JUDGING CRITICAL THEORY, IV

[Note:  This posting is subject to further editing.]

An advocate of critical theory continues his/her presentation[1] …

This blog has been reviewing the main elements of critical theory.  It has done that by tracing, in a summary fashion, the history of the Frankfurt School, an academic group of scholars.  They were/are concerned with the levels of subjugation that they judge afflict nation-states.  The last posting left readers with how this group, coming into the current era, was dealing with various contradictions – this posting addresses them.

          One glaring contradiction is a general support of natural rights’ promotion of individual rights (liberal democracy) but at the same time, as described earlier in this blog, they, critical theorists, attack it as contributing to the subjugation of oppressed people (those of lower income and/or victims of prejudice).

The hitch over this inconsistency centers on how liberal democracy has been wedded to capitalism.  By approaching the ideals of laissez faire economics – the purest approach to capitalism – resulting realities indicate, in recurring fashion, that certain developments take hold.  One is that through the competitive process, certain players will be more successful than others and proceed to eliminate the less profitable competitors or otherwise consolidate them. 

In either case, a concentrated market with fewer competitors comes about.  This further results in higher prices and lower wages.  The relative, political standing of workers vs. entrepreneurs drastically shifts to the entrepreneurs and results in sub subsistence wages and other subjugating realities develop.  This narrative reflects Marxist thought and has been further developed by Frankfurt scholars from Marcuse to Adorno and Horkheimer. 

More recently Habermas, in one his initial books, takes up this argument by claiming that public opinion – the foundation of democratic rule – is less a causal factor – as in majority rule – in determining governmental policy and more of a manipulated factor as a result of political and market research.  Taking account of how people feel about commercial products or political positioning can be subject to the same motivating factors.  Brand X can refer to a soap product or a politician or governmental program – sell, sell, sell.

Clashing in this bifurcation between being supportive of democratic liberalism and critiquing it is competing views of democracy among these scholars.  In one view, people react to common issues or challenges, consider optional policy reactions, debate, compromise, and come to some level of consensus as to what to do. 

As for the other view of democracy, people view it as subject matter needing to be studied.  How? Using positivist protocols where citizens’ actions serve as a dependent variables and subject to influences by independent variables, in which both can be observed, measured, analyzed, theorized, and targeted for predictive conclusion.  How will citizens act or how can they be effectively shepherd to act become central concerns.

It is from the first sense that civics has traditionally taught governance and politics to secondary students.  The second sense is what is taught at the college level, and then further explained at the graduate level.  The first sense reminds one of town meetings or local debates over policy.  The second engenders images of technocratic political manipulations of consumer-oriented citizens.

Picking up the development of the common political environment of the late twentieth century, the last posting pointed out that, first, the anti-war movement influenced the politics of Europe and the US during the 1960s.  This was followed by the counter-culture – hippie – phase.  The whole experience with the counterculture, how it started, grew, and eventually came to an end, pointed out – to those who could be more objective – how critical theory fell amiss of practical concerns and practical politics. 

This impracticality, to a degree, was noted as being purposeful and unapologetic since even practicality was considered too institutionally based to be much of a substantive resource.  As a matter of fact, ongoing developments continued to be more strident as the more ardent expounders of critical thought began engaging in higher levels of hostile activities.  Again, this occurred in Europe and in the US. 

For example, active (verging on violent) protests by students against parliamentary policy decisions in West Germany took place, the activities of Green Party members are noted, and activities of radicals within established political parties such as British Labour Party also occurred.  But that phase lasted for about a decade and popular opinion drifted from the more intense feelings of the radical branch of critical theory advocates.

More recent, and here what follows relies on this writer’s experience with academia, one doesn’t find the energy among critically minded advocates one found in the sixties and seventies.  Yes, there are exceptions, but not found generally.  Consequently, this blogger does not detect that among the academics themselves, within their scholarly work, engaging in such protesting behaviors.

Instead, their participation seems more restrained to their academic research and writings.  They seem, though, to have captured the central interest and concern of those who determine in which directions professional efforts will proceed – the vast majority of research reported in the socially relevant journals reflects this current dominance.

To support this claim, this writer in his book, From Immaturity to Polarized Politics, offers a random selection of article titles from the leading political science journal, the American Political Science Review.  From their respective tables of content, he shares the titles from an issue in 1958 and from 2021.  Comparing them, one can easily detect the dominance of critical theory themes in the more recent selections.[2]

Yet, other forces are at play in affecting how scholarship will proceed.  From funding sources – both public and private – that pay the bills at universities and colleges, one finds meaningful reactions to this tilting to the left.  Here are Brian Milstein’s observations:

 

I do believe that contemporary critical theory has the capacity to … contribute powerful insights in how to confront [subjugating realities]. But there is one area about which I’m less sanguine.

…

[I]f there is one further area that stands in urgent need of critical theory’s attention, it is the academy itself. Many of critical theory’s successes over the past several decades have been in challenging various academic discourses with regard to their unacknowledged presumptions and hidden biases. But little critical-theoretic attention is paid today to the broader social-institutional complex in which theory is generated, including critical theory. As critical theorists who are (or aspire to be) working scholars, we remain at the end of the day participants in a social division of labor. Universities in the U.S. and U.K., for example, are changing rapidly, with politicians and segments of the public demanding trimmed-down curricula focused on technological development and vocational training. If the production of theory plays a role in the reproduction of the societies in which we live, then we need to examine how the rise of the ‘corporate university’, the precarization of academic labor, the increasing subjection of scholarly work to administrative surveillance, and incentive structures that emphasize metrics such as impact factors may come to alter the way theory is produced in the future. If there were ever a question on which we need to think of ourselves as not only observers of society but also participants, this is surely one.[3]

 

While this seemly growing conflict between scholarly concerns and administrative overview of what scholars are producing – where the news is picking up some of its public demonstrations especially with the actions of Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida – public reaction will be interesting to follow. 

The outcome might very well determine if critical theory will have any influence at displacing natural rights as the dominant construct.  If it can, that will not only affect civics education but how Americans see governance and politics in the upcoming decades.  In any event, this account will now, starting with the next posting, address more directly how critical theory can and has affected education.  To do so, the attention of this blog will be drawn to a South American country.

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[1] These postings that convey the basic information regarding critical theory heavily depends on the overview provided by William Outhwaite.  See William Outhwaite, “Critical Theory,” in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought, edited by David Miller, Janet Coleman, William Connolly, and Alan Ryan (Cambridge, MA:  Blackwell Publishers, Ltd), 106-109.

[2] Here are those article titles:

List 1:  American Political Science Review, 52, 2 (June 1958, complete listing) -- The Mathematical Analysis of Supreme Court Decisions: The Use and Abuse of Quantitative Methods / Reply to Fisher's Mathematical Analysis of Supreme Court Decisions / The Paradox of Voting and Congressional Rules for Voting on Amendments, Components of Electoral Decision / The Paradox of Voting and Congressional Rules for Voting on Amendments / Components of Electoral Decision / President-Cabinet Relations: A Pattern and a Case Study / Political Representation in Metropolitan Areas, Political Representation in Metropolitan Areas / Power, Principle, and the Doctrine of the Mouvement  Republicain Populaire / The Viet Nam Constitution of 1956 / A Critique of the Ruling Elite Model / Bacon's Imperialism, Critical Note: Locke's Doctrine of Natural Law

List 2: American Political Science Review, 115, 2 (May 2021, since actual list has 15 entries, to keep it to reasonable length, this listing includes every other title) – To Emerge? Breadwining, Motherhood, and Women's Decisions to Run for Office / Universal Suffrage as Decolonization / When Are Legislators Responsive to Ethnic Minorities? Testing the Role of Electoral Incentives and Candidate Selection for Mitigating Ethnocentric Responsiveness / Why Austerity? The Mass Politics of a Contested Policy, Triggering Ideological Thinking: How Elections Foster Coherence of Welfare State Attitudes  / Four Costly Signaling Mechanisms / Slavery, Reconstruction, and Bureaucratic Capacity in American South / Control without Confirmation: The Politics of Vacancies in Presidential Appointments / Deliberation, Single-Peakedness, and Coherent Aggregation / The Political Economy of Governance Quality / Suppressing Black Votes: A Historical Case Study of Voting Restrictions in Louisiana / Do Commodity Price Shocks Cause Armed Conflict? A Meta-Analysis of Natural Experiments / When the Money Stops: Fluctuations in Financial Remittances and Incumbent Approval in Central Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia - Corrigendum

The judgement here is that the second set of titles amply represent critical theory themes, where the first reflects positivist themes for the most part.  For complete listing see Robert Gutierrez, From Immaturity to Polarized Politics:  Obstacles in Achieving a Federated Nation (Tallahassee, FL:  Gravitas Civics Books, 2022), 359-360 or online, look up the respective citing for each issue of American Political Science Review.

[3] Brian Milstein (political theorist at the University of Limerick), “What Is Critical Theory Today? (And What Is It For?), No date, accessed March 22, 2023, https://www.google.com/search?q=brian+milstein&rlz=1C1RXMK_enUS966US966&oq=Brian+Milstein&aqs=chrome.0.0i355i512j46i512j0i22i30l3j69i60.4223j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8.