Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

by Stephen Eric Bronner

Divorcing experience from critical reflection creates an opening for ideology

Gramsci actually considered the Bolshevik revolution “a revolution against Das Kapital”

Hegel believed that progress is ultimately furthered by the person who is out of step with the majority. Only this person, the genuine nonconformist, really experiences the constraints on freedom.

They knew that mass media tends to champion right-wing causes. But they also knew that the culture industry can also produce works of a seemingly progressive slant. Mass media had already often bashed capitalism, intolerance, and the power elite. Even then, however, it seems to standardize experience and undermine critical reflection.

Public opinion was a source of empowerment: it tended to protect the individual from the arbitrary power of regimes still wavering between monarchy and republicanism.

Herbert Marcuse sought to deal with this matter in what became perhaps his most notorious essay “Repressive Tolerance” (1965). In that work, he maintains that the classical liberal notion of tolerance has lost its radical character.

The seemingly endless array of rebels without a cause evince what Adorno called “non-conformist conformity” while the shallow cynicism and pseudo-heroic combat against imagined conspiracies offer what Paul Piccone—the mercurial editor of the journal Telos that brought critical theory to America—termed “artificial negativity.”