Traditional and Critical Theory Today: Toward a Critical Political Science

Abstract

In the famous early theoretical manifesto of the Frankfurt School, “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937), Max Horkheimer proclaimed the necessity of rethinking the direction in which theory was moving in the context of the circulating intellectual traditions of phenomenology, sociology of knowledge, neo-Kantianism, and positivism. For Horkheimer, while the theoretical terrain associated with 1930s Europe seemed diverse and possibly open to radical directions and progressive articulations, it ultimately conspired to reinforce the socio-economic status quo in which human beings were controlled by the very practices they created and continue to recreate. Drawing on the spirit and concepts of Horkheimer’s opening salvo for critical theory published eighty years ago, I argue that it is time to reinvest in the commitments heralded in the problematic of critical theory and continue to promote a critical political science that takes seriously the importance of critique and human emancipation.

Notes

¹ Karl Marx, “For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing,” in Robert Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 1978), p. 15.

² Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, M. O’Connell, trans. (New York, NY: Herder and Herder, 1972), p. 209. Horkheimer uses the term “savants” to characterize the technicians of traditional theory.

³ Horkheimer, “Postscript,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, p. 246.

⁴ Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” p. 238. This metatheoretical commitment on the part of Marxism is nicely rendered in Marx’s Thesis VIII in Theses of Feuerbach: “All mysteries which mislead theory into mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the contemplation of this practice” (The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 145).

⁵ As Antonio Negri proffered in his book on Lenin’s thought: the Marxist tradition “is a negation of ideology: it is never simply theoretical continuity, filiations, continuous processes leading from thought to thought, but always a rupture and renovation of political hypotheses confronting the needs, exigencies, urgency, and new qualities presented by the revolutionary subject” [Factory of Strategy: 33 Lessons on Lenin, Arianna Bove, trans. (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2014), p. 6.]. See, also, the discussion of Marx and living traditions in Bradley J. Macdonald, Performing Marx: Contemporary Negotiations of a Living Tradition (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006), pp. 13–30.

⁶ Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” p. 214.

⁷ Marcuse, “Philosophy and Critical Theory,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, Jeremy Shapiro, trans. (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 142.

⁸ For an overview of the general character of critical theory and the variety of traditions that have developed under its theoretical rubric, see Bradley J. Macdonald, “Critical Theory,” in M. Gibbons (ed.), Encyclopedia of Political Thought (New York, NY: Blackwell-Wiley, 2014 online; 2015 print).

⁹ See, for example, Razmig Keucheyan’s overview of contemporary critical theories in The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today, G. Elliott, trans. (London, UK: Verso Press, 2013), for a sense of critical theory’s importance and dispersion in the contemporary period.

¹⁰ Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, in The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 162.

¹¹ Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, p. 145.

¹² Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in The Marx- Engels Reader, p. 60.

¹³ Marx, “For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing,” p. 15.

¹⁴ Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, pp. 143, 145.

¹⁵ Ibid., 144.

¹⁶ Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964), pp. xii–xiii.

¹⁷ Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” p. 188.

¹⁸ Ibid., 190–191.

¹⁹ Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” p. 209. See also Theodor Adorno’s critique in “Sociology of Knowledge and Its Consciousness,” in Prisms, Samuel and Shierry Weber, trans. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), pp. 37–49; and Marcuse’s concerns in “Philosophy and Critical Theory,” pp. 140, 148, 149.

²⁰ Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” p. 199.

²¹ Ibid., 207.

²² In speaking of “companion,” I am referring to Michel Foucault’s characterization of Maurice Blanchot’s literary work, in which a doubling presence arises that questions the self-assurance of the original identity, initiating a discursive process that is “indissociably echo and denial,” a deterritorialization of theoretical intent toward a radical possibility of an alternative. See Foucault, “The Thought of the Outside,” in J. Faubion (ed.), Esthetics, Method, and Epistemology, Volume 2, Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 (New York, NY: The New Press, 1998), p. 163.

²³ Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” p. 207.

²⁴ Ibid., 207, 208.

²⁵ Ibid., 213.

²⁶ Ibid., 218.

²⁷ Ibid., 214.

²⁸ Ibid., 241.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ For an historical and intellectual analysis of the Caucus, see Clyde Barrow, “The Intellectual Origins of New Political Science,” New Political Science, 30:2 (2008), pp. 215–244. The updated, extended, “uncut” version of Barrow’s 2008 article appears in this 2017 Special Edition of New Political Science.

³¹ For a comprehensive overview of the debates and positions surrounding the Perestroika movement, consult Kristen Renwick Monroe (ed.), Perestroika!: The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science (New Haven, NY: Yale University Press, 2005). See also the astute analysis of the limitations of the Perestroika movement in Keith Topper, The Disorder of Political Inquiry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), particularly, pp. 181–216.

³² The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship, and Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). While Ricci argues persuasively that the conflict between the discipline’s myopic commitment to scientific analysis (in either positivist, neo-Popperian, or post-behaviorialist forms) and its historical commitment to furthering democratic citizenship has had tragic consequences, his discussion of critical theory and other critical approaches to the study of politics fails to recognize the consistency and importance of this scholarly insurgency.

³³ See Robert Dahl, “The Behavioral Approach in Political Science: Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest,” American Political Science Review 55: 4 (1961), pp. 763–772.

³⁴ Marcuse, “Philosophy and Critical Theory,” pp. 136–137.