They didn’t have the courage to use the “M” word . . . and so they lied
By Stanley K. Ridgley, PhD
Critical Theory is built on deceit, and the deceit of critical theory begins with its name.
Critical Theory is a neo-Marxist ideology spawned almost a century ago in Germany in the Institute for Social Research, which aggregated a collection of impressive scholars whose speculations became known as the Frankfurt School.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were the most well-known of the theorists, with Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Jurgen Habermas rounding out an impressive and influential group of thinkers.
It was an open secret that “critical theory” was code for “Marxist.” This was acknowledged by Benjamin in his correspondence with philosopher Gershom Scholem.[1] It thus constitutes an ideology in any number of definitional schemas, although “critical theorists” chafe at the words “Marxist” and “ideology.” Writes Scholem:
I reminded him of our correspondence about the book by Franz Borkenau, which the Institute had launched very pretentiously in 1934 and which I had regarded as more philosophical chutzpah than a stringent Marxist analysis, and I asked him whether the work of the Institute still was proceeding along these lines. I told him that Horkheimer’s programmatic essays about what was now being circulated under the code word “critical theory” (for the word Marxism, which, as Benjamin explained to me, was now taboo for political reasons) had failed to enlighten me in this regard. (Only in New York did I learn from Adorno that they had realized in the meantime the flimsiness of this bulky concoction.)
The moniker “Critical Theory” is itself a fraud. According to Stephen Eric Bronner, it was coined in 1937 as a self-defensive workaround. The Frankfurt School was, after all, birthed from Marxism, and all of the early Frankfurt School members were “inspired by the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 and the euphoria surrounding the European radical uprisings of 1918-1923.”[2]
Because of the volatile and violent turn in 1930s Germany and the lack of support for communism in the United States, the Institute (transplanted to the US) needed a cover for its Marxist agenda.
Thus, critical theory was stamped from the beginning as a deceit designed to undermine democratic institutions. It is also what is called “self-sealing” and tautological, a product of circular reasoning. This is more than apparent in the most visible public spin-off of critical theory today—critical race theory, or what is more properly called critical racialist ideology.
Critical race theory is a bad theory, and bad theories are always in trouble, with believers perpetually cleaning up after them, forced to explain the latest disconfirmation. If theories were people, we’d recognize critical race theory as a pathological liar. Just like “critical theory.”
[1] Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1975, 1981), p. 210.
[2] Stephen Eric Bronner, Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 20.