JUDGING CRITICAL THEORY, V

 

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

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

By way of transition from reporting on how critical theory developed during the latter decades of the twentieth century, this posting addresses some loose issues.  Specifically, this blog described how critical theory drifted toward a more varied set of views among the ranks of its advocates.  That included addressing more directly pedagogic applications.  Here, in this posting, a few further transitional points will be made. 

That time period, the late 1900s, was noted for the variation the theory adopted and of note was the contributions of Jurgen Habermas.  That variation addressed concerns from political advocacy positions by other critical theorists and from a philosophic perspective which happens to have been initiated early on by Max Horkheimer.  These sorts of varied arguments led to developments among academics such as the initiation of the sub-field, political psychology. 

Of note is the work of Erich Fromm (The Authoritarian Personality and The Fear of Freedom) who developed methods that escaped the limitations of empiricism.  Whether emanating from these scholars or elsewhere, these themes took certain degree of popular interest among what became known as the counterculture movement – the “love generation.”

And this counterculture also stressed the themes of personal politics, sexual liberation, and the critique of authoritarian family and educational structures, it was in large part following a direction mapped out by the Institute’s early study written by Horkheimer, “Authority and the Family,” which was published in 1936.[2]

While this last citation identifies some of the earlier thinking that led to what eventually developed within critical thought, these developments basically took place in the post-World War II years, especially in the sixties.  With years to germinate, this sort of argumentation either contributed or even energized newer “liberation” movements, such as the feminist movement.

And with that backdrop, one can venture into how critical theory has affected pedagogic concerns. Recent postings have been reviewing what proved to be the most meaningful challenge to what has been since the late forties the main perspective guiding civics, the natural rights view. The dominant view relies on the philosophic tradition of classical liberalism as espoused by many political thinkers, none more eloquently than John Locke.

It is a tradition bolstering the rights of the individual and can be most succinctly summarized as the belief that people have the right to do what they individually wish to do if by doing so they do not interfere with the rights of others to do likewise.  While stating that this dominant view is strongly held by the American populace, it is as any given view of governance and politics – dominant or not – subject to challenging views. 

In the case of natural rights, that would be, more than any other view, critical theory.  It, critical theory, holds to various beliefs and values that counter the prevailing view.  For example, while it might favor a level of individual rights, critical theory does not rely on liberty as its trump value, it instead relies on equality. Some might consider its view of equality as radical in that, in its purest form, champions equality of results – or that all are equally able to experience individually their humanity.

That is, this view promotes equality in which all in society, to a meaningful degree, share equally in societal benefits. As Marx put it, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”  With just that distinction one can anticipate that critical theory, if it were to hold a dominant position in a nation’s collective view of governance and politics, would promote a drastically different civics educational curriculum than what now is in effect. 

But does all of critical theory relate to civics education?  From what this blog has reported of late, one can readily argue that all the concerns encompassed by critical theory literature deal with questions appropriate to civics.

The point of briefly reviewing above the last notions of critical development in the post World War II years is to draw readers’ attention to the more recent developments associated with critical thought.  Currently, critical literature directly addresses such issues as multiculturalism, sexism, classism, or teacher training. But the following quote indicates how civic issues underlie typical reported critical research and advocacy:

 

What remains unclear in the debate within critical pedagogy is the relationship (or tension) between utopian thought, values, and pragmatic theory. In other words, while the postmodern and poststructuralist critiques have led many radical educators to accept the problematic and contingent nature of values – including those of radical democracy – there remains an inclination on the part of critical educators to employ such contingent values (e.g., emancipation, freedom, empowerment, democracy, justice, solidarity, etc.) as the basis of a utopian view to orient sociocultural formation.[3]

 

Fancy language to say that critical educators are concerned with the meat and potatoes of what makes up civics education.

But how can critical educators view the natural rights perspective as being a threat to equality or any other political value? The notion that the dominant view of allowing everyone to go about their lives as they wish as long as each of them avoids hurting others seems fairly noncommittal or neutral.  If so, “what’s the beef?”

Critical literature discards the claim that the dominant, liberal approach is a neutral one. Basically, critical pedagogy holds that the natural rights view is one that supports the current distribution of power and wealth. It argues that that view’s advocates' most influential strategy in gaining support consists in espousing discourses that bolster the advantages of pure capitalism and the almost total reliance on science as a source of legitimate and useful knowledge (a position that can be called scientism).

The critical approach would have students engage in a series of inquiries in which they would delve into the oppressive character of the dominant system and learn how that system accomplishes the following: deprivation of equality of condition, socialization of not only the upper segments of society but also the oppressed segments, maintenance of the legitimacy of the system, and the processes of value formulation on an individual basis with little or no concern for the consequences such formulations have on the interests of the common good.[4]

That formulation instead advances the interests of the upper classes or other advantaged groups to the detriment of those not so advantaged.  And therefore, a good deal of inquiry that students would take on in a critical curriculum would be centered on analysis of the dominant language as expressed in common discourses, which sets up the context and parameters of people’s thinking and actions.

And with that, this transitionary posting will come to an end.  Again, the goal is to impart sufficient information to consider the work of the Brazilian educator, the late Paulo Freire.  For those who might want to look ahead, the key work Freire contributed to critical pedagogy literature, is Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  There is also an institute, the Freire Institute, where one can look up related information online.

---

[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] 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, 108.

[3]Lisa. J. Cary, “The Refusals of Citizenship: Normalizing Practices in Social Education Discourses, Theory and Research in Social Education, 29, 3 (Summer 2001), 405-430, 417.  Postmodern is defined by Collins Dictionary as “a late twentieth century approach to art, architecture, and literature that typically mixes styles, ideas, and references to modern society, often in an ironic way.”  Science Direct defines poststructuralism as “an intellectual movement that emerged in philosophy and humanities in the 1960s and 1970s.  It challenged the tenets of structuralism, which had previously held sway over the interpretation of language and texts in the humanities and the study of economics and cultures in the social sciences.”  Both encourage heightened interest and focus on cultural factors in how language and reality is interpreted.

[4] Neil O. Houser and Jeff J. Kuzmic, Ethical Citizenship in a Postmodern World: Toward a More Connected Approach to Social Education for the Twenty-First Century, Theory and Research in Social Education 29, 3 (Summer 2001), 431-461.

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.

---

[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. 

JUDGING CRITICAL THEORY, III

 

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

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

This current series of postings is reporting on the basic elements of critical theory, the main antithetical view to the dominant natural rights view that Americans mostly favor when it comes to governmental/political thought.  Critical theory is a view that focuses its concern on political qualities of domination and authority.  Readers are invited to review the last two posting of this blog for how it, the blog, has introduced this construct.

          Part of that reportage was describing how critical theory grew out of the efforts of a multidisciplinary group of scholars who established the Frankfurt Institute.  Their initial efforts, due to German politics during the 1930s, found these scholars moving the Institute eventually to New York City.  After the ensuing years in which World War II transpired plus some stabilizing years, the Institute moved back to Frankfurt, Germany. 

Changing its name once again – to the Frankfurt School – they were able to skillfully advocate their political positions and garnered a good degree of influence in a conservative West Germany.  With this re-establishment in their original location, this group during the 1950s and ’60s aimed most of its efforts at attacking positivism.  That is, these scholars found a good deal of fault with the trend among the social sciences to adopt more rigorous scientific protocols in conducting their studies. 

This specifically meant that social sciences – which relied heavily, up to that time, on more narrative/historical forms of research – focused on hypothesis testing methods in which observations of human behaviors were measured to discover significant correlations between independent and dependent variables.  This was deemed to be a major obstruction to the School’s main aim, i.e., to change society. 

Why?  Because the behavioral approach objectified the study of politics while the Frankfurt group’s change-oriented aim relied heavily on normative questions – change presupposes value determinations.  And adding fuel to this disaffection of the prevalent social sciences was, at that time, a highly emotional development, that being the student anti-war movement – mostly a reaction to the Vietnam War – that both Europe and the US was experiencing. 

The resulting disruptions between those in power and anti-war demonstrators with allies like leftists from the Frankfurt School, grew and featured concerns over the various forms of subjugation the School was highlighting which mostly affected either low-income groups or targeted groups of prejudicial policies or both.  And this fed into the School’s concern with social science modes of research.

The “establishment” – made of those who belonged to privileged groups – was adopting behavioral approaches in their analyses of social realities and they stood in support, for the most part, with the war footing against Communism.  Partly due to World War II lessons – appeasing aggression from “foreign” invaders – and capitalist aims to expand their markets across the world, there seemed to be tunnel vision among the power centers as to what appropriate policy should be adopted concerning such developments as those being witnessed in Southeast Asia. 

The School found itself, again, in an uncomfortable domestic environment in Germany due to the disruptions associated with the anti-war movement.  At that time, though, new blood was making its way into the School’s ranks.  One such newcomer was Jurgen Habermas, who introduced a very influential communication theory.

That theory points out the necessity for participating actors of various social arrangements – whether they be federated (in agreement) or antagonistic – to recognize the intersubjective validity among their claims so that social cooperation can be achieved.[2]  This is veering critical thought further from pure Marxist thinking (a trend pointed out in previous posting), albeit not in contradiction to it.

Was there a complete divorce between Marxists and critical theorists by what critical theorists were promulgating through the School or other platforms?  One area that these critical scholars seem to have maintained a strong link with Marxist thinking was their rejection of purely objectified social science research. 

And by transcending the boundaries among the various social sciences – becoming highly interdisciplinary – and other related disciplines (such as linguistic or aesthetic studies), these writers started to find fault with segregating these objectified studies from normative political theory as indicated above. 

In so doing, they fell squarely with Marx and his views that it is essential to keep social science protocols (of either historical or behavioral-based types) and social criticism relatable to each other.  The former provides the means, but the latter keeps such efforts along justifiable rationales which, in turn, help those involved in exerting the energy and expending the resources such research demands.

Despite this link, Marxist scholars, for their part, found it offensive that critical theorists would be disposed to seemly leave behind Marxist focus on proletarian revolution and the energetic adoption of going into other non-Marxist sources of scholarship to inform the substance of their research and writings. 

But, as time passed, this separation of research such as between positivist studies (based on factual information) and normative studies (based on values), lost its fervor and has come to be seen today as artificial.  The concern eventually fell from overall academic importance.  In that, critical theorist played an important role.

And as critical theory further developed, certain inconsistencies have materialized among those affected scholars.  The next posting will delve into these inconsistencies and report on how they, ironically, further diversified the interests of those who claim to be critical theorists or exponents of this construct.  Many a movement was generated or overwise inspired by critical theory and its advocates.

---

[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] For interested readers in this generalization, see “Jurgen Habermas,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2007/2014), accessed March 18, 2023, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/#:~:text=Habermas's%20theory%20of%20communicative%20action,on%20which%20social%20cooperation%20depends.  It is beyond the purposes here to delineate Habermas’ argument at this point.

JUDGING CRITICAL THEORY, II

 

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

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

The last posting established what has been the main concerns for critical theorists.  That has been domination and authority.  These main issues were taken on by those scholars that initiated the Frankfurt Institute which got started in Frankfurt, Germany in 1923.  And that posting further gave readers a brief overview of how those scholars, with the backdrop of political turmoil (revolving around the Nazis struggling to attain power); they found their environment anything but hospitable. 

Due to that backdrop, the Institute first moved to Geneva and then on to New York City in 1935.  In the ensuing years, members of the institute began extensive research into various social factors that related to their initial concerns of subjugation of various groupings.  They all shared a certain, qualified allegiance to Marxist thought.  While domination and authority are not foreign concerns to Marxist thinking, their emphasis on those concerns began to develop with a variance from pure Marxist analysis. 

Where Marxists bore down on economic interests and exchange values, critical theorists began to see dominance as a more basic motivator than material well-being.  Specifically, the critical theorists judged material motivations as more of a means toward dominance which intuitively is less of an economic issue than a psychological issue. 

So, instead of the Marxist emphasis on surplus-value, one finds analysis of surplus-repression being critical theorists’ main point of interest.  This, as was noted in their writings, was, in part, a reaction to Sigmund Freud’s promotion of suppression as a social prerequisite in managing modern states.  Here one finds a critique among these scholars of what had been assumed characterizes the legitimate exercise of political power.  That being the “rational exercise of authority.” 

Instead of accepting being rational as the good and proper thing to pursue, one first needs to reflect upon which mental construct serves as a basis for determining what constitutes rational thought – upon what is rationality based?  That is, one can determine a paradox at play, for example, in liberal Western states, rational policies and behaviors, under the reasoned parameters of the given dominate ideology (liberal democracy), it rationalizes subjugating realities.[2] 

To round this out, though, what in the West has been praised as historical liberation, attributed to the effects of enlightenment – rational thought, science, objectified research, positivism, reductionist studies – was deemed by critical thinkers as subjugating forces.  And here a mental exercise might be helpful.

Imagine an unaligned, neutral thinker facing a promoter of capitalism.  The capitalist touts the accomplishments of capitalist economies – outstripping any other economic output, by far, of any current or historical system.  In responding, the unaligned thinker asks the capitalist:  does he/she believe populations of people, by the designs of nature, are equal in the distribution of talents? 

The unaligned questioner, in order to make clear what the questioner is asking, quickly adds, “Yes, one can concede that among individuals, there is variance, but in terms of groupings – race, nationality, religion, people of different geographic origins, even differing familial strains – are people, in total among those groups, equal?

Not to sound prejudicial, the capitalist says yes, and capitalism’s true proponents have fought to equalize legal restraints among these groupings.  The law should be blind to such distinctions.  Yet the unaligned person further asks:  “Why, then, are there notable variances among those groups in terms of asset distribution?  Why are the poor more likely to be members of some groups as opposed to other groups?”

Further, the questioner asks, why do capitalist nations sustain and in some cases support policies that either ignore, uphold, or otherwise promote systems in which meaningful distribution of assets – wage, wealth, education, health care, etc. – favor some groups (in the US, white, male Anglo people) and disfavor other groups (African Americans, Latinos, indigenous people, to some degree, Asians, and others)? 

If one cannot cite natural distinctions among these groups, then “enlightened” logic would claim, something, given the realities, is not fair, something is subjugating these unfavored people.  And if one follows the main argument of capitalist thinking, then one would be prone to argue that government – in the tradition of laissez-faire economics – should not be disposed to do anything to “fix” this state of affairs.

With this mental exercise in hand, which is offered by this blogger and not necessarily proffered by critical theorists, this account hopes to point out an insight critical theorists hold fairly central to their overall argument.  That is, as with the shortsightedness of the above capitalist, people unreflectively ascribe to rationales that are prevalent and do so even at subconscious levels. 

In terms of capitalist, liberal democracies – enlightenment style – what one has are rationales drawn from the prevailing ideology.  That is, what people find (or perhaps don’t even realize) as being true reflects their mode of thinking and speaking – it is “the water in which people swim.”  It functions as a dominating force; and as such, a formula can be deduced:  enlightenment, as Herbert Marcuse points out, equates to totalitarianism.

This has all led to a criticism offered by critical theorists, that the culture – the mode of thought, beliefs, prioritization, and feelings – of Western industrial and postindustrial societies – has become pervasive and beyond reproach.  It is well ensconced in those peoples’ minds.  This cultural approach more than any other aspect of critical theory defines the early work of these initial scholars. 

And it points out the interaction of political, sociological, and psychological factors in how people who live in industrial, capitalist societies – even with democratic features – are so entrapped in subjugating rationales that they have real negative effects on disfavored groups.  The above capitalist may very well not even be conscious of how levels of destitution might exist in that person’s society or in societies in general. 

And even if a number of people know of it, they might simply chalk up such realities to individual shortcomings – they didn’t work hard enough, they didn’t study hard enough, they didn’t play the game smartly enough, etc.  These individuals simply do not see or care to see the institutional nature of such injustices.  And they further don’t see how the various elements of the society play a role in “hiding” what is actually happening.

What readers might find of interest along these lines, is the work that these researchers conducted over cultural realms of interest (e.g., aesthetic works).  But this did not preclude critical commentary on the behavioral turn the social sciences took in the post-World War II years and affected the substances of what was taken as common knowledge.  More specifically, they took aim at scientism, positivist studies, and empiricism.  More on this aspect of critical theory will be shared in the next posting.

---

[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] But less one simply dismisses this sort of thinking as anti-American or anti-West, a higher degree of castigation by critical theorists was aimed at the East where, under the label of socialism (an occidental ideology), was experiencing higher degrees of subjugating authority and domination.

JUDGING CRITICAL THEORY, I

 

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

An advocate of critical theory begins his/her presentation …

It is seldom the case that one can mark in time when a school of thought, say political school of thought, began.  It probably comes closest to that ability when it comes to critical theory.  In 1923 in the city of Frankfurt, Germany a collection of political/social/psychological thinkers got together and founded the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research.  Later, its name was changed to simply the Frankfurt Institute.[1]

          There are an ample number of prominent names involved with this founding.  They include Max Horkheimer (who became its leader), Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin (a literary theorist), philosopher Herbert Marcuse, and psychologist Erich Fromm among others.  This diverse grouping is telling in that critical theory turned out to be a product of a diverse disciplinary base.

While this group shared varying advocacy for Marxist thought, they individually and as a group held deep seated concerns with a good deal of its arguments.  What follows gets into this variance, but first this short historical description points out that the Institute, due to the political environment in Germany (the rise of Hitler) during the late 1920s-early 1930s, moved to Geneva in 1933 and then onward to New York City in 1935.

While much has evolved in critical theory thought since those early days, the role of this blog will be to get at the essential arguments the Institute promoted initially.  The blog also wishes to point out that many other writers with varying arguments have added to the mix and it will refer to some of them.  This, of course, makes nailing down what exactly critical theory is an elusive project.  So, for example, contributors emanated from traditions such as poststructuralism and postmodernism.

Along this line, from this view’s very beginnings, part of a general trend with Marxism in the West, starting in the 1930s, was that they, Marxist leaning academics, sought conceptual connections with non-Marxist thought.  And their writings where not, as pure Marxist writings were, geared at proletarian audiences, but to fellow academics. 

The trend was more specifically aimed at cultural and ideological issues and away from political economy.  Just to remind readers, pure Marxist thought proposed a dialectical materialist view of history.[2]  In addition, Marx, in his strict accounting of what that history reveals, are described forces that simply are/were in place and do not materialize due to normative considerations. 

People, according to this purer form of Marxism, fulfill their roles in this history not because they good or evil, or right or wrong, but because they are human beings acting in accordance with their nature.  Critical theorists reject this reasoning as they turn away from objectified research that opts for scientific protocols (more on this later).

Another factor of importance to this development was contextual and time specific to the 1930s.  At that time, intellectual upheaval was being experienced.  There was a hostile environment made of liberal capitalism (or what some have called the late robber baron era), Stalinism, and fascism. 

Not swayed by arguments distinguishing these ideological traditions, early critical theorists were taken with these isms’ similar organizational, technological, cultural, and personality structural elements and, in turn, gave them, the critical theorists, theoretical focus, at least as compared with what pure Marxist writers were able to enjoy.

From the start, the aim among these writers was to change society.  In such a mode, their attention to these other isms and how their advocates sought to rule not only the politics of their polities, but in how people lived their lives.  One needed to understand that the more recent ideological developments – thought of today as mostly anti-democratic ideologies like fascism – were merely outgrowths of the older, liberal democratic tradition. 

For example, fascism could not be studied or understood in terms of its own attributes but needed to be considered as a development spurred on by the subjugating character of the “parental” liberal democratic regimes.  As Horkheimer is quoted, “He who does not wish to speak of capitalism should also be silent about fascism.”[3]  This seemingly contradictory judgment needs clarifying, but it reveals the central contention critical theory makes regarding social realities.

In this mode of transcending traditional boundaries among the various academic disciplines, critical theory pushed to crossover from discipline to discipline.  Early on, its advocates began analyzing subjugation from sociological and political concerns.  This led to socio-cultural analysis with a dash of history in which antisemitism, for example, is perceived as an outgrowth of dominance initiated by the Enlightenment.

Or stated otherwise, fascism can be categorized as rebellion of suppressed antagonism initiated by de-legitimizing long held prejudices among the population against minority groups – especially if those minorities were perceived as enjoying material largesse.  Perhaps Hitler could have adopted a “MAKE GERMANY GREAT AGAIN” slogan to capture this deep-seated antagonism that before Hitler might have been sustained at subconscious levels.

With that, this posting hints at where critical thought is aiming.  More needs to be described and explained.  Just to further remind readers, this blog warned them that with critical theory, one has a more involved set of ideas than the relatively simple rationales of either parochial federalism or natural rights views.  But to report as to what this other view, critical theory, has to offer, this blog will go about doing so in short installments.

---

[1] This blogger wishes to express a word of gratitude to a source of information that has served to organize how this blogger presents its account of critical theory.  It also is a source of information.  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] Readers who would benefit from a refresher review of Marxist thought, are invited to look up Posting #68.  To gain access, readers can go online and look up this blog’s posting, “Posting 68:  Some Influential Sources of Critical Political Thought,” Gravitas:  The Blog Book, I (April 29, 2011), accessed March 15, 2023, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zh3nrZVGAhQDu1hB_q5Uvp8J_7rdN57-FQ6ki2zALpE/edit, 240.

[3] Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination:  A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Oakland, CA:  University of California Press, 1973), 156.

A PROTOCOL FOR JUDGING CRITICAL THEORY

 

Following the pattern this blog has established in presenting, analyzing, and evaluating the main mental constructs Americans have harbored concerning governance and politics, this posting will review how critical theory will be presented.  Basically, in dialectic style, the blog will attempt to take on the view of one who would advocate the construct.  That is, each posting, under the “judging” series, will begin with a reminder:  “An advocate of critical theory continues his/her presentation …”

The thing is, this blogger, as with natural rights, is not an advocate but will try his best to present that view in positive terms.  The “judgments” will utilize William Schubert’s commonplaces of curriculum, that being subject matter, teachers, learners, and milieu.[1]  Paralleling how these commonplaces have been used in terms of parochial federalism and the natural rights view, each guides what this blog will address. 

Beginning with subject matter, those presentations will focus on the morality of critical theory, the discipline of the social sciences, and the interdisciplinary nature of critical theory.  With the category, the “student,” this review will sustain the subcategories used with natural rights.  Those are personal student interests, student social interests, students’ economic interests, political student interests, and pedagogic student interests. 

And with the category “teacher,” it will be divided into two subcategories:  teacher effectiveness and teacher knowledge.  Finally, the commonplace “milieu” will direct attention to the expectation of schools, school’s socioeconomic base, and youth culture.  Those are the areas of interests which the blog will further analyze by implementing Aristotle’s categories of causation. 

That is, specific questions of inquiry will be derived from those categories, i.e., they will inquire into the state of affairs, interactions, situational insights, and the capacity to act morally.  Stated more descriptively,

 

·       The state of affairs refers to the actual conditions found in schools, as opposed to abstracted or hypothesized relations between factors or variables.  Of particular concern will be dilemmas caused by adherence to critical theory as opposed to another construct. 

·       Interactions refer to social encounters affected by the respective construct.

·       Situational insights are interpretations of encounters gleaned from analyses of practice. 

·       And capacity to act morally will be assessments of practices judged according to good citizenship and social capital. 

 

The reader is warned that these will not be addressed in order and there will be a good deal of imagination in that critical theory is not that widely employed in American schools.  A lot of what follows is speculation in the mode of “what would happen if” critical theory became prominent – an eventuality this blogger does not anticipate.

          And by further introduction to this construct, here are some other broad-based facts regarding critical theory.  To begin, it is not a predominately political construct.  It is more a sociological one or, better stated, it focuses on society and culture, but with a determined interest in the power structures a society might have. 

In terms of its moniker, it has a bent toward critiquing how existing power structures function and pointing out that despite “democratic” processes, power entities ensure its members secure policies that advance their interests at the cost of those not in power.  As such, related study delves into understanding not only political realities, but also the vast array of human concerns that help critical theorists determine which social forces are at play in maintaining power relations.

Along with political science and sociology, active areas of study include psychoanalysis, history, communication theory, feminist theory, race theory, and philosophy.  To what end?  To secure understanding that deciphers the nature and cause of subjugated human conditions, as it utilizes a varied and open approach to seek truth unadorned by simplistic rationales. 

One aim, it seems, is to understand the role that ideology plays in hampering understanding.  It is adherence to such beliefs systems (capitalism, socialism, fascism, and the like) that justify ongoing injustices keeping humans down, short of true liberation.  The aim of this view is, according to Max Horkheimer, “to [achieve] liberated human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.”[2]

In this vein, the following quote is useful in grasping the conceptual boundaries of what critical theorists consider justice – or as Helen Pluckrose refers to it, critical social justice (CSJ) – is:

 

CSJ holds that knowledge is not objective but is culturally constructed to maintain oppressive power systems. This is believed to be achieved primarily by certain kinds of knowledge being legitimised by powerful forces in society, then being accepted by everyone and perpetuated by ways of talking about things – discourses.

These oppressive power systems believed to exist and permeate everything are called things like white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, heteronormativity (assuming that most people are heterosexual), cisnormativity (assuming that people are men or women depending on their reproductive systems), ableism and fatphobia. However, it is believed, most of us cannot see these oppressive discourses and systems because they are just the water we swim in. The marginalised have a greater ability to see them and so have a greater competence to define them and point them out. Knowledge is thus tied to identity and one’s perceived position in society in relation to power – often referred to as “positionality.”[3]

 

One current study that amply describes this sort of mental bondage that transforms into subjugation of the severest form is found in Isabel Wilkerson’s book, Caste:  The Origins of Our Discontents.[4]  It turns out that casteism functions as an ideology.

---

[1] William H. Schubert, Curriculum:  Perspective, Paradigm, and Possibility (New York, NY:  MacMillan Publishing Company, 1986).  The commonplaces can be defined as follows:

·       The subject matter refers to the academic content presented in the curriculum. 

·       The teacher is the professional instructor authorized to present and supervise curricular activities within the classroom setting. 

·       Learners are defined as those individuals attending school for the purpose of acquiring the education entailed with a particular curriculum.

·       Milieu refers to the general cultural setting and ambiance within the varied social settings found at the school site.

[2] Raymond Guess, The Idea of a Critical Theory (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 1981), 2-3.

[3] Helen Pluckrose, “What Do We Mean by Critical Social Justice, Counterweight (February 17, 2021), accessed March 11, 2023, https://counterweightsupport.com/2021/02/17/what-do-we-mean-by-critical-social-justice/. British spelling.

[4] Isabel Wilkerson, Caste:  The Origins of Our Discontents (New York, NY:  Random House, 2020).