It Is Time to Criticize Critical Theory

If you have not already figured it out by now, please allow me to state that the perpetrators of the present wave of anti-white race hatred and Maoist cultural revolution cannot be reasoned out of their narrow and highly destructive point of view. It is not for the sake of rescuing them from their error that we must speak such truths as the fact that when the percentage of blacks among those who die at the hands of the police in the United States is compared with the percentage of blacks among perpetrators of murder, robbery, and other violent crime rather than their percentage of the general population, the first percentage is disproportionately low rather than disproportionately high. It is for the sake of having a sane grasp on reality ourselves. A wall of immunity has effectively been erected around the insular, “woke” point of view protecting it from any intrusion by “things as they are.”

How did we ever arrive at the place where so many people accept the elevation of personal experience as a member of a designated group as being authoritative over verifiable fact?

A large part of the answer to that has to do with the way in which the universities have become leftist re-education camps for brainwashing and indoctrinating young people with wokeness. This is true of universities in general, although the biggest culprits have been the humanities and social sciences departments. While the ascendancy of the STEM disciplines points to another, older, problem in academia, the fragmentation of what ought to be regarded as an integrated whole, human knowledge, they have been more resistant to being turned into factories of wokeness than the humanities. The humanities are venerable in themselves, but they have been corrupted by the social sciences, the source of the problem. My last two essays examined the inherent leftism of sociology, which aspired to be the umbrella discipline of the social sciences, and how the rise of the Boasian school of cultural anthropology amounted to a left-wing takeover of the discipline that produced the immediate ancestor of today’s woke anti-racism.

In this essay I will be looking at Critical Theory, which was the main channel through which the leftism of the social sciences infected the humanities.

Critical Theory is the methodology associated with what is commonly known as the “Frankfurt School.” The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory are often equated with “Cultural Marxism” but the latter is far less precise and a distinction needs to be made here. What is usually meant by Cultural Marxism is the infiltration and takeover of culture generating institutions by leftists who then subvert these institutions into generating a culture that supports progressive causes. Taken broadly, this could describe everything that I have been talking about in my last two essays as well as this one. As a specific strategy, it has more to do with the theories of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist Party leader who was imprisoned by the Fascists, than with the Frankfurt School. Gramsci theorized that the capitalist bourgeoisie had prevented the socialist revolution that Marxist theory regarded as inevitable by means of culture through which they maintained their hegemony over the proletariat by causing them to value the bourgeois values as their own. His theory and proposals for a proletariat counter-culture were translated into a strategy recognizable as Cultural Marxism in its ordinary sense by the student revolutionaries of the 1960s, particularly Rudi Dutschke who coined the phrase “the long march through the institutions.” While perhaps similar in intention, the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School attacked Western Civilization at a much deeper level than this.

The Frankfurt School gets its nickname from the city in Germany in which it was founded. In 1923, Felix José Weil endowed the newly formed Universität Frankfurt am Main, now Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, with funds for the establishment of an affiliate sociological think tank. This thinktank was given the name Institut für Sozialforschung - the Institute for Social Research. It was thoroughly Marxist from the beginning, but in the 1920s under its first two directors its Marxism was the textbook, straight out of Marx and Engels, variety. In 1930 a new director, Max Horkheimer took over, and under his leadership it developed the distinctive form of neo-Marxist thought that has been associated with it ever since. It was Horkheimer who recruited to the think tank most of the notable names of its first generation – the psychoanalyist Erich Fromm, the social critic and musicologist Theodor W. Adorno, the cultural critic and essayist Walter Benjamin, and the sociologist and philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Only a few years after Horkheimer’s directorate began, the Institute was forced into exile by the rise of Adolf Hitler. The Third Reich revoked the Institute’s charter, and they fled briefly to Switzerland before re-locating to New York City in 1935 where Columbia University offered them a new home.

You may recall from my last essay that Franz Boas had become Professor of Anthropology at this very university in 1899, and in the next two to three decades, his doctoral students at Columbia, indoctrinated in his left-wing version of anthropology, had spread out to take charge of all the major anthropology departments in the United States. Now, a second major centre of left-wing thought was located in the same university. Their ideology was not identical. Boas was well-known for his opposition to psychoanalysis in general and Freud in particular, whereas the Frankfurt School included a number of prominent Freudians and it frequently blended the ideas of Marx and Freud. Interestingly, one of the best known and most influential examples of the latter, Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1966) is an argument against the same thing, sexually repressive morality, that the anti-Freudian disciple of Boas, Margaret Mead argued against in Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). There were, however, a number of strong parallels between Boasian and Frankfurt School thought, most notably when it came to anti-racism. Boas, remember, pushed very hard for a cultural approach to anthropology which leaned heavily towards nurture as opposed to nature, against previous anthropologists, especially from the physical branch of the discipline, who stressed nature in their study of race, and his disciples, most notably Ashley Montagu, took this to the extreme of denying the existence of race, a denial which in the second half of the twentieth century came to be imposed as dogma upon all of the social sciences and even the real sciences. The year Boas died, Horkheimer became scientific director for the American Jewish Committe which at his recommendation sponsored a series of “Studies in Prejudice” that were published with Horkheimer as the general editor. The most influential of these was The Authoritarian Personality (1950), authored by a team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, headed by Horkheimer’s Frankfurt associate Theodor Adorno. The gist of the book was that the average white, Christian, middle class, family in the United States of the 1940s to 1950s, was turning everyone into evil racist Nazis by suppressing their homosexuality and instilling in them respect for their fathers as authority figures.

That this book's idiotic and vile thesis received general acceptance among the liberal Left can be attributed to the fact that it was presented as scientific research and progressives tend to uncritically accept anything that is handed to them in the name of science even if it is obviously nothing of the sort. It is interesting, therefore, to note that while Horkheimer served the AJC in the capacity of science director, Critical Theory as he himself had explained it was a repudiation of science.

In an essay entitled “Traditional and Critical Theory” which appeared in 1937 and served as a basic introduction to the methodology of the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer criticized the fact gathering methodology, and the organizational principle of linking propositions into a systematic whole, of the traditional theory which had prevailed in the social sciences in imitation of the natural sciences, and which he condemned as serving the “industrial production techniques” which dominate capitalist society. His own Critical Theory he distinguished by the fact that it does not strictly separate subject and object, but includes a moral element of protest against the existing order, and an activist element of striving to change that order. It is to be applied to society as a whole.

While there are some interesting parallels between the Frankfurt School’s criticism of traditional theory and the orthodox Christian traditionalist criticism of Modern science these are dwarfed by the major differences. If the integration of the social sciences and the humanities in Critical Theory sounds like an appealing step away from the fragmentation of knowledge in the Modern Age, for example, realize that in Critical Theory this is not an argument for recovering a holistic view of things as they are that was lost in the transition to modernity but for weaponizing every discipline in the cause of revolution. The revolutionary cause is, in the end, the chief defining characteristic of Critical Theory and with Critical Theory, as with “orthodox” Marxism, and indeed with every other form of revolutionary ideology, the assumption that the revolutionary who is quick to point out the injustices and oppression of the existing order is capable of replacing it with one without injustice or oppression, or at least with significantly less injustice and oppression, is hardly borne out by the history of revolutions which almost always increase the total amount of injustice and oppression rather than lessen it. If we look around at what is being done today by mobs stirred on by people whose minds have been steeped in Critical Theory, it is evident that these revolutionaries are no exception.

This essay has only begun to scratch the surface of what can be said about Critical Theory, which has evolved and expanded considerably since the days in which Horkheimer and Adorno wrote the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). My purpose here was not to provide an exhaustive treatment of the subject – obviously, that cannot be done in an essay – but an introductory glance at the link through which the agenda the Left was pursuing in the social sciences already in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, spilled over into the humanities in the mid twentieth century. I hope to explore this further in future essays. In the meantime, for a look back at many intellectuals who were influenced by this sort of thinking in the last sixty years, including Jürgen Habermas the most prominent figure of the second generation of the Frankfurt School – which returned to Frankfurt after the war, leaving some of its leading figures behind – see the late Sir Roger Scruton’s Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (2016).