Chapter 5: Critical Theory

Introduction

Critical theory is, in a generic sense, a social theory oriented toward criticizing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theories that aim only to understand or explain it. It is a normative approach that is based on the judgment that domination is a problem, that a domination-free society is needed. It wants to inform political struggles that want to establish such a society.

Critical theory actually has a broad and a narrow meaning in the history of social sciences and international relations. In the broad sense, the theory covers a wide range of approaches focused on the idea of freeing people from the modern state and economic system. That is to say, a theory is critical insofar as it seeks to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.

Critical theory is primarily a European social theory. It emerged out of the Kantian/Marxist tradition, as it has just been said, but as a grand theory, it was particularly developed by a group of philosophers and social scientists, originally locating at the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung, in German), an attached institute founded in 1923 at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. That is the reason critical theory, in the narrow sense , is commonly known with the works of the scholars of the so-called “Frankfurt School”.

The Meanings and Basics Of Critical Theory

As a pure critique, critical theory is usually regarded as a critique of modernity and by extension, a critique of the developments and institutions associated with modern society. It can also be a critique of particular schools of thought within social sciences, rejecting their domination. More recently, a large part of critical theory has been the critique of art and culture, in particular the consumer culture, advertising, the media, and other forms of popular culture.

Critical theory is not only an academic approach but also an emancipatory thought committed to the formation of a more equal and just world. It seeks to explain the reasons why the realization of this goal is difficult to achieve. Therefore, what is crucial is not only the social explanation but also politically motivated action to achieve an alternative set of social relations based on justice and equality.

One of the leading scholars of critical theory, Max Horkheimer, asserts, in his classic work Traditional and Critical Theory, that a critical theory must do two important things: it must account for the whole of society within a historical context, and it should seek to offer a robust and holistic critique by incorporating insights from all social sciences. Furthermore, Horkheimer states that a theory can only be considered a true critical theory if it is explanatory, practical, and normative. That means that the theory must adequately explain the social problems that exist, it must offer practical solutions for how to respond to them, and it must clearly abide by the norms of criticism established by the field. With this point of view, Horkheimer also condemns traditional theorists for producing works that fail to question power, domination, and the status quo, in general (Horkheimer, 1937).

The Frankfurt School And Evolution Of The Classical Critical Theory

The birth of critical theory is greatly inspired by Karl Marx’s theoretical formulation of the relationship between economic base and ideological superstructure. The approach of Marx tends to focus on how power and domination operate, in particular, in the realm of the superstructure.

Following Marx’s critical steps, Georg Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci developed theories that explored the cultural and ideological sides of power and domination. Both Lukacs and Gramsci focused their critique on the social forces that prevent people from seeing and understanding the forms of power and domination that exist in society.

Shortly after the period when Lukacs and Gramsci developed and published their ideas, the Institute for Social Research was founded where most critical theorists, called the Frankfurt School, began to show up.

The School’s interest in psychoanalysis coincided with a marginalization of Marxism. A growing interest began to show up with respect to the interrelation between psychoanalysis and social change, along with Fromm’s insight into the psychic role of the family. This interest became crucial in empirical studies of the 1940s that led, eventually, to Adorno’s co-authored work The Authoritarian Personality in 1950. The goal of this work was to explore a “new anthropological type”, that is, the authoritarian personality. Such a character was found to have specific traits, like compliance with conventional values, non-critical thinking, as well as absence of introspectiveness (Adorno et al., 1950).

The Three Pillars Of Critical Theory

There are basically three pillars of critical theory. The first concerns its epistemology, the second its ontology, and the third its praxeology

1. Epistemology
2. Ontology
3. Praxeology

Epistemology, in a generic sense, is a theory of knowledge. It deals with how the very concepts that constitute a theory are constituted and organized.

In his writing Traditional and Critical Theory, Horkheimer (1937) argues that human and social sciences colonized the scientific approach of natural sciences and applied their empiricist epistemology and positivist methods to the study of the social world. Therefore, the “phenomenologically oriented sociologist” relied on the collection of social data as the basis for building theory and unveiling social laws. This had a significant impact on the social sciences, since it was underpinned by a unitary conception of science prescribing the inadequacy of subjects, such as history or philosophy as theoretical tools for studying the social world (1937: 192).

Ontology is a theory of being, it deals with the question how reality is organized and develops.

The critique of domination and exploitation constitutes critical theory’s ontological dimension. Marx treated Kant’s fundamental philosophical questions about human beings and their knowledge, activities, and hopes in the form of a critical political economy. Marx’s reformulation of Kant’s question was his categorical imperative that is the critique of domination and exploitation.

Praxeology is the study of aspects of human action, especially political action and ethics. It is concerned with the conceptual analysis and logical implications of preference, choice, means, and so forth.

Critical ethics forms a praxeological aspect of critical theory. Critical theory certainly wants to increase and maximize human happiness. It uses the Hegelian method of comparing essence and existence, since in class societies, an appearance is not automatically rational. This essence can be found in human’s positive capacities, such as striving for freedom, sociality, cooperation, and it has the ethical implication that universal conditions should be created that allow all humans to realize these capacities. For political communication studies, critical ethics matters, since it needs criteria for judging what are positive and negative aspects of specific media.

Another praxeological dimension is the focus on struggles and political practice. Critical theory feels associated with actual and potential social struggles of exploited and oppressed groups. It maintains a stress on the importance for a better world. Its philosophy is a reflection of realities, potentials, and limits of struggles. Critical political communication scholars understand themselves as public intellectuals who do not just write books and conduct analyses, but connect their knowledge to political debates and struggles for the better.

Critical Theory And International Relations

Of course, neither the scholars of the Frankfurt School nor those prior to them were not international relations theorists in the contemporary sense. They were essentially philosophers and sociologists. Yet there were two particular scholars who played a crucial role in connecting critical theory to international relations by influencing two other significant scholars in the area. The first was Antonio Gramsci, who influenced Robert Cox , and the second was Jürgen Habermas from the Frankfurt School, who influenced Andrew Linklater . While Cox focuses on contemporary redistribution struggles, Linklater turns to questions of identity and community as more significant than economic relations in today’s quest for emancipation.

In this respect, Cox challenges realism’s assumptions, specifically the study of interstate relations in isolation from other social forces. He stresses the need to see global politics as a collective construction evolving through the complex interplay of state, sub-state, and transstate forces in economic, cultural, and ideological spheres. His purpose is to pay attention to the whole range of spheres where change is needed in contemporary global politics. For instance, when realism focuses only on great powers and strategic stability, it ends up with reinforcing a set of unjust global relations stemming from power and coercion. For this reason, Cox challenges the idea that “truth” is absolute, as in realism’s assertion that there is a timeless logic to international relations, or liberalism’s assertion that the pursuit of global capitalism is positive.

The critical project connecting Linklater to Cox sets out to uncover all sorts of hegemonic interests feeding the world order as a first step to overcome global systems of exclusion and inequality. Linklater’s critical project aims at reconstructing cosmopolitanism, drawing not from some abstract or utopian moral principles but from noninstrumental action and ideal speech (open and noncoercive communication), the assumptions actually developed by Habermas. Ideal speech is the critical tool used in the reconstruction of political communities, from local to global levels, through open dialogue and noncoercive communication, a process whereby all affected by political decisions put forward their claims and justify them on the basis of rational and universally-accepted principles of validity (Linklater, 2007a).

What unites Cox and Linklater, then, is a political inquiry with an explicit emancipatory purpose. It aims at uncovering the potential for a fairer system of global relations resulting from already existing principles, practices, and communities that expands human rights and prevents harm to strangers.

Conclusion

Overall, critical theory, perhaps more than other approaches, promises to go deeper in understanding human problems. From the critical perspective, there are only durable solutions to social and international issues when political actors embrace cosmopolitan criteria that balance the whole range of interests and respect the rights of everyone involved. Politics, knowledge, and global orders should be for people and they all should serve the purpose of freeing them from unnecessary harm and unfair or unbalanced globalized interactions. By extension, institutions and states must be assessed in terms of how they fare in overcoming various types of exclusion for insiders and outsiders.

However, it should be also noted that the fact that critical theory itself focuses on criticism creates an inherent unwillingness for its adherents to engage in selfcriticism. While critical theorists certainly have a point in saying that all knowledge is historical and interest-based, they do not tell, at least in a satisfactory way, how to step out of this historicity. Similarly, they do not provide a reliable and realistic way out of the circumstances that, in their view, enslave people, except in general terms. These issues certainly beg for further research for the proponents of critical theory if the theory is to be a more widelyappreciated grand theory of philosophy, sociology, as well as international relations.