Critical Theory and the Global Left in the 20th and 21st Centuries

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Critical theory played an important role in the history of the global left and democratizing movements across the 20th century, but the global left and the political struggle for democratic equality also played an understudied role in the development of critical theory across the 20th century and into the 21st. This panel brings together an international group of multi-rank scholars to engage a number of questions: To what extent has critical theory historically seen itself as a part of left social and political movements? When and why have critical theorists drawn inspiration from sources and figures on the cultural and revolutionary left? What should the relationship of critical theory be to contemporary left-political struggles in democratic politics like the movement for prison abolition?
Peter Verovšek’s paper presents a reappraisal of the relationship between the most famous living critical theorist, Jürgen Habermas, and the radical left. Verovšek shows the way in which the 1950s and 60s found Habermas caught between the increasingly depoliticized first generation of Frankfurt School critical theorists, and the rapidly radicalizing campuses of the Student Movement. The paper argues that readers of Habermas have frequently underestimated the extent to which he has continued to situate himself on the “radical reformist non-communist left.” Perhaps as a consequence, these critics often ignore the theoretical tools that Habermas can contribute to the political left, and especially the force of his “colonization thesis.” Habermas’ turn to democratic theory need not be a turn away from radical politics.
Celia Eckert’s paper approaches the same historical moment from a different angle by analyzing the theoretical underpinnings of the Situationists, a Marxist art collective that greatly influenced the radical student culture that so antagonized and perplexed Adorno and Horkheimer. Eckert argues that we should understand Situationism against the background of contemporary art movements such as Happenings and Fluxus, rather than as an antithesis to what critical theorists were doing at the same time. The position of the Situationists in these artist debates over theory and practice enables a rich counterfactual conversation to emerge between Situationism and Adorno’s rejection of “barren and brutal practicism.” The paper gives us a “road not taken” for critical theory’s perennial exploration of the complex relationship between theory and practice.
Charles Clavey’s paper explores this dialectic of theory and practice through a discussion of critical theory’s most enthusiastic proponent of left- and revolutionary politics – Herbert Marcuse. Clavey dives deep into the Marcuse archive to reconstruct Marcuse’s historical and theoretical relationship to post-colonial revolutionary thinkers including Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Kwame Nkrumah. The presence of these thinkers in Marcuse’s writing from the 1960s and 70s is not, according to Clavey, merely revolutionary window dressing. Rather, an engagement with the practical revolutionary thought of thinkers from the Global South enabled Marcuse to refine his theory of revolution as immanent political change, and to present an account of revolution that was not only psychological, but also material and political. Understanding this more explicitly political Marcuse can help reframe the democratic politics of critical theory today.
Hari Ramesh’s paper reclaims Jane Addams, the famed social reformer and Nobel Prize laureate, as a theorist of democracy and technology. Ramesh argues that Addams’s meditation on democratic education at a time of unparalleled technological change both echoes the concerns of critical theory as it would emerge in later decades, and provides an underutilized template for thinking about the pressing techno-democratic problems that face democracies today. Ramesh’s paper provides a view of a left-reform debate outside of the context of Western Marxism, but in implicit dialogue with many of the issues that preoccupy that tradition.
The last paper, by Jacob Abolafia, tracks the place of incarceration and prison abolition in the development of critical theory, from Rusche and Kirchheimer’s canonical study to the recent disagreement between thinkers in the tradition of Black critical theory over the status of prison abolition. The paper argues that the true significance of critical theory for understanding the prison has been missed by both abolitionists and opponents of abolition alike. Critical theory both demands the radical contextualization of punishment against the whole background of the economic, psychic, and social world, and denies any easy judgments about the emancipatory potential contained by any single institution or practice in that world. This makes critical theory an important diagnostic tool where forms of punishment are concerned, but a slippery one for those who would use it as the basis for a politically mobilized abolitionist left.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Critical Theory’s Reconciliation with Praxis in the Situationist International - Celia Eckert, Harvard University

• Is Critical Theory Abolitionist? From Frankfurt to Angela Davis - Jacob Samuel Abolafia, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

• New Horizons of Revolution: Marcuse Reading Mao, Ho, & Nkrumah - Charles Clavey, Harvard University

• Resituating Jürgen Habermas as a Critical Theorist of the Left - Peter J. Verovšek, University of Groningen

• Jane Addams on Technology, Communication, and the Social Ethics of Democracy - Hari Ramesh, Wesleyan University

Chair

• Tae-Yeoun Keum University of California, Santa Barbara

Discussants

• Vatsal Naresh Harvard University

• Nica Siegel Amherst