is, that there’s no “epistemological break” as identified by Althusser. As Marx scholar Marx Wartofsky puts it, Brien’s reading of Marx creates opportunities to theorize an internally consistent Marxism, but also incites “lively criticism.”

Eagleton, Terry. Marx and Literary Criticism . Oakland: University of California Press, 1976.

In Marx and Literary Criticism , Eagleton’s seminal work, he shows how and why it is that Marx is relevant to our reading not only of political economy, but to a wide array of literature. Among other topics, he offers an analysis of the relationship of literature to its historical context, and of literature to political activity. He also situates Marxist critique in the larger context of understanding the human relationship to society and civilization.

Eagleton, Terry. Marx and Freedom . London: Phoenix House, 1997.

In Marx and Freedom , Eagleton continues his critique of capitalism, arguing that freedom means not only liberation from material constraints to more creative praxis, but emancipation from capitalist labor as a variety of alienation. Eagleton incorporates a very rich account of individual perception and activity as key to realizing freedom.

Eagleton, Terry. Why Marx Was Right . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.

In Why Marx Was Right Eagleton adopts a more combative tone, defending against the claim that Marxism has outlived its usefulness. He takes on a number of common objections to Marxism, including that it leads to tyranny, or that it’s ideologically reductionistic.

Lee, Wendy Lynne. On Marx . Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002.

Lee’s aim is to offer an introduction to Marx and to Marxism accessible to a wide range of disciplines and audiences. On Marx also provides concise possible applications of Marxist themes for use in environmental philosophy and feminist theory with an emphasis on bridging the gap between philosophical comprehension and activist application—theory and praxis.

Lukacs, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics . Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1966.

History and Class Consciousness offers a classic example of a strategy common in Marx scholarship, namely, an interpretation of Marx’s work (particularly the concept of alienation), the influence of G. W. F. Hegel on Marx, and an application of Marx to contemporary themes, in Lukacs’s case, the defense of Bolshevism.

Sitton, John. Marx Today: Selected Works and Recent Debates . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230117457

Marx Today takes a historically contextualized approach to contemporary socialist theorizing via The Communist Manifesto , among other Marx’s works. Aimed at a broad audience, this anthology includes both sympathetic and critical readings. Sitton’s selections demonstrate the relevance of the Marxist commitment to make philosophy speak to real world issues.

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Critical Theory (Frankfurt School)

[ Editor’s Note: The following new entry by Robin Celikates and Jeffrey Flynn replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author. ]

“Critical theory” refers to a family of theories that aim at a critique and transformation of society by integrating normative perspectives with empirically informed analysis of society’s conflicts, contradictions, and tendencies. In a narrow sense, “Critical Theory” (often denoted with capital letters) refers to the work of several generations of philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School. Beginning in the 1930s at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, it is best known for interdisciplinary research that combines philosophy and social science with the practical aim of furthering emancipation. There are separate entries on influential figures of the first generation of the Frankfurt School – Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), and Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) – and the leading figure of the second generation, Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929).

In a broader sense, there are many different strands of critical theory that have emerged as forms of reflective engagement with the emancipatory goals of various social and political movements, such as feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory, and postcolonial/decolonial theory. In another, third sense, “critical theory” or sometimes just “Theory” is used to refer to work by theorists associated with psychoanalysis and post-structuralism, such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida (see these separate entries as well as the entry on postmodernism ).

This entry is primarily focused on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, but broadens outward at various points to discuss engagements by that tradition with a range of critical theories and social developments. The need for a broad approach to critical theory is prompted today by a range of contemporary social, political, economic, and ecological crises and struggles as well as the critique of Eurocentric forms of knowledge production.

1.1 Origins and Generations

1.2 influences, 1.3 critical theory versus traditional theory, 1.4 studies on authoritarianism and mass culture, 1.5 the dialectic of enlightenment, 1.6 the communicative turn, 1.7 a continuing and contested tradition, 2.1 immanent critique, 2.2 normative foundations for critique, 2.3 reconstructive critique, 2.4 disclosive critique, genealogy, and the critique of normativity, 2.5 current challenges, 3.1 alienation, 3.2 reification, 3.3 ideology, 3.4 emancipation, 4.1.1 gender, 4.1.3 colonialism and post-colonialism, 4.2.1 economic crises, 4.2.2 ecological crises, 4.2.3 political crises, 4.3 critical practices, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the frankfurt school: origins, influences, and development.

The “Frankfurt School” of critical theory is not really a school at all. It is a loosely held together tradition constituted by ongoing debates among adherents about how best to define and develop that tradition. This includes disagreements about methods, about how to interpret earlier figures and texts in the tradition, about whether past shifts in focus were advances or dead ends, and about how to respond to new challenges arising from other schools of thought and current social developments. This section tells a largely chronological story, focusing on the origins, influences, and key texts of the Frankfurt School, and concludes with reference to ongoing debates on how to inherit and continue the tradition.

In their attempt to combine philosophy and social science in a critical theory with emancipatory intent, the wide-ranging work of the first generation of the Frankfurt School was methodologically innovative. They revised and updated Marxism by integrating it with the work of Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, and Friedrich Nietzsche while developing a model of radical critique that is immanently anchored in social reality. They used this model to analyze a wide range of phenomena – from authoritarianism as a political formation and as it manifests in both the nuclear family and deep-seated psychological dispositions, to the effects of capitalism on psychological, social, cultural, and political formations as well as on the production of knowledge itself (for excellent guides, see Thompson 2017 and Gordon et al. 2019).

Max Horkheimer outlined the original research agenda for the Frankfurt School in his 1931 inaugural lecture upon becoming director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt (founded in 1923). He proposed an interdisciplinary research program combining philosophy and social theory with psychology, political economy, and cultural analysis (Horkheimer 1931). In that way, “social philosophy” aims at providing an encompassing interpretation of social reality as a whole – as “social totality,” to use a concept central to the Marxist tradition (Jay 1984).

Other key figures of the first generation include Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin, along with Erich Fromm, Friedrich Pollock, Leo Löwenthal, Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, and figures like Siegfried Kracauer, who belonged to the broader circle for a few years (for rich historical accounts, see Jay 1973, Buck-Morss 1977, Dubiel 1978, Wiggershaus 1986, Wheatland 2009). The work of the largely Jewish members of the first generation was deeply marked by the rise of National Socialism, the experience of exile, and, for some of its inner circle, their return to Germany after 1945. After the Nazis closed the Institute, Horkheimer, who had already moved it to Geneva, re-established it at Columbia University in 1934, where he was soon joined by Pollock, Marcuse, and Löwenthal, while Adorno did not emigrate to the US until 1938. Horkheimer, Adorno, and Pollock moved the Institute from New York to Los Angeles in 1941. Those three reestablished the Institute in Germany after the War, with Horkeimer as director from 1951 to 1958 and Adorno from 1958 to 1969. Key figures who worked with first generation figures during this period emerged as the second generation: Jürgen Habermas, Alfred Schmidt, Albrecht Wellmer, Oskar Negt, and Claus Offe.

Habermas was the leading figure of this second generation, taking up Horkheimer’s chair in Frankfurt in 1964 before moving to a research post in Starnberg in 1971. Habermas returned to Frankfurt in 1981, retiring from this position in 1994. Axel Honneth worked closely with Habermas in the 1980s and took over the chair in social philosophy in Frankfurt in 1996; Honneth was also director of, and largely responsible for the revival of, the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt from 2001 to 2018. He is considered a leading figure in the third generation, along with Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, and Christoph Menke (Anderson 2000, Allen 2010). Going beyond the second and third generations of the Frankfurt School, there are far too many figures to list; and the focal points for critical theory in this tradition have expanded, both geographically – with prominent figures in the United States and an active reception in Latin America – and thematically – for example, with a turn to feminism (see §4.1.1 ).

The first generation of the Frankfurt School took inspiration from an earlier generation of critical theorists: “Left Hegelians” in Germany who, after Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s death in 1831, applied his philosophy critically to social and political phenomena like religion and the state, maintaining that the progressive realization of freedom in history that was central to Hegel’s thought was not yet complete and required a fundamental transformation of the status quo. Karl Marx became the most influential of this group. In a materialist transformation of Hegel’s thought, Marx analyzed the concrete conditions for realizing autonomy for all and viewed philosophy itself as conditioned by socioeconomic developments. By developing a critique of political economy in order to analyze the nature of capitalism and the possibilities for revolutionary social transformation, Marx set the standard for future generations of critical theory by combining radical philosophy with a critique of the best available social science of the day in the pursuit of emancipation.

Marx’s early writings, in the 1840s, were written when capitalist modernization was only just beginning in Germany, but he already saw contradictory social relations as the objective condition of capitalist society and exploited workers as a nascent revolutionary force. By the time the Frankfurt School began working out a critical theory of society in the 1930s much had changed as Germany had emerged as a leading economic power in an industrialized, capitalist Europe. Frankfurt School theorists were committed to social transformation, but the vehicle for change Marx identified – workers in advanced capitalist states like Germany – not only lacked revolutionary consciousness, but would soon embrace fascist politics when faced with economic crisis and mass unemployment. Radical social theorists would need revised analytical tools.

To study the psychology of individuals and groups along with social and cultural influences on that psychology, they could not rely on the then-dominant dogmatic versions of scientific Marxism (Pensky 2019). To understand how social conflicts get denied or repressed, and why individuals and groups turn to authoritarian politics that seem not to align with their class interests, they turned to Freudian psychoanalysis. In contrast to orthodox Marxism, they analyzed individual and group psychology, changes in the modern family, and the cultural “superstructure” of society, not just the material “base,” in order to understand how the rise of “mass culture” and the decline of authority figures in the family led to the decline of critical capacities both in the individual psyche and in society generally. This effort to combine Marx and Freud is one of the distinctive features of the Frankfurt School; exactly how to integrate psychoanalytic theory into critical theory has been a long-standing debate (Marcuse 1955, Whitebook 1995, Honneth 2010, Part IV; Allen and O’Connor 2019, Allen 2021).

In addition to incorporating insights from Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, early critical theorists drew on Max Weber’s social theory to analyze contemporary society. Crucial here was Weber’s theory of rationalization, which stressed the growing dominance of instrumental rationality, or means-end reasoning, through the expanding bureaucratization of society. Weber posited a loss of freedom, due to the “iron cage” of modern bureaucracy, and a loss of meaning generated by the “disenchantment of the world” associated with secularization. Weber’s work was crucial for Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of instrumental reason (1947) as well as for Habermas’s later theory of communicative action (1981).

In synthesizing Marx and Weber, the first generation of critical theory was heavily influenced by Georg Lukács’s attempt to do the same in his ground-breaking 1923 essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” (see Brunkhorst 1983). Radically extending Marx’s analysis of commodities by analyzing how they transform the character of society as a whole, and drawing on Weber to describe a process of rationalization that extends to all aspects of life, Lukács used the term “reification” (see 3.2 below) to describe how the commodity form transforms the consciousness of those living in capitalist societies, who then see all social relations, even their relation to themselves, as taking on a “thing-like” character.

The classic philosophical influences on the Frankfurt School range widely, from Immanuel Kant and German Idealism to Nietzsche. In some form, Kant’s appeal to Mündigkeit (autonomy, maturity, responsibility) in his famous essay “What is Enlightenment?” – with its call for freely and publicly making use of reason – animates the ideal of emancipation throughout the work of the Frankfurt School, along with the Kantian conception of the critique of reason: the use of reason to reflect on the limits of reason. But its adherents follow Hegel and Marx in focusing on the social, cultural, and material conditions for achieving autonomy and insisting that reason is always socially and historically embedded. For first generation critical theorists, this entailed a critique of Kant’s own individualist and repressive understanding of autonomy as it arises within capitalist social conditions (Horkheimer 1933) and formalizes the domination of our own inner nature (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947, Excursus II, Adorno 1963a, Chs. 10–11). Some later critical theorists have engaged more positively with Kant, as in Habermas’s attempt to “detranscendentalize” core aspects of Kant’s transcendental philosophy (Habermas 2005, Ch. 2) and Rainer Forst’s Kantian constructivism in moral and political theory (Forst 2007, 2021a).

Hegel’s work has been a continual reference point for Frankfurt School philosophers, with key figures in the tradition – from Marcuse (1941) and Adorno (1963b) to Benhabib (1986, Part I) and Honneth (1992, 2001, 2011) – contributing both substantive studies and relying on Hegel’s methodology either for its holistic approach or as a paradigm of immanent critique while eschewing his metaphysical, teleological, and reconciliatory tendencies. Honneth first built on Hegel’s account of the struggle for recognition and the intersubjective conditions for living an autonomous life (Honneth 1992) before developing his own account of the practices and institutions of modern ethical life that realize freedom in a way that goes beyond its liberal and Kantian interpretations (Honneth 2011). Rahel Jaeggi builds on Hegel’s method of immanent critique in her account of progressive social change as learning processes in response to problems, contradictions, and crises that arise from within ethically thick forms of life (Jaeggi 2014).

In aiming to explain irrationality, the first generation extended the critique of reason, going beyond rationalist philosophers like Kant and Hegel to figures like Freud and Nietzsche. They turned to Nietzsche in particular as a critic of modern bourgeois culture and the violent formation of individual subjectivity. Engagement with Nietzsche’s thought extends from early essays by Horkheimer (1933, 1936a) through Horkheimer and Adorno’s shift toward doing critical theory in a more Nietzschean spirit with the genealogy of reason in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), and Habermas’s more critical take on Nietzsche’s supposed irrationalism (1985, Ch. 3–4), to contemporary authors such as Menke, who returns to Nietzsche as a positive reference point in the critique of the repressive dimensions of the modern ideal of equality (2000) and for a genealogical analysis of the modern subject who demands rights (2015).

One way of categorizing work by later generations of the Frankfurt School is to note how, even when drawing on a range of theoretical resources, they give pride of place to the legacy of a particular figure like Kant, Hegel, Marx, or Nietzsche (often via Foucault), or how they combine approaches. For instance, Honneth and Jaeggi are more Hegelian while Forst is more Kantian, and Benhabib is, like Habermas, a Hegelianized Kantian, and Fraser draws heavily on Marx in recent work while Amy Allen and Martin Saar are influenced by Foucauldian genealogy. The latter is part of a broader engagement between the Frankfurt School and post-structuralism, ranging from the more critical (Habermas 1985) through the more sympathetic (Honneth 1985, Menke 1988, 2000) to attempts to combine deconstructive and reconstructive approaches to critical theory (McCarthy 1991; see also Fraser 1989).

It is not easy to capture key features of an intellectual tradition shaped by such a variety of influences, including multiple figures whose own thinking changed over time, and a body of work addressing a vast range of topics spanning from the 1930s to the present. The rest of this section outlines some of the main arguments and focal points of key texts by key figures. It is not meant to be exhaustive, but to identify influential methodological approaches, arguments, and themes that are indicative of the work of the Frankfurt School and still provide important reference points for contemporary debates.

One largely undisputed reference for defining Frankfurt School critical theory is Horkheimer’s 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in which he defines critical theory by contrasting it with traditional theories that take the existing social order as given. Social sciences do this, for example, when they model themselves after the natural sciences in attempting to descriptively mirror a given set of facts or establish law-like generalizations. The point is not that empirical social research is invalid, but that traditional theories fail to analyze the broader social context in which they are embedded. This form of “positivism” views science as a purely theoretical undertaking divorced from practical interests even while it actually serves a particular social function in relying on established concepts and categories in a way that reinforces dominant ideologies and power structures. In that way, the forms of knowledge production that we rely on for insight into the social order become obstacles to social change.

Critical theory, by contrast, reflects on the context of its own origins and aims to be a transformative force within that context. It explicitly embraces an interdisciplinary methodology that aims to bridge the gap between empirical research and the kind of philosophical thinking needed to grasp the overall historical situation and mediate between specialized empirical disciplines. Critical theory aims not merely to describe social reality, but to generate insights into the forces of domination operating within society in a way that can inform practical action and stimulate change. It aims to unite theory and practice, so that the theorist forms “a dynamic unity with the oppressed class” (1937a [1972, 215]) that is guided by an emancipatory interest – defined negatively as an interest in the “abolition of social injustice” (ibid., 242) and positively as an interest in establishing “reasonable conditions of life” (ibid., 199). “The theory never aims simply at an increase of knowledge as such,” but at “emancipation from slavery” (1937b [1972, 246]) in the broadest sense of eliminating all forms of domination. The critique of traditional social science was further developed by Adorno and Habermas in the so-called positivism dispute in German sociology (Adorno et al. 1969, Wellmer 1969) and Horkheimer’s model of critical theory continues to inform discussions about how social critique might be carried out today in a variety of contexts (Outlaw 2005, Collins 2019, 57–65).

Nothing epitomizes the Frankfurt School’s interdisciplinary approach to analyzing irrational elements of modern society better than their studies of authoritarianism, beginning with studies of German society in the 1930s and continuing with studies of the U.S. in the 1940s. This work combined philosophy, social theory, and psychoanalytic theory with empirical research.

The first substantial foray was Studies in Authority and the Family (Horkheimer 1936b), the product of five years of research carried out by members of the Institute as part of the research agenda outlined by Horkheimer when he became director in 1930. In an essay articulating the study’s theoretical framework, Erich Fromm argued that the “drives underlying the authoritarian character” are “the pleasure of obedience, submission, and the surrender of one’s personality” along with “aggression against the defenseless and sympathy with the powerful” (Fromm 1936 [2020, 39, 41]). A main concern of the Studies was that the nuclear family had lost the power it once had to counter other socializing forces, which could now more directly influence the individual, and that individuals who view the world as governed by irrational forces submit to powerful leaders who ease their feelings of powerlessness.

The focus on authoritarianism continued into exile, with Neumann and Kirchheimer focusing more on distinctly political phenomena such as law, the state structure, and competing political groups under the Nazi regime (see Neumann 1944, Scheuerman 1996). Neumann and Kirchheimer were the main legal and political analysts of the first generation, but were outside the inner circle and less influential on the trajectory the Frankfurt School took in the 1940s (see Scheuerman 1994 and Buchstein 2020 for attempts to revive interest in their legal and political analysis).

The work on authoritarianism that the Institute is most well-known for came with the publication of The Authoritarian Personality (1950), the result of research conducted by Adorno in collaboration with a team of psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley. The aim was to identify personality types that might be susceptible to authoritarianism, based not on explicit commitments to fascist political movements but on psychological characteristics and social attitudes (measured on an “F-scale”). The researchers posited that individuals with an authoritarian personality tend to exhibit traits such as rigid conformity to conventional norms, a tendency toward stereotypical thinking, a preference for strong authority figures and disdain for perceived weakness, a preoccupation with power and status, and a propensity for prejudice and hostility towards minority groups. The book explored the link between authoritarianism and antisemitism, highlighting the role of scapegoating and the projection of repressed aggression onto targeted minority groups.

The text was published in a series edited by Horkheimer, titled Studies in Prejudice , along with other innovative studies such as Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1949), a psychoanalytic analysis of the rhetoric and tropes of American demagogues authored by Frankfurt School member Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman. If The Authoritarian Personality studied the kinds of people potentially receptive to the messages of authoritarian leaders, Prophets of Deceit studied the content of the messaging itself. Adorno would later follow up on all these themes – both the form and content of fascist agitation and the social and psychological conditions under which it can succeed (1951b, 1967a).

The Authoritarian Personality had a major impact on the field of political sociology, inspiring a wave of similar studies and commentary. The recent resurgence of authoritarian populism has inspired renewed interest in Frankfurt School analysis of authoritarianism (see Section 4.2 below) in conjunction with publication of new editions of some of the classic texts along with previously untranslated work by Kracauer on totalitarian propaganda dating from the late 1930s (Kracauer 2013 [2022]) and a 1967 lecture by Adorno on “Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism” (Adorno 1967a [2020]).

One point of continuity between the studies of authoritarianism and Frankfurt School cultural analysis more broadly was the idea that “mass culture” was one of the powerful forces playing an increasing role in the direct socialization of individuals, a role that led to the “disappearance of the inner life” of the individual (Horkheimer 1941) and an increasing loss of the ability to imagine a world any different than the existing one. In its various forms, this general thesis was common to Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse in their critiques of mass culture from the 1930s to the 1960s.

More generally, the Frankfurt School is known for its analysis of popular culture. By contrast to orthodox Marxist dismissal of cultural analysis for focusing on the less consequential “superstructure” of society, Frankfurt School theorists attentively analyzed the form and content of cultural objects along with the genres and modes of producing works of art and popular culture. In an early essay titled “Mass Ornament” (1927), Kracauer argued that analyzing the “inconspicuous surface-level expressions” of an epoch, by virtue of their “unconscious nature,” can disclose its “fundamental substance” and “unheeded impulses” (1927 [1975, 75]). Adorno would later maintain that “cultural criticism must become social physiognomy” (1951a [1967, 30]), a method he pursued in his interpretations of works of literature and music by interpreting the surface features and forms of various cultural artifacts in relation to underlying social conditions as a mode of disclosive critique.

The more pessimistic analysis of mass culture of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse can be distinguished from the more optimistic views developed by Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. Benjamin posited, in his famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility” (1936), that the rise of technologies for mechanical reproduction, such as photography and film, led to the decline of the “aura” surrounding traditional works of art – the “authenticity” associated with the unique presence of the original in space and time – in part because it makes no sense to talk about the “original” version of a photograph. The resulting changes in perception and modes of collective experience and participation in cultural production could, Benjamin hoped, also bring about political forms of art and a more general democratization of culture. He contrasted this emancipatory potential of mass culture, through a politicization of aesthetics, with the aestheticization of politics under fascism (Buck-Morss 1992). Adorno expressed his disagreement in an earlier letter to Benjamin and in published work (Adorno 1936, 1938). As Wellmer puts it, “in technologized mass culture, Benjamin sees elements of an antidote to the psychic destruction of society, whereas Adorno regards it above all as a medium of conformism and psychic manipulation” (1985/86 [1991, 32–33]). While Benjamin placed hope in mass culture, Adorno saw it lying in the kind of autonomous art that resists reconciling subjects to their social world, instead offering a kind of “promise of happiness” in a transfigured future that lies beyond that social world (Adorno 1970, Finlayson 2015, Gordon 2023).

The critique of mass culture took its most dramatic form in the chapter on the “culture industry” in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (first circulated in 1944 and published in 1947). They introduced the term “culture industry” to underline the fact that “mass culture” is not something “the masses” spontaneously generate (Adorno 1967b [1991, 98]), but is manufactured using the same standardized and profit-oriented methods as any industrial production method. In this sense, culture is no longer a relatively autonomous realm of meaning (that might aim, at its best, at beauty, freedom, and truth) or source of critical awareness, but is thoroughly commodified by the “distraction factories” of the culture industry. “Cultural entities typical of the culture industry are no longer also commodities, they are commodities through and through” (ibid., 129). Entertainment replaces experience, numbing the audience’s capacity for critical thought and reconciling them to the status quo in a form of domination far more subtle than direct tyranny.

In this way, Dialectic of Enlightenment , which is perhaps the most influential text by Frankfurt School philosophers, analyzes two forms of mass society, fascist Germany and the United States, focusing primarily on the latter. Co-authored by Horkheimer and Adorno between 1939 and 1944 at the height of Nazi rule and World War II, the text opens with these lines:

Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity (1947 [2002, 1]).

The book is a genealogy of reason that traces its self-destruction from the dawn of human history to the present. Reason was supposed to liberate human beings. Instead, in the dominant form it takes as instrumental rationality, it has become the primary instrument of their domination. With reason taking this form, humans lose their capacity for critical reflection as their thinking is increasingly oriented solely toward self-preservation within a system in which they are powerless. “Thought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process, aping the machine it has itself produced, so that it can finally be replaced by the machine” (ibid., 19).

The root of the catastrophic dynamic lies not just with modernity or capitalism, but goes back to humanity’s earliest attempts to dominate nature. A core thesis of the book is that myth and enlightenment are entwined. The process of enlightenment began with the earliest attempts to overcome “mythic fear” as a way of explaining the unknown and mitigating threats from nature. This anthropological claim about enlightenment is combined with a historical claim about the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science and technology. This is when instrumental rationality truly comes to dominate, as means-end calculation is the kind of reasoning required for capitalist production and efficient bureaucracy. “Enlightenment is totalitarian” (ibid., 50), Adorno and Horkheimer argue; it subsumes everything under its dissolvent rationality. In this way, enlightenment reverts back to myth.

The book represents a shift away from the critique of political economy, indebted to Marx, to the critique of instrumental reason, indebted to Weber (Benhabib 1986, 149–163). Although this shift is sometimes attributed to the growing pessimism of its authors during National Socialism, it was also motivated by Pollock’s analysis of the shift from nineteenth-century liberal capitalism to “state capitalism”: increased intervention by the state into the economy meant that the primacy of the economy posited by Marx had been replaced by the primacy of politics (1941). This claim supported the focus in Dialectic of Enlightenment on the administered control of society by the state apparatus. The book paints a bleak picture of a society in which people live “totally administered lives” under the sway of efficient and calculating institutions. For the sake of self-preservation, they adapt themselves entirely to this apparatus. All the while the culture industry, as an “organ of mass deception,” keeps them entertained at the price of numbing their critical capacities, producing conformity, and undermining any sense of individuality or capacity for autonomy. The book also represents a shift away from the earlier idea of critical theory as interdisciplinary social theory, which could marshal the findings of empirical social science toward the practical aim of emancipation, and more toward speculative history. In the story they tell, the effects of domination are so ubiquitous that every form of scientific knowledge is corrupted.

If Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment was supposed to provide the grounds for a positive concept of enlightenment – as they maintained in its preface (1947 [2002, xviii]) – many critics have wondered what that is supposed to be (Wellmer 1983). Habermas would later argue that the authors needed to leave “at least one rational criterion intact for their explanation of the corruption of all rational criteria” in order to “set the normative foundations of critical social theory;” but they failed to do so (1985 [1987, 127–9]; see also Benhabib 1986).

Reappraisals of the text in recent decades range from defending its approach as a form of world-disclosive critique (Kompridis 2006) that reveals our familiar social world as pathological by using techniques like “rhetorical condensation” (Honneth 1998), to reading it as developing a dialectical conception of progress – not simply a history of decline – aimed at making us more aware of the inevitable entanglement of reason with power (Allen 2014, 2016), and attempts to build on the chapter on antisemitism, which analyzes its social function in providing a “release valve” that allows rage to be “vented on those who are both conspicuous and unprotected” (1947 [2002, 140]), thereby stabilizing domination by channeling potential resistance to social suffering into hatred of a group (Rabinbach 2000, Rensmann 2017).

Herbert Marcuse’s influential book One-Dimensional Man (1964) – best summarized by its subtitle, Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society – can be read as an attempt to update Dialectic of Enlightenment in the form of a diagnosis of U.S. society and its perfected mechanisms of pacification and social control, ranging from art, sexuality, and politics to philosophy and the very act of thinking. Marcuse argues that all forms of critical thought and practice, having been wholly integrated into the wasteful, dehumanizing, profit-seeking, imperialist logic of advanced capitalism, are subsumed by one-dimensional ideology, a “flattening out of the antagonism between culture and social reality” (61).

Marcuse developed his influential concept of “repressive desublimation” to explain how the manipulated need for instant gratification has sanitized any transgressive forces within the domains of sexuality and art. Prior to the rise of the “affluent society,” art contained a transcendent capacity in the sense that it thought of, engaged with, and appropriated the idea of breaking out of the world in which one lived and embodied the hope for a better one to replace it. Within late capitalism, art has lost this critical aspect and dissolved into consumer culture and technological rationality, masking the “surplus repression” that shapes human instincts and needs in line with the functional requirements of social domination and the reproduction of the status quo.

Marcuse’s work has been criticized for its totalizing diagnosis of domination, his reliance on an objectivist account of human nature and needs, and the paternalistic or even authoritarian implications that possibly result from combining these two elements (Jaeggi 2014 [2018, 104–108]). Nonetheless, it has remained an important reference point for the critique of technology (Feenberg 2023a, 2023b, Fong 2016, Ch. 5) and of false needs, and of new right-wing forms of “repressive desublimation” that affirm the status quo in a transgressive mode (Brown 2019, 165–169). Regardless of how one today assesses Marcuse’s concrete analyses, his work exemplifies a tension that all critical theories have to address between the dominating forces of one-dimensionality and the possibility of breaking free of them.

First-generation critical theorists posited various responses to their own bleak diagnoses of society from the 1940s to the 1960s. Marcuse supported rebellious social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, in contrast to other leading representatives of critical theory who kept a conspicuous distance. In One-Dimensional Man , he placed hope for overcoming the repressive, one-dimensional society in a “Great Refusal” to abide by its norms, as carried out by the “substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable” (1964, 256). He later expressed solidarity with, and saw as examples of this refusal in, both the global student movement (1968, 119) and the feminist movement with its aim of overcoming dominant forms of aggressive masculinity (1974). He likewise praised counter-cultural movements for expressing sexual, moral, and political rebellion in a non-aggressive form of life that might generate a total change in values (1967). For Marcuse, emancipation involves a new morality that fulfills the vital needs for joy and happiness and encompasses an aesthetic-erotic dimension that is foreshadowed in alternative artistic tastes and new social and cultural practices. While Horkheimer and Adorno were less supportive of rebellious social movements, they did become important institutional figures and public intellectuals after their return to Germany (Müller-Doohm 2003, part IV; Demirović 2016). Adorno’s radio addresses in particular can be viewed as an attempt to educate the public for autonomy and so as a kind of response to their own bleak diagnoses of society.

But the core of Adorno’s response, from the early essay on the culture industry to his posthumously published Aesthetic Theory (1970), was to posit that “autonomous” or “authentic” art, by contrast to the products of the culture industry, maintains a utopian impulse insofar as it points beyond, and provides a moment of resistance to, the status quo. For example, atonal music by composers like Arnold Schoenberg generates dissonance in the listener by challenging the unity of the whole found in more harmonious music. Adorno maintained that such art, in challenging aesthetic norms and conventions, can provide aesthetic experiences that are resistant to the homogenizing forces of the culture industry. Critics of this turn to the aesthetic have wondered how this is supposed to provide a sound basis for a critical theory of society (Benhabib 1986, 222).

But one can argue that Adorno’s later work was an attempt to push against that kind of grounding for critical theory. The title of Adorno’s 1966 magnum opus, Negative Dialectics (1966a), refers to a methodology that takes from traditional Hegelian dialectics the emphasis on difference and mediation but abandons the attempt to overcome difference through a unifying synthesis. Instead, taking up an argument already developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment , Adorno argues that “identity thinking” and the “identity principle” have been at the basis of humanity’s destructive project of cognitive as well as practical domination of external as well as internal nature, thereby linking the philosophical to the social oppression of particularity. Adorno rejects “identity thinking” in favor of affirming the negative, namely “non-identity,” that is, the irreducible particularity of objects, experiences, and persons that cannot be subsumed under concepts.

This approach undermines the totalizing aspirations of theoretical systems in philosophy as traditionally understood. The struggle to recognize that which is nonidentical is not only an epistemological but also an ethical and political project that seeks to do justice to both the object and the subject of cognition in their irreducible individuality (Bernstein 2001). Linking epistemology and the philosophy of language to critical theory of society, this leads Adorno to reject not only Hegel’s affirmative synthesis but also Heideggerian ontology and Kantian dualism. Methodologically, Adorno explores alternative ways of thinking about how to use and develop philosophical concepts, taking up the Benjaminian notion of constellation and developing “critical models” in order to articulate the complexity of experience, and suffering, without reducing or constraining it. In Adorno’s view, negative dialectics is a form of immanent critique engaged in a dynamic and transformative process, as it “must transform the concepts which it brings, as it were, from outside into those which the object has of itself, into what the object, left to itself, seeks to be, and confront it with what it is” (Adorno 1957 [1976, 69]). In his cultural criticism and interventions in public debates, Adorno follows this paradigm by exploring how concrete experiences exemplify a form of social domination that is obscured by mass culture but also open up the possibility of transcending reified consciousness by articulating the internal contradictions within social reality.

Jürgen Habermas, who worked closely with Horkheimer and Adorno in the 1950s until he fell out of favor with Horkheimer for seeming too radical, inherited one of the central claims of the Dialectic of Enlightenment , namely that Enlightenment is inseparable from the self-critique of Enlightenment, while also insisting on the context-transcending force of reason embedded in everyday practice.

Two works from the 1960s established his status as a leading figure in the second generation: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) and Knowledge and Human Interests (1968b). In the former, Habermas provides a historical and conceptual reconstruction of the idea of the public sphere in which subjects recognize each other as equals, submit to the “force of the better argument,” and subject legislation to the public use of reason. Against the backdrop of its emergence in eighteenth-century European societies, Habermas identifies the internal contradictions of the public sphere under the conditions of capitalism and traces its decline under the combined pressure of mass culture and mass media that has gradually transformed a reasoning public into passive consumers – a claim consistent with the “culture industry” thesis.

Critics argued that Habermas’s historical narrative of decline presupposes highly idealized versions of public debate and a “reasoning” public – a public that has always in truth been fragmented by class, gender, and race-based domination – and neglects the political significance of a multiplicity of subaltern and non-official public spheres and counter-publics (Negt and Kluge 1972, Fraser 1990, Warner 2002, Allen 2012). Nevertheless, his critical analysis of a contemporary public of consumers as the objects of processes of de-politicization, commercialization, political manipulation, and refeudalization seems to have lost nothing of its relevance (Seeliger and Sevignani 2022). The claim that a robust and independent public sphere is crucial to a healthy democracy is central to Habermas’s later, systematic contribution to democratic theory in Between Facts and Norms (1992), and he continues to analyze recent transformations in the structures and modes of communication within the public sphere (Habermas 2006, 2021).

Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests (1968b) was an ambitious attempt to ground critical social theory as a form of inquiry aimed at fostering a distinct type of knowledge tied to a deep-seated human interest in emancipation. This was a return to Horkheimer’s methodological aims in “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937), but with a novel set of arguments, such as Habermas’s claim that the method of critical theory can be illuminated by way of an analogy with psychoanalysis – “the only tangible example of a science incorporating methodological self-reflection” (1968b [1971, 124]). Like Horkheimer, Habermas was critical of the positivist understanding of science for failing to see the connection between specific kinds of inquiry and fundamental human interests. Habermas posited that both the natural sciences and the “human sciences” (interpretive social sciences and humanities) are grounded in distinct practical interests. The natural sciences are a reflective extension of “labor” (instrumental action), which is tied to the practical interest in material reproduction. The human sciences are a reflective extension of “interaction” (linguistic communication), which is tied to the practical interest in symbolic reproduction. Habermas distinguished “critique” or “reflection” as a third practice organized around the interest in emancipation, understood in terms of overcoming various forms of heteronomy, domination, and dependency.

In the early 1970s, Habermas largely abandoned this framework, based in an anthropology of knowledge, though he did continue to pursue some of its themes, and epistemological questions have remained central to his work in at least two domains: first, in his “postmetaphysical” (non-foundationalist and fallibilistic) understanding of philosophy as a form of critical reflection at the intersection between science and society (Habermas 1983a, Ch. 1) and, second, in his critique of naturalism, especially neuroscience as a form of positivism or scientism that absolutizes the observer’s perspective, thereby negating the irreducibility of the participants’ perspective and occluding the normative structure of interpersonal communication (Habermas 2005, Ch. 6).

Habermas increasingly came to the view that critical theory needed more robust social-theoretical and normative foundations, since, in his eyes, the totalizing critique of the first generation had proven to be self-undermining (1985, Ch. 5) and his own approach in Knowledge and Human Interests had conflated the reconstruction of invariant structures of communication (formal pragmatics) with the critique of the false consciousness of particular persons and societies (1973a). Habermas’s alternative path, after abandoning that methodological framework, was to focus on communicative reason in a two-volume magnum opus titled The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). By contrast with an instrumentalist understanding of reason and action, Habermas’s “communicative turn” starts from a reconstruction of the rational and normative potential of everyday interactions.

This turn involves a multidimensional paradigm shift, illustrating the theoretical ambition of Habermas’ enterprise. He develops a theory of communicative action and rationality that is anchored in everyday practices of communication, in which we raise validity claims whose normative dynamic is context-transcendent and which allow for consensus-based coordination of action. He provides a historical reconstruction of modern rationalization processes, in which social integration via authority or shared tradition has been increasingly replaced by an expanded use of communicative reason in response to the pressure to cooperate. Finally, he constructs a two-level model of society based on the distinction between “system” and “lifeworld,” claiming that the regulation of coexistence in modern societies depends on both communication oriented towards mutual understanding (“lifeworld”) and on the anonymous systems of state bureaucracy and the capitalist market (“system”).

For the methodological renewal of critical theory, Habermas’s central claim is that within complex societies, social order always has a double form: It must simultaneously be viewed as lifeworld and as system. The lifeworld can only be understood from the hermeneutic perspective of its participants while the mechanisms of systemic integration only come into view from a system-theoretical or external perspective. Critical theory needs both perspectives in order to identify distorting effects of the system on the lifeworld. Habermas famously and controversially diagnoses a “colonization of the lifeworld” by the systemic media of money and power, which impose economic and administrative rationality – the main forms of “functionalist reason” – on areas of the lifeworld whose reproduction relies on communicative processes of cultural reproduction, social integration, and socialization that cannot be subsumed under the media of money and power without generating resistance. This provides a new foundation for critical theory by updating the critique of reification in the form of a critique of systematic distortions of communication. The “critique of functionalist reason” becomes a central task for critical theory, along with the aim of diagnosing the “selective pattern” of capitalist modernization that only partially realizes the actually available potential for rationality and learning within society.

In the ensuing discussion, Habermas was accused of reifying the “system” by conceptualizing the capitalist market and the bureaucratic state as functionally necessary and supposedly norm-free systems that lie beyond the theoretical reach of critical social theory and the political reach of emancipatory politics (Honneth and Joas 1991), of idealizing the lifeworld in ways that largely ignore the domination and exploitation of women and minorities (Fraser 1985), of subscribing to a progressivist theory of modernization and history that is Eurocentric and insensitive to the continuing effects of colonial domination (Allen 2016, Ch. 2), and of underestimating how deeply power penetrates into and distorts the very heart of communicative reason (Allen 2008, Chs. 5–6).

Habermas and his followers insist that while these phenomena are real, it is only the power of communicative reason – and the public discourses and deliberations in which it manifests itself and gets institutionalized – that allows us to detect, criticize, and ultimately overcome (if only partially and temporarily) those forms of domination. Whether one agrees or not that the communicative turn enables critical theory to analyze and bring to agents’ attention the distortions that block them from addressing and overcoming obstacles to emancipation, one important legacy of Habermas’s theory can be seen in opening up space for a methodologically pluralist critical theory in response to the fundamental need to capture the perspective of both participants and observers (Bohman 2003). Some Frankfurt School theorists have also built on Habermas’s system-lifeworld distinction in maintaining that social change must be viewed from the perspective of both “evolution” and “revolution” (Brunkhorst 2002, 2014).

One dominant story told about the Frankfurt School begins with Horkheimer’s original research program in the 1930s and views Horkheimer and Adorno’s radical departure from that vision in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) as an intellectual dead end from which Habermas rescued the tradition and returned it to its original methodology. From this perspective, the second generation, dominated by Habermas, superseded the first (see Kompridis 2006, 255–258, for a critique of this story). An alternative story would point out that Dialectic of Enlightenment was in many ways consistent with themes first articulated by Adorno in work from the 1930s – particularly his 1931 inaugural lecture, heavily inspired by Benjamin – that ultimately came to fruition in Negative Dialectics (1966a). To complicate matters in another way, while collaborating on Dialectic of Enlightenment in the 1940s Adorno also contributed to the interdisciplinary collaboration that culminated in The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a product of Horkheimer’s original vision for critical theory that combined social theory with empirical research.

Rather than viewing the second generation solely in terms of Habermas overcoming deficits in the first, this alternative story recognizes that there have always been multiple models and styles of critical theory operating simultaneously within the tradition and that Adorno was heavily influenced by Benjamin prior to collaborating with Horkheimer (Buck-Morss 1977, Wolin 1994, 166, 265–274). Moreover, Adorno’s influence is evident in work by figures in the second generation such as Albrecht Wellmer (1933–2018), who used Adorno’s work as a basis for challenging Habermas’s approach (Wellmer 1985/86, 1993) and was far more sympathetic with post-structuralism than Habermas – also true of Wellmer’s students in the third generation, Christoph Menke (1988, 2000) and Martin Seel. Adorno scholars have defended his work directly against Habermas’s criticisms (Cook 2004, O’Connor 2004: 165–170), and critical theorists continue to defend Adorno’s approach to critical theory (Allen 2016, 2021, 175–183, Marasco 2015, Ch. 3).

To complicate the story further, Benjamin’s work has had an enormous influence on work by a variety of critical theorists, though his wider influence had to wait until Adorno collected Benjamin’s essays for a German audience in 1955 and Hannah Arendt edited them for English readers in 1968. There have been significant studies of Benjamin’s work by scholars working within the Frankfurt School tradition (see Buck-Morss 1989 and Pensky 1993), while many critical theorists beyond the Frankfurt School have engaged Benjamin’s critique of linear notions of progress, and the ways in which they fail to break with the catastrophic continuity of the present (Benjamin 1940, see Löwy 2001), as well as his analysis of the constitutive relation between law and violence (Benjamin 1920/21; see the recently published critical edition, 2021), to mention only Jacques Derrida’s “Force of Law” (1990), Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (1995), and Judith Butler’s Parting Ways (2012) (see also Loick 2012).

Methodological debates within the Frankfurt School focus not only on the legacy of first-generation theorists but also on Habermas’s earlier work, with some arguing that Knowledge and Human Interests is worth revisiting because it was more attuned than his subsequent work to the dynamics of power and domination, making it more apt for addressing oppression based on gender (Allen 2008) or race (McCarthy 2004), or for developing a more comprehensive critical theory of domination (Klein 2020). Honneth (2017) has recently taken Habermas’s text as a jumping off point for refocusing critical theory on the task of elaborating the relation between emancipatory interests and emancipatory knowledge. Honneth nonetheless maintains that Habermas’s use of the methodology of psychoanalysis as a model for emancipatory critique is not apt, while others argue that it is still in many ways productive (Celikates 2009 [2018, 137–157]; see Allen 2021, Ch. 5 for a critique of Habermas, Honneth, and Celikates).

The latter debate is part of the resurging interest in psychoanalysis by some theorists working in the Frankfurt School tradition. Habermas’s own engagement with Freud and psychoanalysis in Knowledge and Human Interests was largely methodological in contrast to the substantive use of Freudian ideas by the first generation (in their analysis of the entanglement of reason and repression and the concrete forces of fascism and antisemitism), and Habermas (1983a) subsequently abandoned psychoanalytic theory entirely in favor of engagement with developmental psychologists like Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg. In developing his theory of recognition, Honneth (1992, Ch. 5) returned to psychoanalysis in the form of object relations theory, primarily in the work of Donald Winnicott, arguing that the experience of fusion and symbiosis that characterizes the early infant-mother relationship is foundational in two ways: It serves as the template for the type of recognition Honneth calls “love” and explains why individuals and groups continue to experience existing relations of recognition – that necessarily fall short of fusion and symbiosis – as unsatisfactory and continue to struggle for recognition. While Honneth’s use of Winnicott is controversial (McAfee 2019, Ch. 2; Whitebook 2021, Deranty 2021), recent debates have more generally focused on how to take up object relations within critical theory (Allen and O’Connor 2019). As a result, the divide now seems to be primarily between those who focus on the pro-social implications of psychoanalytic theory (Honneth 2010, Part IV) and those who also stress asocial or antisocial forces of Freud’s drive theory in general and the death drive in particular in order to avoid what they see as the risk of over-idealization and romanticization built into Honneth’s way of integrating psychoanalysis into his theory of recognition (Allen 2021, Ch. 5). Those critics advocate returning to the more negativistic approaches familiar from first-generation critical theorists (Fong 2016, McAfee 2019, Allen 2021).

Honneth’s return to the question of struggles oriented by emancipatory interests (2017) hearkens back to a shift that began in the 1980s, when a significant strand of Frankfurt School critical theory, including Honneth’s early work (1985), aimed at recovering the connection between theory and practice by linking the development of theory itself to social conflicts and movements. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s Public Sphere and Experience (1972) is an early example of a critique of the bourgeois (i.e. hegemonic) public sphere that invokes proletarian or plebeian non-state forms of the public and the divergent critical experiences they articulate as alternative sources of normativity, while also identifying blockages they face in the form of the “consciousness industry” and the pacification of social conflicts through “pseudo-publics.”

In a more explicit vein, Nancy Fraser contributed to the feminist turn in Frankfurt School critical theory – for which the work of Seyla Benhabib, Jean Cohen, and Amy Allen has also been decisive – in echoing Marx by arguing that critical theory should frame its “research program and its conceptual framework with an eye to the aims and activities of those oppositional social movements with which it has a partisan, though not uncritical, identification” (Fraser 1985, 97), and that the Frankfurt School in general and Habermas in particular had failed to theorize one of the most significant struggles against domination: the feminist movement (see §4.1.1 ).

Honneth has also sought to systematically reconstruct the link between theory development and struggles by taking experiences of misrecognition that lead to social struggles for recognition as a pre-theoretical reference point (1992). Drawing on a wide range of philosophical work, psychological and psychoanalytic accounts of identity-formation, and sociological and historical accounts of social movements struggling for recognition, Honneth has developed a theory of recognition that is the most prominent alternative paradigm, within Habermasian critical theory broadly construed, to Habermas’s theory of communicative action (Honneth 2000, Zurn 2015). Honneth maintains Habermas’s focus on intersubjectivity, but instead of linguistic practice and the ideal of “undistorted communication,” he focuses on relations of mutual recognition and the ideal of “undistorted recognition,” which then serve as the basis for the critique of “social pathologies” that he considers central to the project of critical theory (Honneth 2004).

In short, the Frankfurt School of critical theory is today constituted by lively debates, discussed more below, about how to deploy various critical methods ( Section 2 ) and concepts ( Section 3 ) while remaining attuned to social struggles and crises ( Section 4 ) and positioning itself in relation to critical theories developed out of other traditions.

2. Critical Methods

Frankfurt School critical theory is best characterized by a set of methodological aspirations that set it apart from many other forms of social and political theorizing (both in philosophy and the social sciences): It aspires to be (1) self-reflexive , accounting for its own embeddedness in specific social and historical conditions, (2) interdisciplinary , integrating philosophical analysis with social theory and empirical social research, (3) materialist , grounding critical theorizing in social reality, and (4) emancipatory , orienting itself toward the goal of social emancipation. These commitments situate the Frankfurt School firmly in the Marxist tradition, and that tradition’s aim of overcoming the division between theory and practice without uncritically subsuming one under the other.

This has given rise to three interrelated methodological challenges: how to conceptualize (1) the relation of theory to social reality, (2) the role and standpoint of critical theorists, and (3) the normative foundations, content, or force of their critical theorizing. In light of historical developments in the first half of the twentieth century – the rise of fascism and Stalinism and the integration of the working class into the liberal welfare state – Frankfurt School theorists lost confidence in an identifiable direction of history or an identifiable collective subject like the proletariat to lead the way. It became increasingly unclear how to uphold a link between their theories and a pre-theoretical anchor within social reality – such as oppositional experiences, forms of consciousness, practices of resistance, or social struggles and movements – or even to see how the conditions for any of those things to emerge were present at all.

Against this backdrop, this section first sketches the common ground most Frankfurt School theorists find in the approach of immanent critique ( §2.1 ) before tracing the various ways in which they have sought normative foundations ( §2.2 ) in a more or less constructive or reconstructive ( §2.3 ) register, then turns to methods such as disclosive and genealogical critique that are critical of those normative approaches ( §2.4 ), and concludes by outlining a set of methodological challenges that shape contemporary debates ( §2.5 ).

In responding to the three-pronged methodological challenge of relating theory to social reality, reflecting on the standpoint of critique, and spelling out its normativity, Frankfurt School critical theory moves beyond the usual juxtaposition between internal and external critique. Frankfurt School theorists rely on a third model of critique, which builds on Hegel and Marx and is often understood as immanent or reconstructive. Critique proceeds immanently or reconstructively when it seeks to secure its normative resources and epistemic standpoint from the (often implicit) normative structures and epistemic possibilities of the practices and self‐understandings that are constitutive of the (type of) society in question. Immanent critique avoids the dichotomy between an internal critique that refers to standards and standpoints that are already recognized by those criticized and an external critique that refers to standards and standpoints that are not (or not yet) recognized and therefore have to be derived independently from the agents’ perspective and their social context (see Jaeggi 2005, 2014, Celikates 2009, Stahl 2013a). Critical theory understood in this way is both grounded in social reality as it exists and emancipatory in seeking to radically transform this reality.

The critique of ideology can both serve as a paradigmatic example of immanent critique in this sense and illustrate some of the challenges this model faces (Ng 2015). Ideology critique is immanent insofar as it starts from the contradictions of a social and ideological constellation and the experience of those affected, which is shaped by these contradictions. It does not criticize an ideological form of consciousness because it is immoral or unethical, but because of its epistemic, functional, and genetic features, i.e. for being false or distorted, for contributing to the reproduction of relations of domination, and for arising from within such relations in ways that are relatively immune to self-reflection. Consequently, the critique of ideology does not focus primarily on the injustice or domination found in society, but on the forms of consciousness, culture, practice, habit, and affect that make this injustice or domination seem natural or unavoidable (Jaeggi 2008). On this view, any critical theory that aims at emancipation must first aim at diagnosing and overcoming those obstacles that keep agents from fully experiencing, critically reflecting on, and collectively acting against the unjust and dominating conditions under which they live. The question is how critical theorists can do so without falling back into epistemologically and politically problematic distinctions between false and true consciousness, between ideology and scientific insight, and between true (“objective”) and false (“purely subjective”) interests and needs (Celikates 2006; see Section 3.3 below).

These challenges are among the many challenges critical theorists face in developing an immanent critique that is linked to social reality and practice, a link that comes out in two ways. First, theory is anchored in social reality in terms of its genesis, as it is shaped by the social context from which it emerges. Second, theory aims at a practice that transforms social reality. This dual commitment to linking theory and practice is spelled out in two rather different ways, both in the history of the Frankfurt School and in contemporary discussions. One way of anchoring theory in social reality – call it the crisis approach – starts with social contradictions, antagonisms, and crises, along with the practical challenges and conflicts that result, and maintains that identifying those conflicts requires socio-theoretical analysis and sociological research (Jaeggi 2017a, Fraser and Jaeggi 2018). A second way of anchoring theory in social reality – call it the struggles approach – takes social struggles and movements and the practices of critique and resistance of oppressed groups as its starting point. This approach incorporates alternative standpoints and counter-hegemonic epistemologies into its theorizing with the aim of countering the potentially disempowering and anti-emancipatory effects that arise when critical theorists view crises mainly in terms of structural contradictions while ignoring or underestimating the ways that social and political movements themselves can produce and intensify crises (Collins 2019, Celikates 2022).

While this distinction between crisis and struggle is useful for heuristic purposes, it should not be overstated. Most critical theorists share a commitment to the emancipatory role of theory as well as an immanent anchoring of theory in social reality, whether qua crises or struggles. The distinction is a matter of degree and starting points, and it is usually agreed that crises and struggles stand in need of mutual articulation (see Benhabib 1986, 123–133, and Section 4.1 and Section 4.2 below).

Horkheimer maintained that a critical theory should not have an external relation to, but must enter into a “dynamic unity” with, practice, so that it is “not merely an expression of the concrete historical situation but also a force within it to stimulate change” (1937a [1972: 215], see also Marcuse 1937, Horkheimer 1937b). But under social conditions that neutralize social struggles or turn them into regressive backlash movements, the “dynamic unity” envisaged by Horkheimer can appear foreclosed. Even for Adorno, whose diagnosis of the “totally administered world” is the most radical example of this foreclosure, however, it would be a mistake to conceptualize existing society as a perfectly closed, monolithic, and functionally integrated self-reproducing totality. Rather, even when society is viewed as a totality, it has to be understood not in terms of homogeneity or frozen stability but in terms of structural antagonisms (Adorno 1957 [1976, 77]), conflict, and process (Adorno 1966b), i.e. as riddled with contradictions that, at least in principle, allow for forms of oppositional experience, consciousness, or practice that a critical theory can build on. In one of his last texts written shortly before his death, Adorno concludes that “critical theory is not aiming at totality, but criticizes it. This also means, however, that it is, in its substance, anti-totalitarian, with the utmost political determination” (Adorno 1969a; our translation). Even – or especially – in the face of the closure of political space, the political significance of a critical theory can consist in safeguarding the link between theory and the possibility of a radically different practice. At the same time, this defense of the relation to practice needs to be complemented by a defense of theory in the face of what Adorno identified as an “actionist” and anti-theoretical ideology of “pseudo-activity” in arguing that “praxis without theory, lagging behind the most advanced state of cognition, cannot but fail, and praxis, in keeping with its own concept, would like to succeed” (Adorno 1969b [1998, 265]).

Despite this more nuanced reading of Adorno on the relation between theory and practice, the broader diagnosis – put forth in different guises by Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse – that social integration, the pacification of class conflict, and the internalization of conformist attitudes had robbed critical theory of any pre-theoretical anchor, provides an important background for Habermas’s break with the first generation. That break concerns not only their “pessimism,” but the basic methodological and substantial premises of their theories. In Habermas’s view, the first generation had navigated themselves into a dead end with their totalizing diagnosis of an all-encompassing state of delusion dominated by instrumental rationality. In response, and in order to provide firm normative foundations for critical theory, Habermas advocates a “communicative turn,” reformulating social critique in terms of a critique of the conditions of communication and grounding it in the normative content presupposed within the practice of linguistically mediated social interaction and argumentation.

This element of normative validity – as opposed to merely factual social validity that is forced, imposed, or presupposed – is elaborated in Habermas’s discourse theory, originally referred to as “discourse ethics” (Habermas 1983a, Ch. 4) but later evolving into a differentiated approach that distinguishes between ethical and moral norms (Habermas 1991) and a discourse theory of law and democracy (Habermas 1992). At the heart of discourse theory is a principle of discursive justification that Habermas refers to as the “discourse principle” or “D,” which states: “just those norms of action are valid if all persons affected could agree as participants in rational discourse” (Habermas 1992 [1996, 107]). He further specifies discourse theory with a universalization principle (“U”) that is operative when arguing about moral norms, and a democratic principle that is operative when attempting to justify legal norms within a democratic society. Habermas does not naively suggest that actually existing discourses correspond to these ideals, but maintains that in those discourses participants necessarily make idealizing presuppositions that can then be used to identify and criticize the shortcomings of actual discourse as distorted by interests, power relations, and ideologies.

As a response to the challenges of immanent critique outlined above, Habermas’s work can be understood in terms of a “dialectics of immanence and transcendence” (Cooke 2006, Ch. 3). Habermas maintains the need to situate reason historically and within social reality – the largely Hegelian, pragmatist, or reconstructive element of his thought. But the idealizations that are immanent in our linguistic practices point toward context-transcending validity claims that must be defended in a discursive procedure – the Kantian or constructivist element in his thought. Habermas now refers to his attempt to “de-transcendentalize Kant” as a form of “Kantian pragmatism” (Habermas 1999; see also Bernstein 2010, Ch. 8; Baynes 2016, Ch. 4; Flynn 2014b).

Some interpretations of Habermas stress that his theory of communicative action is still a form of immanent critique (Finlayson 2007, Stahl 2013b) while others object to his increasingly Kantian focus on moral norms (Heath 2014). To provide empirical confirmation of his rational reconstruction of the “moral point of view,” further situating it within social reality, Habermas drew on Kohlberg’s developmental moral psychology, itself decidedly Kantian in its defining the highest stage of moral development in terms of the ability to make universalizable moral judgements (Habermas 1983a, Ch. 4; for a critique, see Benhabib 1992, Chs. 5–6, which, drawing on Carol Gilligan’s critique of Kohlberg, distinguishes a “generalized other” from a “concrete other” whose experience cannot be accounted for by abstract conceptions of the moral standpoint).

Habermas’s shift toward a Kantian position is particularly evident in the Rawls-Habermas debate (Habermas 1995a, Rawls 1995, Habermas 1996), widely viewed as a “family quarrel” among two Kantian political philosophers. In his early work on discourse ethics, Habermas compared his own principle (U) to Rawls’s “original position,” arguing that his approach was the better way to “operationalize” the moral point of view as a form of moral constructivism that tests moral norms in a discursive procedure posited as a dialogical alternative to Kant’s categorical imperative (Habermas 1991). The debate shifted in the 1990s with their contributions to legal-political constructivism: Rawls’s Political Liberalism (1993) and Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms (1992), in which he provides a rational reconstruction of the institutions of constitutional democracy. In that context, Habermas argues that Rawls’s approach is not transcendent enough, since in Habermas’s view Rawls reduces normative validity to the notion of reasonableness immanent within liberal democratic societies (for the implications of their debate for multiple issues in moral and political philosophy, see Hedrick 2010, Baynes 2016, Chs. 6–7, and Finlayson 2019).

Habermas’s Kantian turn also came to the fore when extending his work in a cosmopolitan or “post-national” direction (beginning with Habermas 1995b), even if he has continued to combine a Kantian approach to justifying universal norms with a wide-ranging analysis of the empirical phenomena of globalization (1998). This combination of normative and empirical theorizing, a hallmark of the Frankfurt School, is present in a range of work by other critical theorists addressing global issues (Ingram 2019, Ibsen 2023), from the challenge of disaggregating citizenship from the nation-state (Benhabib 2004) to transnationalizing the public sphere (Fraser et al. 2014), and theorizing new forms of transnational democracy (Bohman 2007). Rather than simply defending abstract cosmopolitan norms, such approaches typically aim at some form of critical cosmopolitanism (Milstein 2015), with some stressing the crucial role of political contestation of allegedly universal norms “from below” (J. Ingram 2013) or of concrete struggles for rights as part of a broadly construed intercultural dialogue on human rights (Flynn 2014a).

In light of Habermas’s turn to Kant, a significant focus of debate among Habermasians and interpreters of Habermas has been the status of idealizing presuppositions and the ultimate status of the principles of justification within discourse theory. Defenders of discourse theory can be divided up into those who focus more on immanence – pointing in a Hegelian, pragmatist, contextualist, or reconstructive direction – and those who focus more on transcendence – pointing in a Kantian or constructivist direction. Among the former, some argue, echoing Hegel’s critique of Kant, that Habermas should situate reason more thoroughly within its social and historical context in order to avoid an overly rationalistic, abstract, or gendered approach (Benhabib 1986, 1992), while others have argued for Habermas to embrace a more pragmatist (McCarthy 1991, Bernstein 2010) or contextualist approach (Rorty 1985, Allen 2008, Ch. 6). Habermas’s most recent work (2019) attempts a kind of middle path, going in a decidedly historical direction by tracing the provincial, European origins of his “post-metaphysical” mode of theorizing as a preparatory stage to a fully inclusive, global intercultural dialogue as the way to establish its universal validity in a world characterized by “multiple modernities” (see Forst 2021b, Chambers 2022, and Flynn 2022 for critical assessments).

Those who have taken discourse theory in a more Kantian or transcendental direction include Habermas’s long-time interlocutor Karl Otto-Apel, who argued that the dynamic of universal validity claims in practices of argumentation transcendentally presupposes an ideal communication community from which universal normative foundations for the assessment of discourses can be derived (Apel 1985). Apel maintained that grounding reason, and thereby critique, requires a more transcendental justification (or “ultimate grounding”) than Habermas has provided (Apel 1989; see Habermas’s most recent reply to Apel in 2005, Ch. 3).

More recently, Rainer Forst has embraced Kantian constructivism in positing that every human being has a “right to justification,” a right to demand reciprocal and general reasons for the practices, institutions, and structures that affect them (Forst 2007). Forst views moral and political constructivism as distinct, but integrated stages. While the task of moral constructivism is to construct a list of basic moral rights that cannot be reasonably rejected, those abstract rights must be given concrete content by citizens in a process of political constructivism. He maintains that his approach is immanent insofar as the right to justification is “recursively grounded” by reconstructing the validity claims implicit in all morally justified claims, while maintaining a moment of transcendence since the right to justification can be justifiably claimed in any context. Forst views this as the normative core of a critical theory that understands society as an ensemble of practices of justification. In that sense, the concept of justification is both descriptive (referring to actual arguments given within a particular social order) and normative (referring to reasons that could or should be accepted), and Forst maintains both perspectives are needed for a critique of existing justification narratives and relations of justification (see the Introductions to Forst 2011 and 2021a).

Various critics of Habermas have argued that his normative turn and shift to Kant risks transforming critical theory into something that looks increasingly like a liberal theory of justice. They posit alternative approaches such as reconstructive, disclosive, and genealogical critique that also return to questions and arguments developed by the first generation.

Those who subscribe to the model of reconstructive critique emphasize the downsides of uncoupling normative argument from social analysis and social theory. In Axel Honneth’s work, this shift takes two forms. In his earlier work (1992), he argues that the relatively narrow rationalist focus on communicative reason occludes more fundamental and often prelinguistic experiences and intersubjective relations that give rise to struggles for recognition and that his Hegel-inspired theory is better able to articulate, thus reestablishing the link between theory and social reality in more substantial ways. Relatedly, Honneth insists that critical theory can be distinguished from other normative enterprises by its reference to “the pretheoretical resource in which its own critical viewpoint is anchored extra-theoretically as an empirical interest or moral experience” (Honneth 1994 [2007, 63–64]).

Expanding on this earlier commitment, in his later work Honneth argues against the division of theoretical labor in which (constructivist) philosophy engages in normative theorizing while empirical sociology investigates our social reality (2011). By contrast, he undertakes a “normative reconstruction” of how modern society – its legal, moral, political as well as social and economic practices and institutions – came to be centered around individual freedom as the highest value of this cultural formation. Honneth wants to show that we can only gain an adequate theoretical understanding of, and critical perspective on, modern society if we analyze its different social spheres as attempts to institutionalize the value of freedom. In contrast to both revolutionary and conservative approaches, he wants to show that the structure of this institutionalization allows for a progressive realization of the value of freedom as social actors appeal to the constitutive idea of freedom to challenge the concrete forms of unfreedom that remain characteristic of our social reality.

Similar to Honneth methodologically, Rahel Jaeggi argues, in her reconstructive approach to the critique of forms of life, that bracketing the question of how to rationally evaluate and criticize forms of life as a whole, as Rawlsians do in the name of liberal neutrality and Habermasians in the name of “ethical abstinence,” ends up hindering precisely the kind of experimental learning processes that are crucial for forms of life to remain dynamic and avoid stagnation and failure (2014 [2018, 9–24, 318–319]). But Jaeggi places a greater emphasis on contradictions, crises, and conflicts than the later Honneth (see also Schaub 2015).

The approaches of both Honneth and Jaeggi exemplify a conception of immanent critique that closely links analysis and critique, issuing in a critique that is neither a mere description of what exists nor a normative demand imposed on what exists from the outside. Accordingly, it does not proceed in a free-standing, normative way, but relies on a specific combination of philosophical reflection and social-theoretical as well as empirical research that is grounded in social developments and crises and actual social experiences and self-understandings. This methodological reorientation has also led to a more substantial engagement with questions of the economy and the sphere of work, both from a more Durkheim-inspired (Honneth 2022, 2023, Celikates, Honneth, and Jaeggi 2023) and a more Marx-inspired (Fraser 2022) position that has also resulted in a fundamental (non-reformist) critique of capitalism (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018).

While these approaches seek to develop a socially grounded form of normativity, critics argue that they are still too idealizing in their understanding of social reality and its historical genesis, as well as too normative in their methods from the point of view of yet another model of critique, which has been called disclosive or genealogical.

Disclosive critique typically takes its cue from Adorno (and sometimes other theoretical sources from Heidegger to contemporary aesthetics), moving beyond the dichotomy between literary world-disclosure and philosophical reason-giving or the quest for normative foundations. On this view, critique has the task of revealing the world in a new and different light, disclosing unrecognized suffering and intricate forms of domination that are not only occluded by dominant ideologies but also shape the norms that emanate from that order in ways that escape more strongly normative versions of immanent critique that build on them. Dialectic of Enlightenment can be read as an exercise in disclosive critique that seeks to defamiliarize the social world for its readers and thereby break open their unquestioned acceptance of how things appear to them (Honneth 1998).

This negative orientation of disclosive critique can be complemented by a more positive one, in which what is disclosed also involves potentialities and horizons that have no space or way to articulate themselves within the existing social and normative order. Walter Benjamin’s writings on the radical potential of mass culture or Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) can be seen as examples of disclosive critique that involve both the disruption of established and the experimental opening up of new experiences and schemas (Vogelmann 2016).

Some critical theorists attempt to integrate a more positive idea of disclosure into critical theory while maintaining that this is not at odds with expanded conceptions or normativity. Some draw on Heidegger to develop an account of world-disclosive critique that rethinks reason and agency, stressing receptivity and “self-decentering” as an alternative model to Habermas’s focus on procedural reason (Kompridis 2006). Others stress that while disclosure can and must be subject to intersubjective validation through argumentation, critical theory must have recourse to the disclosive power of imagination, which is revealed in the force of exemplarity (Ferrara 2008), in focusing attention on the aesthetic dimension of narratives that social movements use to imagine alternative possibilities (Lara 1998, 2021), or in the way that powerful representations of the good society function to disclose a transcendent object that cannot be fully known or represented but can nonetheless provide ethical orientation (Cooke 2006). In a variety of different ways, these approaches attempt to maintain the utopian dimension of critique (Marcuse 1937).

Genealogical critique, by contrast, can be seen as a form of disclosive critique that is more focused on problematizing, unmasking, and disrupting (Saar 2002, Koopman 2013). Given its association with Nietzsche and Foucault, it also has a distinct trajectory, set of methodological commitments, and theoretical implications. Taking aim at social practices, self-understandings, identities and normative commitments that are seen as natural or accepted as given, genealogical critique traces their historical emergence, highlighting their contingency and denaturalizing them with the aim of opening up the possibility of thinking and acting differently. From this perspective, the search for normative foundations is misguided as it both underestimates how normativity is shaped by unacknowledged histories and power relations and overestimates the transformative power of a normative critique that appeals to reason alone. Genealogical critique, by contrast, seeks to destabilize and decenter the subject and its fundamental commitments (Owen 2002, Hoy and McCarthy 1994; for a version of this claim that builds on psychoanalytic theory, see Allen 2021, Ch. 5).

While earlier engagements with genealogical critique, especially Foucault’s, were marked by criticisms of his supposed rejection of all normative and rational standards, lack of social theorizing, and relativism (Habermas 1985, Chs. IX–X, Fraser 1981, Dews 1987), more recently critical theorists have sought to emphasize the potential convergence and mutual illumination of genealogy and Frankfurt School critical theory in providing an analysis of the workings of contemporary forms of power and domination (Allen 2008, Koopman 2013, Ch. 7, Saar 2018). At the same time, a recent debate between Forst and Wendy Brown exemplifies how the earlier split between Habermas and Foucault is rearticulated today, with Forst taking a broadly Habermasian position in arguing that his “respect conception of tolerance” manages to safeguard the autonomy of individuals by grounding toleration in the right to justification, and Brown insisting, with Foucault, on the normalizing, disciplining, and depoliticizing effects of liberal discourses of toleration that ultimately obfuscate the complex operations of social power (Brown and Forst 2014, see also Vogelmann 2021).

A genealogical orientation also characterizes postcolonial critiques of Frankfurt School critical theory that point out the lack of explicit and sustained engagement with European colonialism and imperialism and its legacies, including contemporary forms of racism, and the ways in which these have enabled and shaped the processes of “modernization” and thus the formation of “modern”’ societies, subjects, and forms of knowledge and rationality, all of which critical theorists purport to investigate critically (see §4.1.3 below).

Exponents of genealogical critique and struggle-centered approaches problematize forms of immanent or reconstructive critique that take institutional achievements as their starting point, challenging them by excavating the histories of domination and repression, as well as struggles, that have constituted these institutions and continue to shape their functioning. This gives rise to numerous challenges that continue to animate methodological debates in critical theory: (1) how (or even whether) to defend the putative normative achievements of liberal democracies, and if those are to be defended as achievements, then (2) how to theorize about the relation between struggles, crises, and institutional achievements, in contexts that may involve either (3) an absence of struggles, or (4), the opposite problem, a proliferation and fragmentation of struggles:

From the perspective of genealogical and post-colonial critique, the commitment to the institutions of the modern liberal nation-state (Habermas 1992, Honneth 2011) relies on an idealizing view of the history and present of this political formation that ignores, or treats as historically contingent and philosophically inconsequential, the forms of domination and exclusion that have accompanied it. At a time when the putative institutional achievements of liberal democracies – such as the separation of powers, the independence of the judiciary, the integrity of elections, or the protection of fundamental rights, especially for minorities – have come under attack from right-wing and neo-authoritarian movements and governments, the question is how critical theorists can defend the normative achievements of the existing order despite its systemic shortcomings. Offering a more radical challenge, some critical race theorists and post-colonial critics argue that those shortcomings reveal that what were thought to be normative achievements were historically premised on, and continue to functionally presuppose, domination and exclusion both at a societal and global level (see §4.1.2 and §4.1.3 below). On a methodological level, this involves the challenge of revising or going beyond the normative and sociological categories of critical theory that seem, at least in part, to be tied to a specifically Western experience.

Many critical theorists who accept the claim that these are normative achievements insist that a more complex view of the relation between institutions, struggles, and crises is necessary. As mentioned above, an alternative strand within critical theory that reaches from Negt and Kluge’s recovery of proletarian counterpublics through Fraser’s theorization of feminist movements to current attempts to reconnect critical theory with the struggles of our age, has insisted that abstracting from collective movements and struggles and relocating the emancipatory potential in the normative achievements of the existing institutional order risks underestimating how institutional dynamics, the inherent crisis tendencies of (more or less) liberal democracies, and social struggles are inextricably intertwined. Beyond a merely historical and social-theoretical point, how this question is answered will also affect how to conceptualize the role of emancipatory as opposed to regressive struggles in the face of the new authoritarianism (see §4.2.3 below).

More abstractly, critical theorists must account for situations in which there seem to be no struggles or forms of critical consciousness to latch onto, or only highly constrained forms of them. How can a critical theory respond to a situation in which domination is more or less total and has managed to suppress any critical consciousness and practice? Some of Marcuse’s descriptions of contemporary society come closest to this scenario. One might respond that “a society of happy slaves, genuinely content with their chains,” a society in which domination is experienced not as domination but as freedom, might be the critical theorists’ nightmare, but it “is a nightmare, not a realistic view of a state of society which is at present possible” (Geuss 1981, 83–84). Nevertheless, the challenge points to a dilemma critical theorists need to navigate. On the one hand, a critical theory requires a starting point in the forms of consciousness, experience, and practice of its addressees, but, on the other hand, critical theory should respond to and address distortions and blockages of precisely these forms of consciousness, experience, and practice. While these distortions and blockages will in most cases turn out to be partial rather than total and thus allow for some form of problematization to emerge (Celikates 2009, Part III), it seems equally important to not simply tie a critical theory to already existing social movements and thus to “goals that have already been publicly articulated” since this “neglects the everyday, still unthematized, but no less pressing embryonic form of social misery and moral injustice” (Honneth 2003, 114; see also Renault 2004, 2008).

The opposite problem can arise when critical theorists diagnose a proliferation of social struggles and lines of conflict beyond the classic antagonism of labor and capital. After the demise of the kind of philosophy of history that identified the proletariat as the revolutionary subject and the workers’ movement as the emancipatory force to which critical theory could and should attach itself, it has become unclear how critical theorists can determine with which of the different emancipatory movements of their day to enter into the kind of alliance envisaged by Marx and Horkheimer and which “forms of existing social critique” or “experiences of injustice” to pick up on. This difficulty is not only due to the plurality – or intersectionality – of movements, practices of critique, and experiences of injustice, but also due to the fact that struggles are often far from perfectly aligned and can operate at cross-purposes, with regard to both their aims and their methods. In answering this challenge, critical theorists can neither simply deduce the “correct” struggle from some overarching laws of historical development (the pole of determinism), nor claim that theorists simply have to decide which struggle or movement to link their theory to (the pole of voluntarism).

Insofar as critical theory is committed to immanent critique, focusing on the internal contradictions and crises of a specific social order and the struggles and movements that arise from within it, these challenges cannot be easily resolved. Rather than seeking to resolve them at an abstract level, they could instead be viewed as opening up a field of tensions that critical theorists need to navigate within the specific constellation they find themselves in. While critical theory needs to be anchored in actually existing forms of theoretical as well as practical critique, in the social struggles that people actually engage in, it also has the task of articulating the experiences of those who are blocked from engaging in struggles of their own and of contributing to the further theoretical articulation of existing struggles. At times, critical theory may need “to push beyond the ‘subjective’ elements of struggle and languages of claims-making to the more ‘objective’ dimensions of contradictions and crises, which turn more on the dynamics of systemic elements operating independently of whether or not people actually thematize them via struggle” (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018, 11), without losing sight of the epistemic and political risks this involves.

In addressing these risks, one way forward has been to embrace methodological pluralism and to understand critical theory less as a comprehensive social theory and more as a critical practice, as something critics do (Bohman 2003, Kompridis 2006, Celikates 2019a). This approach can more systematically incorporate alternative standpoints and epistemologies and the practices of epistemic resistance they are tied to, and more easily build on other traditions and paradigms of critical theory, such as feminist, anti-colonial, and anti-racist struggles and theorizing (Mills 1988, Collins 1990, 2019, Medina 2013, Loick 2021, Celikates 2022; see Section 4.1 below). Anchoring the perspective of critical theory within the social struggles and epistemic standpoints of the oppressed can serve as a counterweight – in the sense of “reflexive accountability” (Collins 2019) – to the tendency of actually existing critical theories to set in motion a disempowering spiral of epistemic asymmetries that denies the existence of theoretically sophisticated practices of critique and resistance on the ground and thereby reproduces existing obstacles to equal participation in knowledge production and to radical social transformation. On this view, critical theorizing is itself a social practice that recognizes its addressees as equal partners in a dialogical struggle for appropriate interpretations and realization of transformative potentials that is informed by social theory and sociological research. As such, it can make use of a variety of critical methods – reconstructive, constructive, disclosive, or genealogical (Freyenhagen 2018) – that are not easily subsumed under one unified metatheoretical framework, even if they can be seen as various attempts to spell out the idea of a critical theory as self-reflexive, interdisciplinary, materialist, and emancipatory.

3. Critical Concepts

The basic concepts of Frankfurt School critical theory – such as alienation, reification, ideology, but also emancipation – are expressive of the specific methodology, or set of methodologies, that critical theorists in this tradition employ. As explained in the previous section, critical theory in this tradition proceeds in an immanent way, and this implies that its concepts are both developed from within a certain social constellation and seek to go beyond the self-understanding characteristic of this constellation, they are both descriptive and evaluative, and they exemplify the unity of analysis and critique inherited from Marx. While some concepts are primarily “anticipatory-utopian” (like emancipation) and others primarily “explanatory-diagnostic” (like alienation, reification, and ideology, as obstacles to emancipation) (Benhabib 1986), they are all “thick concepts” whose descriptive content is irreducibly social-theoretically as well as evaluatively loaded.

In addition, some of the critical concepts developed by Frankfurt School authors – again alienation, reification and ideology are the clearest examples – point to second-order phenomena. In contrast to substantial first-order injustices, these concepts seek to critically diagnose what happens when unjust (or exploitative or oppressive) social relations are not experienced as unjust (or exploitative or oppressive) but are accepted as legitimate or natural, or if they are intuitively experienced but not explicitly recognized as such, or recognized but not adequately interpreted and articulated. These concepts pick out social phenomena that are often ignored by more mainstream approaches in moral and political philosophy that focus on the moral status of the individual and their actions, or the legitimacy of institutional arrangements, to the neglect of the domain of the social, with its distinct structure, dynamics, and challenges (see, e.g., Honneth 2000, Ch. 1, Zurn 2011, Neuhouser 2022, Ch. 1). The following subsections introduce four key concepts that exemplify both the critical methodologies discussed in the previous section and the substantial social-theoretical and diagnostic contributions to our understanding of contemporary society that Frankfurt School critical theory aspires to. There are of course other concepts used by critical theorists – from normativity, justice, and autonomy to power, domination, and oppression – but the focus here is on concepts less widely discussed in other traditions or to which Frankfurt School theorists have made distinctive contributions.

The concept of alienation has a long history within critical theory. The basic concept refers to the idea of humans being separated, estranged, or distanced from something crucial to their freedom or capacity to flourish. One is alienated when one has a distorted or deficient relation to oneself or to the natural or social world. Critical theorists face a number of challenges in developing a critique of alienation. Classic critiques of alienation, Rousseau and the early Marx for example, relied on substantive conceptions of human nature or self-realization to ground their diagnoses and provide standards for critique. Thick accounts of human nature are less compelling today, which means contemporary critics of alienation have pursued alternative approaches. Since a critique of alienation attempts to diagnose a social pathology, not a problem with particular individuals, critical theorists must also provide a social theory that can convincingly diagnose the social causes of, and possible paths for overcoming, alienation.

Rousseau can be credited with inaugurating “social philosophy” as a domain of inquiry while developing a critique of alienation (Honneth 2000, Ch. 1). Although he does not refer to alienation in his “Second Discourse” (1755), the term captures his argument that living in society leaves human beings disconnected from their true desires and passions, which he explored by speculating about what humans would have been like in a state of nature. Within Hegelian and Marxist social criticism, the concept of alienation has been used to capture the idea that something produced by humans is wrongly taken by them as something given or outside their conscious control (Jaeggi 2005 [2014, 13–14]). In his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel first develops a concept of alienation to describe the relation of the human mind to reality when the products of human reason are not recognized as our own creation but are instead experienced as alien forces. In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), Marx analyzed how wage labor within capitalist societies causes alienation. Workers produce a world of objects, but the products of their labor as well as their own productive activity are commodities over which they have no control; the world they create becomes an alien power with increasing control over them. They are alienated from the kind of spontaneous and creative productive activity that Marx, in his early work, posits as the essence of human nature.

The concept of alienation was influential among first-generation Frankfurt School theorists, particularly in the work of Marcuse and the later work of Erich Fromm (1961). In Dialectic of Enlightenment , Horkheimer and Adorno echo Rousseau in telling a story of alienation going back to the dawn of civilization. They maintain that human beings, in their quest to dominate the natural world (external nature) and to acquire mastery over themselves (inner nature), become estranged from both aspects of nature, failing to see what Enlightenment denies: that we are fundamentally natural beings (Vogel 1996, 69).

Contemporary critical theorists have attempted to rejuvenate the concept of alienation without relying on overly substantive accounts of human nature and without the totalizing diagnosis of Dialectic of Enlightenment . Rahel Jaeggi formalizes key elements of the Hegelian-Marxist approach in developing a philosophical account of alienation focused on how failure to adequately appropriate oneself or the world results in a “relation of relationlessnes” (2005). In this way, the non-alienated self is not defined by a substantive conception of human nature but by the quality of one’s relation to the world: whether this relation is sustained by successful processes of appropriation. Hartmut Rosa also defines alienation as a distorted relation to the world but with a more substantive approach to the quality of non-alienated relations to the world. For this, he has developed a multifaceted concept of “resonance” to capture a kind of vibrant or responsive relation to the world by contrast with the alienated experience of the world as ossified, mute, or hostile (2016). In contrast to these approaches, which are largely framed in terms of necessary conditions for living a good life, Rainer Forst has argued that deontological aspects of the critique of alienation have been neglected, and that there is a kind of “noumenal alienation” that results from not being recognized, or failing to recognize oneself, as an agent of justification (2017).

Reification is a concept with close ties to alienation. If alienation is viewed as diagnosing a distorted relation to the world, reification can be understood as one way of articulating the form that distortion can take. In the broadest sense, reification is a term used to critique cases in which some entity that should not be viewed as an object – oneself, other people, or some segment of the social or natural world – is treated as a thing-like object. It is instrumentalized, objectified, or quantified in a way that is inappropriate according to some critical standard. One challenge for critical theorists is articulating the standard or perspective – a non-reified relation or perspective – according to which the reified stance is not appropriate.

Georg Lukács’s classic 1923 essay on reification heavily influenced the Frankfurt School. Lukács combined Marx’s analysis of the “fetishism of commodities” – which causes social relations between human beings to appear as quantifiable and thing-like – with Weber’s analysis of bureaucracy – which extends this instrumentalizing attitude to all social domains. Reification becomes “the necessary, immediate reality of every person living in capitalist society” (1923 [1971, 197]), which can refer to an instrumentalizing attitude taken toward objects (whose qualitative feature are reduced to quantitative terms), other people, and features of one’s own personality when viewed solely from the perspective of their marketability.

Different critical theorists have appealed to the concept of reification to capture similar but not identical phenomena, with differing definitions corresponding to differences in the larger theoretical framework in which they deploy the concept. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the concept captures the dominance of instrumental reason and the totally administered world that results (1947). Habermas reinterpreted the concept to describe the ways in which systems such as the economy and the bureaucratic state, which function properly as spheres in which instrumental rationality dominates, extend too far into spheres of everyday life that he refers to as the lifeword (1981). This “colonization” of the lifeworld by the system results in the communicative structures of the lifeworld becoming reified. Honneth, by contrast, takes up the concept of reification in relation to his theory of recognition, arguing that reification involves a kind of forgetting of a primary relation of mutual recognition that he calls “empathetic engagement” (2005). Within Rosa’s theory of resonance, in which he attempts to capture one side of the history of modernity as a “catastrophe of resonance,” reification can be viewed as a “forgetfulness of resonance” (2016 [2019, 325]). The revival of this concept has been extended in other ways by using reification as a guiding concept for analyzing the relation between economics and subject formation within a “political economy of the senses” (Chari 2015) or pairing reification with a suitably modified notion of reconciliation to assess experiences of exclusion and integration within modern social orders (Hedrick 2019).

Ideology is similar to alienation and reification in being both a concept critical theory inherits from the Marxist tradition and one that is used to identify a distorted relationship to the world and one’s own place in it (Eagleton 1991). In the Marxist tradition, it has played a prominent role in answering questions such as why people accept social and political conditions that seem to be contrary to their own interests, or how it is possible that subjects feel free although they are dominated. When people experience and describe relations of exploitation and domination as natural and without alternative or even as just, this seems to be an effect of ideology. Ideology, on this critical understanding, usually denotes a more or less coherent system of action-guiding beliefs, such as liberal individualism, that is said to obscure social reality – especially power relations, crisis tendencies, and social conflicts. As Marx (1844, 1846, 1867) and subsequent critical theorists argue, by obscuring these, ideology contributes to the reproduction of the prevailing order (Rosen 1996). Accordingly, any radically transformative and emancipatory practice presupposes that this ideological obfuscation must be recognized as such, criticized, and overcome. The challenge to such critical reflection is particularly acute when the possibility of even asking questions about how we might want to live, if we could transform society, is occluded by a technocratic ideology that reframes such practical questions as technical problems with narrow solutions (Habermas 1963, 1968a).

Ideology differs from mere deception, propaganda, or conspiracy theories. Because it is structurally anchored in social reality and plays a functional role for its reproduction, it cannot be explained with reference to the individual psyche or manipulation by others alone. Even if false consciousness is an element of ideology, critical theorists from Adorno to Jaeggi emphasize the practical nature of ideology as it shapes identities, is embedded in social practice, and functions via affects and habitus.

According to one influential interpretation, the critical notion of ideology developed in the Frankfurt School is characterized by three dimensions (Geuss 1981, Jaeggi 2008). In the first, epistemic dimension, ideologies always encompass epistemically deficient beliefs and attitudes that can range from substantially false beliefs to the confusion of particular and universal interests and inadequate concepts (such as “illegal alien” to refer to undocumented immigrants). In the second, functional dimension, ideologies are seen as playing a necessary, or at least supporting, role for the stabilization and legitimation of social relations of domination, i.e. for their more or less smooth reproduction. In the third, genetic dimension, ideologies are shaped, in ways that are not transparent to the agents themselves, by the social conditions under which they emerge, so that it is not an accident that people end up with the specific sets of beliefs they end up with in a specific type of society.

Radicalizing the Marxist notion of ideology as “necessarily false consciousness,” i.e. consciousness that is false (and not simply morally problematic) for structural reasons (and not just accidentally), Adorno and Marcuse often seem to argue that ideology reaches into the innermost core of subjects, who are shaped all the way down to their psychological and physical impulses, leading them to affirm the existing order and thereby preempting any resistance to domination. While this might help explain the resilience of ideology and its continued effectiveness, it also poses the challenge for critical theorists to find an anchor for their critique in the forms of consciousness, experience, and practice of its addressees (Celikates 2006, and Section 2.5 above).

Due to its emancipatory orientation, the critique of ideology must connect up with the self-understanding of those affected by trying to initiate learning processes, which in turn are supposed to lead to a transformation of those social conditions that are hidden behind ideologies. At the same time, without recourse to critical theories agents themselves will often continue to face obstacles to identifying, diagnosing, and explaining the effects of ideology on their critical capacities and practices. Arguably, showing that a contradiction is inscribed in the existing social order and can only be “dissolved” if this order itself is fundamentally transformed is also a task for a critical theory.

Although for most critical theorists ideology is not merely false consciousness but embedded in social practices and identities, ideology critique has been criticized for being overly cognitivist and underestimating the role of habitualized attitudes and cultural practices, for relying on an overly strong distinction between true and distorted consciousness, and for presupposing an idealized notion of the subject. Critics such as Foucault and Bourdieu speak instead of power-knowledge (Foucault 1973, 15) or of symbolic power and its embodiment (Bourdieu 1980, Ch. 8). The epistemological and political challenges the notion of ideology gives rise to continue to animate discussions (Celikates, Haslanger, and Stanley (eds.) forthcoming), including, more recently, on the relation between ideology and epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007, Mills 2017), cultural technē (Haslanger 2017a), and propaganda (Stanley 2015).

Frankfurt School critical theory inherits its emancipatory orientation from Marx, in the sense that it aims not only to understand, but also to contribute to a radical transformation of the social world that is already under way, and the commitment to real emancipation as requiring a radical, irreducibly social and political transformation that overcomes the fundamental contradictions of modern society instead of partial or local reforms aimed at surface-level symptoms. Emancipation is thus understood as liberation, including self-liberation, from domination by social, political, and economic powers, both personal and structural. Against this background, however, critical theorists have given different accounts of what emancipation is, what it requires, and how much can be said about it as a process and as an aim or state. While some (Horkheimer 1937a, Habermas 1968b) have thought of emancipation as a process of enlightenment and self-reflection that would allow for the realization of a rational organization of society, others thought of emancipation as sensual liberation (Marcuse 1969), or as emancipation from the (internalized) destructive imperatives of capitalism towards a state “of lying on water and looking peacefully at the sky” (Adorno 1951c [2005, 157]).

At the same time, and insofar as the working class has been integrated, fragmented, or at least reconstituted, it has become increasingly less clear who is to be emancipated (or self-emancipated) from which forms of domination and how. The challenges to the possibility of emancipation include reflections on the potentially overblown ideals of autonomy, sovereignty, and transparency that seem to underlie it (Laclau 1992), the limits of active self-transformation under conditions in which subjects have been shaped by power-ridden forms of subjectivation (Allen 2015), and the prospects of overcoming capitalism given the apparent lack of any clear and viable alternative. Today, critical theorists also face the challenge of reorienting the emancipatory project in the face of a catastrophic climate crisis that seems to privilege adaptation, mitigation, and sheer survival over utopian visions of emancipation that have also served historically as a pretext for an extractive and dominating relation to nature (Brown 2022).

In light of these challenges, a critical theory that wishes to hold on to its emancipatory orientation will need to articulate emancipation as an immanent possibility that is enabled and in some ways required by unprecedented historical developments. Whether in doing so it can build on the presumption of an emancipatory interest of the oppressed that theorists from Marx and Horkheimer to Habermas and Honneth (2017) have sought to identify remains contested. But thinking of emancipation as a second-order process that aims at enabling collective practices of self-determination over and against the obstacles picked out by concepts such as alienation, reification, and ideology, rather than as a substantial ideal or positive utopian vision of emancipation to be attained, might provide a starting point. Insofar as critical theory continues to see the existing social order as one of structurally entrenched domination, exploitation, and alienation, it will also continue to rely on some notion of an emancipatory process that points beyond those structures, even if this process is invariably plural, non-teleological, open-ended, and negative in orientation.

4. Critical Theories Today

Marx defined critical theory as the “self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age” (Marx 1843). The vitality of this approach to critical theory depends on continually taking up this task in new social contexts, as the first generation of the Frankfurt School did. Contemporary critical theorists continue this legacy by engaging with and theorizing in relation to contemporary struggles, crises, and practices. This has meant engaging a much wider range of emancipatory social movements than earlier generations of the Frankfurt School, who focused more on class struggle and capitalism (and the ways these were entangled with antisemitism and fascism) while largely neglecting issues like colonialism, racism, and the subordination of women. Contemporary critical theorists have expanded and enriched the Frankfurt School tradition by engaging with, and in some cases making contributions to, feminist theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial and decolonial theory (4.1), enlarging their analyses of crises beyond capitalism and its contradictions (4.2), and exploring a variety of critical practices ranging from civil disobedience to prefigurative, abolitionist, and revolutionary practices (4.3).

4.1 Theorizing Struggles and Movements

As emphasized above, Frankfurt School critical theory is methodologically interdisciplinary and defined by its aim of contributing to the emancipatory transformation of society by critically reflecting on the ways in which thinking itself can be distorted by structures of domination. This is also true of the various forms of critical theorizing that have emerged from and in relation to struggles against gendered oppression, racism, and colonialism and its legacies. Indeed, those critical theories bring to light structures of domination and modes of thinking (patriarchy, white supremacy, neocolonialism and Eurocentrism) that have until recently been neglected by the Frankfurt School and must be taken into account by any theory that aims to be critical and emancipatory.

More than one feminist theorist has argued that engaging feminism has been, and still is, crucial to renewing Frankfurt School critical theory both methodologically and in order to live up to its emancipatory aims (Fraser 1985, Ferrarese 2018). But analyzing the intersection between feminist theory and the Frankfurt School is complicated by the diverse array of theorists on both sides of that intersection. Some of the debates among feminist critical theorists mirror debates already discussed, for instance between those who draw on first generation versus Habermas or those who embrace Habermasian versus poststructuralist critical theory.

In most accounts, the first generation of the Frankfurt School is portrayed as not including any women and, with the exception of Marcuse in the 1970s (Marcuse 1974), its main protagonists largely failed to theorize about gender-based oppression or engage with feminist movements or the feminist theory of their time (there is, however, a new research project at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt that aims to challenge the dominant historiography by highlighting contributions of female researchers such as Käthe Weil and Else Frenkel-Brunswik and feminist work within the Frankfurt School). While fully acknowledging why feminists might find little of value in the first generation, some feminist theorists have highlighted important methodological affinities between, and potential for productive engagement with, that body of work (Brown 2006, Heberle 2006, Marasco 2006). In spite of the first generation’s nostalgia for the authority of the patriarchal family, their studies of authoritarianism were groundbreaking in analyzing the family as a political institution and breeding ground for fascism (Marasco 2018). Recent interest in Adorno’s work in particular builds on his theory of the nonidentical as support for the feminist critique of essentialist identities as well as affinities between feminist aims and his deconstruction of dualisms like nature and history or reason and desire, and his appeal to lived experience as crucial to philosophy and critique (Heberle 2006, 5–6). Attempts at synthesis include using his theory of the nonidentical, in dialogue with Lacan and Marx, to theorize a new approach to feminist political subjectivity (Leeb 2017), and combining Adorno’s insights into “bourgeois coldness” with the feminist ethics of care to rethink the fragility of our concern for others within a capitalist form of life that fosters “generalized indifference” while also producing a gendered form of attention to others (Ferrarese 2018).

Turning to the second generation, the critique of Habermas’s failure to adequately theorize gender in his Theory of Communicative Action (1981) was a turning point. In a now-classic essay, Nancy Fraser (1985) took a cue from the Marx quote about critical theory reflecting on the struggles of the age to criticize the Frankfurt School, and Habermas in particular, for failing to theorize one of the most significant struggles against domination. Seyla Benhabib raised similar concerns about whether the theory of communicative action could adequately theorize the feminist movement (1986, 252), and in Situating the Self (1992) aimed to make Habermasian discourse theory more cognizant of the self as gendered (see also the essays collected in Meehan 1995). In his later discourse theory of democracy, Habermas does engage the feminist theory and politics of equality to illuminate his core thesis about how private and public autonomy mutually presuppose each other (1992 [1996, 418–427]). But feminist critical theorists maintain that his rationalist approach fails to adequately capture the way power operates (Allen 2008, Ch. 5; McNay 2022, Ch. 1) or to incorporate forms of communication like narrative that have been crucial to feminism (Lara 1998, 2021; Young 2000).

The third generation of the Frankfurt School represents a crucial shift, with prominent feminist theorists like Fraser and Benhabib attempting to make critical theory more amenable to feminism from within the tradition, while also engaging in debates with leading figures in the poststructuralist strand of feminist critical theory like Judith Butler (Benhabib et. al. 1995). A core issue in these debates has been between Habermasian feminists who stress autonomy and poststructuralists who stress the idea of subjection – the ways in which power is central to the formation of subjects and their desires (Butler 1997). Amy Allen critically engages and synthesizes insights from both sides of this debate in viewing subjects as both constituted through relations of power and able to exercise autonomy in the form of critical reflection (Allen 2008). Axel Honneth, another key figure in the third generation, has engaged with feminist theory (Honneth 2000) and the feminist movement (2011 [2014, 154–176]), and in debates with feminist critical theorists including Fraser (Fraser and Honneth 2003) and Butler (Ikäheimo et al. 2021), but his work has also been the subject of sustained feminist critique of his conception of love, the family, and caring labor (Young 2007, Rössler 2007, Wimbauer 2023).

Fraser has, over several decades, developed a systematic defense of socialist feminism while charting various shifts in the feminist movement (see the essays collected in Fraser 2013), recently making the case that the contemporary crisis in care work must be understood as part of a larger general crisis in capitalist society (Fraser 2016, 2022, Ch. 3). Other feminist critical theorists also argue for a return to the critique of capitalism as crucial to feminist theorizing (Leeb 2017). From a different perspective, Lois McNay argues that recent Frankfurt School theorists, not only Honneth and Forst but also Fraser and Jaeggi, have failed to adequately incorporate the experience of gendered oppression into critical theory (McNay 2022). Another set of challenges arises from the need to develop an intersectional analysis of power and domination while engaging with a broader range of work in feminist and gender theory including queer and trans* theory as well as transnational and postcolonial feminism (Allen 2019, 537–538).

Apart from the influential studies on antisemitism and fascism by the first generation, Frankfurt School theorists have until recently shown little interest in issues of race and racism despite the prominence of anti-racist struggles and theorizing throughout the twentieth century and the present. The silence is of course not total. Early analyses point to prejudice toward Jews and other minority groups as an important part of the authoritarian personality and a key mechanism of providing “pseudo-orientation in an estranged world” (Adorno et al. 1950, 622), diagnose a culturalist transformation of the earlier biological racism at the center of fascism in post-war Europe that serves to maintain white supremacy (Adorno 1955, 148–9), and identify the phantasmatic dimension of racism and its fictions of homogeneity, purity, and essential difference (Adorno 1967a). Arguably, there are also broader methodological lessons from the relational and materialist theory of antisemitism developed by Adorno and Horkheimer that also hold for the study of racism (even if their relation remains contested, see Catlin 2023), namely the rejection of psychologizing and individualizing approaches, the insistence that the pathology always lies in the antisemitic or racist subjects and not in their victims, and the emphasis on structural factors that include the functional role of racism in the context of the crisis of capitalism and democracy (see Postone 1980 for an early attempt to explain modern antisemitism in relation to the nature of capitalism and the anti-capitalism of National Socialism).

Despite these openings, there has not been any sustained engagement with the phenomena of race and racism or with anti-racist struggles and theorizing, an eminently emancipatory form of knowledge production that, from W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon to Black feminism (Collins 1990, 2019, Mills 2017), has been engaged in crossing the theory-practice divide and articulating dominated standpoints in ways that should have been of significant interest to Frankfurt School theorists (Outlaw 2005; for a relatively early exception see McCarthy 2009).

This missed opportunity is all the more astonishing as the intersection of class and race, of racism and capitalism has been at the center of theorists that share a Marxist orientation, and even some closeness to the Frankfurt School, most notably Angela Davis – who had studied with Marcuse in the US and with Adorno in Frankfurt, and, following Marcuse, insists on the need to bridge the gap between theory and practice and to combine the critique of racism as well as gender-based domination with a critique of capitalism (Davis 1983, 2004) – and Stuart Hall, who, building on Marxist and post-Marxist approaches, theorizes racism as a historically variable response to crisis and as a mechanism that allows capital to divide the working class (Hall 2021).

In contrast to the first generation’s focus on the “dark side” of modernity, later theorists, from Habermas to Honneth, developed a stronger commitment not only to Enlightenment values, but to the belief that these have been, more or less successfully, institutionalized in Western societies. As a result, their views clash with a core aim of Critical Race Theory (Crenshaw et al. 1995) – itself influenced by Marxist theories of the state and the law – namely, the aim of debunking the idea that the law and the state are neutral institutions that secure the common good and the rights of all as an ideology masking their character as instruments of racial (and class) oppression, as evidenced by massive and persistent inequalities that systematically disadvantage Blacks in the US in particular and racialized populations on a global scale, in various areas of life, from access to education, health, jobs, and housing to the risk of becoming a victim of police violence. According to this view, the forms of freedom and solidarity realized in liberal-democratic societies are not just contingently accompanied by exclusions of racialized groups, as if these values had only been insufficiently realized up to now and only need to be extended to those hitherto excluded. Rather, the thesis is that these exclusions have played a constitutive role in the history of these societies and their value systems and continue to shape them to this day, and that radical emancipation would therefore require developing entirely different visions of living together in freedom and solidarity (Kelley 2002).

More recently, Nancy Fraser (2022, Ch. 2) has picked up on Black Marxist discussions of racial capitalism (prominently Du Bois 1935) by arguing that capitalism provides a structural basis for racial oppression and thus exhibits an inherent (even if historically variable) tendency to racialize populations in order to more effectively expropriate and exploit them. Others have elaborated a relational and materialist understanding of racism that builds on how antisemitism was theorized in the early Frankfurt School, and how racism was rearticulated in a culturalist register in reaction to anticolonial and antiracist struggles (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991, Bojadžijev 2020). What these approaches share, and what might be a distinctive contribution of a critical theory of race and racism, is a commitment to understanding racism as a comprehensive social relation that needs to be understood in relation to broader (capitalist) social formations, “race” as an ideological effect rather than an unquestioned category for social analysis, and anti-racist struggles as a starting point for critical theorizing about race – commitments that are at least partially shared with important contributions in the critical philosophy of race (Mills 2003, Shelby 2003, Haslanger 2017b).

For all its focus on modes of domination in modern society, Frankfurt School critical theory has largely failed to address European colonialism and imperialism (Said 1993, 278) and their continuing effects in a world structured by massive inequalities and asymmetries between the Global North and the Global South. With a few recent exceptions to be discussed here, critical theorists in this tradition have not engaged much with the large body of postcolonial and decolonial theory, even if in recent years debates about the universal validity of human rights and cosmopolitanism, globalization and multiple modernities, religious pluralism and postsecularism, have provided ample occasion to go beyond still operative Eurocentric limitations and become more globally relevant (Mendieta 2007, Butler et al. 2011, Baum 2015, Ingram 2019, Kerner 2018; on some early Frankfurt School engagement with Chinese thought, specifically in Benjamin’s work, see Ng 2023).

The main target of postcolonial critique is the idea of a universal history in which the central engine of progress is located in modern Europe while non-Europeans are viewed as always lagging behind. The story has taken many forms, from narratives of progress in Enlightenment thinkers and their critics, such as Hegel (Buck-Morss 2009), to nineteenth-century theories of racial hierarchy and twentieth-century theories of development that have been shaped by, and in turn, rationalized, racism, slavery, and imperialism (McCarthy 2009, Bhambra and Holmwood 2021). Both anticolonial struggles and theorizing (in the work of Mahatma Gandhi, Aimé Césaire, Fanon and others) have insisted that the history and present of capitalism and of modern European and North American societies are constitutively entangled with colonialism, imperialism, and their afterlives, and that taking their trajectory as paradigmatically modern ends up representing a specific and heterogeneous trajectory and experience as universal and self-contained (Grüner 2010). While some aspects of postcolonial critique can be seen as overlapping with the critique of conceptions of the subject, reason, and universal history in the early Frankfurt School, the former also goes beyond the latter by understanding these as the effects of specifically colonial forms of domination and by tracing a different genealogy of fascism through its roots in the colonialism of the nineteenth century (Bardawil 2018).

Recent decades have seen attempts to bring postcolonial theory into dialogue with the Frankfurt School. From the side of decolonial theory, Enrique Dussel has been one of the most prominent decolonial philosophers to engage with Frankfurt School philosophers, developing a global ethics of liberation in critical dialogue with the discourse ethics of Apel and Habermas (Dussel 1998; see also Dusell 2011 and Allen and Mendieta 2021).

From the side of Frankfurt School critical theory, postcolonial critique has been taken up in a variety of ways (see also Vázquez-Arroyo 2018). In the same spirit of Horkheimer and Adorno’s attempt to critique enlightenment in the name of an alternative conception of enlightenment, both Susan Buck-Morss (2009) and Thomas McCarthy (2009) attempt to salvage something of the core idea that is the target of their critique: “universal history” for Buck-Morss, and “development” for McCarthy.

Amy Allen (2016), on the other hand, is more decidedly critical of the role of the discourse of “progress” and the role of such concepts in grounding normativity and shaping assumptions about historical development, modernization, and reason in the work of Habermas, Honneth, and Forst. She regards the latter approaches as deeply Eurocentric and contrasts them with a contextualist form of critique, inspired by Foucault and Adorno, that takes the form of a critical history of the present that uncovers the deep entanglement between reason and domination. Calling for an even more thorough revision of historical narratives, conceptual frameworks, and normative criteria, Gurminder Bhambra (2021) argues that the prevalent understanding of modernity as an endogenous European achievement obscures the fact that colonization and slavery were integral to and constitutive of the Enlightenment project of modernity in both its epistemic and institutional dimensions, a task for which historical and theoretical resources beyond Adorno and Foucault would be required. Fundamental questions about modernity, the human subject, and freedom also emerge from an encounter between critical theory in the Frankfurt School tradition and Caribbean thought (Sealey and Davis forthcoming). In a similar vein, contemporary critics of the persistence of colonial structures point to how a denial of the colonial past reaffirms a violent global color line (Mbembe 2016) that affects how societies treat Indigenous peoples (Coulthard 2014) and racialized and migrant populations (Celikates 2022).

4.2 Diagnosing Crises

Diagnosing crises, and the social contradictions that give rise to them, is a hallmark of Hegelian-Marxist critical theory. Marx famously diagnosed capitalism as a crisis-ridden social system, and the early work of the first generation of the Frankfurt School was a response to the economic, social, and political crises of their time. Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947) can be understood as addressing the crisis of reason that was experienced with the rise of National Socialism, but the critique of instrumental reason was disconnected from more concrete crises and struggles. Habermas aimed to restore the link between critique and crisis beginning with his 1973 book Legitimation Crisis (Benhabib 1986, 252–3, Cordero 2017, Ch. 3). Writing in the context of state-managed capitalism, Habermas diagnosed the distinctively political contradictions and potential for political crises within a social system that aims to steer the economy and manage economic crises (a point influentially elaborated by Offe 1984).

In subsequent decades, crisis critique, along with the critique of capitalism, was largely abandoned by Frankfurt School theorists (for a notable exception see Postone 1993). Renewed theoretical interest has coincided with rising public concern about social, political, and economic systems currently in, or always seemingly on the brink of, crisis, all against the backdrop of the unfolding effects of the ongoing climate catastrophe.

Nancy Fraser was one of the first critical theorists to revive crisis critique and to do so as part of a comprehensive critique of capitalism that renews the link between analytical diagnosis and critique (Fraser 2011, 2014; see Wellmer 2014 for a critique of the Frankfurt School’s earlier neglect). What distinguishes Fraser’s approach is that it posits capitalism as the unifying causal link among seemingly distinct crises – in relation to care work, the environment, and political institutions – by viewing capitalism as an institutionalized social order in which the economic system “cannibalizes” the very conditions that make it possible within the spheres of social reproduction, the natural environment, and the political system (Fraser 2022). Fraser combines analysis of “objective” social conditions – contradictions and crises – with an orientation toward social movements by analyzing the “boundary struggles” that arise at the seams between the economic system and other domains, making the case for these struggles to unite around an anti-capitalist agenda.

In a similar way, Rahel Jaeggi has developed a crisis-oriented theory of immanent critique (2014, Ch. 6) that is not limited to diagnosing systemic dysfunction but includes the normative expectations and self-understandings of social agents (Jaeggi 2017a; see Fraser and Jaeggi 2018), but at a more abstract theoretical level than Fraser’s immanent analysis of capitalism as a social order. Like Fraser and Jaeggi, Albena Azmanova argues for renewed attention to the critique of capitalism but is skeptical about how helpful “crisis” talk is (2014) and maintains that radical social change is possible without crisis, revolution, or utopia through a united struggle against forms of precarity that are endemic to contemporary capitalism (2020). More generally, the turn to economic crisis dynamics has also led to a renewed interest in work – its general significance, pathologies, and emancipatory potential (Jaeggi 2017b, Dejours et al. 2018, Honneth 2023).

Turning specifically to the ecological crisis, Frankfurt School theorists have only recently begun taking seriously the task of rethinking their approach to critical theory in the current context of an ongoing ecological disaster on a global scale (for an early exception, see Vogel 1996). Some critical theorists argue that this situation calls for a new paradigm of “Critical Naturalism” (Gregoratto et al., 2022); others argue for a fundamental rethinking of Western conceptions of human freedom and a radical shift in conceptions of the ethically good life as a precondition for the kind of radical social change required by the current crisis (Cooke 2020, 2023). Fraser focuses on the role of capitalism in the climate catastrophe and the need for eco-politics to be anti-capitalist so that we can reassert control over, and begin to reinvent from the ground up, our relation to nature (Fraser 2021, 2022; see Bernstein 2022 for a recent approach to such rethinking).

In rethinking our conception of nature, given the lack of serious attention to theorizing about nature in the second and, until quite recently, third generation of the Frankfurt School, it is not surprising that many critical theorists have looked more to the first generation (see the collected essays in Biro 2011), with Adorno’s work viewed as a promising starting point for rethinking humans’ relation to nature (Cook 2011, Cassegård 2021, Ch. 3). Cook argues that the “project of showing that human history is always also natural history and that non-human nature is entwined with history… informs all Adorno’s work” and that there are important affinities between his work and proponents of radical ecology (Cook 2011, 1, 5–6). On the other hand, the view of nature as having a kind of otherness that is beyond and not fully graspable by humans – a view expressed at times by Adorno and Horkeimer as well as Marcuse – has been criticized in favor of a more Hegelian-Marxist approach that sees “nature” as a product of human activity (Vogel 1996, 2011). Others argue for reviving critical engagement with Marcuse’s work as a resource for addressing the ecological crisis, with its combination of a critique of science and technology (most radically, as a call for a “new science”) with the idea that social transformation must include a changed, aesthetic relation to nature (Feenberg 2023a, 2023b). At this point, it is clear that there must be more engagement between Frankfurt School theorists and the many “critical ecologies” being developed today, e.g., deep ecology, eco-feminism, eco-socialism, ecological Marxism, environmental justice, indigenous and decolonial ecologies, and new materialism (on the recent dialogue between Frankfurt School theorists and new materialism, see Rosa et al., 2021).

Finally, Frankfurt School theorists have turned their attention to political crises and the rise of right-wing populist, authoritarian, and neo-fascist movements, parties, and governments (Brown, Gordon, and Pensky 2018, Gordon 2017, Abromeit 2016). This crisis is particularly important because adequately addressing the economic and ecological crises of our time requires political solutions, which will be hindered by political systems that are themselves in crisis, thereby contributing to a regressive dynamic (Jaeggi 2022, Forst 2023).

From the perspective of critical theorists, there seem to be two aspects of the political crisis that are often missing from mainstream liberal accounts. The first pertains to the genesis and the causes of the crisis (Brown 2019, Gambetti 2020). Against accounts that see authoritarianism only in terms of a rupture with and as entirely foreign to liberal democracy, they argue that we need to examine the continuities and enabling conditions that allow authoritarian tendencies to arise from within liberal-democratic capitalist societies. Without analyzing the neoliberal restructuring of social relations and the ways in which populist and authoritarian movements exploit electoral strategies, fragmented public spheres, and liberal ideological frameworks such as “freedom of speech,” the critique of and resistance to them will necessarily remain truncated.

The second aspect pertains to the dynamic of authoritarianism and the political crisis it engenders. Beyond focusing on its political dimension (e.g. political aims and values), critical theorists have sought to analyze the socio-cultural, affective, and psycho-social dynamics of authoritarianism and its attractiveness to populations that seem to have little to gain from the election of populist leaders (Marasco 2018, Brown 2019, McAfee 2019, Redecker 2020, Zaretsky 2022). These approaches can draw on and are supported by Adorno’s analysis (1967a) of core features of authoritarian right-wing populism. First, it is not so much actual abandonment but a feared, anticipated, or imagined abandonment, along with a perceived loss of privileges that had come to seem natural, that are the driving force of the rise of a reactionary authoritarianism that then gets misdescribed as a revolt of the oppressed and exploited. Second, the proponents of authoritarianism, following an antisemitic and/or racist logic, personalize the blame for their fears and feelings of abandonment by projecting it onto groups they classify as alien, rather than attributing it to structural features of society.

In responding to all the crises discussed here – economic, ecological, and political – critical theorists must grapple with a number of challenges. Purely at the level of theory, there is the question of whether positing unity or convergence among crises is diagnostically accurate. At a practical level, it remains to be seen whether a unity thesis will be politically motivating and whether a convergence of social struggles is indeed on the horizon. The issue of practice also bears on the question of whether and to what extent the objective conditions of crisis and contradiction diagnosed by critical theorists actually affect people’s everyday lived experience and become motivating factors for political movements (see Section 2.5 ). Such questions about the relation between theory and practice have long been a focus of critical theorists and have recently gained attention in theorizing about a range of critical and political practices.

While overcoming the gap between theory and practice has been a central methodological and political concern for critical theorists, critics have pointed out the prominent turn away from practice to theory in the first generation – accused by Lukács of taking up residence in the “Grand Hotel Abyss” (Lukács 1963, 22) – and the continued marginalization of critical praxis in later generations (Harcourt 2020). There are multiple grounds for challenging this assessment. Frankfurt School theorists had arguments all along about how to assess and relate to radical movements, such as the student movement of 1968 (Adorno and Marcuse 1969, Freyenhagen 2014, Pickford 2023), and there has always been a strand that continuously engaged with struggles and movements, from Marcuse to Negt and Kluge and Fraser. Some critical theorists have focused on deliberative democracy, the public sphere, and civil society (Habermas 1962, 1992, 2021, Cohen and Arato 1992, Benhabib 2004, Lafont 2019) as core fora for critical practice, while others have argued for critical theory itself to be democratized and understood as a critical practice (Bohman 2003, Celikates 2009).

Still, many of these approaches have been criticized for prioritizing institutional achievements over struggles and critical practices, and reform over revolution. Given the challenges outlined above (4.2), it is not surprising that some recent work tries to reverse this tendency by exploring more radical responses to such crises. These attempts notably push beyond the dichotomy between reform and revolution – for example, by promoting non-reformist reforms that could “alter the terrain on which future struggles will be waged, thus expanding the set of feasible options for future reforms” (Fraser, in Fraser and Honneth 2003, 79) – and mine the rich history and present of radical struggles outside traditional forms of political organizing such as the party or reimagine the party in radical ways (Dean 2016).

The range of critical practices engaged with by critical theorists past and present is extensive (for an inventory, see Harcourt 2020, Ch. 15). Frankfurt School theorists of earlier generations covered various forms of resistance, from the “Great Refusal” of the 1960s (Marcuse) and the potential for resistance in independent thinking and critical analysis in the face of universal reification (Adorno) to civil disobedience as a sign of a dynamic public sphere and civil society (Habermas 1983b, Cohen and Arato 1992, Ch. 11). More recently, critical theorists within various traditions have analyzed forms of disobedience (direct, digital, migrant etc.) as political practices of contestation and struggles for democratization “from below” (Young 2001, Smith 2013, Scheuerman 2018, Celikates 2019b). Other practices of resistance that do not directly engage with state institutions or appeal to the broader public include forms of sabotage (Malm 2020), fleeing, withdrawal, or defection. These turn away from what are seen as state-oriented struggles for visibility, recognition, or representation (Virno 2004, Roberts 2015) and towards subaltern forms of sociality (Moten and Harney 2013) and counter-communities that prefigure fundamental alternatives for living together (Loick 2021). Emphasizing the revolutionary dimension of critical practices, theorists have drawn on the abolitionist tradition of struggles against slavery and colonialism, and its revitalization in movements like Black Lives Matter, to call for a fundamental critique of racial capitalism and its entanglement with the punitive state, and a correspondingly radical transformation of all social relations and institutions (Davis 2005, Gilmore 2022). Critical theorists have also explored political practices of assembling (Butler 2015), occupying, striking, and reorganizing processes of social reproduction (Gago 2019), linking these to the need to rethink revolution beyond the model of a single break or event and more as an interstitial process (Redecker 2018, Saar 2020).

Whether the new revolutionary subjects and struggles that emerge in these critical practices will indeed converge to fundamentally challenge the existing order, open up new pathways to emancipation, and develop emancipated – more just, democratic, and sustainable – modes of living together remains to be seen. Horkheimer’s quip still holds: “if the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the eating here is still in the future” (1937a [1972, 220–1]). Against this background, theoretical explorations of critical practices – in the multiplicity of their forms, terrains, and actors – can be seen as part of the ongoing attempt to bring theory and practice together with an emancipatory orientation in light of the crises and struggles of the age. This approach has characterized the Frankfurt School from its very beginnings and has been a driving force in its continual (self-)transformation, making it into one of the most influential paradigms in social philosophy today.

Abromeit, John, 2016, “Critical Theory and the Persistence of Right-Wing Populism”, Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture , 15(2) [ Abromeit 2016 available online ].
Adorno, Theodor W., 1931 [year this lecture was given], “Die Aktualität der Philosophie”, in Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften I: Philosophische Frühschriften , Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973, pp. 325–344; translated as “The Actuality of Philosophy”, Benjamin Snow (trans.), Telos , 31 (1977): 120–133.
–––, 1936 “Wiesengrund-Adorno an Benjamin, 18. März 1936”, in Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Briefwechsel 1928–1940 , Henri Lonitz (ed.), Frankfurt am Main, 1994, pp. 168–177; translated as March 18, 1936, “Wiesengrund-Adorno to Benjamin, March 18, 1936”, Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin , The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940 ,, Nicholas Walker (trans.), Henri Lonitz (ed.), Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999, pp. 127–133.
–––, 1938, “Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 7(3), 321–356; translated as “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening”, Susan L. Gillespie (trans.), in Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music , Richard Leppert (ed.), Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, pp. 288–317.
–––, 1951a, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft”, in Karl Gustav Specht (ed.), Soziologische Forschung unserer Zeit , Köln and Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1951, pp. 228–240, republished in Theodor W. Adorno, Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1955, pp. 7–31; translated as “Cultural Criticism and Society”, in Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms , Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981, pp. 17–34.
–––, 1951b, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda”, in Géza Roheim (ed.), Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences Vol. 3 , New York: International Universities Press, 279–300. Reprinted in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture , Jay Bernstein (ed.), New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 132–157.
–––, 1951c, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life , Edmund Jephcott (trans.), London: Verso, 2005.
–––, 1955, “Schuld und Abwehr”, in Friedrich Pollock (ed.), Gruppenexperiment: Ein Studienbericht , Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 278–428; translated as Guilt and Defense: On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar Germany , Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin (eds./trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
–––, 1957, “Soziologie und empirische Forschung”, in K . Ziegler (ed.), Wesen und Wirklichkeit des Menschen: Festschrift für Helmuth Plessner , Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, pp. 245–260; translated as “Sociology and Empirical Research”, Glyn Adey and David Frisby (trans.), in Theodor W. Adorno et al. (eds.), The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology , London: Heinemann, 1976, pp. 68–86.
–––, 1963a [year this transcribed lecture course was given], Probleme der Moralphilosophie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996; translated as Problems of Moral Philosophy , Rodney Livingstone (trans.), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
–––, 1963b, Drei Studien zu Hegel , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Hegel: Three Studies , Shierry Weber Nicholsen (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.
–––, 1966a, Negative Dialektik , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Negative Dialectics , E. B. Ashton (trans.), New York: Seabury Press, 1973.
–––, 1966b, “Gesellschaft”, in Hermann Kunst and Siegfried Grundmann (eds.), Evangelisches Staatslexikon , Stuttgart: Kreuz Verlag, pp. 636–643; translated as “Society”, Fredric R. Jameson (trans.), Salmagundi , 10–11 (1969): 144–153.
–––, 1969a, “Zur Spezifikation der kritischen Theorie”, in Theodor W. Adorno Archiv (ed.), Adorno. Eine Bildmonographie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 292.
–––, 1969b, “Marginalien zu Theorie und Praxis”, Die Zeit , No. 33 (1969); translated as “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis”, Henry W. Pickford (trans.), in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords , New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, pp. 259–278.
–––, 1967a [year this transcribed lecture was given], Aspekte des neuen Rechtsradikalismus , Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1999; translated as Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism , Wieland Hoban (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2020.
–––, 1967b, “Résumé über Kulturindustrie”, in Theodor W. Adorno, Ohne Leitbild: Parva Aesthetica , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 60–70; translated as “The Culture Industry Reconsidered”, Anson G. Rabinbach (trans.), in Jay Bernstein, (ed.), The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture , New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 98–106.
–––, 1970, Ästhetische Theorie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Aesthetic Theory , Robert Hullot-Kentor (trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977.
Adorno, Theodor W., Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, 1950, The Authoritarian Personality , with a new Introduction by Peter E. Gordon, New York: Verso, 2019.
Adorno, Theodor W., Hans Albert, Ralf Dahrendorf, Jürgen Habermas, Harald Pilot, and Karl R. Popper, 1969, Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie , Neuwied/Berlin: Luchterhand; translated as The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology , Glyn Adey and David Frisby (trans.), London: Heinemann, 1976.
Adorno, Theodor W. and Herbert Marcuse, 1969, “Correspondence on the German Student Movement”, New Left Review , 233 (1999), 123–136.
Agamben, Giorgio, 1995, Homo Sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita , Turin: Einaudi; translated as Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life , Daniel Heller-Roazen (trans.), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Allen, Amy, 2008, The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory , New York: Columbia University Press.
–––, 2010, “Third Generation Critical Theory: Benhabib, Fraser, and Honneth”, in Rosi Braidotti (ed.), After Poststructuralism: Transitions and Transformations , Durham: Acumen, pp. 129–48.
–––, 2012, “The Public Sphere: Ideology and/or Ideal?”, Political Theory , 40(6): 822–829. doi:10.1177/0090591712457664
–––, 2014, “Reason, Power and History: Re-reading the Dialectic of Enlightenment ”, Thesis Eleven , 120(1): 10–25. doi:10.1177/0725513613519588
–––, 2015, “Emancipation without Utopia: Subjection, Modernity, and the Normative Claims of Feminist Critical Theory”, Hypatia , 30(3): 513–29. doi:10.1111/hypa.12160
–––, 2016, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory , New York: Columbia University Press.
–––, 2019, “Critical Theory and Feminism”, in Gordon, Peter, Espen Hammer, and Axel Honneth (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School , London: Routledge, pp. 528–541.
–––, 2021, Critique on the Couch: Why Critical Theory Needs Psychoanalysis , New York: Columbia University Press.
Allen, Amy, and Eduardo Mendieta, (eds.), 2021, Decolonizing Ethics: The Critical Theory of Enrique Dussel , University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Allen, Amy, and Brian O’Connor (eds.), 2019, Transitional Subjects: Critical Theory and Object Relations , New York: Columbia University Press.
Anderson, Joel, 2000, “The ‘Third Generation’ of the Frankfurt School”, Intellectual History Newsletter 22, 49–61.
Apel, Karl-Otto, 1985, “Ist die Ethik der idealen Kommunikationsgemeinschaft eine Utopie? Zum Verhältnis von Ethik, Utopie und Utopiekritik”, in Wilhelm Vosskamp (ed.), Utopieforschung , Frankfurt: Suhrkamp; translated as “Is the Ideal Communication Community a Utopia? On the Relationship between Ethics, Utopia, and the Critique of Utopia”, David Frisby (trans.), in Seyla Benhabib and Fred Dallmayr (eds.), The Communicative Ethics Controversy , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990, pp. 23–59.
–––, 1989, “Normative Begründung der ‘Kritischen Theorie’” durch Rekurs auf lebensweltliche Sittlichkeit? Ein transzendentalpragmatisch orientierter Versuch, mit Habermas gegen Habermas zu denken”, in Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer (eds.), Zwischenbetrachtungen im Prozess der Aufklärung: Jürgen Habermas zum 60. Geburtstag , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 15–65; translated as “Normatively Grounding ‘Critical Theory’ through Recourse to Lifeworld? A Transcendental-Pragmatic Attempt to Think With Habermas Against Habermas”, William Rehg (trans.), in Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer (eds.), Philosophical Interventions Into the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992, pp. 125–70.
Azmanova, Albena, 2014, “Crisis? Capitalism is Doing Very Well. How is Critical Theory?”, Constellations , 21(3): 351–365. doi:10.1215/00382876-7165857
–––, 2020, Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia , New York: Columbia University Press.
Balibar, Etienne, and Immanuel Wallerstein, 1988, Race, nation, classe: les identités ambiguës , Paris: La Découverte; translated as Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities , Chris Turner (trans.), New York: Verso, 1991.
Bardawil, Fadi, 2018, “Césaire with Adorno: Critical Theory and the Colonial Problem”, South Atlantic Quarterly , 117(4): 773–789. doi:10.1215/00382876-7165857
Baum, Bruce, 2015, “Decolonizing Critical Theory”, Constellations , 22(3): 420–434. doi:10.1111/1467-8675.12169
Baynes, Kenneth, 2016, Habermas , New York: Routledge.
Benhabib, Seyla, 1986, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory , New York: Columbia University Press.
–––, 1992, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics , New York: Routledge.
–––, 2004, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Benhabib, Seyla, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, 1995, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange , New York: Routledge.
Benjamin, Walter, 1920/21, “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”, in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik , 47(3): 809–832; translated as “Toward the Critique of Violence”, Julia Ng (trans.), in Peter Fenves and Julia Ng (eds.), Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition , Stanford University Press, 2021, pp. 39–60.
–––, 1936, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”, originally published as “L’œuvre d’art à l’époque de sa réproduction mécanisée”, Pierre Klossowski (trans.), Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 5(1), 40–68, all textual variants can be found in Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Walter Benjamin Werke und Nachlaß: Kritische Gesamtausgabe vol. 16), Burkhardt Lindner (ed.), Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012, the essay was translated as “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility”, Michael W. Jennings (trans.), Grey Room , 39 (2010): 11–37. doi:10.1162/grey.2010.1.39.11
–––, 1940, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte”, in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften I , Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (eds.), Frankfurt am Main, 1974, pp. 691–706; translated as “On the Concept of History”, Harry Zohn (trans.) in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds.) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings (Volume 4), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, pp. 389–400.
–––, 1955, Schriften , 2 vols., Theodor W. Adorno and Gretel Adorno (eds.), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated in parts as Illuminations , Harry Zohn (trans.), Hannah Arendt (ed.), New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.
Bernstein, Jay, 2001, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bernstein, Richard, 2010, The Pragmatic Turn , Malden, MA: Polity.
–––, 2022, The Vicissitudes of Nature: From Spinoza to Freud , Malden, MA: Polity.
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Bhambra, Gurminder K., and John Holmwood, 2021, Colonialism and Modern Social Theory , Malden, MA: Polity.
Biro, Andrew, 2011, Critical Ecologies: The Frankfurt School and Contemporary Environmental Crises , Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Bohman, James, 2003, “Critical Theory as Practical Knowledge: Participants, Observers, and Critics”, in S. P. Turner and P. A. Roth (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences , Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 91–109.
–––, 2007, Democracy Across Borders: From Dêmos to Dêmoi, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bojadžijev, Manuela, 2020, “Anti-Racism as Method”, in John Solomos (ed.), The Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Racisms , London: Routledge 2020, pp. 193–204.
Bourdieu, Pierre, 1980, Le sens pratique , Paris: Minuit; translated as The Logic of Practic e, Richard Nice (trans.), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992.
Brown, Wendy (ed.), 2006, “Feminist Theory and the Frankfurt School”: a Special Issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies , 17(1).
–––, 2019, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West , New York: Columbia University Press.
–––, 2022, “Rethinking Politics and Freedom in the Anthropocene”, Crisis and Critique , 9(2): 24–44 [ Brown 2022 available online ].
Brown, Wendy, and Rainer Forst, 2014, The Power of Tolerance: A Debate , New York: Columbia University Press.
Brown, Wendy, Peter Gordon, and Max Pensky, 2018, Authoritarianism. Three Inquiries in Critical Theory , Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Brunkhorst, Hauke, 1983, “Paradigmenkern und Theoriedynamik der Kritischen Theorie der Gesellschaft”, Soziale Welt , 34: 22–36; translated as “Paradigm-core and theory-dynamics in critical social theory: people and programs”, Peter Krockenberger (trans.), Philosophy & Social Criticism , 24(6) (1998): 67–110.
–––, 2002, Solidarität: Von der Bürgerfreundschaft zur globalen Rechtsgenossenschaft , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community , Jeffrey Flynn (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
–––, 2014, Critical Theory of Legal Revolutions: Evolutionary Perspectives , New York: Bloomsbury.
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–––, 1989, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
–––, 1992, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered”, October , 62: 3–41. doi:10.2307/778700
–––, 2009, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History , Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Butler, Judith, 1990, Gender Trouble , London: Routledge.
–––, 1997, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
–––, 2012, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism , New York: Columbia University Press.
–––, 2015, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Butler, Judith, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West, 2011, The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere , New York: Columbia University Press.
Cassegård, Carl, 2021, Toward a Critical Theory of Nature: Capital, Ecology, and Dialectics , New York: Bloomsbury.
Catlin, Jonathon, 2023, “Antisemitism and Racism ‘After Auschwitz’: Adorno on the ‘Hellish Unity’ of ‘Permanent Catastrophe’ ”, in Marcel Stoetzler (ed.), Critical Theory and the Critique of Antisemitism , New York: Bloomsbury, pp. 203–230.
Celikates, Robin, 2006, “From Critical Social Theory to a Social Theory of Critique: On the Critique of Ideology after the Pragmatic Turn”, Constellations , 13(1): 21–40. doi:10.1111/j.1351-0487.2006.00438.x
–––, 2009, Kritik als soziale Praxis: Gesellschaftliche Selbstverständigung und kritische Theorie , Frankfurt am Main: Campus; translated as Critique as Social Practice: Critical Theory and Social Self-Understanding , Naomi van Steenbergen (trans.), London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.
–––, 2019a, “Critical Theory and the Unfinished Project of Mediating Theory and Practice”, in Peter Gordon, Espen Hammer, and Axel Honneth (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School , London: Routledge, pp. 206–220.
–––, 2019b, “Constituent Power Beyond Exceptionalism: Irregular Migration, Disobedience, and (Re-)Constitution”, Journal of International Political Theory , 15(1): 67–81. doi:10.1177/1755088218808311
–––, 2022, “Remaking the Demos ‘from Below’? Critical Theory, Migrant Struggles, and Epistemic Resistance”, in Didier Fassin and Axel Honneth (eds.), Crisis Under Critique: How People Assess, Transform, and Respond to Critical Situations , New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 97–120.
Celikates, Robin, Sally Haslanger, and Jason Stanley (eds.), forthcoming, Analyzing Ideology , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Celikates, Robin, Axel Honneth, and Rahel Jaeggi, 2023, “The Working Sovereign: A conversation with Axel Honneth”, Journal of Classical Sociology , 23(3): 318–338. doi:10.1177/1468795X231170980
Chambers, Simone, 2022, “Can Postmetaphysical Reason Escape its Provincial Roots?”, in Tom Bailey (ed.), Deprovincializing Habermas: Global Perspectives , Second Edition , New York: Routledge, pp. 229–248.
Chari, Anita, 2015, A Political Economy of the Senses: Neoliberalism, Reification, Critique , New York: Columbia University Press.
Cohen, Jean L., and Andrew Arato, 1992, Civil Society and Political Theory , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Collins, Patricia Hill, 1990, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment , London: Routledge. Second edition published in 2000.
–––, 2019, Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory , Durham and London: Duke University Press. doi:10.1515/9781478007098
Cook, Deborah, 2004, Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society , London and New York: Routledge.
–––, 2011, Adorno on Nature , Durham: Acumen.
Cooke, Maeve, 2006, Re-Presenting the Good Society , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
–––, 2020, “Ethics and Politics in the Anthropocene”, Philosophy & Social Criticism , 46(10): 1167–1181. doi:10.1177/0191453720903491
–––, 2023, “Reenvisioning Freedom: Human Agency in Times of Ecological Disaster”, Constellations , 30: 119–127. doi:10.1111/1467-8675.12681
Cordero, Rodrigo, 2017, Crisis and Critique: On the Fragile Foundations of Social Life , New York: Routledge.
Coulthard, Glen Sean, 2014, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, 1995, “Introduction”, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement , New York: The New Press, pp. viii–xxxii.
Davis, Angela Y., 1983, Women, Race and Class , New York: Vintage.
–––, 2004, “Marcuse’s Legacies”, in John Abromeit and W. Mark Cobb (eds.), Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader . New York, Routledge, pp. 43–50.
–––, 2005, Abolition Democracy , New York: Seven Stories Press.
Dean, Jodi, 2016, Crowds and Party , London: Verso.
Dejours, Christophe, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Emmanuel Renault, and Nicholas H. Smith, 2018, The Return of Work in Critical Theory: Self, Society, Politics , New York: Columbia University Press.
Demirović, Alex, 2016, “The Frankfurt School, Critical Theory, and Sociology at the Institute for Social Research (1950 to 1960)”, in Gabriel R. Ricci (ed.), The Persistence of Critical Theory , London: Routledge, pp. 25–40.
Deranty, Jean-Philippe, 2021, “Negativity in Recognition: Post-Freudian Legacies in Contemporary Critical Theory”, in Ikäheimo, Heikki, Kristina Lepold and Titus Stahl (eds.), Recognition and Ambivalence , New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 223–255.
Derrida, Jacques, 1990 [year the lecture was given], Force de loi , Paris: Galilée, 1994; translated as “The Force of Law”, Mary Quaintance (trans.), in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David G. Carlson (eds.), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice , New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 3–67.
Dews, Peter, 1987, Logics of Disintegration: Poststructuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory , London: Verso.
Dubiel, Helmut, 1978, Wissenschaftsorganisation und politische Erfahrung: Studien zur frühen Kritischen Theorie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory , Benjamin Gregg (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985.
Du Bois, W. E. B., 1935, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 , New York: The Free Press, 1998.
Dussel, Enrique, 1998, Ética de la Liberación en la edad de globalización y de la exclusión ; translated as Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion , Eduardo Mendieta, Camilo Pérez Bustillo, Yolanda Angulo, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres (trans.), Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.
–––, 2011, “From Critical Theory to the Philosophy of Liberation: Some Themes for Dialogue”, Transmodernity , 1(2): 16–43. doi.org:10.5070/T412011806
Eagleton, Terry, 1991, Ideology: An Introduction , London, Verso.
Feenberg, Andrew, 2023a, “Marcuse’s Critique of Technology Today”, Philosophy & Social Criticism 49(6): 672–685. doi:10.1177/01914537231164657
–––, 2023b, The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing: Nature and Revolution in Marcuse’s Philosophy of Praxis , London: Verso.
Ferrara, Alessandro, 2008, The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment , New York: Columbia University Press.
Ferrarese, Estelle, 2018, La fragilité du souci des autres: Adorno et le care , Lyon: ENS Éditions; translated as The Fragility of Concern for Others: Adorno and the Ethics of Care , Steven Corcoran (trans.), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
Finlayson, James Gordon, 2007, “Political, Moral and Critical Theory: On the Practical Philosophy of the Frankfurt School”, in Michael Rosen and B. Leiter (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 626–670.
–––, 2015, “The Artwork and the Promesse du Bonheur in Adorno”, European Journal of Philosophy , 23(3): 392–419. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0378.2012.00542.x
–––, 2019, The Habermas-Rawls Debate , New York: Columbia University Press.
Flynn, Jeffrey, 2014a, Reframing the Intercultural Dialogue on Human Rights: A Philosophical Approach , New York: Routledge.
–––, 2014b, “Truth, Objectivity, and Experience after the Pragmatic Turn: Bernstein on Habermas’s ‘Kantian Pragmatism’ ”, in Judith M. Green (ed.), Richard J Bernstein and the Pragmatist Turn in Contemporary Philosophy , Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 190–209.
–––, 2022, “Decentering Eurocentrism through Dialogue”, in Tom Bailey (ed.), Deprovincializing Habermas: Global Perspectives , Second Edition , New York: Routledge, pp. 249–270.
Fong, Benjamin Y., 2016, Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism , New York: Columbia University Press.
Forst, Rainer, 2007, Das Recht auf Rechtfertigung: Elemente einer konstruktivistischen Theorie der Gerechtigkeit , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translated as The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice , Jeffrey Flynn (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
–––, 2011, Kritik der Rechtfertigungsverhältnisse , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translated as Justification and Critique: Towards a Critical Theory of Politics , Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2014.
–––, 2017, “Noumenal Alienation: Rousseau, Kant and Marx on the Dialectics of Self-Determination”, Kantian Review , 22(4): 523–551. doi:10.1017/S1369415417000267
–––, 2021a, Die noumenale Republik: Kritischer Konstruktivismus nach Kant , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translation, The Noumenal Republic: Critical Constructivism after Kant , Ciaran Cronin (trans.), forthcoming.
–––, (ed)., 2021b, “Symposium on Jürgen Habermas, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie ”, Constellations , 28(1): 1–147.
–––, 2023, “The rule of unreason: Analyzing (Anti-)Democratic Regression”, Constellations , 30(3): 217–224. doi:10.1111/1467-8675.12671
Foucault, Michel, 1973 [year this lecture was given], “La vérités et les formes juridiques”, Chimères , 10 (1990): 8–28; translated as “Truth and Juridical Forms”, in Michel Foucault, Power , ed. James D. Faubion, New York: New Press, 2000, pp. 31–45.
Fraser, Nancy, 1981, “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions”, PRAXIS International , 3: 272–287.
–––, 1985, “What’s Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender”, New German Critique , 35: 97–131. doi:10.2307/488202
–––, 1989, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
–––, 1990, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text , 25/26: 56–80.
–––, 2011, “Marketization, Social Protection, Emancipation: Toward a Neo-Polanyian Conception of Capitalist Crisis”, in Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derlugian (eds.), Business as Usual: The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown , New York University Press, pp. 137–58.
–––, 2013, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis , London: Verso.
–––, 2014, “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode”, New Left Review , 86: 55–72.
–––, 2016, “Contradictions of Capital and Care”, New Left Review , 100: 99–117.
–––, 2021, “Climates of Capital”, New Left Review , 127: 94–127.
–––, 2022, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – And What We Can Do about It , New York: Verso.
Fraser, Nancy, et al., 2014, Transnationalizing the Public Sphere , Kate Nash (ed.), Cambridge: Polity.
Fraser, Nancy, and Axel Honneth, 2003, Redistribution or Recognition? A Philosophical-Political Exchange , New York: Verso.
Fraser, Nancy and Rahel Jaeggi, 2018, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory , Brian Milstein (ed.), Cambridge: Polity.
Freyenhagen, Fabian, 2014, “Adorno’s Politics: Theory and Praxis in Germany’s 1960s”, Philosophy & Social Criticism , 40: 867–893. doi:10.1177/0191453714545198
–––, 2018, “Critical Theory: Self-Reflexive Theorizing and Struggles for Emancipation”, in: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics [ Freyenhagen 2018 available online ].
Fricker, Miranda, 2007, Epistemic Injustice , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fromm, Erich, 1936, “Studien über Autorität und Familie. Sozialpsychologischer Teil”, in Max Horkheimer (ed.), Schriften des Instituts für Sozialforschung, Vol. V: Studien über Autorität und Familie , Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan; translated as “Studies on Authority and the Family. Socio-psychological Dimensions”, Fromm Forum , 24 (2020): 8–58.
–––, 1961, Marx’s Concept of Man , New York: Continuum.
Gago, Verónica, 2019, La potencia feminista: O el deseo de cambiarlo todo , Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón; translated as Feminist International: How to Change Everything , Liz Mason-Deese (trans.), London: Verso, 2020.
Gambetti, Zeynep, 2020, “Exploratory Notes on the Origins of New Fascisms”, Critical Times , 3(1): 1–32. doi:10.1215/26410478-8189841
Geuss, Raymond, 1981, The Idea of a Critical Theory , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, 2022, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation , London: Verso.
Gordon, Peter, 2017, “The Authoritarian Personality Revisited”, boundary 2 , 44(2): 31–56. doi:10.1215/01903659-3826618
–––, 2023, A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity , Chicago: University of Chicago Press. doi:10.4324/9780429443374
Gordon, Peter, Espen Hammer, and Axel Honneth (eds.), 2019, The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School , London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780429443374
Gregoratto, Federica, Heikki Ikäheimo, Emmanuel Renault, Arvi Särkelä, and Italo Testa, 2022, “Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto”, Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy , 42(1): 108–24. doi:10.21827/krisis.42.1.38637
Grüner, Eduardo, 2010, La oscuridad y las luces , Buenos Aires: Edhasa; translated as The Haitian Revolution: Capitalism, Slavery and Counter-Modernity , Ramsey McGlazer (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2019.
Habermas, Jürgen, 1962, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft , Neuwied, Berlin: Luchterhand; translated as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society , Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.
–––, 1963, Theorie und Praxis: Sozialphilosophische Studien , Neuwied am Rhein and Berlin: Luchterhand. New and extended edition Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971; translated as Theory and Practice , John Viertel (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press, 1973.
–––, 1968a, Technik und Wissenschaft als ‘Ideologie’ , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Chapters 4–6 of Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics , Jeremy J. Shapiro (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press, 1970.
–––, 1968b, Erkenntnis und Interesse , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Knowledge and Human Interests , Jeremy J. Shapiro (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press, 1971.
–––, 1973a, “Nachwort”, in Jürgen Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse, Mit einem neuen Nachwort , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 367–417; translated as “A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests ”, Christian Lenhardt (trans.), Philosophy of the Social Sciences , 3: 157–189.
–––, 1973b, Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Legitimation Crisis , Thomas McCarthy (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press, 1975.
–––, 1981, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns , 2 vols., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as The Theory of Communicative Action , 2 vols., Thomas A. McCarthy (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press, 1984.
–––, 1983a, Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, translated as Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action , Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.
–––, 1983b, “Ziviler Ungehorsam: Testfall für den demokratischen Rechtsstaat”, in Peter Glotz (ed.), Ziviler Ungehorsam im Rechtsstaat , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 29–53; translated as “Civil Disobedience: Litmus Test for the Democratic Constitutional State”, Berkeley Journal of Sociology , 30: 95–116.
–––, 1985, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures , Frederick Lawrence (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.
–––, 1991, Erläuterungen zur Diskursethik , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics , Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.
–––, 1992, Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy , William Rehg (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
–––, 1995a, “Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s Political Liberalism”, The Journal of Philosophy , 92(3): 109–131. doi:10.5840/jphil199592335
–––, 1995b, “Kants Idee des ewigen Friedens aus dem historischen Abstand von 200 Jahren”, Kritische Jusitiz , 3: 293–319; translated as “Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the Benefit of Two Hundred Years’ Hindsight”, in James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (eds.), Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997, pp. 113–153.
–––, 1996, “Vernünftig versus Wahr oder die Moral der Weltbilder”, in Die Einbeziehung des Anderen: Studien zur politischen Theorie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as “‘Reasonable’ versus ‘True,’ or the Morality of Worldviews”, Ciaran Cronin (trans.), in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory , Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff (eds.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998, pp. 75-105.
–––, 1998, Die postnationale Konstellation: politische Essays , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays , Max Pensky (ed./trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
–––, 1999, Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung: philosophische Aufsätze , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Truth and Justification , Barbara Fultner (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
–––, 2005, Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion. Philosophische Aufsätze , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Between Naturalism and Religion , Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Malden, MA: Polity, 2008.
–––, 2006, “Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research”, Communication Theory , 16(4): 411–426. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2006.00280.x
–––, 2019, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie , 2 vols., Berlin: Suhrkamp; part of volume 1 translated as Also a History of Philosophy, Volume 1: The Project of a Genealogy of Postmetaphysical Thinking , Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2023.
–––, 2021, “Überlegungen und Hypothesen zu einem erneuten Strukturwandel der politischen Öffentlichkeit”, in: Martin Seeliger and Sebastian Sevignani (eds.), Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit? , Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag, 470–500; translated as “Reflections and Hypotheses on a Further Structural Transformation of the Political Public Sphere”, Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Theory, Culture & Society , 39(4) (2022): 145–171. doi:10.1177/02632764221112341
Hall, Stuart, 2021, Selected Writings on Race and Difference , Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Harcourt, Bernard E., 2020, Critique and Praxis , New York: Columbia University Press.
Haslanger, Sally, 2017a, “Culture and Critique”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Supplementary Volume), 91: 149–173. doi:10.1093/arisup/akx001
–––, 2017b, “Racism, Ideology, and Social Movements”, Res Philosophica , 94(1): 1–22. doi:10.11612/RESPHIL.1547
Heath, Joseph, 2014, “Rebooting Discourse Ethics”, Philosophy & Social Criticism , 40(9): 829–866. doi:10.1177/0191453714545340
Hedrick, Todd, 2010, Rawls and Habermas: Reason, Pluralism, and the Claims of Political Philosophy , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
–––, 2019, Reconciliation and Reification: Freedom’s Semblance and Actuality from Hegel to Contemporary Critical Theory , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heberle, Renée (ed.), 2006, Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno , University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania University Press.
Honneth, Axel, 1985, Kritik der Macht: Reflexionsstufen einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory , Kenneth Baynes (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
–––, 1992, Kampf um Anerkennung: Zur moralischen Grammatik sozialer Konflikte , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts , Joel Anderson (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 1995.
–––, 1994, “Die soziale Dynamik von Mißachtung: Zur Ortsbestimmung einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie”, Leviathan , 22(1): 78–93; translated as “The Social Dynamics of Disrespect: On the Location of Critical Theory Today”, John Farrell (trans.), Constellations , 1(2): 255–69, reprinted in in Axel Honneth, Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory , Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007, pp. 63–79.
–––, 1998, “Über die Möglichkeit einer erschließenden Kritik. Die Dialektik der Aufklärung im Horizont gegenwärtiger Debatten über Sozialkritik”, Paradigmi. Rivista di critica filosofica , 16(48): 501–514; translated as “The Possibility of a Disclosing Critique of Society: The Dialectic of Enlightenment in Light of Current Debates in Social Criticism”, Constellations , 7(1) (2000): 116–127. doi:10.1111/1467-8675.00173
–––, 2000, Das Andere der Gerechtigkeit ; translated as Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory , Joseph Ganahl (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2007.
–––, 2001, Leiden an Unbestimmtheit: Eine Reaktualisierung der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie , Stuttgart: Reclam; translated as The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel’s Social Theory , Ladislaus Löb (trans.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
–––, 2003, “Redistribution as Recognition”, in N. Fraser and A. Honneth (eds.), Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange , London: Verso, pp. 110–197.
–––, 2004, “Eine soziale Pathologie der Vernunft. Zur intellektuellen Erbschaft der Kritischen Theorie”, in Christoph Halbig and Michael Quante (eds.), Axel Honneth: Sozialphilosophie zwischen Kritik und Anerkennung , Münster: LIT-Verlag, pp. 9-32; translated as “A Social Pathology of Reason: On the Intellectual Legacy of Critical Theory”, in A. Honneth , Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory , New York: Columbia University Press, 2009, pp. 19-42.
–––, 2005, Verdinglichung: Eine anerkennungstheoretische Studie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Reification , Martin Jay (ed.), New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
–––, 2010, Das Ich im Wir: Studien zur Anerkennungstheorie , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translated as The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition , Joseph Ganahl (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2012.
–––, 2011, Das Recht der Freiheit: Grundriß einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translated as Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life , Joseph Ganahl (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
–––, 2017, “Is There an Emancipatory Interest? An Attempt to Answer Critical Theory’s Most Fundamental Question”, European Journal of Philosophy , 25: 908–920. doi:10.1111/ejop.12321
–––, 2022, “‘Labour’, A Brief History of a Modern Concept”, Philosophy , 97(2), 149–167. doi:10.1017/S003181912100036X
–––, 2023, Der arbeitende Souverän , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translation, The Working Sovereign , Cambridge: Polity, forthcoming.
Honneth, Axel, and Hans Joas (eds.), 1986, Kommunikatives Handeln: Beiträge zu Jürgen Habermas ‘Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; translated as Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action, Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
Horkheimer, Max, 1931, “Die gegenwärtige Lage der Sozialphilosophie und die Aufgaben eines Instituts für Sozialforschung”, Frankfurter Universitätsreden , XXXVII: 3–16; translated as “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research”, John Torpey (trans.), in Max Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993, pp. 1–14. Retranslated as “The State of Contemporary Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research”, Journal for Cultural Research , Peter Wagner (trans.), 22(2) (2018): 113–121. doi:10.1080/14797585.2018.1461354
–––, 1933, “Materialismus und Moral”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 2(2): 162–197; translated as “Materialism and Morality”, G. Frederick Hunter (trans.), in Max Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings , Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993, pp. 15–47.
–––, 1936a, “Egoismus und Freiheitsbewegung: Zur Anthropologie des bürgerlichen Zeitalters”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 5(2): 161–234; translated as “Egoism and Freedom Movements: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Era”, G. Frederick Hunter (trans.), in Max Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings , Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993, pp. 49–110.
––– (ed.), 1936b, Studien über Autorität und Familie: Forschungsberichte aus dem Institut für Sozialforschung , Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan.
–––, 1937a, “Traditionelle und kritische Theorie”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 6(2): 245–294; translated as “Traditional and Critical Theory”, Matthew J. O’Connell (trans.), in Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays , New York: Continuum, 1972, pp. 188–243.
–––, 1937b, “Nachtrag”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 6(3): 625–631; translated as “Postscript”, Matthew J. O’Connell (trans.), in Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays , New York: Continuum, 1972, pp. 244–252.
–––, 1941, “Art and Mass Culture”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 9(2), 290–304, republished in Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays , New York: Continuum, 1972, pp. 273–290.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno, 1947, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente , Amsterdam: Querido; translated as Dialectic of Enlightenment , Edmund Jephcott (trans.), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Hoy, David Couzens and Thomas McCarthy, 1994, Critical Theory , Oxford: Blackwell.
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–––, 2019, “Critical Theory and Postcolonialism”, in Gordon, Peter, Espen Hammer, and Axel Honneth (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School , London: Routledge, pp. 500–513.
Jaeggi, Rahel, 2005, Entfremdung: Zur Aktualität eines sozialphilosophischen Problems , Campus; translated as Alienation , Frederick Neuhouser and Alan E. Smith (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
–––, 2008, “Re-Thinking Ideology”, in Christopher Zurn, Boujdewijn de Bruijn (eds.), New Waves in Political Philosophy , Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
–––, 2014, Kritik von Lebensformen , Berlin.: Suhrkamp; translated as Critique of Forms of Life , Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.
–––, 2017a, “Crisis, Contradiction, and the Task of a Critical Theory”, in Banu Bargu und Chiara Bottici (eds.), Feminism, Capitalism, and Critique. Essays in Honor of Nancy Fraser , Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 209–224.
–––, 2017b, “Pathologies of Work”, Women’s Studies Quarterly , 45(3/4): 59–76. doi:10.1353/wsq.2017.0044
–––, 2022, “Modes of Regression: The Case of Ressentiment”, Critical Times , 5(3): 501–537. doi:10.1215/26410478-10030204
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–––, 1984, Marxism and Totality , Cambridge: Polity.
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Koopman, Colin, 2013, Genealogy as Critique , Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Kracauer, Siegfried, 1927, “Das Ornament der Masse”, Frankfurter Zeitung , July 9–10, 1927; translated as “Mass Ornament”, Barbara Correll and Jack Zipes (trans.) New German Critique , 5 (1975): 67–76.
–––, 2013, Totalitäre Propaganda , Bernd Stiegler (ed.), Berlin: Suhrkamp. Selections are translated as part of “Studies of Totalitarianism, Propaganda, and the Masses (1936–1940)” in Siegfried Kracauer, Selected Writings on Media, Propaganda, and Political Communication , Jaeho Kang, Graeme Gilloch, and John Abromeit (eds.), New York: Columbia University Press, 2022.
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–––, 2021, Beyond the Public Sphere: Film and the Feminist Imaginary , Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
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Löwy, Michael, 2001, Walter Benjamin: Avertissement d’incendie , Paris: Presses Universitaires de France; translated as Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ , Chris Turner (trans.), London: Verso, 2016.
Loick, Daniel, 2012, Kritik der Souveränität , Frankfurt: Campus; translated as A Critique of Sovereignty , Amanda DeMarco (trans.) London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.
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–––, 1963, “Vorwort” to Die Theorie des Romans , Berlin: Luchterhand; translated as The Theory of the Novel , Anna Bostock (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974.
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Marcuse, Herbert, 1937, “Philosophie und kritische Theorie”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 6(3): 625–647; translated as “Philosophy and Critical Theory”, in H. Marcuse (ed.), Negations , Jeremy J. Shapiro (trans), London: MayFlyBooks, 1968, pp. 99–117.
–––, 1941, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
–––, 1955, Eros and Civilization , Boston: Beacon Press.
–––, 1964, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society , Boston: Beacon Press.
–––, 1967, “Liberation from the Affluent Society” in Douglas Kellner (ed.), The New Left and the 1960s: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume 3 , New York: Routledge, 2004.
–––, 1968, “Beyond One-Dimensional Man”, in Douglas Kellner (ed.), Towards a Critical Theory of Society , Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume 2 , New York: Routledge, 2001.
–––, 1969, An Essay on Liberation , Boston: Beacon Press.
–––, 1974, “Marxism and Feminism”, Women’s Studies , 2: 279–288.
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–––, 1844, “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie: Einleitung”, in Karl Marx: Werke, Artikel, Entwürfe: März 1843 – August 1944 (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels Gesamtausgabe, vol. I.2), Berlin: Dietz, 1975, pp. 170–184; translated as “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law”, Martin Milligan and Barbara Ruhemann (trans.), in Karl Marx March 1843 – August 1944 (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels Collected Works, vol. 3), London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975, pp. 3–127.
–––, 1846, Die deutsche Ideologie: Manuskripte und Drucke (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels Gesamtausgabe, vol. I.5), Berlin: De Gruyter/Akademie, 2017; translated as The German Ideology (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels Collected Works, vol. 5), Clemens Dutt, W. Lough, and C. P. Magill (trans.), London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976.
–––, 1867, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Erster Band (Hamburg 1867) (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels Gesamtausgabe, vol. II.5), Berlin: Dietz, 1983; translated as Capital, Volume I (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels Collected Works, vol. 35), London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1996.
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–––, 2004, “Political Philosophy and Racial Injustice: From Normative to Critical Theory” in Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser (eds.), Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment: Essays for Richard J. Bernstein , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 147–168.
–––, 2009, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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–––, 2000, Spiegelungen der Gleichheit , Berlin: Akademie; translated as Reflections of Equality , Howard Rouse and Andrei Denejkine (trans.), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.
–––, 2015, Kritik der Rechte , Berlin: Suhrkamp; translated as Critique of Rights , Christopher Turner (trans.), Cambridge: Polity, 2020.
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–––, 2008, Souffrances sociales: Sociologie, psychologie et politique , Paris: La Découverte; translated as Social Suffering: Sociology, Psychology, Politics , Maude Dews (trans.), London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017.
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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Amy Allen, Axel Honneth, Noëlle McAfee, and Martin Saar for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts and Christian Meyer for judicious editorial assistance.

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Marxist Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reading Guide

2019, Historical Materialism

Appeared online here: http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/index.php/reading-guides/marxist-literary-criticism-introductory-reading-guide?fbclid=IwAR2vioz8HnlwSHpgoUdnH6cnwFNE7D2gb7juShyG0-z2LxNmyzYevqJLH8I

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Marxist Theory & Criticism

Primary sources i marxist theory & criticism.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Marxism and Literary Theory

Marxism and Literary Theory

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on April 12, 2016 • ( 27 )

Marxism is a materialist philosophy which tried to interpret the world based on the concrete, natural world around us and the society we live in. It is opposed to idealist philosophy which conceptualizes a spiritual world elsewhere that influences and controls the material world. In one sense it tried to put people’s thought into reverse gear as it was a total deviation from the philosophies that came before it. Karl Marx himself has commented on this revolutionary nature of Marxism, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” It is true that while other philosophies tried to understand the world, Marxism tried to change it.

Classical Marxism: Basic Principles

According to Marxism, society progresses through the struggle between opposing forces. It is this struggle between opposing classes that result in social transformation. History progresses through this class struggle. Class struggle originates out of the exploitation of one class by another throughout history. During the feudal period the tension was between the feudal lords and the peasants, and in the Industrial age the struggle was between the capitalist class (the bourgeoisie) and the industrial working class (the proletariat). Classes have common interests. In a capitalist system the proletariat is always in conflict with the capitalist class. This confrontation, according to Marx, will finally result in replacing the system by socialism.

Take the case of the novels of Mulk Raj Anand which address the life of the untouchables, coolies and ordinary workers struggling for their rights and self esteem. It is true that they can be traced back to the class conflict prevalent in the Indian society M.T. Vasudevan Nair , a noted Malayalam novelist wrote about the breaking up of the feudal tharavads in Kerala. But in the final analysis his stories reveal the filtering of the bourgeois modernity in Kerala society and how it enters into a conflictual relationship with the values of feudalism. Thus traces of this connection can be identified in various forms of cultural production.

Socialist Realism

Socialist Realism took shape as the official aesthetic principle of the new communist society. It was mainly informed by the 19th century aesthetics and revolutionary politics. Raymond Williams identifies three principles as the founding principles of Socialist realism. They are Partinost or commitment to the working class cause of the party, Narodnost of popularity and Klassovost or writer’s commitment to the class interests. The idea of Partinost is based on Vladmir Lenin ‘s essay, Party Organisation and Party Literature (1905) which reiterates the commitment of the writer to the aim of the party to liberate the working class from exploitation. Narodnost refers to the popular simplicity of the work of art. Marx, in Paris Manuscripts , refers to the alienation that originates out of the separation of the mental and manual in the capitalist society. Earlier under feudalism the workers engaged in cottage industries produced various items on their own, all activities related to the production happening at the same place under the supervision of the same people. But under capitalism the workers lost control over their products they were engaged in the production of various parts and were alienated from their own work. So, only folk art survived as people’s art. The concept Narodnost reiterates this quality of popular art which is accessible to the masses and wanted to restore their lost wholeness of being. Klassovost refers to the commitment of the writer to the interests of the working class. It is not related to the explicit allegiance of a writer to a particular class but the writer’s inherent ability to portray the social transformation.

For example, Balzac , a supporter of Bourbon dynasty, provides a penetrating account of the French society than all the historians. Though Tolstoy , the Russian novelist, was an aristocrat by birth and had no affiliation to the revolutionary movements in Russia, Lenin called Tolstoy the “mirror of Russian revolution” as he was successful in revealing the transformation in Russian society that led to the revolution through his novels. Lenin’s position regarding art and literature was harder than that of Marx and Friedrich Engels . He argued that literature must become an instrument of the party. In the 1934 congress of Soviet Writers , Socialist Realism was accepted as the official aesthetic principle of Soviet Union. It was accepted as a dogma by communists all over the world.

Thus with the declaration of official literary policy by Soviet Union the “Moscow Line” was popularized and got international acceptance among communists. As a result, a direct cause-effect relationship between literature and economics was assumed, with all writers seen as trapped within the intellectual limit of their class position. One of the examples of this rigid Marxist literary criticism is Illusion and Reality by Christopher Caudwell . However establishing a one to one relationship between base and superstructure as some “vulgar Marxists” may attempt, is opposed by the Marxist critic, Terry Eagleton . According to him, “each element of a society’s superstructure, art, law, politics, and religion has its own tempo of development, its own internal evolution, which is not reducible to a mere expression of the class struggle or the state of the economy.” Yet classical Marxists claim that in the last analysis the superstructure is determined by that mode of production. The Hungarian Marxist critic Georg Lukacs represented this type of political orthodoxy. Lukacs considered the 19th century realist fiction as a model and believed that a realist work must reveal the underlying pattern of contradictions in a social order. His debate with Bertolt Brecht on the whole questions of realism and expressionism discussed in detail the importance of form and the concept of form in Marxisi criticism. The debate was handed over to the Formalists who developed new directions in the development of Marxist criticism.

Further developments in Marxist Aesthetics

Marxist criticism flourished outside the official line in various European countries. Russian Formalism emerged as a new perspective informed by Marxism in the 1920s. It was disbanded by the Communist party as it did not conform to the official theoretical perspective of the party. The prominent members of this group were Victor Shklovsky, Boris Tomashevsky and Boris Eichenbaum, who published their ideas originally in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays , edited by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J Reis.

Though suppressed in Soviet Union, the Formalists emerged in various forms in the USA, Germany and Prague. One of the members of this group, Mikhail Bakhtin remained in Soviet Union and continued his critical practice. His concept of Dialogism affirmed plurality and variety. It was an argument against the hegemony of absolute authorial control. He affirmed the need to take others and otherness into account. In one sense, it was an argument against the increasing homogenization of cultural and political life in Soviet Union.

Many others belonging to the same perspective went into exile and continued their work abroad. It was the beginning of a new form of Marxist criticism. Roman Jakobson founded the Prague Linguistic Circle along with Rene Wellek and a few others. In Germany the Frankfurt School of Marxist aesthetics was founded in 1923 as a political research institute attached to the University of Frankfurt. Walter Benjamin , Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse were some of the important figures attached with this school. They tried to combine aspects of Formalism with the theories of Marx and Freud. They produced for the first time studies on mass culture and communication and their role in social reproduction and domination. The Frankfurt School also generated one of the first models of a critical cultural studies that analyzes the processes of cultural production and political economy, the politics of cultural texts, and audience reception and use of cultural artifacts.

Marxist scholars like Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht considered art as a social production. Walter Benjamin’s essay, The Author as Producer (1934) addresses the question, “What is the literary work’s position within the relations of production of its time?” Benjamin tries to argue that artistic production depends upon certain techniques of production which are part of the productive forces of art like the publishing, theatrical presentation and so on. A revolutionary artist should not uncritically accept the existing forces of artistic production, but should develop and revolutionize those forces. It helps in the creation of new social relations between artist and audience. In this process, authors, readers and spectators become collaborators. The experimental theatre developed by Brecht is a realization of Benjamin’s concept.

The French Marxist thinker, Louis Althusser further developed the Marxist approach through the introduction of various concepts like overdetermination , Ideology etc. Overdetermination refers to an effect which arises from various causes rather than from a single factor. This concept undercuts simplistic notions of one to one correspondence between base and superstructure. Ideology is another term modified by Althusser. According to him “ideology is a system of representations endowed with an existence and an historical role at the heart of a given society.” It obscures social reality by naturalizing beliefs and by promoting values that support it. The civil society spreads ideology through the law, textbooks, religious rituals and norms so that the people imbibe them even without their knowledge. Ideology is instituted by the state through two apparatuses, Repressive State Apparatuses (RSA) and Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA). The RSA includes law courts, prison, police, army etc and the ISA include political parties, schools, media, churches, family, art etc. Althusser imported structuralism to Marxism. In his view, society is a structural whole which consists of relatively autonomous levels: legal, political and cultural whose mode of articulation is only determined by the economy.

The founder of Italian communist Party, Antonio Gramsci was a politician, political theorist, linguist and philosopher. Known as an original thinker among Marxist scholars, Gramsci introduced the concepts like Hegemony and the Subaltern . Hegemony is the domination of particular section of the society by the powerful classes. Most often it works through consent rather than by power. It is the moral and intellectual leadership of the upper class in a particular society. The term subaltern was originally used by Gramsci as a collective description for a variety of different and exploited groups who lack class consciousness. But now it is being used to represent all marginalized sections like Dalits, women, minorities etc.

An influential figure among the New Left was Raymond Williams . His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. Williams was interested in the relationship between language, literature and society. He coined the critical method, Cultural Materialism which has four characteristics, Historical context, Theoretical method, Political /commitment and Textual analysis. Cultural materialism gives us different perspectives based on what we choose to suppress or reveal in reading from the past.

Cultural Materialism argues that culture is a constitutive s social progress which actively creates different ways of life. Similarly creation of meaning is viewed as a practical material activity which cannot be consigned to a secondary level. Another important concept in Williams thought is Structures of feeling. They are values that are changing and being formed as we live and react to the material world around us. They subject to change. Williams contributed much for the development of Marxist aesthetics through his studies on culture. His most important works include The Country and the City (1973), in which chapters about literature alternate with chapters on social history. His tightly written Marxism and Literature (1977) is mainly for specialists, but it also sets out his own approach to cultural studies which he called cultural materialism.

Fredric Jameson , an American Marxist intellectual focused on critical theory and was influence by Kenneth Burke , Gyorgy Lukacs , Ernst Bloch , Theodor Adorno , Frankfurt School , Louis Althusser and Sartre . He viewed cultural criticism as an integral feature of Marxist theory. This position represented a break with more orthodox Marxism, which held a narrow view of historical materialism. In some ways Jameson has been concerned, along with other Marxist cultural critics such as Terry Eagleton to articulate Marxism’s relevance in respect to current philosophical and literary trends. In 1969, Jameson co-founded the Marxist Literary Group with a number of his graduate students at the University of California. His major works include Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971) and The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (1972). History came to play an increasingly central role in Jameson’s interpretation of both the reading (consumption) and writing (production) of literary texts. Jameson marked his full-fledged commitment to Hegelian-Marxist philosophy with the publication of The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), the opening slogan of which is “always historicize” .

Apart from Jameson, contemporary Marxist critics like Terry Eagleton , Professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster, England and Aijaz Ahmad , a well known Marxist thinker and political commentator from India have significant contributions in the field of Marxist theory and aesthetics. Aijaz Ahmad’s famous work, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992) contained Marxist analysis of the concepts like Third World Literature and Orientalism . Eagleton on the other hand published more than 40 books which include Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), and The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996). Marxist thought have undergone huge transformation over the years befitting to the claim of Marx that change is the only unchanging phenomena in this world. It has been the backbone of almost all modern theories of culture and criticism. It may be a paradox that while Marxist practices have received set backs in recent years Marxist theory has been widely accepted all over the world.

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This chapter explains and defends the sort of materialism that was a core theoretical commitment of Marx and of the early Frankfurt School—in particular, Max Horkheimer—and which has been the subject of aggressive internecine criticisms on the part of later critical theorists, like Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth. The author offers grounds for thinking Marx’s and Horkheimer’s materialism both attractive and plausible. Section 10.1 establishes some necessary distinctions between substantive and explanatory materialism, Sect. 10.2 offers an account of Marx’s materialism, intended to hew closely to Horkheimer’s reading of Marx, Sect. 10.3 discusses Horkheimer’s understanding of materialism as a practical–theoretical commitment, and Sect. 10.4 concludes the chapter by offering some defense of materialism, chiefly centered around the normative importance of social labor, which both Marx and Horkheimer affirm.

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On this, see Alfred Schmidt’s excellent work; in the case of Marx, see Schmidt (1981) and Schmidt ( 2014 ); in the case of Horkheimer, see Schmidt ( 1984 , 1993 ).

For agreement that Horkheimer’s early materialism represents a form of what is now called “nonideal theory”, see Berendzen ( 2008 : 713).

It is unclear to me how Schmidt would define the substantive basis of Marx’s materialism in the sense I intend: in Chap. 1 of Schmidt 2014 , the emphasis is on material conditions and labor, as I have suggested; in Chap. 2 , however, Schmidt seems to suggest that it is Marx’s insistence on the independence of matter, of nature and its laws, from human consciousness and will that is basic ( 2014 : 69–70). At the same time, the significance of the claim about the independence of nature is, for Schmidt, the permanence of labor in human life, understood as the metabolic interaction between humans and nature ( 2014 : 83, 86). For what it is worth, I take the argument regarding matter and nature to be a secondary, “negative ontological” (as Schmidt calls it) consequence of the anti-idealist nature of Marx’s materialism, understood with reference to the basic conditions of human life.

The reflexive form is not the product of translation: “Sie selbst fangen an, sich von den Tieren zu unterscheiden, sobald sie anfangen, ihre Lebensmittel zu produzieren , ein Schritt, der durch ihre körperliche Organisation bedingt ist” (Marx and Engels 1962 : 21).

As Schmidt writes, quoting The German Ideology : “An ‘opposition between nature and history’ is created by the ideologists in that they exclude from history the productive relation of men to nature. Nature and history, said Marx in criticizing Bruno Bauer, are ‘not two separate “things” ’. Men always have before them a ‘historical nature and a natural history’ ” (Schmidt 2014 : 49).

Eclipse of Reason is back in print in English and a number of Horkheimer’s early essays have been republished, some translated for the first time, in Horkheimer 1993 (a, b, c, d, e), which appeared with a companion volume of newer commentary (although much of this is actually translation of some of the major contributions to German reception of Horkheimer in the 1970s–1980s). On the other hand, as others have also noted, several of the authors included in this companion volume demonstrate a marked lack of charity in their treatment of Horkheimer, a somewhat puzzling feature in an anthology the declared intent of which is to stimulate renewed interest in Horkheimer’s work: see Regier ( 1995 ) and Abromeit ( 2011 : 9, n. 26).

See McCole et al. ( 1993 ) for agreement that the secondary literature displays a distorting focus on methodological works, see Abromeit ( 2011 : 3). Important exceptions to that tendency include: Schmidt ( 1984 , 1993 ), Berendzen ( 2010 ), Berendzen ( 2008 ), and Schnädelbach ( 1993 ).

As Habermas himself observes, “Only twice did Marx express himself connectedly and fundamentally on the materialist conception of history [in The German Ideology , and in the “Preface to The Critique of Political Economy”]; otherwise he used this theoretical framework, in the role of historian, to interpret particular historical situations or developments… Engels characterizes historical materialism as a guide and a method. This could create the impression that Marx and Engels saw this doctrine as no more than a heuristic that helped to structure a (now-as-before) narrative presentation of history with systematic intent” (Habermas 1979 : 131). As we will see, this is in keeping with Horkheimer’s account of materialism, as centered on the response to contingent, historical conditions, relative to which the more abstract and universal commitments are the less essential and binding. And, as Habermas has just reported, this would also more or less fit Marx’s practice. Yet Habermas does not accept this account, insisting to the contrary that “historical materialism was not understood in this way … I shall not, therefore, treat it as a heuristic but as a theory, indeed as a theory of social evolution that, owing to its reflective status, is also informative for purposes of political action and can under certain circumstances be connected with the theory and strategy of revolution. The theory of capitalist development that Marx worked out in the Gründrisse and in Capital fits into historical materialism as a subtheory” (Habermas 1979 : 131). With respect to the full theory of social evolution, Habermas insists: “Marx conceives of history as a discrete series of modes of production, which, in its developmental-logical order, reveals the direction of social evolution” (Habermas 1979 : 132).

But one finds scarcely any argument in Habermas to support this sweeping interpretation which, as he admits, does not conform to Marx’s priorities as a theorist: we are to make nothing of the fact that, despite his central theoretical commitment purportedly being located in a highly abstract and universal theory of social evolution, Marx almost exclusively directed his attention elsewhere and to the development of forms of argument which indeed fit somewhat awkwardly with his rare metatheoretical pronouncements. To the contrary, as Schmidt observes: “In the 1850s, as [Marx] turned his attention to an almost overwhelming amount of social-historical material (and thus began preliminary work on Capital ), he became aware of the uselessness of a rigid linear schema of successive historical stages. Marx is concerned not only with ‘the uneven development of material production relative to, for example, artistic production’ but also with the considerable disproportions and cleavages that he confronts ‘within practical-social relations themselves’… These passages should make it clear that the philosophy of history constitutes only one—albeit indispensable—aspect of Marx’s thinking about history. It consists more of a radical humanistic impulse which gladly embraces and grows out of substantive investigations than of a doctrinaire developmental schema” (1981: 15–19). As Schmidt also notes, when Marx perceived a Russian commentator to have interpreted him as offering an “historical-philosophical theory of a general developmental path which is prescribed as a fate for all peoples regardless of their historical situation”, he protested that “such a ‘universal key’ to history is mistaken” (Schmidt 1981: 19).

I am less certain that Habermas’ judgment is fair to Marcuse. As Abromeit reports, in 1936, Horkheimer and Marcuse each sent letters to Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and others, announcing their joint intention to produce “a source book that contains the materialist theories of Western philosophy from classical antiquity to the end of the 19th century”, a project for which Marcuse had lead responsibility (Abromeit 2011 : 243; quoting Horkheimer 1985 –1996: V. 15, 517). The project was never completed, but Marcuse and Horkheimer appear to have been in substantive agreement about what it would involve. Nevertheless, there are pronounced differences between the materialist theory of the early Horkheimer and that of Marcuse, but that is a topic which I cannot pursue here.

Of course, as Horkheimer himself sarcastically notes, “metaphysics” has been used to describe a great variety of things as well: “It is difficult to come up with a formulation which will appeal to all learned gentleman and their views about ultimate things. If you are reasonably successful in your attacks on some such pompous ‘metaphysics,’ you may expect all the rest to say that they always had something altogether different in mind. And yet it seems to me that there is some sense in which metaphysics means insight into the true nature of things” ( 1978 : 45). As Berendzen puts it, “metaphysics”, in Horkheimer’s usage, refers to “a kind of intellectualized, theoretically elaborated attempt at coming up with a synoptic view of nature and human experience” ( 2008 : 698). While Hegel makes for an obvious example, Stirk ( 1992 ) suggests that Horkheimer, in the 1930s, principally had in mind the work of neo-Kantians like Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, as well as “life philosophers” like Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann.

For a discussion of Horkheimer’s view of materialism in contrast to the “metaphysical materialism” of the Soviet type, for instance, see Schmidt ( 1984 : 71–72); for specific criticisms of Lenin and Engels, see Horkheimer ( 1985 –1996: V. 11) and Abromeit’s discussion ( 2011 : 150–56).

In his discussion of the relationship between Horkheimer and Rawls, Berendzen neglects this important difference: that the form of constructivism recommended by Horkheimer’s combination of ethical theory and social theory is importantly more like Habermas’ in this sense than like Rawls’ (see Berendzen 2010 : 1031–32). I am also not convinced that Horkheimer’s materialism is best understood as resting on a minimal, realist foundation—in the metaethical sense—as Berendzen suggests, as opposed to being constructivist “all the way down”. Such a position is both difficult to reconcile with Berendzen’s own compelling reading of Horkheimer’s materialism as a pragmatic “stance” and, in any case, metaethical realism in the standard sense adopts what Horkheimer would likely see as an undialectical attitude toward the objectivity of moral facts. In a letter to Friedrich Pollock, Horkheimer once wrote “The most unpleasant discovery to which materialism leads is that reason exists only as long as it is supported by a natural subject” (Dubiel 1985 : 1), and I suspect he would similarly tie the normativity of the facts of suffering to the existence of subjects capable of solidarity (see, e.g., Horkheimer 1993c : 158, where he asserts that the “materialist fighter”, as Dubiel puts it, prefers to struggle against the existing social order rather than to accommodate himself to it, not because of an external command or an inner voice; the reason lies “only in his wishes and desires, which will one day disappear”).

Of course, I enthusiastically concede that an account of discourse that is compatible with Horkheimer’s materialism will also differ from Habermas’ in important ways: in particular, it will deal in a direct way, as Habermas does not, with the material conditions which make discourse and the individual competence for discourse possible. For a more detailed critique of Habermas’ puzzling position on this, see Borman ( 2011 : Chap. 4).

As Berendzen also notes ( 2008 : 700), Horkheimer sees metaphysics both as a “symptom of the social arrangements that cause suffering” and as a distraction from and thus a cover for those very social arrangements, protecting them from critique and change.

For agreement on the centrality of the refusal of theodicy to Horkheimer’s thinking, early and late, see Schmidt ( 1993 : 28). Of course, this commitment is not unique to Horkheimer but is clearly found in Adorno as well. On the other hand, as Abromeit discusses, it was a significant point of disagreement between Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin (see Abromeit 2011 : 231–32).

“Materialist theory certainly does not afford to the political actor the solace that he will necessarily achieve his objective; it is not a metaphysics of history but rather a changing image of the world, evolving in relation to the practical efforts toward its improvement. The knowledge of tendencies that is contained in this image offers no clear prognosis of historical development. Even if those who maintain that the theory could be misleading ‘only’ in regard the pace of development, and not its direction, were correct (a frightful ‘only,’ since it concerns the agonies of generations), merely formally understood time could, after all, turn around and affect the quality of the content, i.e., humanity could be thrown back to earlier stages of development simply because the struggle had lasted too long” (Horkheimer 1993b : 44). See also Horkheimer ( 1978 : 35–37), where he insists that socialism in no way follows mechanically from the economic “laws” discovered by Marx, that “[o]ne has to fight for socialism, in other words” because “it will not be realized by a logic that is immanent in history but by men trained in theory and determined to make things better. Otherwise, it will not be realized at all”.

In this light, Honneth’s repeated complaint that Horkheimer subscribes to a problematic “philosophy of history” must indeed seem surprising and implausible (see Honneth 1993 : passim). Surveying the various arguments he directs at Horkheimer and Marx, it seems Honneth regards the philosophy of history as having two principal and unacceptable characteristics: the postulation of “a unified species-subject” in history ( 1993 : 190) and/or the postulation of a single, unitary process as the basis of history—to wit, the development of the forces of production, the technical mastery of nature—which unfolds behind and explains all of the myriad phenomena of historical change (200-01). Honneth offers very little textual evidence for his belief that Horkheimer endorses either of these positions. For a detailed discussion of Horkheimer’s texts which convincingly argues against his endorsement of either a metasubject of history or an inexorable historical process, see Schmidt ( 1993 ) (also, Dubiel 1985 : 33), and for more of Horkheimer’s own clear statements on these issues, see (1993d: 374, 388).

That is, rather than independently analyzing the dialectical relationship between labor—understood by Habermas as a reflection of accumulated instrumental knowledge of nature—and interaction—understood as actions coordinated on the basis of agreement or shared norms—Marx and Horkheimer reduce the latter to the former.

There is also something seriously disingenuous about Habermas’ position here given that he has disqualified as a reasonable desire for the members of any society, as a consequence of his theory of social evolution, the desire for the democratization of their economic life (see Habermas 1987b ; Borman 2011 : 101–2).

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Borman, D.A. (2017). Materialism in Critical Theory: Marx and the Early Horkheimer. In: Thompson, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55801-5_10

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Charlotte Brontë

Literature Notes
A Marxist Approach to the Novel
Jane Eyre at a Glance
Book Summary
About Jane Eyre
Character List
Summary and Analysis
Chapters 2-3
Chapters 6-7
Chapters 14-15
Chapters 18-19
Chapters 24-25
Chapters 28-29
Chapter 38-Conclusion
Character Analysis
Edward Fairfax Rochester
St. John Rivers
Character Map
Charlotte Brontë Biography
Critical Essays
A Jungian Approach to the Novel
A Postcolonial Approach to the Novel
Full Glossary
Essay Questions
Practice Projects
Cite this Literature Note

Critical Essays A Marxist Approach to the Novel

Based on the ideas of Karl Marx, this theoretical approach asks us to consider how a literary work reflects the socioeconomic conditions of the time in which it was written. What does the text tell us about contemporary social classes and how does it reflect classism? Jane Eyre depicts the strict, hierarchical class system in England that required everyone to maintain carefully circumscribed class positions. Primarily through the character of Jane, it also accents the cracks in this system, the places where class differences were melding in Victorian England. For example, the novel questions the role of the governess: Should she be considered upper class, based on her superior education, or lower class, because of her servant-status within the family? What happens when relationships develop between people of different classes, such as Rochester and Jane?

Jane's ambiguous class status becomes evident from the novel's opening chapter. A poor orphan living with relatives, Jane feels alienated from the rest of the Reed family. John Reed tells Jane she has "no business to take our books; you are a dependent . . . you ought to beg, and not to live here with gentleman's children like us." In this quote, John claims the rights of the gentleman, implying that Jane's family was from a lower class, and, therefore, she has no right to associate on equal footing with her wealthy cousins. Jane's lack of money leaves her dependent upon the Reeds for sustenance. She appears to exist in a no-man's land between the upper- and servant classes. By calling her cousin John a "murderer," "slave-driver," and "Roman emperor," Jane emphasizes her recognition of the corruption inherent in the ruling classes. As she's dragged away to the red-room following her fight with John Reed, Jane resists her captors like a "rebel slave," emphasizing the oppression she suffers because of her class status. When Miss Abbot admonishes Jane for striking John Reed, Jane's "young master," Jane immediately questions her terminology. Is John really her "master"; is she his servant? Emphasizing the corruption, even despotism of the upper classes, Jane's narrative makes her audience aware that the middle classes were becoming the repositories of both moral and intellectual superiority.

Jane's experiences at Thornfield reinforce this message. When Jane first arrives, she is happy to learn that Mrs. Fairfax is a housekeeper, and not Jane's employer, because this means they're both dependents and can, therefore, interact as equals. Mrs. Fairfax discusses the difference between herself, as an upper-servant, and the other servants in the house; for example, she says Leah and John are "only servants, and one can't converse with them on terms of equality; one must keep them at due distance for fear of losing one's authority." As a governess, Jane is in the same category as Mrs. Fairfax: neither a member of the family nor a member of the serving classes. The ambiguity of the governess is especially pronounced, as we see with the example of Diana and Mary Rivers: the well-educated daughters of upper-class parents who've fallen on hard financial times, the Rivers are better educated than their employers, though treated with as little respect as the family cook. Victorian society brutally maintained the boundaries between governesses and the upper-class families, practically prohibiting marriages between the two groups and attempting to desexualize governesses, who were often accused of bringing a dangerous sexuality into the family. Blanche, for example, calls governesses "incubi," and Lady Ingram believes that liaisons should never be allowed between governesses and tutors, because such relationships would introduce a moral infection into the household.

The relationship between Jane and Rochester also emphasizes class issues. In a conversation preceding their betrothal, Rochester treats Jane like a good servant: Because she's been a "dependent" who has done "her duty," he, as her employer, wants to offer her assistance in finding a new job. Jane confirms her secondary status by referring to Rochester as "master," and believing "wealth, caste, custom," separate her from him. She fears he will treat her like an "automaton" because she is "poor, obscure, plain and little," mistakenly believing the lower classes to be heartless and soulless. Claiming the aristocratic privilege of creating his own rules, Rochester redefines Jane's class status, by defining her as his "equal" and "likeness."

Before she can become Rochester's wife, Jane must prove her acceptability based on class. Does she have an upper-class sensibility, despite her inferior position at Thornfield? For example, when Bessie sees Jane at Lowood, she is impressed because Jane has become "quite a lady"; in fact, her accomplishments surpass that of her cousins, yet they are still considered her social superiors based solely on wealth. The conversation emphasizes the ambiguities of Jane's family's class status and of the class system in general: Should a lady be judged based on academic accomplishments, money, or family name? The novel critiques the behavior of most of the upper-class characters Jane meets: Blanche Ingram is haughty and superficial, John Reed is debauched, and Eliza Reed is inhumanely cold. Rochester is a primary example of upper-class debauchery, with his series of mistresses and his attempt to make Jane a member of the harem. In her final view of Thornfield, after Bertha has burned it down, Jane emphasizes the stark contrast between her comforting, flowering, breathtaking dream of Thornfield, and the reality of its trodden and wasted grounds. The discrepancy emphasizes that the world's vision of the upper classes doesn't always capture the hidden passions that boil under the veneer of genteel tranquility.

One of Jane's tasks in the novel is to revitalize the upper classes, which have become mired in debauchery and haughtiness. Just as Rochester sought Jane for her freshness and purity, the novel suggests that the upper classes in general need the pure moral values and stringent work ethic of the middle classes. At novel's end, Rochester recognizes the error in his lifestyle, and his excessive passions have been quenched; he is reborn as a proper, mild-mannered husband, happily dependent on his wife's moral and intellectual guidance.

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Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory: An Introductory Sketch

*** Editor’s Content Notice: This article includes language that is not for younger readers. ***

Introduction

This article provides an introductory sketch of Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory. It discusses the disappointment of economic Marxists over the failure of the workers of the world to unite for revolution. It presents the diagnosis of that failure by Cultural Marxists. The diagnosis identified obstacles to revolution, especially the family and Christianity. The obstacles were cultural, so Marxism needed to shift from economics to culture to destroy the obstacles and make ready for revolution. It explains “the long march” through the institutions of Western civilization and the search for a surrogate for the proletariat which turned out to be students and minorities.

Along the way this article looks at the founding of the Frankfurt School, a half dozen Frankfurt School theorists including three major ones who came to America, two examples of Cultural Marxism’s influence in pornography and socialist feminism, and how Cultural Marxism creates a self-assuring feedback loop.

Obstacles to Economic Marxist Revolution

When Marx called for revolution saying, “Workers of the world unite,” [1] the workers did not unite.

Since laborers would not revolt, Marxism needed a modification. Lenin provided the first modification: the revolutionary vanguard party. The party would provide workers with political consciousness and revolutionary leadership to depose capitalism. Hence the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. But still, the workers of the world did not unite.

Why had Marx thought they would unite? Economic Marxism applied Hegel’s master-slave dialectic to economics. The bourgeoisie masters oppress and exploit the proletariat slaves. Capitalists rob the labor value of goods and wealth from workers. That should have been reason enough, Marx thought, for the workers of the world to unite.

Why didn’t they? Later Marxists diagnosed the obstacles to revolution. The obstacles include:

Christianity
Republican government
Nation-states
Free speech

Each of these is an impediment to forcing people into dependence upon a totalitarian Marxist state. Consider the failure of one of Marx’s important predictions. He said if continent-wide war came to Europe, that would be a catalyst for the proletariat to revolt. When World War I broke out, however, people’s loyalties to nation-states held. Once more, the workers of the world did not unite. Marxists concluded that for revolution to come, the nation-state must go.

Creation of the Frankfurt School

Since the workers of the world did not unite even with the modification of Marxism that added the revolutionary vanguard party and even with World War I, Marxism needed more modifications.

In the 1920s and 1930s, a defined school of Marxist thought developed to round out the diagnosis of the proletariat’s failure and prescribe a cure. It would become known as the Frankfurt School. Its origin was in the Erste Marxistische Arbeitwoche (First Marxist Work Week). The idea for the work week was conceived by Felix Weil. The success of the meeting led to the founding of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) affiliated with the University of Frankfurt am Main, initially funded by Weil’s father Hermann Weil.

The Institute developed Critical Theory which is the underlying philosophical base of Cultural Marxism. Then a number of Frankfurt School Marxists came to the United States to launch Cultural Marxism in America.

In Critical Theory, each element of each obstacle to the proletarian revolution undergoes criticism and indictment. The criticism finds master-slave oppression everywhere. Whereas in Economic Marxism the enslavement and oppression are economic, in Cultural Marxism, the myriad oppressions are of many kinds. For example, the family has marriage, husbands, wives, parents, and children. Whereas in Economic Marxism capitalism is the oppressive system, in Cultural Marxism, Critical Theory makes marriage into an oppressive regime. The masters – husbands and parents – oppress and exploit women and children. Since patriarchy is an obstacle to revolution, Cultural Marxism must clear the way for revolution by abolishing patriarchy, redefining or eliminating marriage, and nationalizing children.

Critical Theory finds master-slave oppression in Christianity, republican government, nation-states, free market enterprise, and free speech — for starters.

Critical Theorists synthesized and resynthesized Marx and Freud. This brought a focus on two of the obstacles that caused the failure of the proletariat to revolt: the family and Christianity. Adding Freudianism to Marxism revealed the relation between, for example, fatherhood and the nation-state. To get rid of the nation-state the pre-revolution would have to abolish fatherhood. Abolishing fatherhood would kill two birds with one stone: the family and the nation-state.

A Half Dozen Frankfurt School Theorists

As one way to sketch the development of Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory, let’s look briefly at a half dozen of its founding theorists: Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Antonio Gramsci, and Herbert Marcuse.

Of these, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse came to the United States to launch Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory in America. As we will see, these were some of the “big guns” in the Frankfurt School.

Max Horkheimer

Max Horkheimer was the first director of the Institute for Social Research. In 1937 he published the institute’s ideological manifesto, an essay titled “Traditional and Critical Theory.” The role of traditional theory was only to understand and explain society. In contrast to that, a theory is critical to the extent that it seeks “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.” [2]

Horkheimer said workers would not unite for revolution because of their involvement in production and the successes of capitalism. He said that something needed to be substituted into the place of workers in Marx’s theory. He looked for a surrogate for workers to unite for revolution. The search for the useful surrogate for the proletariat would continue into the 1960s. Once found, the surrogate is a key element of Cultural Marxism.

In 1934 Horkheimer moved to New York. He accepted an offer from Columbia University to relocate the Institute to one of their buildings. In 1941 he moved to the Los Angeles area. The Institute operated on both coasts of the country.

Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm, a Frankfurt School psychoanalyst, saw the family as the primary means by which the values of the masters are imprinted onto people’s minds. By blending historical materialism with psychoanalysis, he justified reclassifying societal norms as pathologies. For example, masculinity and femininity are not objective sexual differences. They are pathologies. They exist only because they are enforced as artificial social constructs.

George Lukács

Georg Lukács was appointed Deputy Commissar for Culture in the communist dictatorship established in Hungary following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. He let loose what he called “cultural terrorism.” He wanted to show that Sigmund Freud’s idea that sexual liberation can manipulate and control individuals also could work against an entire population. His government program included sex education in Hungarian schools. The program taught that monogamy was outdated, women should abandon sexual mores, and people should give rein to free love and promiscuity. Many Hungarian youth became sexual predators.

The dictatorship collapsed for multiple reasons, a significant one being the revulsion of the proletariat by the attack on traditional values. Not only did the workers not unite. They opposed the revolution. Lukács fled to Vienna, then Moscow, and later returned when the Soviet Union occupied Hungary. He returned to Hungarian government via Soviet occupation.

Lukács developed the foundation for Cultural Marxism to fuse form in art with the history of class struggle. In History and Class Consciousness , [3] Lukács identified Christianity as both the primary obstacle to revolution and the primary oppressor in the master-slave regime.

Theodor Adorno

Theodor Adorno said that reason itself is oppressive. The Enlightenment and science both inhibited revolution because of their use of reason. This foundational influence in Cultural Marxism accounts for the irrational methods it uses and the futility of trying to reason with Cultural Marxism.

Adorno moved to the United States in 1938 to help launch the Frankfurt School’s program in America. He worked at Princeton and the University of California Berkeley. He returned to the University of Frankfurt in 1949.

Having thrown off reason, Adorno catapults past Fromm’s pathology of the family to the family being inherently psychotic. In 1950 he, with others, published The Authoritarian Personality . [4] This book asked the question, what makes a fascist. He ranked personality traits on the “F-scale,” that is, the fascist scale. According to Adorno, positive feelings about parents can’t be simply that. Instead, that is superficial. The superficiality hides negative feelings about outsiders. The family is a repressive regime that conditions people to respond to father figures. The result is dangerous patriotism and fascism. [5] People who are insecure and anxious about their relations with their families make progressives. They have revolutionary personalities.

That sort of talk sold in Germany, but not so much in Great Britain and the United States. The Frankfurt School adopted a shift in language for American consumption of their revolutionary program. They removed references to Marxist studies upon which their theories were based. They changed terms like “revolutionary personality” to “democratic personality” which gave revolution a more domesticated feel.

Cloaking their empirically unfounded theories in a veneer of science, they introduced a perverted use of the medical term “phobia” to condemn anti-revolutionary thought. Instead of phobias being neuropsychological conditions toward which medicine is sympathetic, now phobia is the pathological bigotry of a fascist. This rhetoric was used to paint prejudice and racism as pathologies endemic to the mythical white Christian majority in America. Parenthood, pride in one’s family, traditional attitudes about sex, traditional roles of men and women, and love of one’s country now are phobic pathologies. If you are guilty of any of these sins, you are phobic, so there is no use and no moral requirement in approaching you with reason.

Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci called the reasons for the failure of global Marxism “hegemonies.” The hegemonies existed in the existing cultural framework of self-governing societies. Those needed to be progressively eroded. The erosion would make people less self-reliant and more reliant on the state. The gradual process would pass through socialism as an intermediate phase and then onward to communism. Dependence would disable republican self-government.

To accomplish this, Gramsci developed the idea of “the long march.” Past attempts at worker revolution failed because they made one frontal push and succumbed to the hegemonies. That strategy needed to be replaced by multiple avenues instead of one, infiltration instead of frontal attack, and progressive destruction of the hegemonies from within. Cultural Marxism would advance through theatre, literature, art, newspapers, magazines, radio, universities, law, mass media, and so on. The terrain was wide. It would take time. Terrain and time made for the long march.

Primary attention in the long march would be given to education. Cultural Marxism would rely on capturing young impressionable minds first. Marxists would raise a generation or two who had known little else than their Critical Theory.

Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse taught at Columbia University, Brandeis University, and the University of California at San Diego. He completed the translation of Marxism into cultural terms. He became the Frankfurt School’s most widely read spokesman. He remained in the United States after Horkheimer and Adorno returned to Germany. He became a guru of “the New Left.”

Recall that back at the beginning of the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer began the search for the surrogate for the proletariat, the substitute for the working class to accomplish revolution. Marcuse discovered the surrogate: students and minority groups.

To recruit minorities for revolution as surrogates of the proletariat, Marcuse invented another piece of Critical Theory, the criticism of “repressive tolerance.” He acknowledged that republics and liberal democracies were tolerant of minorities. But he alleged that the tolerance, contrary to appearance, truly was repressive. It lulled minorities into embracing their continuing enslavement. Tolerance was a weapon of domination. Repressive tolerance needed to be replaced with a new “liberating tolerance.” Liberating tolerance would be vigilantly and coercively intolerant of the political right, traditionalism, conservatism, and any opposition to socialism. It would use subversion and revolutionary violence.

A prime target of liberating tolerance is free speech. Free speech allows the false consciousness of the sleeping victims to continue because it gives voice to the masters in the repressive regime. Because only Marxist consciousness is awake to the truth of the master-slave dialectic, revolutionary minorities have the right to suppress opposing speech. What we know today as “political correctness,” “cancel culture,” and “safe spaces” originated with Marcuse in such of his writings as his 1965 essay, “Repressive Tolerance.” [6]

Under the Critical Theory of liberating tolerance, the meaning of ordinary language is criticized. For example, the word “racism” no longer means belief in the superiority of one’s race. Now it means the combination of prejudice and power. Superficially, that does not sound like a shift. But note that the added element of power means minorities cannot be guilty and the majority cannot avoid guilt. The possession of power is both indictment and conviction awaiting only punishment.

Under liberating tolerance, there never can be two sides to any story. There always is only one story and always the same story. For example, no minority can have any negative behavior. Any negative behavior is just more proof of oppression and the guilt of the oppressors. In the circular nonlogic of Critical Theory, rioting and destruction prove that oppression caused rioting and destruction. You are not woke if, when you look at rioting and destruction, you do not see oppression and the oppressors. Just the use of the word “riot” is hate speech.

Perhaps Marcuse’s most important work is Eros and Civilization , [7] first published in 1955. By yet another resynthesizing of Freud and Marx, Marcuse proposes a sexually non-repressive society. The book influenced subcultures of the 1960s, the gay liberation movement, and is a seedbed of ideology for transgenderism, polyamory, and a myriad of other sexual movements. Human beings cannot liberate themselves without ridding society of all conventional sexual mores.

Two Examples of Influence

The influence of Cultural Marxism was rapid. Let’s consider a couple examples: pornography and socialist feminism.

Pornography

By the end of the 1960s, Andy Warhol’s film Blue Movie became the first adult erotic film with explicit sex to be given wide theatrical release in the United States. The film’s original title was to be simply, “Fuck.” He unwittingly shot it on a type of film that was not meant for the lighting he was using. The film turned blue and the title changed to Blue Movie . It is one of the first films in the so-called Golden Age of Porn. It helped inaugurate “porno chic” with porn being publicly discussed by celebrities and film critics.

Blue Movie was followed by Mona , Deep Throat , Behind the Green Door , The Devil in Miss Jones , The Opening of Misty Beethoven , and Last Tango in Paris .

Cultural Marxist influence in law produced the 1973 decision of the U. S. Supreme Court in Miller v. California . [8] In typical Cultural Marxist fashion, the Supreme Court redefined words and censored anyone else’s say about the meaning of those words. Legislatures and voters had defined “obscenity.” The Supreme Court arrogated to itself the place of the people and their representatives by taking over and monopolizing the definition of “obscenity.” Now voters and legislators have no say. The only say allowed is the one which unleashed the ubiquitous flood of pornography we have today and have had for a long time. Pornography is a front in Cultural Marxism’s long march to destroy the family.

Socialist Feminism

The same year as Blue Movie was released, the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union was formed. The Union stated its purpose as liberation from “the systematic keeping down of women for the benefit of people in power.” By 1972 its socialist character was overt with the Hyde Park Chapter of the Union’s publication of the pamphlet Socialist Feminism: A Strategy for the Women’s Movement . The pamphlet was circulated nationwide.

Socialist feminism expanded feminism from public issues like equal pay for equal work to the private sphere of the home. With women as a supposed minority serving as a surrogate for the unreliable proletariat, patriarchy serves as surrogate for capitalism to foment revolution. The Union founded chapters across the nation and moved into the educational sphere. The object was to destabilize the family for Cultural Marxism’s long march.

Feedback Loop

By moving into a diverse array of cultural realms, Cultural Marxism is able to establish a self-proving feedback loop. What students hear at school and in the university is reinforced at the movie theatre, in church, in news media, in literature, on television, by the law, and in popular culture. After one generation, the bulk of the population is self-assured of victim status, the evils of a rogue’s gallery of oppressors, and the righteousness of liberation tolerance to silence any opposition.

The feedback loop and Critical Theory’s liberating tolerance generate the cancel culture. To condemn white supremacy and the oppression of Black Americans, protesters deface a statute of abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, call for removal of a statute of Abraham Lincoln, vandalize a statue of Jimi Hendrix, deface a monument to an all-Black regiment of Union Army soldiers, and intimidate Black tour guides of DC Black Tours at a monument built entirely with Black funding to educate about Black experience and contributions to American society.

That is what Cultural Marxism has done to education. People do not know who Abraham Lincoln was, who John Greenleaf Whittier was, or who Jimi Hendrix was. Even with a Black tour guide of DC Black Tours explaining a Black monument to them, protesters cannot understand what the tour guide is telling them. Critical Theory’s criticism of language and reason has accomplished this. The emotion of victimhood has no ears.

This has been only an introductory sketch. Christians need to learn more about Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory. We need to learn why anarchists ally with LGBTQ+ campaigners to brand us homophobic and transphobic on Monday, and then ally with anti-gay Islamists to brand us islamophobic on Tuesday. That does not make sense to us, but it does to them, and it is working for them.

[1] “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Jones, Gareth Stedman, ed., The Communist Manifesto , new ed. (London: Penguin Classics, 2002).

[2] Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory Selected Essays (New York: Continuum Publishing Corp., 1982), 244.

[3] Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics , trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1972).

[4] Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Verso, 2019).

[5] Note the hypocrisy of the Frankfurt School. While identifying fathers as fascist repressors, they took funds from Weil’s father to found their Institute.

[6] The essay may be found in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).

[7] Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).

[8] Miller v. California , 413 U.S. 15 (1973).

11 thoughts on “ Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory: An Introductory Sketch ”

Very insightful. Thank you for your work. I pray that it is read by the multitudes.

This is one of the best expositions of Cultural Marxism I have ever read. I especially appreciated the way Halvorson explained the contributions of the various thinkers of the Frankfurt School. It will be very helpful in explaining Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory to those who don’t understand it (and therefore don’t understand what is happening to America and the Western World). The discussion of the Court’s role in recognizing pornography needs further explanation. The case Halvorson refers to, Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973), was actually a more conservative reaction to the very liberal position the Court took in Massachusetts v. Memoirs, 383 U/S. 413 (1966). In Memoirs, the Court had said pornography was protected by the First Amendment unless it was “utterly without redeeming social merit,” a hard standard for a prosecutor to meet. But in Miller the Court relaxed the Memoirs test, holding that a publication could be prosecuted as obscene if, “applying contemporary community standards,” the work, taken as a whole, “lacks serious merit.” The Court added that a quotation from Voltaire on the flyleaf does not redeem an otherwise obscene publication. With the Miller modification, the Court has given local and state governments sufficient latitude basis to prosecute pornography. It was difficult to prove that a publication is “utterly without redeeming social value,” but much easier to prove that the publication, “taken as a whole, lacks serious merit.” The problem now is not so much the courts (except for liberal judges who were educated in the Warren era and still hanker back to the Memoirs test) but rather prosecutors, police, and the public who are so inoculated to pornography that they simply don’t care and don’t realize the extent to which porn undermines the moral fiber of our nation.

Thanks for the overview

Quick correction: Miller v. California broadened the definition obscenity over the Supreme Court’s previous definition to allow for *more* local prosecution of pornographers, strip joints, etc. The decision was authored by Warren Burger who was joined by William Rehnquist among others, neither of whom had a Marxist bone in their bodies. “Community standards” does seem relativistic, but it is consistent with the idea of geographical diversity accordant with a federalist system. The problem with the internet is that it is nongeographical.

Hi John, Thank you for the substantive comment. Owing to my high regard for your work, I will look into that. The Lord bless you and yours.

I’m glad that this is being posted in light of what’s going on in the world today. Many of the things you’ve written here, especially about the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory are also spelled out in the late Andrew Breitbart’s book Righteous Indignation which I would highly recommend. I feel like many others in this country that Christianity is under assault.

Shawn, Thank you for the constructive comment. With yours and John’s, I am looking farther into that part of the story. Thanks for the lead.

This article is a helpful introduction. Can you share more of your sources? Also, do you know any longer works critiquing Critical Theory and its conflict with Christianity? I have come across a number of articles (especially Neil Shenvi’s work), but little seems to be available in book form. Thank you.

Dr. Andrew Chitty at the University of Sussex has assembled an extensive bibliography which you may find at:

https://users.sussex.ac.uk/~sefd0/bib/marx.htm

If you search on any of the following phrases or on any of the names of the six examples of Cultural Marxist theorists that I mentioned in the article on Amazon, you will have enough reading on it for some time:

“cultural marxism” “critical theory” “frankfurt school”

Interesting article, but badly outdated information. The Left has moved on to Kropotkin and Chomsky. There aren’t that many Marxist revolutions going on at the moment, but on the other hand, Rojava is still fighting the Syrians and Turks. Yes, the modern left draws on Marx to a degree, but Kropotkin especially was primarily an opponent of Marx. Since the end of the Cold War, Marx has become a faint voice in the background, even in philosophies descended from those that once were solidly rooted in his writings. Further, there is not unanimous agreement on the left of the aisle anymore than traditionalists, libertarians, neocons and others on the right all agree on everything, all of the time.

The idea that everyone we disagree with is part of a massive Communist conspiracy is frankly childish. Perhaps, especially in light of the Eighth Commandment and the command to love our enemies (it’s so easy to forget that one sometimes, or to pretend that it’s just for the kids in Sunday school), if we want to “learn why anarchists ally with LGBTQ+ campaigners to brand us homophobic and transphobic on Monday, and then ally with anti-gay Islamists to brand us islamophobic on Tuesday,” then we should ask them, and listen to what they say, rather than stuffing their mouths so full of words that they can’t speak for themselves.

Peter, you said, “then we should ask them, and listen to what they say, rather than stuffing their mouths so full of words that they can’t speak for themselves.”

Agreed. That was not contradicted in the article. I do hope Christians will decide to learn more and read the people’s own words.

Chomsky and Co. are just a variation of the same Socialist theme. A “new” way of trying the same tired song. Not unlike Hitler and his NAZI brand of Nationalist Socialism that were,vat the time the main sibling rivals of the USSR and their International Socialist. Later the Chinese version cam into conflict with the Soviet version, which we’ll nigh led to a nuclear war in 1969. But, these are all man’s efforts to create a counterfeit system to replace and nullify what God has set in order. They will all in the end lead to destruction. They are all finally atheistic (anti-true Christian) and anti-Semitic. You can never have a lasting freedom in a system that depises it.

Marxist theory in Japan: A critical overview

To summarise the reception history of Marx in Japan is no small task. 1 In fact, it is essentially impossible to give an adequate overview of one of the deepest, most prolific, and most variegated linguistic repositories of the Marxist tradition. Although it remains remarkably little-known in contemporary European or North American intellectual circles, Marxism was the dominant strand of theoretical inquiry in Japan for most of the 20th century; more pointedly, we might say, Japanese has remained perhaps the most important language for Marxist-theoretical scholarship beyond English, German, and French, yet its theoretical history remains relatively isolated within its own linguistic boundaries. From its initial entry into the Japanese intellectual world in the late 1800s, Marxist analysis quickly came to constitute a vast and osmotic field that permeated all aspects of academic life, historical thought, forms of political organisation, and ways of analysing the social condition. Numerous examples testify to this, including the striking fact that the first Collected Works of Marx and Engels in the world was not published in German, Russian, French or English, but in Japanese, by Kaizōsha publishing house in 1932 in 35 volumes, overseen by Sakisaka Itsurō.

There are few other places in the world where the distinction between the history of Marx’s reception and the history of Marxism is as important. Why? In the first place, while Japan constitutes one of the earliest and most influential receptions of Marx (especially for the ‘non-Western’ world), and in the twentieth century one of the advanced capitalist countries most intellectually and socially marked by Marxist thought, the path of development of this reception is quite different from its main comparable societies, mostly in Europe and North America.

While the English, French, German, Italian, American and numerous other receptions of Marx saw his work as immediately linked to and embedded in the history of the workers’ movement, it would be hard to say that this holds true in the case of Japan. Although a strong and powerful labour movement had existed since the intense industrialisation of the 1870s-1890s, this movement was principally conditioned in intellectual terms by a certain socialist-nativist orientation that provided the political ground for numerous social movements of the 19th century, stretching back to the late years of the Tokugawa feudal system, with its millenarian peasant contestations and formations of mass social consciousness. In this sense, Marx’s work entered Japan not simply as the political vanguard of the labour and socialist movements, but also (or even principally) as the theoretical vanguard of the cutting-edge of social-scientific inquiry into the character of modern society, with its two central poles: the social relation of capital, and the formation of the modern national state.

Marx’s Capital was first published in German one year before the Meiji Restoration of 1868, which would place Japan thereafter on its pathway towards rapid capitalist development, industrialisation, and the turn to imperialism on the Asian continent. The first known introduction to Marx, well before the publication of Capital as a translated text, was a text titled simply “Karl Marx,” written by Kusaka Chōjirō, who had studied in Germany in 1889-90, in the Kokka gakkai zasshi (vol. 6, no. 72-74) in 1893 (the 26 th year of the Meiji Era) (Suzuki 1956: 1), although as Suzuki points out, it is perhaps doubtful that Kusaka’s text was based on a real reading of Capital . For that, we ought to rather point to one of the most dominant and important thinkers of the early reception of Marx in Japan, Yamakawa Hitoshi, whose text “Marx’s Capital ” was serialised in his radical newspaper, the Osaka heimin shinbun , in 4 issues in 1908 (Suzuki 1956: 6). Yamakawa would later go on to be one of the key figures in the early historiographical battles that would deeply mark the reception of Marx in Japan, which we will touch on shortly.

A tradition of socialism, linked to the workers’ and peasants’ movements, already existed, whose prominent intellectuals included Kōtoku Shusui and Katayama Sen. Kōtoku’s Shakaishugi shinzui (The Essence of Socialism) emerged in print in the same year as Katayama Sen’s Waga shakaishugi (My Socialism), 1903, a pivotal turning point in the development of Marxist thought in Japan (Sugihara 1998: 47). Kōtoku, who would soon be executed in the ‘High Treason Incident’ of 1911 on trumped-up charges of plotting to assassinate the emperor, was the translator of The Communist Manifesto , and a committed early socialist. Soon moving towards an anarcho-syndicalist position in subsequent years, Kōtoku’s early linking of the emperor system to the development of capitalism in Japan would remain a key point of contention in later debates in Marxist thought. In the following year, on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, it would be Katayama’s handshake with his Russian counterpart Georgy Plekhanov at the 6 th Congress of the Second International in Amsterdam that introduced the socialist world to the existence and prominence of the Japanese socialist movement. Katayama would, in the subsequent decades, go on to an extraordinary internationalist life: as a member of the executive committee of the Comintern, he was a founding member of three communist parties: the Japan Communist Party, the U.S. Communist Party, and the Mexican Communist Party, which he helped found alongside his internationalist Indian comrade M.N. Roy in their unlikely years of struggle in Mexico City together. His story is all the more remarkable considering Katayama was born a destitute peasant in rural Okayama in the last days of the feudal system (see Katayama’s early English text in Katayama 1918).

But, aside from these early developments of Marxist thought at the turn of the century, the specificity of Marx’s theoretical work—and its essence in Capital —remained to be developed. In a sense, it is impossible to dissociate Marx’s reception in Japan from its centrality to the university system. From the 1910s into the 1920s, during the Taisho era, Marx’s Capital came more and more to the fore, to the extent that it became even a public figure of discourse to refer to the young men obsessed with Capital by the name “Marx boys” [ Marukusu bōi ]. This new culture of the study of Marx produced an extraordinary generation of thinkers, many of whom would go on to become important theorists of Marx, and of Marxism in a broad sense: Yamakawa Hitoshi, Fukumoto Kazuo, Inomata Tsunao, Noro Eitaro, Yamada Moritaro, Hani Goro, Uno Kozo, Kuruma Samezo, and many others, alongside those in the realm of philosophy proper, such as Tosaka Jun or Kakehashi Akihide. Perhaps the catalyst or turning point of the entire period was the appearance of Kawakami Hajime’s Binbō monogatari (A Tale of Poverty), essentially a kind of popular introduction of socialist thought, which was serialised over three months in 1916 in the Osaka Asahi newspaper. The articles were shortly after compiled in book form, and proved so powerful in the intellectual climate at the time, that it was reprinted thirty times already by 1919 (Bernstein 1976: 87). This text in turn led Kawakami towards Marx’s own work, and in 1919, he published the influential Introduction to Marx’s Capital ( Shihonron nyūmon ). Many later Marxist thinkers cited this text and its appearance as the main catalyst for the popularisation of Marxist theoretical work. Uno Kozo for instance, later referred to the importance of Kawakami’s work as some of the first value-theoretical writing in Japanese (See Uno 1970, vol. 1: 214, 305). By the late 1910s, especially in the two years following the success of the October Revolution, the theoretical vitality of Marx in Japan had been firmly established, and a new era of polemics opened (On this period in general, see Wakabayashi 1998: 147-206).

One distinguishing and central element that deeply conditioned the Marxist tradition in Japan, as is the case most everywhere outside Europe and North America, is the necessarily-central status of the so-called national question. Historically speaking, the “national question” has been largely associated with Marxist theoretical investigations of the “non-West.” Typically, therefore, it has been something that Western Marxism often considered settled, although Gramsci’s analysis of the “southern” and colonial questions remained a notable exception. Unlike the instance of late imperial Russia or the various Third World movements in the 1950s and 1960s, the “national question” has been often treated merely as a sign of an incomplete bourgeois revolution. In Japanese Marxist theory and historiography, however, this has certainly not been the case. Compressed into a period of one hundred years, from the Meiji Restoration of 1868 to the 1968 explosion of the New Left, Japan’s history encompassed the emergence of a modern, rapidly industrialising nation-state, the formation of a multi-ethnic, multi-national empire, the defeat of the nation and its empire, the occupation of the former “centre” of the empire by the United States, and its subsequent stratospheric economic development, under American hegemony, into the second largest capitalist power on earth by the end of the 1960s. That is, the Japanese case effectively combines into one complex whole the trajectories of empire, colony, dependent power, and dominant power. From the introduction of the modern social sciences in their primarily German and French inflections in the early Meiji period (1868-1912), some form of the national question remained always the dominant concern: from Fukuzawa Yukichi’s attempt to translate JS Mill’s work on national sentiment into the discourse of the “national body”, to the Hegelian focus on “world history” and national destinies, the figure of the nation —historically new in its modern political sense at this time—constituted a genuine site of potential and anxiety. No wonder then that this multi-dimensional crystallisation of the national question was for a long time the foundational problem confronting Japanese Marxists: how to account for Japan’s historical position within the world (On the Marxist historiography of the prewar, see Harootunian and Isomae 2008, especially the preface).

Another distinguishing feature of the Japanese Marxist tradition of historiography has been its relative insularity, at least in the postwar period, from Marxisms elsewhere, or more specifically its unidirectional insularity. One still frequently meets in Europe and North America with incredulity: “Japanese Marxism? It exists?” I do not mean here that Japanese Marxists were unaware of the developments in Marxist theory, both so-called Western Marxism and Marxism of other sorts. Rather, I mean precisely the opposite. While the Japanese Marxist tradition encapsulated and developed an exceptionally high level of theoretical development, in many ways more advanced than the contemporary discussions occurring in Europe, North America, and elsewhere, especially in the prewar period, Japanese Marxist theory was and continues to be relatively little-known on a world scale save for a few figures. Even for those few figures that entered directly into global debates in Marxism, their context and the intellectual history that formed the background to their positions has been largely ignored. It is my view that the long, dense, and extremely comprehensive discussions of the national question in Japan, in addition to a series of other considerations, require rethinking the conventional division of Western Marxism, Soviet Marxism, and “other” Marxisms that underpins so many attempts to consider this space of thought in modern intellectual history.

This dominance of Marxism in Japanese academic fields such as political economy, sociology, history, and so forth, is only part of the story. There is also a decisive political history that underpins the massive influence of Marxist theoretical inquiry in the Japanese situation. After the formation of the Japan Communist Party in 1922, internal debate in Marxist theory centred at first around the questions of Marxist philosophy (in the major Marxist theorists of the 1910s and 20s such as Kawakami Hajime, Yamakawa Hitoshi, and Fukumoto Kazuo, among others): the theoretical grasp of subjectivity, the problem of alienation, and the historical necessity of the revolutionary mission of the proletariat. After enjoying a level of support in the early 1920s, Fukumoto’s austere obsession with the correct line, what would later be understood as the theory of the “primacy of correct ideas”—the standpoint of so-called “ bunri ketsugō” or, the unification of the party by removing ideologically incorrect elements (literally “unity in separation”)—became the target of denunciation during the time of publication of the 1927 Comintern Theses, largely authored under the influence of N.I. Bukharin (henceforth and still to this day in Marxist theoretical work in Japan, the term “Fukumotoism” is used to dismissively subject to critique a certain hysterical insistence on purity of line, perhaps similar to the figure of Amadeo Bordiga in the European situation). The Comintern-JCP ‘27 Theses began to lay out a theoretical line which emphasised the “two-stage” theory of the revolution: Japan was not a fully realised modern state, but still overwhelmed with “feudal remnants” in the form of parasitic landlordism, and so forth, and it was this analysis of the stage of development of Japanese capitalism that initiated the beginnings of the split which would come to a head with the ‘32 Theses (Comintern 1961). As the major “developed” country relative to its neighbouring states and primary imperialist power in East Asia, the Comintern considered Japan the most important and pivotal target for the revolutionary project, but in the wake of the ‘27 Theses, which emphasised that the 1868 Meiji Restoration had not yet been fully accomplished as the necessary bourgeois-democratic revolution and transition to modern world capitalism, the question thus emerged: was Japanese capitalism in the 1930s ready for socialist revolution—in the conditions on the ground, was it possible to discover the revolutionary subject of this process?

In the clarification of this question emerged the famous and influential “debate on Japanese capitalism” ( Nihon shihonshugi ronsō ), a debate whose centrepiece was the clarification of the essential questions of mode of production and the historical process of articulation of the social formation: what stage of development was Japan actually in—how, and by what means, had Japanese capitalist development proceeded, and did there exist a concomitant total development of the social formation as a whole, thus producing the political consciousness necessary for the revolutionary transition? Was the basic economic category of social life in the villages—the form of land-tenancy rent ( kosakuryō )—a “holdover” or “remnant” of feudalism, something partially feudal, or a product of the development of modern world capitalism? The debate on Japanese capitalism, in its encyclopaedic sense, took place between the mid-1920s and the mid-to-late 1930s, a concentrated period of approximately 12-15 years. This debate, while central to Marxist theory, had an exceptionally broad influence on the formation of Japanese social thought, and on the formation of the modern Japanese social sciences in general. In addition, it must be emphasised here that, although there was certainly also extensive exegetical work directly on Marx in the 1920s and 30s, the principle field through which exceedingly complex receptions of Marx—not only of volume 1 of Capital , but of volume 2 (the reproduction schemas) and volume 3 (the category of ground rent and its theoretical explication)—took place was precisely the historiography and theoretical analysis of Japanese capitalism.

In the debate on these questions, there emerged roughly two positions: one, which became that of the Rōnō (“Labour-Farmer”) faction, who argued that the land reforms instituted in the 1868 Meiji Restoration—which they squarely considered to be a bourgeois-democratic revolution—had begun the solution to the “backwardness” of the countryside, planting the initial seeds that would lead to full capitalist development; and another, which became that of the Kōza (“Lectures”) faction (representing the mainstream line of the JCP and the Comintern), who argued that the Restoration had not been a full bourgeois-democratic revolution, but rather an incomplete transition to modernity, and that Japanese capitalism was only partially developed, on a primarily feudal basis. The Comintern’s ‘27 Theses, in splitting from earlier emphases on the immediate socialist-revolutionary process, installed the conditions for the split between the JCP and the Rōnō faction (particularly Yamakawa Hitoshi and Inomata Tsunao). But, in its ‘32 Theses, the Comintern position reinforced this line even further in parallel to the world situation, by calling for a mass-based bourgeois-democratic revolution against absolutism and feudalism concretised in the form of the Emperor-system ( tennōsei ) (On the history of the debate, see Nagaoka 1985; Hoston 1987). The primary authorial and conceptual influence on this period of Comintern policy on the “national question” was Otto Kuusinen, who, in the 12 th Plenum of the Comintern in this same year, called in general for mass-based actions which subordinated communist demands to the immediate needs of the broad mass front. By arguing that a directly communist political platform would alienate and keep the party separate from the rural poor and the “non-advanced” strata of the working class, this call essentially began the transition in the Comintern to the line of the popular front adopted a few years later in 1935.

In Japan, the Kōza faction’s position and dominance of this debate was comprehensively established with the publication of their 8-volume Lectures on the History of the Development of Japanese Capitalism ( Nihon shihonshugi hattatsushi kōza ) in 1932. The works in this volume were in preparation well before the publication of the ‘32 Theses, and therefore should be seen not as an expansion of the position of this Theses, but rather as preparing the ground for the hegemony of its position in the wake of the ‘27 Theses. Noro Eitarō, a leader of the JCP, who was arrested and died in prison two years later in 1934, oversaw the compilation of the Lectures . Noro could be seen as the one who most concretely laid the groundwork for the overall conceptions of the Kōza faction. For him, the only way to truly and effectively articulate the political consequence of theory, the proletarian strategy, was to focus on the “particularity” ( tokushusei ) of Japanese capitalist development. The reason for this, Noro claimed, was that, without understanding the “dominated” ( hishihaiteki ) mode of production (i.e., the agrarian semi-feudal structure of the countryside), one could not understand the particular way in which the development of the productive forces had necessitated a turn to imperialism. This basic logic was echoed by Otto Kuusinen, then the leader of the Comintern’s Eastern Bureau, and charged with preparing analyses of revolutionary conditions in East Asia. Kuusinen famously argued: “We observe the uninterrupted and limitless oppression of the peasantry, conditioned by the exceptionally powerful remnants of feudalism ( hōkensei no zansonbutsu ). The Japanese village is for Japanese capitalism a colony contained within its own domestic limits ( Nihon shihonshugi ni totte jikoku naichi ni okeru shokuminchi de aru ).” He continues: “Japan’s bourgeois transformation remains remarkably incomplete ( ichijirushiku mikansei de ari ), remarkably inconclusive or non-determinate ( ichijirushiku hiketteiteki de ari ), and is in essence partial and unfinished ( chūtohanpa ).” Precisely because of these features, he argues, Japanese capitalism is crippled or deformed (see on this point, Walker 2016). In an obvious sense, the transition debates in the Japanese context functioned allegorically to refract line struggles at the level of politics (the ‘semi-feudal’ thesis led to a two-stage theory of revolution; the thesis of an accomplished capitalism lead to a one-stage theory), but they also served as laboratories of theoretical experimentation on the status of Marx’s Capital , and how to apply its insights to the local conjuncture.

In the immediate postwar period, the Japan Communist Party, reinvigorated after decades of governmental repression, bloomed and flourished as a source of resistance politics and intellectual organisational force. In the early 1950s, the political logic around which the JCP had theorized its position began to change towards the form of a “national liberation” struggle, an armed struggle for liberation from “subordination” inspired by the Chinese revolutionary line. This was largely touted by certain JCP leaders, in particular Tokuda Kyūichi (1894-1953), who had spent 18 years imprisoned under the prewar Peace Preservation Law, and Nosaka Sanzō (1892-1993), who had spent the war years in a variety of locations, and who had established linkages to the Chinese party, fleeing the Red Purges undertaken by the American occupation forces to newly liberated Beijing.

They emphasised in particular the continuance, rather than rupture, of earlier land relations that had obtained in the Japanese countryside, what they described as a “parasitic landlord system” ( kisei jinushisei ): with this as the decisive backbone of the subjugation of the “nation,” the JCP began an ill-fated movement of returning to the villages. This took the form of the quasi-clandestine “Village Operations Corps” ( Sanson kōsakutai ), groups of cadre and students who would enter the villages, agitate among the peasants, and attempt to ignite a revolutionary spark in the countryside (Mao’s “a single spark can start a prairie fire”) in order to sow the seeds of an “encircling of the cities.” This movement was doomed from the start, not only because the peasants were by and large completely uninterested in the movement, but also because their conditions, although still mired in appalling poverty, had been shifted by the postwar land reforms, enough at least to diminish the direct “parasitism” they faced, and thus enough to render ineffective the “operations corps” call for revolutionary action (Koschmann 1996).

This moment, however, was certainly more than merely a failed political strategy: although the JCP soon disowned the return to the village as “ultra-left adventurism” ( kyokusa bōkenshugi ) and officially rejected the line of armed struggle in 1955 at its Sixth Congress, the material and affective memory of the village operations remained a critical site of literary politics, of political inspiration, and of imagination and experimentation throughout the decade of the 1950s and well into the subsequent years.

After the end of World War II, the Japan Communist Party returned to the forefront of Japanese society, bolstered by the sacrifice and legitimacy of its main leaders, Nosaka and Tokuda. Hailed as uncorrupted by the war years, the JCP and the Japan Socialist Party undertook a concerted electoral effort in 1946 and 47. Alarmed at the wide favour these parties enjoyed, McArthur and the Supreme Command of the Allied Powers (SCAP) took a pivotal decision: what came to be known amongst historians as the “reverse course,” changing strategy to prevent the spread of socialism rather than principally attempt to rid the Japanese state of fascism. Thus, the so-called “red purges” of the late 1940s attempted to destroy the sudden resurgence of the prewar Japanese communist tradition, once the strongest in Asia (in the 20s and 30s), and the source of major theoretical work in Marxist thought. This drove the JCP underground, and led to a short period (late 40s-55) of emphasis on armed struggle, underground clandestine work, and a renewed proximity to the Chinese line (on the question of the nation in this period of Marxist thought, see Gayle 2003). In 1955, at the Sixth Congress of the postwar JCP, this line of armed struggle in the countryside was repudiated, its supporters expelled, and a new “historic compromise” (along the lines of the Italian party) was installed, paving the way for the JCP’s full transition to reformism and participation in government. In a sense, this moment can be seen as the first emergence of a Marxian ‘New Left’ on a world-scale, one year before the events of 1956 in Hungary would generate a similar process for the Western European and North American communist parties.

As the 1950s drew to a close, a new social mass of students, intellectuals, workers, peasants, and the popular classes were once again rising, in particular around the 1960 renewal of the U.S.-Japan Joint Security Treaty (Anpo, in its Japanese abbreviation) (see the texts in Haniya 1963). The inaugural mass demonstration of the 1960s around the Anpo protest mobilised immense numbers: only one of the three major general strikes called by the unions brought 6.2 million onto the streets in June 1960. With this intense level of mobilisation, a new combative Left had formed, heralding a new social arrangement: no longer beholden to the JCP, who were by now regarded by many on the Left to have betrayed their politics, this New Left in Japan came to produce one of the most intense decades of political organisation, political thought, and political aesthetics in the global twentieth century (see the essays in Walker 2020). New and creative theoretical work emerged from within the political movements of the Zengakuren around the 1960 Anpō, as well as from within the 1968-69 Zenkyōtō, notably Nagasaki Hiroshi’s extraordinary Theory of Revolt ( Hanranron ) (see Nagasaki 1969), along with a new impetus and direction for Marxist theory as a whole, in this cauldron of political upheaval that would come to be the long 1968 in Japan. As the long 60s entered the 70s—a dark period of the intensity and desolation of the armed struggle, with its internal violence ( uchi geba ), the eclipse of the URA experience, the struggle of the East Asian Anti-Japanese Armed Front, the emergence of new politics linked to a growing awareness and centrality of minority struggles (the Ainu, Okinawan, Zainichi Korean and Chinese, buraku movements, and so forth)—an older sequence of Marxist theory came largely to a close, while new battlegrounds ‘on the philosophical front’ simultaneously emerged, so to speak.

If the prewar debate on Japanese capitalism–its character, its development, its mode of relation to the emergence of capitalism depicted in Capital —was centred on the relation between the historical and the logical, the postwar boom of Marxist theoretical writing tended to be split between the methodological analysis of capital itself, and the search for a philosophy of subjectivity located around the theory of alienation, and characterised by an interest in the early Marx. These latter figures, particularly Kakehashi Akihide, Kuroda Kan’ichi, and Umemoto Katsumi, all tended towards a reading of Marx centred to an extent around the subject, or what Kakehashi called the ‘subjective grasp’ ( shutaiteki ha’aku ) of capital, with a concomitant centrality given to the figure of ‘human labour’. In contrast to this, Uno Kozo and his primary colleagues, figures like Suzuki Koichiro, Iwata Hiroshi, along with others posed against this a relatively structural, Capital -centred reading, concerned with three major points: 1) the methodological clarification of Capital in terms of levels of analysis (logic or ‘principle’; stage or mode of capitalist development; conjunctural analysis); the centrality of the peculiar quasi-commodity labour power; the importance of a theory of imperialism internal to a re-reading of Capital ) (See Uno, Walker 2016). While many of those around him took up ‘world capitalism’ (Iwata), returned to the agrarian question (Ōuchi Tsutomu), or developed logical readings of Capital in their own right (Suzuki Kōichirō), Uno’s work, while studiously separated from politics proper, or from the increasingly intense partisan struggles internal to the Marxist left, nevertheless became widely influential amongst the New Left (Suga 2005; Walker 2020). In the wake of the moment of 1968, and the eclipse of the armed movements (for example, the United Red Army and the East Asian Anti-Japanese Armed Front [ Higashi ajia han-nichi busō sensen ]), a new turn emerged in the early 1970s. Characterised by Kojin Karatani’s Marukusu sono kanōsei no chūshin [Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility] and Hiromatsu Wataru’s Shihonron no tetsugaku [The Philosophy of Capital ], this moment saw a return to the textual centre of Marx’s work, once again at a certain degree of separation from the existing Marxist politics.

Hiromatsu’s extraordinarily dense philosophical prose, with its focus on the philosophical category of reification in relation to the theory of the value-form, was highly influential in the generation of the 1960s, not least because of Hiromatsu’s involvement in the student movement. His work, not only in the realm of philosophy, but also in the active correcting of the manuscript of The German Ideology to create a more Marxologically-accurate text, produced numerous examples of lasting philosophical importance, perhaps symbolised in his 1974 The Philosophy of Marx’s Capital (Hiromatsu 1974). Hiromatsu was, of course, much more of a bridge to the prewar high point of Marxist philosophy (see for example Hiromatsu, forthcoming), represented by Tosaka Jun or Miki Kiyoshi, while at precisely the same time, Karatani’s work brought into the reading of Marx a specific moment that coincided with the development of critical theory (in its broad, rather than narrow Frankfurt School, sense), particularly in the United States, where Karatani had spent time at Yale in the 1970s, and where he subsequently taught, at Columbia University.

Since the famed 1966 Johns Hopkins conference on the “Sciences of Man,” so-called “French theory” had been in intense development, particularly in north America. In a way, the generality provided by the language of theory was not an entirely new development in Japan, where a certain type of crossover between literary criticism and social theory had long been viable as a public discourse, even at times wholly outside the university system. Karatani’s Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility (Karatani 2020) , serialised in the literary magazine Gunzō in 1974 represented a break—or rather is itself situated within a break, one might say—with the prevailing reading of Marx, dominant in 1968: that of the early Marx, a Lukácsian reading of the figure of the self-alienated labouring human. This new reading brought into the picture a literary or linguistic reading, focused on the textuality of Capital , a transversal reading intersected by structural linguistics (Saussure), psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan), and deconstruction (Heidegger and Derrida). In a sense, Karatani’s text can now be seen in the long intellectual-historical light as a key point wherein the tradition of Japanese Marxist theory produced a new point of departure for itself in the global terms of critical theory (Karatani 1990). This would condition heavily the development of what was called “new academism” in the 1980s, when the dominant critical figures came to be Karatani himself and Asada Akira (whose own works on Marx interrelated to Deleuze and Guattari, as well as questions of psychoanalysis and aesthetics would be widely influential).

Today, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, there is no question that the reading of Marx remains a decisive part of the Japanese intellectual landscape, although one would be hard-pressed to name any truly dominant or hegemonic intellectuals in the style of Uno, Hiromatsu, or even Karatani (who is himself still writing important work, albeit without the exceptional influence he had in the 1990s). The Japanese readings of Marx have paralleled the post-90s globalisation years in interesting ways: on the one hand, there has been a significant ‘internationalisation’ of Japanese Marxist theorists, historians, and philosophers, in the sense that the dominant modes of reading are now less centred on key figures and positions within the historical development of Japanese Marxist thought (the Rono/Koza positions, Uno’s work, Hiromatsu’s work, the work of more explicitly Kyoto-school inflected theorists like the postwar figures Kuroda Kan’ichi, Kakehashi Akihide, and so on). But, on the other hand, the rest of the world remains deeply ignorant of the Japanese tradition, a peculiarity that can only be explained by linguistic distance, since at every other level, Japanese is certainly a language in which as much theoretically powerful Marxist analysis exists as has been written in French, Spanish, Italian, or other major world languages. Certainly, the hyper-methodological character of mid-twentieth century Japanese-language Marxist thought did not help its reception, due in part to the quite obscure polemics in which much of it was embedded.

While the internationalism of the prewar period, upheld by both the existence of the Soviet Union, and specifically the pre-Popular Front (1935) Comintern, provided a globality to the early decades of Marxist theory in Japan, the postwar period saw a retreat of this international scope, with only a few notable exceptions (in the field of history, a number of important Marxists, such as Toyama Shigeki and Takahashi Kōhachirō were certainly known globally). The revolutions of 1968 and the formation of the New Left in the wake of 1955 provided another globality, but this time at a level of the contemporaneity of events and processes, rather than an intimate involvement. The early Trotskyism of the 1950s, with links to French organizations like Socialisme ou barbarie was one such avenue (Kuroda Kan’ichi, later the supreme leader of the Revolutionary Marxist Faction (the so-called Kakumaru-ha ), was in the 1950s the Japanese correspondent for S ou B ); the armed-struggle organisations, with their direct actions and descent from armed resistance into global armed struggle of an increasingly isolated character in Lebanon, Western Europe, and South-East Asia was another.

In the years after 1968, a new generation emerged, no longer necessarily beholden to the experience of the Japanese Marxist tradition as such. After the 1990s, a new change has taken place within the sphere of Marxist theory and Marxian analysis in Japan, bringing forward extraordinary and powerful voices that ought to be more widely disseminated in other languages (I think here of theorists such as Ichida Yoshihiko, Nagahara Yutaka, and others—see for recent examples Ichida 2014 and Nagahara 2017). The Marxian tradition of scholarship remains extraordinarily widespread, with new links to the growing body of work on value-form theory (although the many possible links between the Neue Marx-Lektüre and its antecedents in the various Japanese value-form debates remains to be a point further developed, which forthcoming work will surely deal with), as well as new work linked to the reception of French and Italian post-68 philosophical-political figures.

The above highly schematic overview is a nothing more than a kind of impossible placeholder for a vast bibliographical and conceptual tradition. It remains a crucial task for Marxists today to bring this immense theoretical history in the Japanese language into connection with its counterparts around the world.

Gavin WALKER is Associate Professor of History at McGill University, the author of The Sublime Perversion of Capital (Duke, 2016), and a member of the editorial collective of positions: asia critique . He is the editor of The End of Area (Duke, 2019, with Naoki Sakai), Marx, Asia, and the History of the Present , a special issue of postions: politics (positionspolitics.org), and editor and translator of Kōjin Karatani’s Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility (Verso, 2020). His new edited collection, The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ‘68 is now out from Verso.

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↩ Earlier versions of this text were previously published as Gavin Walker, “Marx in Japan” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx, ed. Imre Szeman et al (London: Bloomsbury, 2018) and « Le marxismd au Japon: guide de lecture » in the online journal Période: révue de théorie marxiste (January 2019).

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Guest Essay

I Thought the Bragg Case Against Trump Was a Legal Embarrassment. Now I Think It’s a Historic Mistake.

A black-and-white photo with a camera in the foreground and mid-ground and a building in the background.

By Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Mr. Shugerman is a law professor at Boston University.

About a year ago, when Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, indicted former President Donald Trump, I was critical of the case and called it an embarrassment. I thought an array of legal problems would and should lead to long delays in federal courts.

After listening to Monday’s opening statement by prosecutors, I still think the district attorney has made a historic mistake. Their vague allegation about “a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election” has me more concerned than ever about their unprecedented use of state law and their persistent avoidance of specifying an election crime or a valid theory of fraud.

To recap: Mr. Trump is accused in the case of falsifying business records. Those are misdemeanor charges. To elevate it to a criminal case, Mr. Bragg and his team have pointed to potential violations of federal election law and state tax fraud. They also cite state election law, but state statutory definitions of “public office” seem to limit those statutes to state and local races.

Both the misdemeanor and felony charges require that the defendant made the false record with “intent to defraud.” A year ago, I wondered how entirely internal business records (the daily ledger, pay stubs and invoices) could be the basis of any fraud if they are not shared with anyone outside the business. I suggested that the real fraud was Mr. Trump’s filing an (allegedly) false report to the Federal Election Commission, and that only federal prosecutors had jurisdiction over that filing.

A recent conversation with Jeffrey Cohen, a friend, Boston College law professor and former prosecutor, made me think that the case could turn out to be more legitimate than I had originally thought. The reason has to do with those allegedly falsified business records: Most of them were entered in early 2017, generally before Mr. Trump filed his Federal Election Commission report that summer. Mr. Trump may have foreseen an investigation into his campaign, leading to its financial records. He may have falsely recorded these internal records before the F.E.C. filing as consciously part of the same fraud: to create a consistent paper trail and to hide intent to violate federal election laws, or defraud the F.E.C.

In short: It’s not the crime; it’s the cover-up.

Looking at the case in this way might address concerns about state jurisdiction. In this scenario, Mr. Trump arguably intended to deceive state investigators, too. State investigators could find these inconsistencies and alert federal agencies. Prosecutors could argue that New York State agencies have an interest in detecting conspiracies to defraud federal entities; they might also have a plausible answer to significant questions about whether New York State has jurisdiction or whether this stretch of a state business filing law is pre-empted by federal law.

However, this explanation is a novel interpretation with many significant legal problems. And none of the Manhattan district attorney’s filings or today’s opening statement even hint at this approach.

Instead of a theory of defrauding state regulators, Mr. Bragg has adopted a weak theory of “election interference,” and Justice Juan Merchan described the case , in his summary of it during jury selection, as an allegation of falsifying business records “to conceal an agreement with others to unlawfully influence the 2016 election.”

As a reality check: It is legal for a candidate to pay for a nondisclosure agreement. Hush money is unseemly, but it is legal. The election law scholar Richard Hasen rightly observed , “Calling it election interference actually cheapens the term and undermines the deadly serious charges in the real election interference cases.”

In Monday’s opening argument, the prosecutor Matthew Colangelo still evaded specifics about what was illegal about influencing an election, but then he claimed , “It was election fraud, pure and simple.” None of the relevant state or federal statutes refer to filing violations as fraud. Calling it “election fraud” is a legal and strategic mistake, exaggerating the case and setting up the jury with high expectations that the prosecutors cannot meet.

The most accurate description of this criminal case is a federal campaign finance filing violation. Without a federal violation (which the state election statute is tethered to), Mr. Bragg cannot upgrade the misdemeanor counts into felonies. Moreover, it is unclear how this case would even fulfill the misdemeanor requirement of “intent to defraud” without the federal crime.

In stretching jurisdiction and trying a federal crime in state court, the Manhattan district attorney is now pushing untested legal interpretations and applications. I see three red flags raising concerns about selective prosecution upon appeal.

First, I could find no previous case of any state prosecutor relying on the Federal Election Campaign Act either as a direct crime or a predicate crime. Whether state prosecutors have avoided doing so as a matter of law, norms or lack of expertise, this novel attempt is a sign of overreach.

Second, Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that the New York statute requires that the predicate (underlying) crime must also be a New York crime, not a crime in another jurisdiction. The district attorney responded with judicial precedents only about other criminal statutes, not the statute in this case. In the end, the prosecutors could not cite a single judicial interpretation of this particular statute supporting their use of the statute (a plea deal and a single jury instruction do not count).

Third, no New York precedent has allowed an interpretation of defrauding the general public. Legal experts have noted that such a broad “election interference” theory is unprecedented, and a conviction based on it may not survive a state appeal.

Mr. Trump’s legal team also undercut itself for its decisions in the past year: His lawyers essentially put all of their eggs in the meritless basket of seeking to move the trial to federal court, instead of seeking a federal injunction to stop the trial entirely. If they had raised the issues of selective or vindictive prosecution and a mix of jurisdictional, pre-emption and constitutional claims, they could have delayed the trial past Election Day, even if they lost at each federal stage.

Another reason a federal crime has wound up in state court is that President Biden’s Justice Department bent over backward not to reopen this valid case or appoint a special counsel. Mr. Trump has tried to blame Mr. Biden for this prosecution as the real “election interference.” The Biden administration’s extra restraint belies this allegation and deserves more credit.

Eight years after the alleged crime itself, it is reasonable to ask if this is more about Manhattan politics than New York law. This case should serve as a cautionary tale about broader prosecutorial abuses in America — and promote bipartisan reforms of our partisan prosecutorial system.

Nevertheless, prosecutors should have some latitude to develop their case during trial, and maybe they will be more careful and precise about the underlying crime, fraud and the jurisdictional questions. Mr. Trump has received sufficient notice of the charges, and he can raise his arguments on appeal. One important principle of “ our Federalism ,” in the Supreme Court’s terms, is abstention , that federal courts should generally allow state trials to proceed first and wait to hear challenges later.

This case is still an embarrassment, in terms of prosecutorial ethics and apparent selectivity. Nevertheless, each side should have its day in court. If convicted, Mr. Trump can fight many other days — and perhaps win — in appellate courts. But if Monday’s opening is a preview of exaggerated allegations, imprecise legal theories and persistently unaddressed problems, the prosecutors might not win a conviction at all.

Jed Handelsman Shugerman (@jedshug) is a law professor at Boston University.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

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Marxist Criticism Critical Essays
Essays and criticism on Marxist Criticism - Critical Essays. Select an area of the website to search ... it was not until the 1920s that Marxist literary theory was systematized. The greatest ...
Student Example: Marxist Criticism
32. Student Example: Marxist Criticism. The following student essay example of Marxist Criticism is taken from Beginnings and Endings: A Critical Edition . This is the publication created by students in English 211. This essay discusses Raymond Carver's short story, "A Small, Good Thing.".
Marxist Literary Criticism: An Overview
German Marxist theory found a further advocate in Karl Kautsky (1854-1938), whose preeminence endured till around 1915. A propagandist for the Social Democratic Party, he founded in 1883 a prestigious Marxist journal, Die Neue Zeit, which offered a forum for the elaboration of Marx's economic and political thought.His works included Karl Marx's Economic Teachings (1887) and The ...
Marxist Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reading Guide
Marxist literary criticism investigates literature's role in the class struggle. The best general introductions in English remain Terry Eagleton's Marxism and Literary Criticism (Routledge, 2002 [1976]) and, a more difficult but foundational book, Fredric Jameson's Marxism and Form (Princeton UP, 1971). The best anthology in English ...
Marxism
The Norton Critical Edition of The Communist Manifesto includes essays situating Marx's incendiary pamphlet in the history of Marxist scholarship. It includes a rich selection of pieces devoted to themes including the revolutionary potential of Marx's critique of capitalism (Mihailo Markoviç), his theory of wage labor (Ernest Mandel), a ...
Critical Theory (Frankfurt School)
One largely undisputed reference for defining Frankfurt School critical theory is Horkheimer's 1937 essay "Traditional and Critical Theory," in which he defines critical theory by contrasting it with traditional theories that take the existing social order as given. ... is a hallmark of Hegelian-Marxist critical theory. Marx famously ...
Marxist Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reading Guide
In 20th century, literary criticism has witnessed influences from many schools of critical inquiries. One of the major schools is Marxist literary criticism. This paper highlights the major tenets of Marxist literary criticism. In other words, it studies the Marxist approach to literature. Download Free PDF.
Full article: What Is Marxism?
Fukuyama even proclaimed that its demise was the final refutation of the Marxist theory of history and the conclusive demonstration that capitalism and liberal ... As a part of this, Marxist critical thinking and even purely scholarly work about Marx and Marxism have played a vital role. ... His books include Marx and Alienation: Essays on ...
Marxist Theory & Criticism
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993). Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). Special Collections & Archives I Langson Library, 5th floor, PO Box 19557, Irvine , CA 92623-9557.
Marxism and Literary Theory
Marxism is a materialist philosophy which tried to interpret the world based on the concrete, natural world around us and the society we live in. It is opposed to idealist philosophy which conceptualizes a spiritual world elsewhere that influences and controls the material world. In one sense it tried to put people's thought into reverse….
Materialism in Critical Theory: Marx and the Early Horkheimer
In fact, Horkheimer's early work, including his substantive, nonmethodological essays, is the most promising place to look for an account of the meaning of materialism in critical theory; and although Marx is only rarely explicitly mentioned by Horkheimer, it is clear that the latter's understanding of materialism is a very much a product ...
Marxism and Critical Theory (Chapter 4)
The chapter is in two parts. The first focuses on Marxism and its contribution to IR, the second on an offshoot of Marxism that goes by the name Critical Theory. The part on Marxism provides a discussion of how Marx's ideas have been received in IR, an account of the historical and intellectual context that 'created' Marxism, and an ...
Critical theory as Post-Marxism: The Frankfurt School and beyond
View PDFPDFView EPUBEPUB. Critical theory as a Post-Marxist discourse is a category of academic thought that broadly involves theoretical scholarship aimed at interrogating the structures and discourses of power. As such, it casts a broad net to include interdisciplinary thinkers ranging from cultural studies, Marxism, linguistics, sociology ...
A Marxist Approach to the Novel
Critical Essays A Marxist Approach to the Novel. Based on the ideas of Karl Marx, this theoretical approach asks us to consider how a literary work reflects the socioeconomic conditions of the time in which it was written. What does the text tell us about contemporary social classes and how does it reflect classism?
What is Marxist Criticism? A Guide to Theory and Literary Criticism
Mar-ks-hist Kri-tuh-siz-uhm. Marxist criticism is based on the theory of Marxism, which stands against the capitalistic model of society and class discrimination. E.g. Marxist literary criticism is an approach to reading, writing, and studying literature, while Marxism is a theory of history and social change based on class struggle.
Frankfurt School and Critical Theory
Marcuse, for instance, in the essay Philosophie und Kritische Theorie (1937), defends the view that Critical Theory characterizes itself as being neither philosophy tout court nor pure science, as it claims to be instead an overly simplistic approach to Marxism. Critical Theory has the following tasks: to clarify the sociopolitical determinants ...
[Essay] Why Marxism and Critical Theory Still Matter
This essay will survey some of the canonical texts in the Western Critical tradition, suggesting that whilst the cultural specificity of thinkers like Karl Marx and Theodor Adorno is open to question, contemporary cultural criticism discards these foundational critical theorists at its peril. The essence of ideological theories (and almost all ...
Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory: An Introductory Sketch
This article provides an introductory sketch of Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory. It discusses the disappointment of economic Marxists over the failure of the workers of the world to unite for revolution. It presents the diagnosis of that failure by Cultural Marxists. The diagnosis identified obstacles to revolution, especially the family ...
Marxist theory in Japan: A critical overview
The debate on Japanese capitalism, in its encyclopaedic sense, took place between the mid-1920s and the mid-to-late 1930s, a concentrated period of approximately 12-15 years. This debate, while central to Marxist theory, had an exceptionally broad influence on the formation of Japanese social thought, and on the formation of the modern Japanese ...
Essay on Marxism
In this essay we will discuss about the political theory of Marxism. ... Criticism of Marx's Theory of Surplus Value: The theory of surplus value comes under heavy criticism on the ground that Karl Marx distorted the relation that exist between the rich ruling class and the working class. The industrialists actually work for the benefit of ...
The Marxist takeover of higher education reaches a fever pitch
For example, Max Horkheimer, the German architect of the culturally Marxist "critical theory" approach, averred in 1969 that Marx had erred in believing that "capitalist society would ...
Opinion
About a year ago, when Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, indicted former President Donald Trump, I was critical of the case and called it an embarrassment. I thought an array of legal ...

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Marxism by Wendy Lynne Lee LAST REVIEWED: 26 July 2017 LAST MODIFIED: 26 July 2017 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0031

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