Critical Theory and Social Transformation

Crises of the Present and Future Possibilities

Gerard Delanty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367276409
• eBook ISBN: 9781000037326
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Critical Theory and Social Transformation provides an exploration of the major themes in critical social theory of recent years. Delanty argues that a critical theory perspective can offer much-needed insights into the pressing socio-political challenges of our time. In this volume, he advances the need to reconnect social theory and social research and to return to the foundational concerns of critical social theory. Delanty engages with the key topics facing critical social theorists: capitalism, cosmopolitanism, modernity, the Anthropocene, and legacies of history. The connecting thread is that the topics are all contemporary challenges for critical theory and relate to major social transformations. The notions of critique, crisis, and social transformation are central to the book.

Critical Theory and Social Transformation will be of interest to the broad readership in social and political theory. It will appeal to those working in sociology, political sociology, politics, and international studies and to anyone with an interest in any of the chapter-specific topics, such as public space, memory, and neo-authoritarianism.

Part 1

Critical theory revisited

1
Spectres of critique

The legacy of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School

This book seeks to demonstrate the relevance of a critical theory of society for the present day. In this chapter, I set out the core ideas that define the nature and scope of critical theory.¹ It is necessary to do so as, I argue in what follows, critical theory has lost direction due to both internal and external developments. On the one side, critical theory has inevitably undergone considerable transformation from the original project associated with the early Frankfurt School to the varieties of post-Habermasian theory that now exist, of which Honneth’s recognition theory is perhaps the most influential. On the other side, since Foucault and postmodern theory, there has been a plethora of critical approaches in the human and social sciences that are very different from the Left-Hegelian tradition of the Frankfurt School. This spectrum would include Bourdieu’s critical sociology, critical realism, and Boltanski’s critical pragmatism, but it also includes what now also claims to be critical theory, namely, the French post-structuralist tradition, especially stemming from Foucault, postcolonial and de-colonial theory, and Lacanian feminism. Critical theory today has become a general term to refer to all of these traditions of radical thought which are reflected in a concern with the advancement of progressive politics. But beyond that they do not have much in common.

Such cross-fertilization of traditions – as in the confluence of Adorno and Foucault, once seen as incompatible – has undoubtedly been productive in interpretations of now classical authors (Allen 2016; Cook 2018). This has been acknowledged by thinkers associated with the postmodern turn such as Jameson and Lyotard.² However, in my view, such re-interpretations have a limited capacity to open up new avenues for critical theory as a programme of social research, which requires a macro-sociological re-direction. The limitations of the older approaches from Adorno and Horkheimer to Habermas are now all too clear, especially in light of the need to take into account a more global perspective and the necessity to address problems of Eurocentrism. A major limitation of the Frankfurt School tradition has been its preoccupation with European modernity and a lack of engagement with race and empire and the North-South relationship. The prominence of these concerns in social and political thought in recent times has led to a much wider and more diverse conception of critical theory. However, the result of such theoretical pluralization is that critical theory lacks both theoretical specificity and a theory of society.³ It is also evident that the various traditions of critique have not come together in a way that provides clear methodological directions for social research to address major questions for our time. One reason for this is simply because, beyond a certain level of agreement on the need for critique and the need to address legacies of colonialism, many approaches are simply incompatible and have different views on the meaning of critique and political praxis. While the Left-Hegelian tradition has much to learn from critical philosophies inspired by, for instance, Foucault, there are clear differences in these different traditions of critical theory. Despite some conceptual similarity and the concern with the total transformation of society, Foucault’s project was fundamentally different, as were his politics, given his ambivalent relation to neoliberalism.⁴

My position in this book is that the Left-Hegelian tradition of critical theory offers the most robust basis for critical theory as a framework of critical social research as opposed to a social or political philosophy. However, it will need to engage and learn from other conceptions of critique. I also argue for the need for a certain self-correction in the direction Left-Hegelianism has taken in recent years with recognition theory. While recognition theory has been one of the most fruitful developments in critical theory in re-connecting philosophy with social research, this has been at the cost of reducing the scope of critical theory to issues that can be framed in terms of a politics of recognition. I am not arguing for a return to an earlier kind of critical theory, such as Adorno’s, but for a re-appraisal and clarification of the core concepts. This is with a view to applications in social science rather than within philosophy. Critical theory has today become a largely philosophical project conducted mostly by philosophers. The original project for the integration of philosophy and sociology has been lost, despite some attempts to revive it, as in the work of Rahel Jaeggi (2018) and Hartmut Rosa (2015, 2019). This is not because of the retreat into philosophy but because sociology in recent times has not been sufficiently receptive to critical theory. As I see it, what is lacking is a concern with macro-sociological questions. Indeed, the reception of recognition theory, as perhaps the last remnant of the critical theory tradition, has mostly been in micro-sociology.

A brief overview of critical theory is in place in order to identify the core concepts and principal aims, beginning with the legacy of Left-Hegelianism. Critical theory operates at a high level of philosophical abstraction, with its key texts based on concepts derived from German idealism. This presents a number of difficulties which are compounded by different interpretations of the philosophical systems of Kant and Hegel. Moreover, the critical theorists more or less never explicitly defined their core concepts, such as their master concept of Reason (see Jay 1996/1973: 63). Despite the problems this all presents, an understanding of these concepts is necessary since they provide a framework for understanding the processes and conditions that render society possible and which are not discernible from empirical data as such.

The legacy of Left-Hegelianism

The intellectual legacy established by Hegel for later critical theory was a conceptual system for the analysis of the world in terms of the realization of Reason. While Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason, had confined the critique of Reason to the critique of metaphysical ideas that are transcendent and not derived from experience, Hegel posited Reason as unfolding historically in social reality. The critique of Reason thus became the critique of social reality, and Reason was historical rather than timeless.⁵ Rather than being limited, as in Kant, it was a phenomenological process of self-formation. Critical theory, despite its Hegelian and Marxist lineage, retains a distinctive Kantian influence in that Hegel appropriated Kant’s philosophy as, for example, in the notion of ideas of Reason. Later critical theorists, such as Habermas, re-affirmed the Kantian background as a corrective to Hegel’s historical re-working of Kant’s transcendental arguments. The Kantian tradition asserted the importance of what has to be presupposed in any account of the world (for example, a capacity for learning, for morality, for human judgement). Such presuppositions (which are ‘transcendental’ conditions) are not primarily empirical since they are more akin to principles and capacities integral to the make-up of human beings and society. Thus, for example, ideas of Reason such as peace, democracy, life, the person, humanity, and so on are not empirical as such in that nothing empirical corresponds to them. They are rather ideas of universal significance that make possible the formation of more specific empirical realities. They are the conditions of the possibility of social phenomena. Kant more than Hegel stressed this distinction, which illustrates how the social world is constituted and (though not Kant’s preoccupation) how it can be transformed. Hegel’s philosophy and Marx’s later provided critical theory with a way to develop a theory of social transformation which required going beyond the limited horizon of Kant’s concerns.

As developed in 1807 in Phenomenology of Spirit and in 1812–16 in the Science of Logic and applied from 1833 in the lectures on the philosophy of history,⁶ the elusive notion of Reason refers to the ideas of the modern world that attempt to shape the world according to how we think it should be. Now, for Hegel that largely revolved around the idea of freedom and how it might be realized and flourish in social reality. It was Hegel’s belief that freedom was the essential promise of modernity and that it was slowly emerging in the modern world with ever-greater possibilities for self-realization. As an emergent idea, it was more than an idea; it was part of the modern world and signaled the total transformation of society. However, it was also incomplete. It was this difference between the signs of its appearance and its incomplete existence that gave rise to the need for a critique of Reason. So, Reason is always present, but it is incomplete or unevenly developed. It is thus, in part, a condition of negativity in that it is not fully actualized, but it is also real in so far as it is manifest in reality.

While Hegel made much of the idea of freedom, which was the basis of emancipation, today this notion would need to be extended to include a wider spectrum of ‘ideas of Reason’, such as liberty, democracy, peace, truth, justice, equality, and autonomy. The legacy of Left-Hegelianism since the 1840s is to see these concepts as having normative relevance for the present and the basis of progressive politics. Left-Hegelianism was an interpretation of Hegel’s thought that stressed less metaphysics – and the realization of spirit – than the social and historical manifestation of Reason and in ways that offer a means for the present to transcend itself. As summed up by Habermas, since the first generation after Hegel, philosophy became ‘post-metaphysical’ while retaining the notion or Reason (Habermas 1992: 29). The Left-Hegelian tradition also established a methodology for social interpretation rather than relying on a philosophy of history. While such concepts as freedom, Reason, and so on may take an ideological form in justifying the existing state of affairs, they also have a transformative capacity to make possible new realities. As Marcuse wrote in 1941 in Reason and Revolution, a key work in transmitting Hegel’s more radical ideas to later critical theory: ‘Hegel did not declare that reality is rational (or reasonable), but preserved this attribute for a definite form of reality, namely, actuality. And the reality that is actual is the one wherein the discrepancy between the possible and the real has been overcome. Its fruition occurs through a process of change, with the given reality advancing in accordance with the possibilities manifest in it’ (Marcuse 1977: 153).

The idea of Reason, as expressed in Freedom, or these wider ideas of Reason, are concepts that are actualized to a degree in reality. They are not entirely abstractions in the sense of not having a concrete existence but refer to the accumulated cognitive potential that the world has built up in the course of history in shaping social reality. There is an immanent relationship between Reason and historical reality. The aim of philosophy is to reveal that relationship. To follow Marcuse again: ‘As such the real is not yet “actual”, but is at first only the possibility of an actual’ (p. 150). So, Reason refers not only to ideas that transcend social reality; it is also manifest in social reality. In other words, it is immanent in reality. For Honneth, ‘it amounts to the general thesis that each successful form of society is possible only through the maintenance of its most highly developed standard of rationality’ (Honneth 2009: 23). We can therefore say that Reason forms the basis of the Hegelian ontology, a characteristic of which is the incompleteness of reality. In order to understand how Reason is actualized, two other key concepts are required: mediation and dialectics.

By mediation, Hegelianism posits processes that connect (i.e. mediate) the different parts and dimensions of social reality. Thus, the realization of freedom in one part of the world connects with other parts, and the realization of freedom in one aspect of society, for example, civil society, filters through to the domain of the state. Processes of mediation bind social reality together such that the ideas of Reason become inherent in the world and in time become manifest at the level of consciousness as self-consciousness whereby the self sees itself reflected in the world. The existence of something is dependent on its relation to something else. Mediation is thus a concept of interdependence. It is how a unity is forged out of diversity. Thus, through recognition, to refer to another famous Hegelian term and which could be seen as a process of mediation, the self is a self by being recognized by another. More generally, mediation refers to the ways in which subject and object are mutually constituted through ideas of Reason rather than, as in Kant, residing in a dualism or in differentiated spheres of Reason. According to Susan Buck-Morss (2009), Hegel took inspiration from the Haitian Revolution of 1791, which made possible emancipation from slavery and colonialism. It is possible that this interpretation inspired the famous discussion of master and slave in the Phenomenology of Spirit. If this is the case, it would suggest that this radical idea of freedom had a profound mediating influence in the modern world in stemming from Haiti as much as from Paris.

The mediation of Reason in the world is not a simple matter of the manifestation of ideas in social reality or a linear and harmonious process. It is achieved through dialectics, by which is meant relations of antagonism and contradiction through which new realities are created. The notion of dialectics captures the transformative process by which ideas of Reason become actualized or mediated in the world. It signifies a notion of reality as manifest in processes of transformation by which ideas work through reality to create new forms. While Hegel frequently fell into the trap of idealism, in seeing the relation of ideas to reality as one-sided, with reality simply reflecting ideas of Reason, his philosophy in fact informed a more radical interpretation that gave a stronger emphasis to the transformative moment in which reality undergoes a fundamental shift as a result of the development of its own ideas and latent possibilities.

This path of development, which makes possible developmental logics, is played out in terms of the interrelations of three worlds or levels of reality: the subjective world, the intersubjective world of social relations, and the objective world of nature. The combination of these levels is one of the critical factors in the shaping of reality. A critical theory approach requires taking all of these dimensions into account. It is this larger picture of the world that necessitates a macro-sociological approach and a theory of society that encompasses the learning capacities of society.⁷

The core of the intellectual legacy of Hegel’s philosophy, as taken up by the left-wing tradition of Hegelianism – the so-called Young Hegelians such as, most famously, Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner and, of course, Karl Marx – was a conception of critique that was addressed to the contradictions, struggles, paradoxes, and crises of modernity across these dimensions. Since Marx, the dialectical conception of history gave a special place to social struggles as advancing the realization of Reason in the world. It became integral to a tradition of critical thought that strongly defended a normative view of society, that is, the belief that a better world is possible. Unlike utopian thought, with which it had much in common, the critical mind did not accept that a better world was impossible or not of this world. In other words, the normative position of critique was rooted in an ontological position tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1 Critical theory revisited
• Part 2 Capitalism, cosmopolitanism, the Anthropocene
• Part 3 Space, memory and legacies of history
• Index