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The Crisis of Critique
Abstract
This chapter develops the notion that Frankfurt School research both inside and outside of IR is in a state of crisis. First, I propose a general definition of Frankfurt School Critical Theory that specifies its basic characteristics and establishes the standards by which its condition can be evaluated. Second, I introduce the subject area that constitutes the primary literature interrogated in this book: Frankfurt School research in International Relations. I discuss two sub-literatures of Critical Theory that have, from the 1980s onwards, engaged in the study and critique of international politics—and both of which are today in a state of stagnation. These are the literature on Cosmopolitan Democracy and the project of Critical International Relations Theory. Lastly, I relate the current predicament of Critical Theory in IR to broader discussions over the state of Frankfurt School theory that are taking place in political theory, sociology and philosophy. Bringing together these separate conversations, I argue that the contemporary impasse of Critical Theory of IR should be understood as a particular instance of the generalised crisis of critique of Frankfurt School theorising.
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Critical theory was one of the most vigorous and insightful intellectual traditions of the twentieth-century. At its core was a critique of culture and consciousness tied to instrumental rationality and capitalist economic life. Yet, Michael J. Thompson argues in this highly original book that this once critical tradition has been domesticated - it no longer offers a philosophically convincing nor politically viable form of social critique.
Thompson demonstrates that critical theory has surrendered its concerns with domination, alienation, and the pathologies of capitalist modernity and shifted its focus toward neo-Idealist themes. This new critical theory has turned its back on the insights of the classical critical theorists. Thompson traces how this shift occurred and how we can reclaim critique in an age of conformism, apathy, and depoliticization. He goes on to defend the different aspects of critical theory that can be used to reformulate social critique, one that must be brought into a dialogue with contemporary political, social and moral philosophy that protects the lasting and crucial legacy of critical theory as an emancipatory political project.
The recent rise of populism has generated a resurgence of interest in critical theory, in the wider public debate and in academia—with critical theory being variously accused of paving the way for post-truth politics, hailed as explaining the rise of populism, or criticized for failing to achieve its emancipatory political goals. Failure of the latter kind, many International Relations scholars argue, calls for a fundamental reform of critical theory if it is to address current political developments. Investigating this claim, this article makes three contributions: First, an empirical account shows that, far from failing, critical theory has been politically highly successful. Second, a theoretical reconstruction of critical theory shows that it is precisely this success that leads to the alienation of critical theorists from their own approach. In light of this analysis, third, the article concludes that the task of critical theory in times of Brexit and Trump does not lie in abandoning its core principles but in systematically applying them to a new historical conjuncture.
Theorists working within the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory have not been immune to calls to “decolonize” that have been circulating in and beyond the academic world. This article asks what it means to seek to decolonize a tradition of thought that has never explicitly acknowledged colonial histories. What is needed, instead, this article suggests, is consideration of the very implications of the “colonial modern”—that is, an acknowledgement of the colonial constitution of modernity—for Frankfurt School critical theory's idea of historical progress. The issue is more extensive than simply acknowledging the substantive neglect of colonialism within the tradition; rather, this article suggests that its categories of critique and their associated normative claims are also necessarily implicated by this neglect and require transformation. Acknowledgment of colonial histories requires material reparations for the substantive inequalities bequeathed as legacies of the past, but these reparations also require a transformation of understandings and a recognition of “epistemological justice.”
The question of what it means to be a ‘critical’ scholar is heatedly contested, both within academia and without. This ‘state of the field’ article reviews and explores recent debates on this issue within international politics. In particular, it focuses on claims that critical approaches to knowledge are, in their received forms, inadequate and must, therefore, be supplemented, restrained, or otherwise transformed. Four such ‘post-critical’ schools of thought are distinguished: reflexivist, reformist, reactionary, and restitutive. A range of works from fields such as security studies, narrative politics, decolonisation, and political theory are explicated, interrelated, and contextualised. Overall, this review makes the case that, while a concept such as ‘being critical’ cannot and should not be strictly bounded, this category has expanded to the point of seeming almost all-encompassing. The meaning of the category itself is thus brought into question, raising not only narrowly academic questions but also broadly political ones.
Racism is a historically specific structure of modern global power which generates hierarchies of the human and affirms White supremacy. This has far-reaching material and epistemological consequences in the present, one of which is the production and naturalisation of White-racialised subject positions in academic discourse. This article develops a framework for analysing Whiteness through subject-positioning, synthesising insights from critical race scholarship that seek to dismantle its epistemological tendencies. This framework identifies White subject-positioning as patterned by interlocking epistemologies of immanence, ignorance, and innocence. The article then interrogates how these epistemological tendencies produce limitations and contradictions in international theory through an analysis of three seminal and canonical texts: Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics (1979), Robert Keohane’s After Hegemony (1984) and Alexander Wendt’s Social Theory of International Politics (1999). It shows that these epistemologies produce contradictions and weaknesses within the texts by systematically severing the analysis of the international system and the ‘West’ from its actual imperial conditions of possibility. The article outlines pathways for overcoming these limitations and suggests that continued inattention to the epistemological consequences of race for International Relations (IR) theory is intellectually unsustainable.
This article argues that ‘Critical International Relations’, often counterpoised to ‘mainstream IR’, has come to function as a major theoretical category in its own right. It argues that critique involves ‘minor theorising’, defined as the practice of disturbing settled theoretical assumptions in the discipline. The article examines the role and significance of ‘minor theories’ in the context of ongoing debates about Critical IR. It argues that critique is defined by context, and is politically and ethically ambiguous. The article concludes that the scope for critique could be advanced if the terms ‘Critical IR’ and ‘Critical IR Scholar’ are dropped from scholarly parlance.
This article argues that Critical IR theory’s (CIRT) claims to reflexivity, its engagement with “difference” and its emancipatory stance are compromised by its enduring Eurocentric gaze. While CIRT is certainly critical of the West nevertheless its tendency towards “Eurofetishism” – by which Western agency is reified at the expense of non-Western agency – leads it into a “critical Eurocentrism”. While this Eurofetishism plays out differently across the spectrum of CIRT, nevertheless all too often the West is treated as distinct from the non-West such that a fully relationalist conception of the West – one in which the non-West shapes, tracks and inflects the West as much as vice versa – is either downplayed or dismissed altogether. Our antidote to this problem is to advance such a relationalist approach that brings non-Western agency back in while simultaneously recognizing that such agency is usually subjected to structural constraints. This gives rise to two core objectives: first, that non-Western agency needs to be taken seriously as an ontologically significant process in world politics and second, that it needs to be explored in its complex, manifold dimensions. Here we seek to move beyond the colonial binaries of non-Western “silence vs. defiance” and an “all-powerful West vs. powerless non-West”. For in-between these polarities lies a spectrum of instantiations of non-Western agency, running from the refusal to be known and categorized by colonial epistemes to mundane moments of everyday agency to the embrace of indigenous cosmologies through to modes of developmental- and global-agency. Sometimes these speak back to the West and at other times they occur for reasons Other-wise. Ultimately we call for a relationalist sociology of global interconnectivities that problematizes CIRT’s Eurofetishization of the West as a separate, self-generating, self-directed and hyper-autonomous entity.
Robert W. Cox's dictum that ‘(t)heory is for someone and for some purpose’ (emphasis in the original) is said to be the most-quoted line in International Relations (IR) theory. Yet whilst this spurred a revolution in critical thinking in IR, it echoed a far older conception of Critical Theory advanced by Max Horkheimer in the 1930s that claimed there is ‘no theory of society … that does not contain political motivations'. Both sentiments emphasize the relation between knowledge and human interests, and yet both formulate two distinct—though allied—ways of approaching ‘critical’ theorizing. In order to understand the similarities and differences in their approaches, this paper draws out three loci of difference between Cox and Horkheimer regarding the question of emancipation: (i) the epistemological relation between ‘critical’ and ‘Problem-Solving’ (Cox) or ‘Traditional Theory’ (Horkheimer); (ii) the emphasis placed on transformation and historical process; and (iii) the importance of intersubjectivity in how each approach emancipation. It is argued that by actively combining critical (dialectical) approaches across the social sciences, broadening human agency through civilizational dialogue, and retaining a commitment to emancipatory (and visionary) political futures based on human association, that Critical International Theory can maintain ongoing relevance in IR.
When the nation-state loses many of its traditional powers, Daniele Archibugi argues, democracy requires a cosmopolitan political authority above it. But current 'humanitarian' interventions do not fulfil such higher norms-they betray them, as the self-arrogated prerogatives of the few.
Hannes Lacher presents a new critical social theory of international relations that integrates sociology, history and political geography to understand the formation and development of modern international relations. Far from implying a return to state-centrist Realism, this essential new volume leads us towards a critical social theory of international relations that questions the prevailing conceptions of the modern international political economy as a collection of nationally bounded spaces more fundamentally than ever before. It also shows us that capitalist modernity itself was, from the beginning, characterized by the dualism of global economic integration and the fragmentation of political space, which actually stems from the divergent origins of capitalism and territorial sovereignty. This book will be of great interest to al students of historical sociology, political geography, international relations and political science.
Critical Theory and Contemporary Europe introduces the major contributions critical theorists made to the study of Europe, from the interwar years to the present time.
The work begins with theorists such as Adorno who addressed Nazism and the Holocaust, then moves on to discuss the postwar affluence of capitalist Europe. It proceeds to examine how critical theorists provided much of the analysis that motivated the student and youth movements of 1968 and subsequent alternative social movements. Lastly, it relates the development of a critical theory of state socialism, looking at the works of thinkers such as Arato, Offe, and Habermas and how critical theory is now addressing social issues such as European xenophobia and the future of Europe.
This new volume in the Critical Theory and Contemporary Society series brings together critical theory and European studies in a clear, accessible manner and shows the relevance of critical theory to practical political issues.
This book analyses the impact of the idea of civilization on the global political order. The inquiry explains Norbert Elias’s pioneering examination of the rise of European civilized self-images. It extends the perspective by discussing the interdependencies between state formation which was central to Elias’s explanation and two inter-related phenomena – European colonial expansion and the evolution of the first universal society of states. Special emphasis is placed on European convictions that other societies would become civilized as a result of colonial civilizing offensives and the mimetic behaviour of non-European regimes. The nineteenth century standard of civilization which embodied that belief was an important junction between state formation, colonial expansion and international society. The book concludes with reflections on the cultural
Discussions about diversifying the discipline of international relations (IR) are often met with limited evidence in practice. Employing the concepts of epistemic oppression and academic dependency, this article contributes to filling the existing knowledge gap by examining what the pedagogical practices of IR professors, particularly in terms of syllabi design and content, tell us about the state of disciplinary diversity. The article examines results from a preliminary study that analyzes different graduate-level IR syllabi from leading universities in the Global North (represented by United States and United Kingdom) and Global South (Africa in particular) in order to determine how their design, including required readings and other pedagogical choices in the classroom, contributes to the explicit diversity needed to push IR beyond its usual canon. The findings suggest that although more perspectives have become accepted or recognized, what is considered essential for graduate students to study and further propagate is still primarily mainstream. Another point is that what has become known as “critical IR” cannot automatically be equated with diversity. This means there is the need to further interrogate and open up more avenues that go beyond what can be characterized as a “critical canon” of IR.
This article emerges out of the racism debate in Security Dialogue (May 2020). It takes its cue from the passing claim that Orientalism/Eurocentrism is different from racism and that the former is deemed to be relatively innocuous while the latter is viewed as egregious. Here I reveal how Eurocentrism is equivalent to cultural racism. I show how racism has outwardly shapeshifted through time in everyday life and world politics, and how orthodox international relations theory’s racist trajectory has mirrored this. Since 1945, modern orthodox international relations theory has covered its racism with a non-racist mask through a sublimated discourse that focuses on cultural difference but is white racism in disguise. Unmasking modern international relations/international political economy theory exposes this sublimated racist discourse by revealing its racist double move: first, it whitewashes racism and denies its presence in the conduct of world politics and the global economy in the last three centuries, thereby providing an apologia for racist practices; second, it advances subliminal cultural-racist analytical/explanatory frameworks. I close by solving the conundrum as to how white orthodox international relations scholars who are most probably non-racist (though not anti-racist) in their personal lives embrace, albeit unwittingly, racist theories of world politics and the global economy.
While race existed as a cultural marker in earlier history, a mutually-reinforcing link between racism, slavery and empire is a distinct product of western Europe and the US-led world order. Yet, mainstream scholarship on International Relations has obscured the question of race or worse, legitimized its exclusion in discussions of world order-building. At the same time, demand for racial equality from anti-colonial forces presented an alternative and inclusive conception of world order. The first part of this article offers a brief discussion of concepts of race, racism and world order. The next part examines how racist ideas and norms created exclusionary frameworks and approaches of world order, such as the European ‘standard of civilization’ principle. The third part looks at the role of racism in the emergence of the American-led world order, including US President Woodrow Wilson's rejection of the ‘racial equality’ principle in the League of Nations Charter, the privileging of ‘sovereign equality’ over ‘racial equality’ in the UN Charter, and the scant attention given to the link between colonialism and denial of human rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet, anti-colonial leaders and conferences, especially the 1955 Bandung Conference, integrated ‘national sovereignty, racialism and colonialism’, and demanded racial equality as a fundamental human right. The final part cautions against the dangers of complacency and compartmentalizing the study of race and racism, and calls instead for viewing racism as an inter-linked global challenge, hence integral to the emerging research agenda of Global International Relations.
The epithet ‘critical’ has become both coveted and contested. A long-established lodestone of personal, political, and professional commitment within academia, its meanings are multiple, and its histories are poorly understood. This article reconstructs an interdisciplinary history of debates concerning what it is to ‘be critical’, beginning in the 1930s but focusing on the late 1960s to the late 1990s. It argues the significance of the category ‘critical’ to be that it can connote political radicalism while allowing for a degree of professional respectability. Furthermore, the article shows that claims and counterclaims upon the parameters of criticality have privileged certain thought traditions. In particular, while contemporary discourses of ‘anti-wokeness’ caricature critical academics as being prepossessed with issues of coloniality and race, traditions of thought dealing with these issues have, until recently, been rather marginalised. The enduring ‘colour line’ of critical thought is not only unjust but also deleterious to political imagination.
Over the last decade, a call for decolonisation has challenged IR scholarship. The call has advocated for the need to decolonise the epistemology and ontology of the discipline, critically engaging with the legacies of imperialism, colonialism, racism, and patriarchy in global power relations. Parallel to the decolonial project, a call to globalise International Relations has been made by well-known scholars in recent years predominantly through the Global IR project. In this review essay of four books I briefly engage with the debates around Global IR and its critics drawing on a decolonial perspective. On the one hand, I discuss the potentialities and limitations of historiographical deconstruction as a methodological tool, raising issues with the current silencing of the ‘present’ due to the continued coloniality of knowledge. On the other hand, I delve into the wide range of possibilities that a serious and critical commitment to diversifying the discipline of IR might bring to academics in the so-called non-West/Global South. I analyse current critiques of Global IR considering them necessary though, in some cases, agents for the reification and silencing of the interests of the non-West/Global South. I argue that, whilst coloniality operates in multiple ways, decoloniality is also a project that surpasses the ideal total exteriority as imagined through the West/non-West dichotomy.
Relaciones Internacionales Globales y Dominación Occidental: ¿Avance o entrampamiento eurocéntrico?
Whether inspired by the Frankfurt School or Antonio Gramsci, the impact of critical theory on the study of international relations has grown considerably since its advent in the early 1980s. This book offers the first intellectual history of critical international theory. Richard Devetak approaches this history by locating its emergence in the rising prestige of theory and the theoretical persona. As theory's prestige rose in the discipline of international relations it opened the way for normative and metatheoretical reconsiderations of the discipline and the world. The book traces the lines of intellectual inheritance through the Frankfurt School to the Enlightenment, German idealism, and historical materialism, to reveal the construction of a particular kind of intellectual persona: the critical international theorist who has mastered reflexive, dialectical forms of social philosophy. In addition to the extensive treatment of critical theory's reception and development in international relations, the book recovers a rival form of theory that originates outside the usual inheritance of critical international theory in Renaissance humanism and the civil Enlightenment. This historical mode of theorising was intended to combat metaphysical encroachments on politics and international relations and to prioritise the mundane demands of civil government over the self-reflective demands of dialectical social philosophies. By proposing contextualist intellectual history as a form of critical theory, Critical International Theory: An Intellectual History defends a mode of historical critique that refuses the normative temptations to project present conceptions onto an alien past, and to abstract from the offices of civil government.
A provocatively argued call for shifting the emphasis of critical theory from Habermasian "critique," restricted to normative clarification, to "disclosure," a possibility-enhancing approach that draws on and reinterprets ideas of Heidegger.
In Critique and Disclosure, Nikolas Kompridis argues provocatively for a richer and more time-responsive critical theory. He calls for a shift in the normative and critical emphasis of critical theory from the narrow concern with rules and procedures of Jürgen Habermas's model to a change-enabling disclosure of possibility and the enlargement of meaning. Kompridis contrasts two visions of critical theory's role and purpose in the world: one that restricts itself to the normative clarification of the procedures by which moral and political questions should be settled and an alternative rendering that conceives of itself as a possibility-disclosing practice. At the center of this resituation of critical theory is a normatively reformulated interpretation of Martin Heidegger's idea of "disclosure" or "world disclosure." In this regard Kompridis reconnects critical theory to its normative and conceptual sources in the German philosophical tradition and sets it within a romantic tradition of philosophical critique. Drawing not only on his sustained critical engagement with the thought of Habermas and Heidegger but also on the work of other philosophers including Wittgenstein, Cavell, Gadamer, and Benjamin, Kompridis argues that critical theory must, in light of modernity's time-consciousness, understand itself as fully situated in its time—in an ever-shifting and open-ended horizon of possibilities, to which it must respond by disclosing alternative ways of thinking and acting. His innovative and original argument will serve to move the debate over the future of critical studies forward—beyond simple antinomies to a consideration of, as he puts it, "what critical theory should be if it is to have a future worthy of its past."
Islam and International Relations: Fractured Worlds reframes and radically disrupts perceived understanding of the nature and location of Islamic impulses in international relations. This collection of innovative essays presents an alternative reading of contestation and entanglement between Islam and modernity. Wide-ranging in scope, the volume illustrates the limits of Western political imagination, especially its liberal construction of presumed divergence between Islam and the West. Split into three parts, Pasha?s articles cover Islamic exceptionalism, challenges and responses, and also looks beyond Western international relations. This volume will be of great interest to graduates and scholars of international relations, Islam, religion and politics, and political ideologies, globalization and democracy.
Acknowledgements - Preface - PART 1: FOUNDATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL THEORY - The Case for International Political Theory - Men and Citizens in International Relations - Internal and External Concepts of Obligation in the Theory of International Relations - PART 2: FROM RATIONALISM TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY - Introduction to Part Two - Pufendorf's Theory of International Relations - Vattel's Society of States - Kantian Ethics and International Relations - The Dissolution of Rationalist International Theory - Freedom and History in the Political Theory of International Relations - PART 3: A HIERARCHY OF FORMS OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS - Introduction to Part Three - From Tribalism to Political Society - From Citizenship to Humanity - Concluding Remarks - Notes and References - Select Bibliography - Index
Beyond Realism and Marxism: Critical Theory and International Relations discusses the challenge to realism which proponents of international political economy and critical theory have mounted in the last few years. At the same time, it emphasises the part that realist themes now play in the argument for a 'post-Marxist' critical sociology. The changing relationship between realism and Marxism is explored in a wide-ranging survey which includes recent developments in the theory of international relations and various Marxist and non-Marxist approaches to nationalism, imperialism, international inequality, the world-system and the relationship between class and the state. Beyond Realism and Marxism presents the case for a critical approach to international relations which analyses the reasons for the expansion and contraction of community in relations between states. This book is aimed specifically at students of approaches to international relations, but it will also be of interest to students of Marxism, politics and sociology.
How do we ‘decolonise’ the field of International Relations? The aim to decolonise has become a widely discussed and mentioned subject across the social sciences and humanities. The article aims to discuss what 'decolonisation' might mean in the context of the field of International Relations.
The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory provides comprehensive and critical coverage of the lively and contested field of political theory. Long recognized as one of the main branches of political science, political theory has in recent years burgeoned in many different directions. In this book forty-five articles by distinguished political theorists look at the state of the field, where it has been in the recent past, and where it is likely to go in future. They examine political theory's edges as well as its core, the globalizing context of the field, and the challenges presented by social, economic, and technological changes. The Handbook is one of The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science - a ten-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of political science.
The 1990s have seen the emergence of a new 'constructivist' approach to international theory and analysis. This article is concerned with the relationship between constructivism and critical international theory, broadly defined. Contrary to the claims of several prominent critical theorists of the Third Debate, we argue that constructivism has its intellectual roots in critical social theory, and that the constructivist project of conceptual elaboration and empirical analysis need not violate the principal epistemological, methodological or normative tenets of critical international theory. Furthermore, we contend that constructivism can make a vital contribution to the development of critical international theory, offering crucial insights into the sociology of moral community in world politics. The advent of constructivism should thus be seen as a positive development, one that not only enables critical theorists to mount a more powerful challenge to the dominant rationalist theories, but one that also promises to advance critical international theory itself.
This book sets out a philosophical and practical account of contemporary global politics from a cosmopolitan point of view. The volume begins by developing a theory of cosmopolitanism, explicating its core principles and justifications. The role many of these principles have had in global politics is then explored; they have been important in framing the human rights regime and several aspects of international law and politics.
The book then examines how legal and institutional developments at the global level fall short of cosmopolitan ideals. The argument is that this deficit is not inevitable, and can be overcome over time through an ambitious and yet practical agenda of reform. In the second half of the book, chapters are devoted to some of the most pressing issues of our time - financial market crises, climate change, and the fallout from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In each of these areas, the author argues that realist politics is exhausted, and that cosmopolitanism is the new realism.
In short, the book offers a novel approach to thinking about global politics and case studies of its application by one of the best known authors in the field.
International Relations and the Problem of Difference has developed out of the sense that IR as a discipline does not assess the quality of cultural interactions that shape, and are shaped by, the changing structures and processes of the international system. In this work, the authors re-imagine IR as a uniquely placed site for the study of differences as organized explicitly around the exploration of the relation of wholes and parts and sameness and difference-and always the one in relation to the other.
The need to control violent and non-violent harm has been central to human existence since societies first emerged. This book analyzes the problem of harm in world politics which stems from the fact that societies require the power to harm in order to defend themselves from internal and external threats, but must also control the capacity to harm so that people cannot kill, injure, humiliate or exploit others as they please. Andrew Linklater analyzes writings in moral and legal philosophy that define and classify forms of harm, and discusses the ways in which different theories of international relations suggest the power to harm can be controlled so that societies can co-exist with the minimum of violent and non-violent harm. Linklater argues for new connections between the English School study of international society and Norbert Elias's analysis of civilizing process in order to advance the study of harm in world politics.
The notion of 'reflexivity' has been so intimately tied to the critique of positivism and empiricism in International Relations (IR) that the emergence of post-positivism has naturally produced the anticipation of a 'reflexive turn' in IR theory. Three decades after the launch of the post-positivist critique, however, reflexive IR has failed to impose itself as either a clear or serious contender to mainstream scholarship. Reasons for this failure include: the proliferation of different understandings of 'reflexivity' in IR theory that entail significantly different projects and concerns for IR scholarship; the equation of 'reflexive theory' with 'critical' and 'emancipatory theory' and the consequent confusion of ethical/normative issues with strictly epistemic/theoretical ones; and the refusal to consider reflexive IR as a 'research programme' concerned with empirical knowledge, not just meta-explanation. The development of reflexivity in IR theory as a sustainable cognitive and praxeological effort is nonetheless possible - and still needed. This article suggests what taking the 'reflexive turn' would really entail for IR.