by Rick Plasterer, Juicy Ecumenism
DEI and Critical Theory have receded from public attention with the advent of the second Trump Administration, but they are still living ideologies with many people firmly committed to them. Another change in government, which to some degree could come as soon as the new Congress, could bring them back to the forefront of national attention. A book by Carl Trueman, published at the end of the last U.S. administration, in 2024, To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse, provides an extremely well-written and understandable review for a lay audience of the origins of critical theory in the Frankfurt School of Marxism in the early twentieth century.
The Crisis of Early Twentieth Century Marxism
Having grown out of the original Marxism of the nineteenth century and its denial of human nature, critical theory poses the crucial question in the intense ideological struggle of the West and America in particular: “What is a human being?” Critical theory has a revolutionary aim – the complete transformation of life and society – and posing such a fundamental question has the revolutionary benefit of unsettling ordinary life and institutions. At their organization, the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany, the critical theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno beginning in the 1920s developed the ideas that would later animate both Critical Race Theory and gender ideology. Although critical theory proceeded from Hegel and Marx, a later strand in the second half of the twentieth century, developed by Michel Foucault in France, proceeded from Nietzsche, yet was influenced by the Frankfort School.
The key move in critical theory is to unmask domination, and the suffering it causes. This move, Trueman indicated, takes its cue from Hegel, and his account of the origin of self-consciousness. Human consciousness is not unchanging, Hegel believed, but changes from one era to the next. Modern people do not think like medieval people, nor did medieval people think like Greco-Roman people, nor did they think like people in ancient Egypt or China. Their thought was determined by their circumstances. Self-consciousness, Hegel maintained, can only exist in relation to another. The important point Trueman highlights is that “human self-understanding and human action are the result of negotiated relationships involving hierarchies, expectations, desire, and power.” Trueman pointed out as crucial Hegel’s discussion of “the lord-bondservant” relationship in his philosophical treatise, The Phenomenology of Spirit. What is important here is that one gains a recognition of self from a recognition of another in terms of the other’s value, which then leads to an assessment of one’s own value. The bondservant recognizes the lord as having greater value than himself, and the lord recognizes the bondservant as having less value than himself. But this is not a voluntary relationship. The bondservant cannot leave the lord, although he recognizes the lord as superior, and while the lord is free, he is less than satisfied with unwilling submission.
Additionally, the relationship changes over time, both from the familiarity and experiences the lord and bondservant share, and the experience of the bondservant becoming more proficient in his service, while the lord loses the abilities that made him dominant by becoming dependent on the bondservant. It is thus a relationship of tension, which is liable not to last.