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Critical theory was initially conceived as a philosophical and social scientific doctrine that called into question the most fundamental sources of social domination in advanced capitalist societies. Its focus was on the various ways that instrumental reason, channeled and harnessed by the pressures of capital and the pulse of market exchange value, had the capacity to deform the cognitive powers of subjects and weaken their ability to critique the prevailing norms and institutions that secured power over them. The withering of critical agency was therefore the central concern of the early critical theorists who saw the dominant forms of theoretical self-understanding as reflecting and reproducing those same forms of power and sought to promote a new kind of theory that would be able to overcome the reification of consciousness. In so doing, they extended and deepened the traditions of western Marxism, the sociological theories of Max Weber, and saw their linkages with the personality and the psyche in their turn to psychoanalysis and social psychology. But at the heart of their program was the thesis that societies based on hierarchy and dominance had adverse, pathological effects upon consciousness and culture. What was essential in the process of critique was the unification of reason with resistance; with “the power to resist established opinions and, one and the same, also to resist existing institutions, to resist everything that is merely posited, that justifies itself with its existence.”1 Critique is therefore always in tension with the given reality and the practices and concepts that it made ambient in a world increasingly riven with reification and dehumanization.

Critique, in the sense that it was taken up by the Frankfurt School in the mid-twentieth century, was also centrally concerned with the confrontation of the very model of society shaped by capital, exchange value, and the increasing power of commodification to shape the nature of consciousness and the personality of modern subjects. Critical theorists therefore saw that the problem of a new form of rationality—one shaped by the harnessing of new forms of social production and technology—was eroding the critical consciousness of modern subjects. At the core of their project was an interdisciplinary theory of modern society that would take as its primary task the articulation of a theory of society that was immune and insurgent to the reified forms of thinking and practice that was infected by capitalist social relations.

But today a new paradigm of critical theory has risen from the ashes of the old. What I am calling here the “domestication” of critical theory therefore refers to the ways that the linguistic, procedural, and recognitive turn in critical theory that was initiated in the 1970s and 1980s by figures such as Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and others has receded from the confrontation with the primary source of social domination and the disfiguration of human culture: capitalist market society. In essence, the domestication of critical theory implies that it has been effectively emptied of radical political content. The theories of discourse, of recognition, or of justification that contemporary critical theory has elaborated speak more to the concerns of mainstream political philosophy than to a radical challenge to its systemic imperatives and structures of power and domination; they play more into the very rhythms of the predominant social reality than seek any kind of social transformation. To retrieve critical theory is to make it accountable to these structures once again and to show that both Idealist and materialist themes are dialectically related in any kind of theory construction.

With this in mind, the extent to which critical theory remains essentially critical—by which I mean oppositional to and explanatory of the concrete forms of social power that shape consciousness, social relations, culture, and the contours of modernity—is today an open question. Once a paradigm of thought that sought to expose the power relations of modernity rooted in capitalist social relations, it seems to have lost its critical edge. What was once a research program into the ideational structures of consciousness and its relation to the structures and functions of capitalist modernity has become a philosophical discourse critical in name only. Today, critical theorists have become accustomed to asking questions about the nature of discourse, of mutual understanding, respect, and recognition, and concerns about justification and human rights. Even as they have embraced the early Enlightenment conception of reason and rationality that was once under sharp attack from both the reactionary forces of fascism and the right, on the one hand, and the reactionary forces of the left under the guise of postmodernism, on the other, they have jettisoned the later enlightened critiques of the Enlightenment, such as Hegel and Marx, who sought to use its general premises to go deeper into the foundations of human sociality and freedom. The project of reconstructing a conception of human reason that could underwrite not only human action but also the institutional structure of democratic society was therefore of great interest and, to be sure, a grand intellectual achievement. But the question remains: Does this transformation of the tradition render critical theory uncritical; has the move away from the concerns of Marx and the centrality of the critique of capitalism as a social force and a unique form of social power rooted the tradition in a new set of concerns that are no longer oppositional to the kinds of power that initially inspired the first generation of critical theorists?

I submit that the answer to this question is affirmative, that the dominant trends in critical theory have abandoned the search for the real mechanisms and sources of social power and instead place at the center of their research program a neo-Idealist search for the kinds of reasoning that they believe will create the conditions for democratic politics. The dominant trends in critical theory are domesticated in that they now seek not a confrontation with the forms of organized power that reproduce social pathologies, but rather to articulate an academicized political philosophy sealed off from the realities that affect and deform critical subjectivity. Safe in their respective philosophical systems, they search for an emancipatory theory within the striations of everyday life. More crucially, they seek to ground critical theory in the innate powers of reason, communication, and recognitive relations that they see as untouched by the reificatory and mutilating powers of capitalist society. As a result, they have made the crucial error of positing the rationality of subjects at the expense of the concrete power relations that socialize and pervert that very same rationality in and through social processes shaped by the imperatives of economic power and interests. The crucial flaw in contemporary critical theory, the major drawback of what I will call its neo-Idealist premises, is that it detaches itself from a theory of socialization that is actually fused to the concrete structures of social power and its capacity to shape consciousness and cognition. More particularly, it ceases to perceive the ways that social power rooted in economic imperatives informed by capital shape and routinize institutionalization and socialization and defective forms of subjectivity. Perhaps more to the point, it ceases to make domination an intrinsic facet of intersubjective relations and the structures of consciousness that are embedded in the practices of everyday life. Rather, it sees intersubjective forms of social action as essentially creative and empowering and overinvests them with the potential for cultivating critical cognition and critical rationality more broadly.

Material structures of power are not, it should be emphasized, to be reduced to economic phenomena in some crude sense. Rather, I will argue that we need to see social power and domination as a social fact that is embedded in social structures, but that these structures and forms of power are social facts produced by the routinization of consciousness to think along the lines of specific cognitive rule-sets, norms, and value-orientations. We should not see power as something merely external to us, but rather see ourselves as constituent subjects and objects of it. Capital, in this sense, is not simply an empirical phenomenon of production, consumption, and accumulation; it is the social process that is made possible because it has been able to establish cognitive rules, norms, and value-orientations that have become so basic to the modern personality, consciousness, and culture that it has been able to establish itself as the dominant reality—it has become our social reality because it has authority over our cognitive rule-following, our values, and the norms we see as valid. The source of these norms, rules, and so on is, of course, the unequal control over resources, but the essence of the story is that it has been able to shape the culture and ideas that make capital what it is as a process, as a social fact. It is the result of a shared kind of reasoning that infects the deepest structures of the self and consciousness.

Capital is therefore an ontological reality, not a physically material one: we cannot see it, touch it, smell it. It achieves its realization because we follow norms and rules of cognition that we internalize from the institutions we participate in and which socialize us. Uprooting it therefore requires that we posit a new kind of understanding of the social world and its potential—that we articulate a form of reasoning that will look for the deeper, rational structures of what social reality is and judge it by the rational formations that its currently existing pathological forms actively negate. What is required, I contend, is a reconstructed, critical form of cognition and subjectivity, one invested with a critical form of reasoning and willing. Consequently, it is not a postmetaphysical turn that we should embrace, but we should rather seek to construct a critical metaphysics understood as an attempt to grasp the nature of social reality in a critical, comprehensive sense as well as grant the individual cognitive access to a more rational form of sociation in order to define the higher purposes and ends that social life can yield for the development of the individual and the collective interest of the community as a whole.

Too much has been made of the supposed antithesis between Hegel and Marx. What is crucial is grasping that both sought to understand social institutions as objectifications of social practices and that these practices were themselves accompanied by specific kinds of thinking about the world and thinking in the world. The key for any critical theory is to look for the correct, objectively valid form of life and set of concepts that can explode the reified forms of life that capitalist modernity secretes. We make a crucial theoretical error, therefore, if we seek to separate capital and economic relations—indeed, the dominant organizing power of modern society—from our social epistemology and practices. The turn to intersubjectivity in critical theory is artificially cleansed of the ways that material bases of social power are able to shape and exert influence on the shape of consciousness as well as the personality system of the individual. Neo-Idealist critical theory proposes a theory of social action that focuses on the kinds of practices that will be able to enhance critical consciousness external to the kinds of pathologies that early critical theory saw as basic. But neo-Idealism differs from Idealism proper by placing the intersubjective over the subjective. Whereas there is no question that the intersubjective turn has opened up much in terms of the ways that socialization processes operate, it seems to me that viewing it as the source for normative claims is mistaken. For one thing, there is no way to secure the pathologies of social reality from seeping into the structures of intersubjectivity. What is needed is to show how a critical subjectivity can be created, one that has in view the concrete social world as the framework for critical judgments. Idealism always sought after this kind of deeper, richer form of subjectivity, one that would be capable of grasping objectively valid reasons for our sociality. Neo-Idealists, however, eschew the advances made by thinkers such as Marx and others who have been consistent in showing how concrete social structures and the mechanisms that hold them together exert formative pressures on socialization and consciousness. Indeed, if we view social domination as I think we should—as a structural-functional phenomenon in which hierarchical forms of social structure are held together by norms, values, and forms of legitimate authority internalized by subjects—then the neo-Idealist premise lacks critical potential as a social theory and a moral-philosophical system.

Of course, this argument should not be construed as implying that the theories of communication, of intersubjective recognition and so on are devoid of relevance or moral-political salience. Habermas’s basic claim that a widening of the public sphere, the expansion of communicative forms of rationality, and that limits must be placed on the commercialization of communication and public forms of discourse and deliberation are desirable goals. Similarly, Honneth’s thesis that recognitive relations be placed at the center of any kind of humanistically based society and culture are also laudable. But these are projects that presume that modern subjects seek these ends or that the capacity to embrace them results from everyday practices and that struggles against the kinds of reification of consciousness that prevent these kinds of reforms and cultural shifts are already in place. They assume, put simply, that everyday practices, phylogenetically developed by modern institutions and when properly channeled by them, are sufficient to cultivate and generate critical consciousness against unjust social arrangements. They fall into what I will call in this book a neo-Idealist fallacy in that they posit modern subjects with powers of rationality that modern capitalist society, with all of its various mechanisms for producing pathologies of reason, cognition, and self-formation, simply cannot possess. In a theoretical sense, they place the cart before the horse and fail to see that the real need is to shatter the forms of reification and acritical, affirmative, or alienated consciousness that gives support and legitimacy to the social order.

Critical theory was always skeptical of the inevitability of social change and conflict. The “iron cage” of modernity was taken to mean that culture and consciousness were being transformed by the administered society. Against this pessimistic idea, contemporary critical theorists who follow the path of intersubjectivity, recognition, and discourse posit that critique can take place without a confrontation with the organizing pull of economic life. Their theories posit the existence of subjects capable of and looking for a critical, democratic, and progressive confrontation with their society and culture. But the opposite is the case. We now see the lack of large-scale struggle against the integrating system of administered life as well as the increasingly deleterious and de-democratizing effects of the expansion of inequalities of wealth. The question needs to be posed to those who advocate such theories: To what extent do you presuppose a kind of subjectivity that has not been shaped and formed by defective social relations and institutions? If there is a way out of this dialectic between structure and consciousness, I propose that it must take the form of theory helping us to view the inner potentialities of what a rational social order can provide, what modernity can become if it were to be organized according to the rational framework of a free community. To this end, we must examine the ontological properties of social life to understand how to examine the false forms of social structure and consciousness that pervades our world. We must derive our categories of critique from the very purposes immanent within social life and ensure that they are governed by the rational principles of individual self-development no less than those of collective need. We must seek to create the kind of cognition that will lay a foundation for a critical form of judgment.

But contemporary critical theory has moved away from such questions. Now we are asked to look toward the formal practices of discourse, justification, or recognition as resources for emancipatory critique. But the basic problem remains that neo-Idealist theory falls into the trap of abstraction in that it sidesteps the dilemma of perverted subject-formation—and that this perverted subject-formation is largely a function of the kind of political economy that pervades late modernity. Their search for a formalist, procedural understanding of sociation entails a logical misstep in that, as Hegel knew all too well, form and content cannot be separated without doing violence to our rational grasp of reality.2 In essence, even though these models of human action and the kind of moral philosophy to which they give rise possess some normative attraction, they have telescoped the project of critical theory to a point where the processes of social pathologies have already been overcome within certain basic capacities of the subject. The domestication of critical theory is expressed in the ways that these theories and models are asserted outside of the real-world pressures of capitalist modernity. Moving toward a paradigm in which social action could be separated from the pressures of capitalist economic life was a crucial step in moving critical theory away from a radical critique of society. Axel Honneth makes this move explicitly. For him, the problem that plagues earlier variants of critical theory was a dependence on the paradigm of social labor as the only form of social action relevant for analysis. “Because no other type of social action is conceded alongside societal labor,” Honneth writes, “Horkheimer can only take the instrumental forms of societal practice systematically into account on the level of his theory of society, and thus loses sight of that dimension of everyday practice in which socialized subjects generate and creatively develop common action-orientations in a communicative manner.”3

The severing of forms of social action from the unequal control of social resources and the kinds of social-cultural forms of legitimacy that it entails paves the way for the domestication of critical theory in that now the theoretical mind is free to create moral and philosophical systems that are cleansed of the forces of concrete power. Critical theorists such as Horkheimer, Adorno, Fromm, and Marcuse subscribed to an implicit model of modern society in which the kind of power needed to coordinate economic production, consumption, and the hierarchies generated by these new forms of social life had to permeate into noneconomic spheres of the society, polity, and culture. They took the problem of reification elaborated earlier by Georg Lukács as a central pathology of consciousness that was itself dialectically related to the structural-functional processes that pulsed beneath the appearance of everyday life. Power and domination were no longer exerted by state power but rather embedded in the normative order of rationalized institutions that were increasingly tethered to the dynamic logic of capital’s expansion and preservation. Behind even this was the basic problem initially pointed out by Rousseau, that concrete forms of social power—of extraction, of exploitation—require cultural and psychological forms of control and subordination—a shaping of consciousness, norms, culture, and so on—in order to stabilize the system and make legitimate an irrational form of reality. What they saw was that the convulsive nature of nineteenth-century political and social life was now being eclipsed by a society of acquiescence and a new form of rationalized legitimacy.

One way I seek to make sense of the limits of these contemporary currents of critical theory and also uncover the deeper logic of the distinctiveness of what critical theory is about and what it has to offer is through a concept of power I develop and call constitutive power. As I see it, this is the kind of social power that results from the ways that socialization occurs within social-structural and institutional contexts and the way this socialization shapes and structures the attitudes, values, consciousness, and cognitive powers of subjects. In a basic sense, I derive the idea from Rousseau, who was concerned with the ways that norms and customs within civil society conditioned the individual to accept and actively to endorse and participate in an unjust, corrupt society of inequality and domination. This captures the essence of what early critical theorists saw as an essential aspect of modern forms of social power: namely, that it has the capacity to shape the subject and his rational, emotive, and evaluative powers. Following Hegel and Marx, critical theory must therefore be concerned with the ways that concrete forms of social power possess the capacity to shape the kinds of social reality that is then used to sustain those same structures of power. What is relevant here is that this kind of power shapes the personality of the individual as well as his cognitive and evaluative powers. To assume that language, recognition, or some other social-relational form of social action can resist this kind of power, I contend, allows for the infiltration of power into the very kinds of social action that contemporary critical theorists see as emancipatory and democratic. The domestication of critical theory results, then, when critique abandons the premise of constitutive power and seeks to invest critical power in forms of social action that are taken to be untouched by the pressing forces of social power—that is, of communication, recognition, and so on. Indeed, the main task of critical theory must remain the unmasking of the social forms of consciousness that hide from view the true sources of social power and domination. Making critical theory radical means rethinking the ethical goal of what a rational society ought to be able to make manifest.

Indeed, in this sense, we could say that the initial premise that gave coherence to critical theory was derived from the base-superstructure hypothesis of Marx. It was in the notion that there are particular forms of thought, of cognition, that were conditioned by the concrete processes of rationalized, commodified, industrial society. By no means was this a simple process of consciousness being mapped by the prevailing economic system. Rather, what resulted was a widespread surface legitimacy of the systemic imperatives of capitalist economic life as well as the widespread problem of social pathologies that emerged from the sublimation of the contradictions that it entailed. The studies in the social psychology of authority, Fromm’s analysis of “sadistic” and “masochistic” personality types, and the general problem of one-dimensional thought, no less than the attack on positivism and the culture industry, still retain their importance. One reason is because these arguments took modern society as a whole as its analysis—there could be no crude separation of political economy from the processes of socialization, of communication, of the family, of any of the forms of social action that contemporary critical theory takes as central resources for an “intramundane” critique of society.4 Rather, the first generation of critical theorists sought to unmask the ways that the basic, foundational structural-functional processes of social life come to affect, to shape, and to distort forms of thought, the personality system, and the basic drives of human subjects. The basic idea was that ideas, politics, law, the state, religion, were all shaped or in some sense guided by the base economic institutions and practices that emerge from the ways that human society organizes its basic production and reproduction. Under capitalism, this means the articulation of new forms of ideological constraint that orient subjects toward compliance with social systems that do not serve their interest, the interests of the community as a whole. With the intensification of capitalist crisis and development, the realm of culture and ideology became paramount: organizing a common consciousness to oppose the imperatives of capitalist interests was seen as a central means of overthrowing the structures of capitalism and moving toward a radical transformation of society.

But the new currents in critical theory look to a different set of intellectual and philosophical resources to articulate their ideas. Ever since the rise of analytic moral and political philosophy, associated with the success of the work of John Rawls, the basic trend has been to create ideal models of moral argument that can be used to regulate political and social life. A separation between the real and the ideal underlies this effort and a fall back into formalism—which Hegel saw as problematic in Kant—returns as a central theme in domesticated critical theory. A central feature of this domesticated theory is a return to pre-Marxian forms of Idealism (primarily Kant and Hegel) as resources for social philosophy. Hence, Rainer Forst can argue that, in his attempt to construct a “critical theory of justice,” that “[t]he principles and right that result from moral constructivism form the normative core of what I call political constructivism (again I use a concept from Rawls but differently). This means that the collective and discursive ‘construction’ and establishment of a basic social structure for a political community—whether in a single state or across borders—is, speaking ideally, an autonomous achievement of the members themselves.”5 The move back to Kant, however, raises more issues than it solves. For one thing—and this is the central thesis that I want to develop in the pages that follow—the task of critical theory must be to call into question the innate, formal capacity of individuals to construct ideal principles and institutional contexts such as those that Forst suggests.

The appeal of this kind of thinking should be of little surprise. With the collapse of Marxism throughout the 1970s and 1980s and the reconciliation of major political parties in western democracies to the capitalist system, the search for a theory of critique that could be found in everyday life has an obvious appeal. Indeed, since thinkers such as Adorno and Horkheimer had led critical theory into a kind of philosophical cul de sac with their emphasis on a radical, negative subjectivity, critical theory had few places to turn. In the end, the turn that was made has created a domesticated critical theory that no longer calls into question the perverting mechanisms of liberal, industrial (and postindustrial) capitalism, but seeks to articulate theories of justice and democracy as if those mechanisms have no effect on society and subject-formation more broadly. Indeed, recent expressions of this kind of critical theory such as Axel Honneth’s work have even sought to argue that the structures of market capitalism possess inherent norms of recognition and freedom.6 Its conception of reason purportedly exists outside of the forms and structure of power that pervert it. Although they recognize the power of the market and, at times, the kind of exploitation distinctive of capitalist relations, they wrongly assume that these are the only forces that shape the dynamics of subject-formation. They instead invest intersubjective practices with a form of cognition that can oppose the forces of modern forms of social integration and to articulate theories of democracy that are essentially outside of economic concerns. But as I will show, this is to mistake the real aim of critical philosophy, which is to explode the reified forms of thought through the vantage point of theoretical reflection.

The decoupling of thinkers such as Kant and Hegel from Marx is perhaps the central means of domestication because now theory follows Idealist premises and forms of thought. What is troubling, however, is that this theoretical shift is occurring at the same time as a massive integration of social life along neoliberal lines. Now, the culture industry, commodified forms of technology, the ideological legitimation of the goals of capitalist economic life, right-wing reaction, and the quietism of social conflict and critique—themes that were in view for the classical generation of critical theorists—once again saturate our age. Any attempt to see moral constructivism, recognition, discourse ethics, and so on as operating outside of the pressures and forces of the kind of deformed subject-formation that this kind of social order produces must therefore be called into question. The divide between the idealized forms of praxis and cognition these theorists espouse and the actual mechanisms of the real world could not be greater—indeed, could not be more alienated from one another. Critical theory must, in this sense, insist on its own auto-critique. Habermas, Honneth, and their followers have forged a theoretical apparatus that seeks to articulate procedural norms, or to isolate aspects of social relations (such as recognitive relations) that can then be used to understand the whole of social life. But this makes the fundamental error posed by Hegel of defining the whole through one of its moments.

In contrast to this neo-Idealist kind of theory construction, a critical-dialectical approach places cognition not only within the social structures of actual living relations, as Hegel proposed, but also, along with Marx, sees that these social structures are no longer autonomous from the integrative power of economic imperatives. This does not mean we cannot achieve an objective, critical perspective; it merely implies that we cannot achieve this perspective from within the intramundane practices that pervade the prevailing reality. This approach to political economy should not be misconstrued as simply a specific logic or distinctive form of rationality, it is also, and indeed primarily, a structural way of understanding the power relations that actively constitute social relations. The kind of cognition needed for critical thought must embrace the historically situated theory of capital that Marx describes as well as the kind of normative ontology that Hegel elaborates in his critical metaphysics. The root of the Hegelian-Marxist viewpoint therefore is not only methodological but also ontological: it proposes that critical knowledge of the world is knowledge of process as well as knowledge of internal relations. The essential structure of human social life is one of processual development as well as social relatedness. For modernity to fulfill its inner potential, for it to be able to truly liberate human life, its internal contradictions must be overcome.

This critical-ontological view is distinct from the neo-Idealist view in that it does not see intersubjective life alone as constituting what Hegel and Marx meant by sociality or society in general. The neo-Idealist sees intersubjectivity as a basically cognitive-practical reality, rooted in either communicative or recognitive terms. But this return to Kantian and Hegelian Idealism, respectively, no longer allows a critique of the political dimensions of social power rooted in material life that then deform those same powers of communication and recognition. None of this is meant to take away from the important achievement of this intersubjective paradigm in overcoming the sterility of the liberal-individualist view. But in doing so, they now see the material-structural realities of capitalism as, at best, vestigial concerns. This has defanged the political potential of critical theory. In what follows, I will therefore seek to show the limits of this turn in critical theory and to revisit what I see to be a more fruitful way of understanding the logic of critical theory. It is my hope that a renewed interest in constructing a critical form of cognition can aid in struggles for social justice and progressive, enlightened social transformation.

Notes

1. T. W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 281–82.

2. See the discussion by Konstantinos Kavoulakos, “Back to History? Reinterpreting Lukács’ Early Marxist Work in Light of the Antinomies of Contemporary Critical Theory,” in M. Thompson (ed.), Georg Lukács Reconsidered: Critical Essays in Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics (New York: Continuum, 2011), 151–71.

3. Axel Honneth, The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995), 71–72.

4. See the important critique of Habermas and his neglect of political economy for his theory of discourse by Tom Rockmore, “Habermas, Critical Theory and Political Economy,” in G. Smulewicz-Zucker and M. Thompson (eds.), Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics: The Betrayal of Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 191–210.

5. Rainer Forst, The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 6.

6. See Axel Honneth, Das Recht der Freiheit. Grundriß einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2011), 317–470.