Is Critical Theory Abolitionist? From Frankfurt to Angela Davis

• In Event: Critical Theory and the Global Left in the 20th and 21st Centuries

Abstract

The modern critique of incarceration begins, for all intents and purposes, with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Institute members’ George Rusche and Otto Kirschheimer’s study stands as a classic account of the economic origins of incarceration, but it refrains from singling out the prison as an object of social critique. From the perspective of the early Frankfurt School, to borrow from their colleague Adorno, the false was the whole and the prison merely one indication of this. Rusche and Kirschhemer are therefore the beginning of an ambivalent relationship between critical theory and the politics of incarceration that has spanned the entire history of the movement. At times, theorists in the heterodox Marxian tradition have taken it for granted that punishment, and perhaps even incarceration, would persist even in an emancipated society (Murphy 1973). At other times, Rusche and Kirschheimer’s successors have participated in enthusiastically in projects of radical decarceration (see Dilts and Zorn 2016). This paper seeks to draw these disparate strands into a coherent account of the relationship between critical theory and incarceration, especially in light of recent debates over prison abolition between theorists who identify with the tradition of Black critical theory including Angela Davis (2003, 2022) and Tommie Shelby (2022).

Critical theory, the paper argues, is caught between its unique sensitivity to the social determination of political ideology, including ideologies of punishment, and its methodological wholism, which critics have often accused of being a form of anti-politics. Angela Davis’ forceful arguments for prison abolition, grounded as they are in a genealogical critique very much in the spirit of critical theory, suggest a possible alternative to this anti-political wholism. But does ending the ideologically-motivated punishment of certain class and racial categories meet the emancipatory standards demanded by the Marxian tradition? The paper concludes by trying to square Davis’ politically mobilized “prisons first” approach with the critique of broader ideological elements which threaten to persist even if the prison is abolished.

Author

• Jacob Samuel Abolafia, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev