By John F. Doherty, Public Discourse. (Image: Hennie Stander/Unsplash)
Book Review: Carl Trueman, To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse, B&H Academic, 256 pages.
Carl Trueman has delivered an invaluable explanation of Marxist critical theory, and of why it resonates with so many in our troubled times.
After a slow march through our society’s schools, businesses, and courtrooms, critical Marxists are in retreat, facing political backlash for movements like transgenderism and critical race theory that they inspired.
But political fortune runs in cycles, and Marxist critical theory has sunk roots deep in our institutions; its return may only be an election away. Rather than complacently trust heavy-handed politicians to undo it, conservatives need to continue the hard work of understanding why it has won over so many people, and of answering it.
An excellent place to start is Carl Trueman’s recent book To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse. Trueman explains not only the logic of this movement that rejects the very notion of truth, but its appeal to the darker emotions of the heart.
From Traditional Marxism . . .
Trueman begins explaining critical Marxism by reviewing the original, “traditional” Marxism of Karl Marx. Marx learned from philosopher G. W. F. Hegel that “[h]istory was a story of becoming, not being”: there are no unchanging, transcendent truths that all human beings know; rather, “the way people think about the world” develops directly from “the underlying social conditions” in which they live. The aspiration for universal freedom never occurred in pre-twentieth-century China, because China’s people lived in servitude to the emperor; political freedom first developed in the West, where Christianity and economic changes had eroded aristocracy.