Welcome to Monday Methods – a weekly feature we discuss, explain and explore historical methods, historiography, and theoretical frameworks concerning history.

Today's topic is Critical Theory dun dun duuuun.

But seriously, while this topic on this forum often comes up in connection with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, that is now what I want to talk about today but rather to give a primer on Critical Theory and critical theory as a school of thought and a philosophy. I'll get to difference between the captialized and un-capitalized version in a minute but first want to emphasize that this really is a condensed primer and nowhere near as differentiated and exhaustive as this school of thought is. As /u/kieslowskifan put it: "it is actually very difficult on social media platforms like Reddit to really do justice to their writings and ideas. [...] Social media platforms privilege the concise and simple, which are two things the Frankfurt School emphatically was not. Reddit, for example, has a 10000 character limit on its posts, and multi-part posts are possible, but clumsy. Hence, it is quite difficult to encapsulate their ideas in a TL/DR fashion without losing much of the important nuances."

Anyways, the first confusion to be cleared up is that when we talk about critical theory, there are two seperate, yet related things to talk about: There is Critical Theory (capitalized) and critical theory (uncapitalized). Critical Theory in the narrow sense describes a school of thought pioneered by a very heterogenous group of mostly German philosphers that is commonly known as the Frankfurt School. From some of the principles and ideas they laid out, a number of critical theories in the broader sense have been developed and emerged that include but are not limited to some feminist theories, critical race theory, critical legal studies, and so on and so forth.

What both of these, the narrow and broader form, have in common is that a critical theory provides the descriptive and normative bases for social inquiry aimed at decreasing domination and increasing freedom in all their forms.

"Not the mere accumulation of knowledge but the emancipation of man from slavery" is a quote from the essay "Critical and traditional theory" by Max Horkheimer, written in 1937, that somewhat summarizes the basic idea behind a critical theory and become the foundation for Critical Theory. Horkheimer, who together with Adorno, is probably the most prominent member of the Frankfurt School (a school of social theory and critical philosophy founded in the Weimar Republic in Frankfurt and encompassing thinkers such Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Löwenthal, and others), in this essay draws the distinction between critical and traditional theory:

Traditional theory, according to Horkheimer, is theory that, like Carthesian theory, focused on coherency and on the strict distinction between theory and praxis. It explain facts through the application of universal laws, so that by the subsumption of a particular into the universal, law was either confirmed or falsified. Knowledge, in this system, is a mirror of reality and that knowledge is the goal of theory.

Critical Theory rejects this approach. Rather, in Critical Theory, the goal of social inquiry is to combine goals and approaches from philosophy and the social sciences. It seeks explanation and understanding, structure and agency, and regularity and normativity at the same time. This, Horkheimer argues, leads to Critical Theory being an enterprise that that is practical in a moral sense, meaning it is theory that rather than some independent goal seeks human emancipation from circumstances of domination and oppression. Hence, it aims not at the mere accumulation of knowledge but at the application of knowledge and understanding as a tool of criticism with which existing circumstances of oppression and domination can be changed into a direction that more closely resembles the liberatory ideas of the enlightenment of equality, freedom, and solidarity.

For a theory to be a Critical Theory, it must, according to Horkheimer, meet the following three criteria: it must be explanatory, practical, and normative. That means, such a theory must a.) explain what is wrong with current social reality, b.) identify the actors to change it, and c.) provide both clear norms for criticism and achievable practical goals for social transformation.

Now Horkheimer and the other members of the Frankfurt School had read their Marx and while in line with their definition of what is Critical Theory, they rejected orthodox Marxism as a model of superstructure (ideology and culture) arising solely from economic conditions and as the way to liberation and emancipation lying solely in a revolution lead by the working class. Rather, they embraced the Marxian dictum of "man making their own history but not under conditions of their choosing" and this lead them to Horkheimer writing that Critical Theory "has as its object human beings as producers of their own historical form of life." Because of this, the emancipation and liberation Horkheimer, Adorno and the others seeks is the transformation of contemporary society into a more free and emancipated one by becoming more democratic, to make it such that, as he puts it, “all conditions of social life that are controllable by human beings depend on real consensus” in a society that embraces Enlightenment "Vernunft" (translated as rationality). Horkheimer's and the other's normative transform they seek therefore, is the transformation of capitalism in what they call a "real democracy" in which humans can control all the circumstances that humans can control by democratic consensus.

So far, so good. This, in broad strokes, is what Critical Theory and the host of critical theories like some feminist theories etc. pp. share: The idea that theory should be practical and through criticism seek to transform society into a direction that frees people from oppression through giving them democratic control over the conditions that influence their lives.

Where they often differ is the methods they employ in service of their critical theories, which isn't very surprising, given that Horkheimer and Adorno wrote their texts from the 20s to the 60s and quite a lot has happened since then in terms of philosophical theories and methods. Adorno and Horkheimer are very much steeped in what counted as the most exciting and interesting theories of their days: Marx and Freud's psychoanalysis. And this is very present in their writing and Critical Theory.

So, for example, for them the way to broach the gap between all the goals Critical Theory wants to achieve – explanation and understanding, structure and agency, and regularity and normativity – lies in dialectics inspired by Marx and Hegel. But they reject the metaphysical apparatus of Hegel (Rationality throughout history) and the eschatological aspects of Marx historical dialectic, instead seeking a dialectical application of different methods and the dialectics of capitalism itself as a system of exploitation as a method of social criticism. E.g. in order to operationalize knowledge gained from theory, one needs to take into account both the historical circumstance of the subject of knowledge as well as the historical circumstances of the receiving organ – the intellectual, scientist and so forth – and understand them through an application of a variety of methods applied in a dialectical manner.

More modern critical theory approaches have very much retained the idea of a combination of different methods but have in many ways expanded upon the application of dialectics through an infusion with more recent philosophical and social studies methods. For example, Critical Race Theory or others, would use the idea of discourse as pioneered by French theorists in the 60s and 70s – something that didn't exist in 1937 – in place of dialectics as the unifying aspect of many of its methodological approaches. But as already state, while approaches may vary, there is a unifying element between Critical Theory and critical theories in that theory should be unifying and aim to change circumstances of oppression and dominance by not simply explaining but by being practically applicable.

So, the gist of it all is that Critical Theory and critical theories seek not to merely expand upon knowledge of the social but to be applicable in a practical manner to change society in a sense that makes it more free and less oppressive through the application of a variety of scientific methods.