Critical Theory as Post-Marxism: The Frankfurt School and Beyond - Detailed Notes

Critical Theory as Post-Marxism

Critical theory, as a Post-Marxist discourse, broadly involves theoretical scholarship aimed at interrogating the structures and discourses of power.
It encompasses interdisciplinary thinkers from cultural studies, Marxism, linguistics, sociology, philosophy, and psychoanalytic criticism.
Key figures include those from the Frankfurt School (Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Jurgen Habermas, and Axel Honneth) and other Continental European thinkers like Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, and Louis Althusser.
Broadly, critical theory can apply to French thinkers employing Marxist and non-Marxist frameworks, as well as structuralist, post-structuralist, postmodernist, and psychoanalytic traditions, including Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard, and Gilles Deleuze with Félix Guattari.
Narrowly, it applies to works in the tradition of modernity and includes postmodern thought.
Conventional themes include critiques of modern, global capital and wage-labor relations, and ideas arising from late capitalism, including mass consumerism.

Origins of Critical Theory

The transition from feudalism to industrialization exposed social and cultural inequalities.
New social relations between owners and workers, the educated and illiterate, and the powerful versus the marginalized fostered structural critiques.
Critical theory originates from Karl Marx, Marxism, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, and Sigmund Freud.
Herbert Marcuse noted that critical social theory rests on G.W.F. Hegel, with Immanuel Kant as an early critical philosopher.
Karl Korsch was an early 20th-century Marxist whose work Marxism and Philosophy influenced the Frankfurt School.
The Frankfurt School drew on Nietzsche and Freud, leading to Freudo-Marxism.

Forerunners to Critical Theory

Neo-Kantianism in German academic institutions reapplied Kant’s critical philosophy to the ‘human sciences’, ‘cultural sciences’, and social sciences.
This marked early theory construction of a critical nature, problematizing how power operates in structural and discursive constructs.
Thinkers borrowed from Destutt de Tracy’s French academy, where the concept of ideology originated.
Wilhelm Dilthey pioneered the study of human sciences in Berlin and influenced the Frankfurt School.
Georg Simmel and Max Weber were also influential in the cultural and social sciences.
Weber’s theories of rationalization and disenchantment were important to modern critical theory, especially Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas.
Weber’s critiques of dialectical reason and skeptical social inquiry were built on his social theory of a calling and his iron cage of bureaucratic society.

Canonical Critical Theory: The Frankfurt School

The Frankfurt School and its Institute for Social Research exemplify scholars employing critical theory.
They aimed to understand how cultural messages compelled millions into embracing Nazism.
The school embraced interdisciplinary academic works to understand complexities in neo-industrial societies.
The first generation included Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Ernst Bloch.
The second generation included Jurgen Habermas.
The third generation includes Axel Honneth, Hans Joas, and Claude Offe.
Nancy Fraser and Seyla Benhabib are U.S.-based political philosophers informally considered part of the third generation.
Habermas engaged in scholarly dialogues with Michel Foucault, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Jean-François Lyotard.
The Frankfurt School is known for its cultural critiques, questioning media's role, examining cultural text production, and interrogating audience consumption of cultural artifacts.

Critical Social Theory and Post-Marxism

Critical theory includes critical social, political, and cultural theory drawn upon by various disciplines.
Philosophers have long explored critical political theory, differentiating new cultural terrain from social and political philosophy.
Critical theory is often used in English, Comparative Literature, and Communications departments.
English departments often employ Foucault and the Frankfurt School, while Philosophy departments typically rely solely on the Frankfurt School.
Foucault and other French theorists are grouped in post-structuralism, separate from critical theory’s tradition of continental philosophy.
Interdisciplinary approaches have been more productive than disciplinary frameworks in understanding socio-cultural and political societies.

Notable Critical Theorists and Theories

Critical theory's interdisciplinary nature means many academic lines of thought contribute to its evolution.
Georg Lukács (1885–1971) was a Hungarian philosopher who refined the Marxist notion of reification.
Lukács’ theory of reification articulated social relations and power dynamics in modernity.
His work History and Class Consciousness and The Theory of the Novel extended his theory.
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a literary critic and cultural theorist associated with the Frankfurt School.
He proposed a theory of ‘aura’ in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.
His Arcades Project critiqued everyday life.
Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) developed a critical theory of the metropolis in The Mass Ornament.
His work shares commonalities with Benjamin and Georg Simmel.
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) is best known for his theory of hegemony.
He analyzed Italian history, culture, politics, and economics, believing oppression was a cultural phenomenon.
The subaltern, citizens relegated to the margin of society, exist in the terrain of oppression.
The Gramscian dialectic suggests the organic intellectuals within the subaltern stratum can yield a possibility of subsuming the main dominant power base, which he called ‘hegemony’.
Hegemony is neither good nor bad, but it is merely a descriptive label for elements of power in society. It is a conception of societal power, but not a coercive, or forceful power, but rather power that operates based on the consent of the governed.
Gramsci argued that hegemony was ‘gelatinous’, meaning it ebbs and flows based on historical moments, or blocs. When hegemony is weak, other cultural groups could establish their own hegemonic principles through civil society.
Gramsci used the military metaphors of ‘war of position’ and ‘war of maneuver’ to explain how hegemonic transitions can occur.
Transitions can transpire if individuals can recognize and reflexively overcome ‘common sense’, or the everyday unquestioned assumptions that permeate society and allow the hegemony to function relatively without molestation.
Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) pursued ‘ideology critique’, presenting critical theory as primarily a political activity.
Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) directed the Frankfurt School and established critical theory as separate from the social sciences.
In his work, he described the differences between traditional theory and critical theory and Stated how critical theory could be considered by some as an intellectual activity that was between philosophy and social science.
His critical theory of The Eclipse of Reason continued themes from Dialectic of Enlightenment, namely, how reason had turned into its opposite in modernity, or how all truth is relative in the deception of the culture industry.
Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) developed critical theory beyond philosophy, including in metaphysics, epistemology, art, and musicology.
One of his critical themes in aesthetics was the idea of content versus form, and in metaphysics was the long subjective/ objective dichotomy in that philosophical tradition.
His idea of critical consciousness had socio-economic implications for the development and fate of democracy in modernity.
Adorno embodied the idea of critical theory as a largely pessimistic intellectual activity, yet one that involved and promoted the full use of the faculties of reason.
Adorno also proposed a critical theory that portrayed subjective identity in modernity and its late capitalism as ‘psychoanalysis in reverse’ which represented his continental philosophical attempt at extending and reviving nineteenth century relativism in the social sciences. This complemented and built on Lukács’ neo-Marxian theory of false consciousness, which nearly all the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School added to or revised in some fashion.
Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) applied critical theory to the aesthetic dimension and incorporated Freud’s psychoanalysis.
He became a leading figure of the New Left, synthesizing European critical theory with Leftist American thought.
His book One-Dimensional Man critiqued advanced industrial society.
Erich Fromm (1900–1980) developed a critical theory of society from Freud and other psychological works analyzing mass society and consumerism.
The Frankfurt School attempted to synthesize Marx and Nietzsche and build a bridge between Hegel and Marx.
Adorno critiqued jazz music and jazz culture in his philosophy and sociology of music and functioned as the Frankfurt School’s chief music critic. His critical philosophy of music was aesthetic, ontological, and metaphysical.
Louis Althusser (1918–1990) was important for critical theory because of his theory of ideology.
Althusser used structural pillars – the repressive state apparatuses (RSAs) and ideological state apparatuses (ISAs).
ISAs, on the other hand, function through ideology in mostly private arenas, such as churches, schools, etc.. The society can forcefully impose its views on society, or it can insert its raison d’etre through common cultural sites. The individual subject, over time, grows accustomed to the state's ideology to the point where their subjectivity is ‘interpellated’. Althusser uses the analogy of a police officer yelling ‘hey you’ at a citizen, and the citizen turns to see what is the matter.
According to the perspective of the ruling order, ideology inculcates itself into our very identity based upon our position in the larger societal fabric.
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) contributed a critical theory of politics, examining power dynamics in authoritarian regimes in The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Jurgen Habermas (1929–) re-established critical theory at the Frankfurt School, signaling a communicative turn.
Habermas wrote The Theory of Communicative Action that signaled a communicative turn in critical theory.
He built on Weber’s notion of rationalization and discussed the role of media in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
Habermas opposed post-modernity, arguing critical theory was intended as a purely modern discourse.
His critical theory proved influential among sociology and political science.
His work launched a leading contribution to discourse ethics and discourse theory.
Those following in his tradition of critical theory at the Frankfurt School include his students Claus Offe, Axel Honneth, Hans Joas, Oskar Negt, and Karl-Otto Apel.
Those among the first generation of critical theory also included Friedrich Pollock, Leo Lowenthal, Otto Kirchheimer, and Franz Neumann.
*“French” Critical Theory included Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard.
In literary criticism, critical theory’s relation to postmodernism and post-structuralism was examined in full by the employment of these French thinkers’ works, as was the case with the earlier structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss, and in that sense, his predecessor, Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. The postmodern Marxist, American Fredric Jameson, was also studied among the tradition there.
British cultural studies employed critical theory, reformulating Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and drawing upon Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes.
Other works of critical theory by French thinkers include Etienne Balibar, Lucien Goldmann, Sylvère Lotringer, Paul Virilio, Georges Bataille, Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, and to a certain extent, the social practice theory of Pierre Bourdieu, including his notions of habitus and reflexivity.
Recent European critical theory includes Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Rancière, Umberto Eco, and Peter Sloterdijk.
Žižek’s critical theory synthesized Hegel and Lacan.
Recent critical theory in the U.S. includes Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, Seyla Behabib, Michael Hardt, Douglas Kellner, Thomas McCarthy, Donna Haraway, and Avital Ronell.
A recent theme in political economy among critical theory has been the critique of Neo-Liberalism that was begun in the late lectures of Foucault.
Post-colonial theorists have also formed a venue for contemporary critical theory, including Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi Bhabha.
Other Marxists that have contributed to critical theory have included Marshall Berman, Stanley Aronowitz, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Antonio Negri.
In a certain sense the social theorist Anthony Giddens has too, as well as Ulrich Beck, Scott Lash and Zygmunt Bauman, the latter of which by the proposing of his theory of liquid modernity and critique of postmodern consumerism.