Kritik Der Kritik: Critical Theory in a Time of Crisis

We all love critical thinking. But today democracy is struggling to cope with the rise of new political forces, and a major driver of this is the spiralling Degree Divide. The class polarisation typical of postwar and post-Cold-War democratic systems has in many cases been swamped, even turned on its head, by polarisation on lines of education and geography, fuelling the rise of new populisms often (though not always) on the far right. (See e.g. Gethin, Martínez-Toledano, and Piketty, eds., 2021.) In this historical moment, focusing narrowly on the philosophical content of truth claims does not have the same political meaning it did during the Kantian Enlightenment, or even, more recently, after the expansion of the universities in the 1960s and the ensuing rise of an independent, university-trained middle class able to force new issues like feminism and the environment onto the political agenda. Something similar happened before, when in the 1930s and 1940s disappointment in the unredeemed promise of Kantian Enlightenment and Marxist revolution inspired the novel project of Frankfurt critical theory. Famously, thinkers including Horkheimer, Adorno, and Benjamin sought to save the spirit of rationalist Enlightenment by subjecting it to a self-critique of its own limitations. And in this they followed the model of Kant himself, who, in his own way, had sought to save the political force of rationalism from its own tendency to overreach, already in the 1780s – that’s what his notion of Kritik was originally all about. Today, the problem with an uncompromising focus on the critical justification of truth claims is that, understood as a dialogical practice, it presupposes certain educational opportunities – access to a world of common references and habits of mind and conversation that allow one first to participate as an equal in a critical public sphere. Most of us learned all that in four years at university (if not many more), but about 60% of voters in even the richest democracies never had the similar time and institutional support to socialise themselves into the culture of critical thinking. Taking this fact seriously raises urgent normative and political-theoretical questions about the relationship of academia and science to democratic politics. What could ‘critique’ or ‘critical theory’ mean today? We certainly don’t want to trade critical thinking for prejudice or convention. But when we teach critical thinking to students, or when we intervene in the name of science in public debate, are we not duty-bound to reflect also on the potentially self-defeating consequences of a critical language that always risks excluding those without the educational resources to develop fluency in it, thus reinforcing the resentment of smart people who know perfectly well they aren’t listened to in public only because they never went to university? Shouldn’t problematising this tendency to insulate certain assumptions of authority from challenge be part of the mission of ‘critique’, on pain of self-contradiction? What might it look like to subject the very practice and language of critical thinking also to its own critique?