The Challenge of Progress

Theory Between Critique and Ideology

Harry F. Dahms

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781787145726
• eBook ISBN: 9781787149809
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Globalization has accelerated the process of social, political, cultural, and especially economic transformations since the 1990s. In recent decades, this has cast doubt over the validity and reliability of many working assumptions about the nature and logic of progress in modern societies, at all levels of social structure and complexity. 

In The Challenge of Progress, editor Harry F. Dahms and a series of contributors explore how this doubt has been magnified, looking at how the institutions and constellations between business, labor and government have begun to weaken. The essays included in this volume examine the foundations, nature and contradictions of progress in the modern era. Anchored by - but not exclusively focused on - a debate of Amy Allen's recent book, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (2016), the eleven essays identify, analyse and confront the challenges of progress, looking across social class, philosophy, history and culture in their analyses. 

For researchers and students across social theory, this is an unmissable volume confronting the present and future of our societies. Examining the choices of modern society, Dahms and contributors ask: what are the social costs of "progress"?

PART I
IDENTIFYING THE CHALLENGE: A CRITICAL DISCUSSION OF THE END OF PROGRESS: DECOLONIZING THE NORMATIVE FOUNDATIONS OF CRITICAL THEORY (2016), BY AMY ALLEN

HISTORY, CRITIQUE, AND PROGRESS: AMY ALLEN’S “END OF PROGRESS” AND THE NORMATIVE GROUNDING OF CRITICAL THEORY

Reha Kadakal

ABSTRACT

Allen’s critique of current Frankfurt School theory presents the joint methods of “problematizing genealogy” and “metanormative contextualism” as alternative for the normative grounding of critical theory. Through a close reading of Allen’s critique, I investigate whether Allen’s identification of philosophy of history is an accurate diagnosis of the problems of the normative grounding of current Frankfurt School theory, whether Allen’s distinction between metanormative and normative levels is tenable for critical theory, and whether Allen’s methodology constitutes a viable alternative for the normative grounding of critical theory. As an alternative, I suggest scrutinizing the grounding strategies of current Frankfurt School theory to expand beyond their genealogy in Enlightenment thought, and address the question of what made the affirmative form of thought underlying current Frankfurt School theory a historical possibility. Expanding on Allen’s reiteration of the mediated nature of categories, I suggest that the stark contrast between forms of thought underlying first- and second-generation Frankfurt School critical theory needs to be understood not in relation to philosophy of history but against the backdrop of the specific context of the European historical present that informs its normative universe.

Keywords: Philosophy of history; critical theory; normative social theory; Frankfurt School; genealogy; Hegel

What is the relationship between history and critique? Is critical social theory possible without a conception of historical progress? Where do we seek the normative grounding of critical social theory in an epoch defined as “postmetaphysical”?

In Amy Allen’s recent work The End of Progress (2016), these and similar questions on the relation of theory, critique, and normativity reassert their significance for a critique of the normative horizon and internal structure of the current generation of Frankfurt School critical theory, as represented in the works of Habermas, Honneth, and Forst. More specifically, Allen points to a fundamental problem of the normative-theoretical framework of current Frankfurt School thought: it remains inadequate, indeed silent on the forms of domination made possible through colonialism, the challenges that followed in its aftermath through the postcolonial period, and the forms of neocolonial domination that characterize the contemporary political landscape. We are compelled to ask how is it that, despite its essential critical and emancipatory intent, Frankfurt School theory has not taken up the questions of colonial domination that have been central to postcolonial critique? The question involves more than simply the problem of the relative shortcomings of a research agenda of the Frankfurt School tradition. Rather, Allen’s critique reveals that such a lack of engagement with the fundamental questions of colonization and its legacies emerges from a central problem in the normative foundations of current Frankfurt School thought, namely its strategy of grounding normativity through the notion of historical progress. Allen interrogates such a notion of historical progress, as well as the form of theorizing within which it is envisaged, in the context of the historical relationship between Europe and its colonized “others.” For Allen, the commitment to the “idea of historical progress” as a means to “ground normativity” defines the current Frankfurt School’s distinctive approach. This is also the “biggest obstacle” to decolonize the Frankfurt School theory (Allen, 2016, p. 3).

In this chapter, I will respond to Amy Allen’s critique of the normative foundations of current Frankfurt School social theory. More specifically, I will engage her critique of the notion of progress that Allen takes as a grounding category for its normative claims, and the alternative methodology she offers to counter its problems. In order to better assess Allen’s critique, in what follows, I will first delineate the main points of Allen’s critique of normativity in current Frankfurt School theory. I will then outline the methodology Allen offers as a means to an alternative normative grounding of critical social theory. This methodology draws on Foucault and Adorno and rests on two key tools, namely problematizing genealogy and metanormative contextualism. Only after such an account of her overall argument, I will be able to draw out possible implications of these methodological tools for critical social theory. From the outset, it must be pointed out that Allen’s work is not a claim for the impossibility of normative ends of social theory, or a rejection of the aims of critical theory in general and Frankfurt School critical social theory in particular. Nor is it an attempt at relativism. In pointing to the problematic grounding of the normative claims of current Frankfurt School theory, and by developing an alternative methodology for normative truth claims, her work seeks to rebuild critical social theory and its normative intent on sound theoretical as well as practical foundations. Allen’s critique necessitates reflecting not only on the limitations of current Frankfurt School theory, and the questions of its relevancy for the contemporary moment, but also on the task of critical social theory beyond the Frankfurt School tradition, its foundational questions as well as its normative ends. Nevertheless, it is the premise of this essay that the success of every critical-theoretical paradigm ultimately hinges upon the question of how its methodology measures up against the task it sets for itself from the outset. In the final part of the essay, I will lay out my reservations regarding Allen’s methodology and examine in what ways such an alternative methodology may not be viable for the normative ends of critical theory. I will end my discussion of Allen’s work by expanding on her emphasis on the question of mediation and will elaborate on its further implications on the current Frankfurt School thought.

HISTORY AND NORMATIVITY

Within the overall work of the current generation of Frankfurt School theory, Allen identifies two main strategies for grounding normativity. The first path represents what Allen refers to as a “neo-Hegelian reconstructivist strategy”, embodied in the works of Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, where “historical progress and sociocultural learning and development” serve as the central ideas. The second path represents a “neo-Kantian constructivist strategy”, where normativity is grounded in a foundationalist conception of “practical reason”, as exemplified in the work of Rainer Forst (Allen, 2016, p. xv). While each of these strategies consists in a conception of history that informs a particular paradigm of normativity, and hence constitutes the subject–matter of Allen’s critique, in this chapter I will limit my discussion to the fundamental questions arising from Allen’s critique of Habermas and Honneth – that is, those theorists she identifies with a neo-Hegelian tradition. The issues arising from Allen’s critique of Forst’s work, on the other hand, involve an exposition of the fundamental problems of Kant’s philosophy, the kind of social theory it informs, and its limitations in providing a philosophical horizon for critical social theory, and as such, requires a separate treatment that I will not tackle at the moment.

As Allen conceives it, the main tenets of Habermas’ and Honneth’s overall theoretical-normative framework build on the argument that “our current communicative or recognitional practices represent the outcome of a cumulative and progressive learning process and therefore are deserving of our support and allegiance” (2016, p. 3).

For Allen, the cornerstones of Habermas’ and Honneth’s strategy, namely communicative consensus and recognition, consist in a “progressive, developmental understanding of history as a way of grounding normativity” (2016, p. 3). Evidently, the notion of history-as-progress is not new to the history of ideas. In fact, as Allen points out, such a concept of progress occupied prominent roles in the forms of philosophy of history running through Kant, Hegel, and Marx (Allen, 2016, p. 8). Central to this philosophy of history was a notion of an end of history or telos, a “metaphysically loaded conception” that designates a goal of history and the direction of its progress variously conceived as “the kingdom of ends” (Kant), the “Absolute” (Hegel), or “communist utopia” (Marx) (Allen, 2016, p. 8). Allen points out that, while current Frankfurt School thinkers do not adhere to a philosophy of history and its idea of historical progress in the traditional sense of the concept, she nevertheless observes that there are remnants of such a philosophy of history in their grounding strategy (2016, pp. 8–9). Accordingly, unlike the traditional form of philosophy of history, the notion of progress as it figures into current Frankfurt School theory is “contingent rather than necessary, disaggregated rather than total, and postmetaphysical rather than metaphysical” (Allen, 2016, p. 9). For Allen, these postmetaphysically conceived notions of progress in history are expressed in the form of “sociocultural development, historical learning, and moral-political progress that inform Habermas’ and Honneth’s conceptions of modernity” (2016, p. 9). I will return to the question of Allen’s depiction of philosophy of history and its larger implications for social theory in the second half of this essay. For the moment, however, it is important to specify how a philosophy of history, as Allen conceives it, relates to the problems of normativity in current Frankfurt School theory.

For Allen, the conception of progress raises fundamental questions in relation to the normative-theoretical framework of critical theory. To begin with, Allen points out that such normative aims are grounded in a “developmentalist, progressive reading of history,” and such a reading, in turn, is immanently interrelated with the “civilizing mission of the West” and its inherent connection to power (2016, p. 3). In adopting a progressive reading of history as a grounding strategy, however, the current Frankfurt School theory not only brackets this idea of the “civilizing mission of the West” and its relation to power, but also ignores the fact that this “civilizing mission” emerged from, and is, in turn, inseparable from the European Enlightenment. That Enlightenment legacy served not only to justify colonialism and imperialism but also “continues to underwrite informal imperialism or neocolonialism” (Allen, p. 3). Against such an affirmative model of “history-as-progress,” Allen reminds us of Horkheimer’s fundamental distinction between critical and traditional theory, and asserts that critical theory must “hold open the central tension between power, on the one hand, and normativity and rationality, on the other” (2016, p. xiv). It is such a tension between power and normativity, along with its accompanying forms of rationality, that separates critical theory’s understanding of the critical subject, as Allen puts it, as “self-consciously rooted in and shaped by the power relations in the society that she nevertheless aims self-reflexively and rationally to critique” (2016, p. xiii). Only when seen from this standpoint at the intersection of power, rationality and normative claims do the inadequacy of the notion of history-as-progress that underlies the normative grounding of current Frankfurt School theory become clear. For Allen, resolving this tension either through power (the ultimate standpoint of political realism) or through normativity amounts to a form of theory that builds on idealizing presuppositions, and as such, it would be in contradiction with the task of critical theory (Allen, 2016, p. xiv). “History-as-progress,” accordingly, manifests a fundamental shortcoming of the normative-theoretical framework of the current Frankfurt School theory. Whereas both Habermas and Honneth attempt to ground normativity through what Allen calls a “backward looking story of historical progress” (2016, p. 13), Allen invokes Adorno to argue that for a critical social theory that is “truly critical,” it is in fact necessary to “[call] into question the conception of progress as a historical ‘fact’” (2016, p. 198). For Allen, one result of this inadequate approach to grounding normativity is that “a gulf has opened up between the Frankfurt School approach to critical theory and critical theory done under the heading of postcolonial theory” (2016, p. xv).

Nevertheless, the fundamental shortcomings of the current Frankfurt School theory vis-à-vis the critical and political needs of the present are not only discernible from the standpoint and purposes of postcolonial theory. Allen’s critique also scrutinizes the grounding strategies of Habermas and Honneth against the measure of the very goals of the Frankfurt School tradition of critical social theory. As Allen states, the object of the Frankfurt School tradition of critique extends from “political economy” and “social-cultural analysis” to “theories of self or individual” simultaneously (2016, p. xiii). Put this way, the failure of the normative foundations of critical theory is not only a matter of abstruse theory construction. What is at stake is also the practical aspect of critical social theory and the interest in human freedom that distinguishes critical theory from other theoretical endeavors. As such, a truly critical normative-theoretical alternative to what is currently available in the Frankfurt School tradition is crucial for the contemporary relevance of critical theory (Allen, 2016, p. xiv). The challenge that Allen identifies for critical theory, then, is how to integrate a fundamental critique of Eurocentric and colonial history and its accompanying discourses of “progress” while also grounding the normative and emancipatory aims of critical theory. In Allen’s account, the task of “decolonizing” is already inherent in the very purpose of critical theory.

Given Allen’s critique, where do we seek a conception of history, and with it, alternative standards with which to ground the normative horizon of critical theory? Allen pursues such an alternative normative grounding through a synthesis of Adorno and Foucault, specifically in their respective insights into the relationship between history and normative truth claims (2016, p. 186). In reading Adorno and Foucault together, Allen’s goal is to rethink the relationship between history and normativity through a new theoretical and conceptual framework (2016, p. 165). Through this synthesis, Allen not only problematizes the very idea of historical progress that ignores, among other things, the immanent relation of the notion of “progress” to the “logic of colonialism,” but also offers a methodology for critical theory to decolonize itself (2016, p. 201). In what follows next, I will briefly outline the main features of her alternative methodology that draws on Adorno and Foucault, followed by my critical assessment of the viability of that methodology.

THE ENTANGLEMENT OF REASON AND POWER

For Allen, Foucault’s and Adorno’s thought converge at a point where they each express a fundamental skepticism about the concept of “progress” as a means to understand the history of modernity and its underlying “a-temporal point of view.” They both consider such a view to be a “metaphysical illusion” (Allen, 2016, pp. 163–164). In so doing, both Foucault and Adorno, according to Allen, offer a break with the tradition of philosophy of history and its underlying notion of dialectics that had defined Hegel’s conception of history (2016, p. 164). As such, they both represent an attempt to “think through Hegel but also beyond him” (Allen, 2016, p. 164). That attempt, as Allen points out, is guided by a desire for the fuller realization of normative content through a broader framework of “immanent critique” (2016, pp. 164–165). For Allen, this immanent critique involves a normative intent: it demands that the contemporary representatives of Enlightenment thought “live up more fully to its own normative ideals of freedom, inclusion and respect for the other” (2016, p. 165). It is because of such normative content, Allen points out, that it is crucial to recover the immanent critique in Foucault and Adorno as a possible means to decolonize critical theory (2016, p. 165).

Drawing on this notion of immanent critique, Allen builds an alternative methodology by reconstructing the main thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Allen points out that in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1994), where Adorno and Horkheimer identify Enlightenment rationality as the sources of “totalitarian repression,” the Enlightenment does not stand for simply a particular epoch of history; rather the object of their critique is the whole process of “regressive rationalization” whose outcome is the increasing domination not only of nature but also of human beings, and whose origin is captured in the notion of “will to mastery” (Allen, 2016, pp. 166–169). Allen stresses that for Adorno and Horkheimer, the “will to mastery” does not originate in the Enlightenment. Rather, the latter represents its full fruition. Arguing against Habermas’ interpretation of the main thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment as “a totalizing critique or abstract negation of the normative content of Enlightenment modern...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Editorial Advisory Board
• Introduction
• PART I IDENTIFYING THE CHALLENGE: A CRITICAL DISCUSSION OF THE END OF PROGRESS: DECOLONIZING THE NORMATIVE FOUNDATIONS OF CRITICAL THEORY (2016), BY AMY ALLEN
• PART II ASSESSING THE CHALLENGE: PROGRESS, POLITICS, AND IDEOLOGY
• PART III CONFRONTING THE CHALLENGE: THE DYNAMICS OF PROGRESS IN THE MODERN AGE
• About the Contributors
• Index