critical theory
According to Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy…
Critical Theory has a narrow and a broad meaning in philosophy and in the history of the social sciences. “Critical Theory” in the narrow sense designates several generations of German philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School. According to these theorists, a “critical” theory may be distinguished from a “traditional” theory according to a specific practical purpose: a theory is critical to the extent that it seeks human “emancipation from slavery”, acts as a “liberating … influence”, and works “to create a world which satisfies the needs and powers” of human beings (Horkheimer 1972, 246).
Not exactly. People commonly (mis)use the word theory to mean an educated guess about why something exists or is the way it is. That actually describes a hypothesis. Here is an example. Someone might wonder if gravity is the same as or directly related to magnetis. You may lift a magnet, let go of it and watch it fall to the ground. You might then hypothesize that
the object that you released fell because it was pulled by the Earth's magnetic field.
Writes Robert Krampf the Happy Scientist. Krampf continues,
Once we started testing, it would not take long to find out that my hypothesis was not supported by the evidence. Non-magnetic objects fall at the same rate as magnetic objects. Because it was not supported by the evidence, my hypothesis does not gain the status of being a theory. To become a scientific theory, an idea must be thoroughly tested, and must be an accurate and predictive description of the natural world.
In other words, a theory is a principle or set of principles that have explanatory power, that can be used to accurately predict the phenomena it addresses. A theory works. Critical theory, critical race theory, queer theory, Marxist theory and so on are nothing of the sort. They make assumptions and operate on those assumptions even as those assumptions are demonstrated to be wrong. Thus they are not theories or even hypotheses. They are political agendas masquerading as branches of the social "sciences".
Returning to Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy…
Because such theories aim to explain and transform all the circumstances that enslave human beings, many “critical theories” in the broader sense have been developed. They have emerged in connection with the many social movements that identify varied dimensions of the domination of human beings in modern societies. In both the broad and the narrow senses, however, a critical theory provides the descriptive and normative bases for social inquiry aimed at decreasing domination and increasing freedom in all their forms. Critical Theory in the narrow sense has had many different aspects and quite distinct historical phases that cross several generations, from the effective start of the Institute for Social Research in the years 1929–1930, which saw the arrival of the Frankfurt School philosophers and an inaugural lecture by Horkheimer, to the present.
In the pro-cultural marxist book Critique of Domination: The Origins and Development of Critical Theory (printed 1973), author Trent Schroyer has this to say about critical theory,1
Today the critique of domination has suffered the fate of being identified with the “communist” world’s alleged blueprint for world revolution. This association has blocked and obscured the real potential for critical reflection which, following its modern reconceptualization in critical philosophy (i.e. Kant, Fichte, Hegel, etc.), can be called critical theory. While Marx inherited this classical tradition of criticism and comprehended its radical reformation in German idealism more clearly than the “Marxists” have, he neither developed its final form nor adequately realized its utopian “moment” as a theory of emancipation. Contemporary critical theorists, such as Marcuse, Habermas, Sartre, and Henri Lefebvre continue to try to work out the foundations for a critical theory that would retain its ties to classical philosophy but would have the role of effecting a more critically oriented type of such an attempt. In a sense, all the efforts to found a genuinely critical social science involve both the sphere of philosophical reflection and the ongoing attempt to either update or transcend Marx’s concrete realization of a political-economic critical theory material force within the planning mechanisms of the contemporary world. In a way, today’s social theorists are all “Marxists” in their one-sided stress upon the objective necessity for economic development as the first priority for all societies and as the vari-genuinely radical concept for emancipation of an international proletariat, may now be the means for their permanent suppression and domination.
According to Dino Franco Felluga in Critical Theory - the Key Concepts,2
THE RISE OF CRITICAL THEORY
The rise of critical theory can be traced to these changes of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Two figures from this time are important to mention as early influences on he concept of “critical” theory. However much Immanuel Kant’s notion of the “transcendental subject” may itself be critiqued by critical theory, it is also true that in his works. The Critique of Pure Reason (1781). The Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and The Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant established “critique” as an activity practiced by the autonomous, rational subject, who, untrammeled by the rules of authority, must seek to dispel allmyths and unsubstantiated beleifs through the rigorous impliementationof reason. What distinguishes critical theory from this autonomoussubject is the insistence that all such critique must also be politically engaged. Marx was an important firgure in recasting critique along these lines. Indeed, the first volume of Marx’s magisterial work, Capital (1867), had as its subtitle “A Critique of Political Economy” and sought, like Kant’s philosophical work, to dispel all ideological obfuscations, though in this case the goal was explicitly to change society through revolution. By showing proletarian workers how bourgeois ideology alienates and exploits them, Marx believed that he could effect an international communist revolution.
The term “critical theory” was actually dubbed by Max Horkheimer in his 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” (Horkeimer 1972). A neo-Marxist, Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School to which he belonged sought to rethink Marx’s theories in light of the fact that the revolutions Marx predicted did not, in fact, occur. As with Marx, critical theory for Horkheimer seeks always to fight ideological mystification, class oppression, and hegemony with the goal of changing society for the better. Such a critical attitude, for Horkheimer, “is suspicious of the very categories of better, useful, appropriate, productive, and valuable, as these are understood in the present order, and refuses to take them as nonscientific presuppositions about which one can do nothing” (1972: 207). This critical stance questions one of the principles of bourgeois thought, the very idea of autonomous subjectivity that was developed from the Renaissance to the present and that Kant helped to theorize: “Bourgeois thought,” according to Horkheimer, “is essentially abstract, and its principle is an individuality which inflatedly believes itself to be the ground of the world of even to be the world without qualification , an individuality separated off from events” (210). Critical thinking seeks to counter both of these stances: “Critical thinking is the function neither of the isolated individual nor of a sum-total of individuals” (210-11). It seeks instead always to question all aspects of the current system of society, to be “critical of the present” (218), with the goal of instantiatingnew social forms, a “better reality” (217), a “society without injustices” (221). It must also be prepared to critique idealistic tendencies in its own thinking: the theoretician “execercises an aggressive critique not only against the conscious defenders of the status quo but also against distracting, conformist, or utopian tendencies within his own household” (216). Unlike the “detached” figure of the ivory-tower “liberalist intelligentsia” (224), the critical theorists is, then, politically engaged while never being what Horkheimer terms “deeply rooted” in one ideological stance, as in totalitarian propaganda (223-24).
It is no coincidence that Horkheimer articulates his notion of critical theory at the time of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. That period in Germany marks a significant mement in world history (and for critical theory) precisely because Weimar Germany, which directly preceded the rise of Nasism, had all the hallmarks of modern society and differed little from the countries that eventually formed the Allied Powers: democracy, a justice system, librariesm technological advances, scientific advances, capitalism, and high culture of all stripes. Yet none of that protected the country from descending into the barbarism of the Holocaust. That fact has led many critical theorists to question everything associated with progress, truth, civilization, science, and so on.
As practiced today, critical theory often adopts a political stance on the present, with the goal of forming a more just society, even when far removed from the Marxist roots of Horkheimer’s thinking. Judith Butler for example adopts to defend queer identity; such critical theory sees itself as engaged in a project of “permanent political contest” (1993: 222), as she puts it. However, “critical theory” as a methodology has also developed beyond, while still very much influenced by, the Frankfurt School’s emphasis on social transformation and has become a general term for the theorietical analysis of culture at large, thus bringing under its umbrella a tradition of thinking that extends from the structuralists of the modern period to the deconstructionist and postmodern theorists of the last 50 years. In this sort of critical theory, the aim is not so narrowly specific social change through the analysis of class antagonism than it is the examination of the larger linguistic and iudeological structures by which we make sense of, while thus ideologically constructing, the world around us.
In the 1980s when, according to the editors of Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement,3 the term ‘critical race theory’ was coined as such by the organizers of the “Critical Race Theory Workshop” to make it clear that the field occupies the
intersection of critical theory and race, racism and the law.
Below is a Venn diagram we made to depict this intersectional description of CRT.
Also see the following sections in the Culture War Encyclopedia
communism
Implicit Association Test (IAT)
intersectionalism
marxism
microaggression
neo-marxism
Non-Neutrality & Oppositional Scholarship in Critical Race Theory
poststructuralism
progressivism
race crits
racial separatism in critical race theory
racial microaggression
socialism
wokeism
last update 2023-11-9
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SOURCES
(multiple authors). Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement edited by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, Kendell Thomas, forward by Cornel West (published by The New Press, copyright 1995)
Bohman, James. Critical Theory - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Archive Winter 2019 Edition (first published March 8, 2005)
Felluga, Dino Franco. Critical Theory - the Key Concepts (Routledge, 2015)
Krampf, Robert. Is Gravity a Theory or a Law? Robert Krampf the Happy Scientist (copywrite 2019)
Schroyer, Trent. Critique of Domination: The Origins and Development of Critical Theory (copywrite Trent Schroyer, 1973, published by George Braziller, New York)
FOOTNOTES
Page 16 in Critique of Domination: The Origins and Development of Critical Theory by Trent Schroyer (copywrite 1973, published by George Braziller, New York)
Pages xxii-xxiv in Critical Theory - the Key Concepts by Dino Franco Felluga, Routledge, 2015
Page 105 in Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement by multiple authors, edited by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, Kendell Thomas, forward by Cornel West (published by The New Press, copyright 1995)