One step forward, two steps back: Idealism in critical theory

Abstract

Amy 1 Allen's book The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (Allen, 2016, hereafter EP) has been widely read, discussed, and criticized. 2 Her harsh verdict on contemporary Frankfurt School critical theory, which animates the debate, is all the more devastating because it is based neither on nostalgic adoration of Adorno's writings nor on over-inflated hatred of Habermas's theory, two well-known sources of severe criticisms of critical theory. On the contrary, Allen's book on the disastrous state of contemporary Frankfurt School critical theory fascinates because it is based on sympathy, even fondness, for those theories which she criticizes, especially Habermas's. Most prominent in the unfolding debate have been two strands of Allen's complex argumentation, namely her critique of founding critical theory's normativity on backward-looking progress ("progress as a fact," see EP, pp. 11−13) and her charge of Eurocentrism against Habermas, Honneth, and Forst. This is not surprising, given that these two criticisms feature in the book's title.Yet there is a third strand in Allen's book that demonstrates her fondness of Frankfurt School critical theory, brings into view the full force of her critique, and allows us to examine and extend it one step further. This third strand is Allen's concern for an adequate conceptualization of reason's intertwinement with power, and I argue that it really is the backbone of her argumentation that organizes the other two more prominent strands. On my interpretation, Allen returns us to the core of the discontinued yet unfinished debate of the 1980s and early 1990s about the relationship between normativity and facticity, reason and power, critique and its normative foundations. 3 In her readings of Habermas, Honneth, and Forst, she uses the critique of "progress as a fact" and of Eurocentrism in order to demonstrate that their accounts of reason's intertwinement with power are too idealistic for critical theory (Section 2).However, I argue that the criteria for an adequate conceptualization, ingeniously worked out by Allen in her combined reading of Adorno and Foucault, are not met by her own proposal. She relies on Anthony Laden's account of reasoning as a social practice but limits its conceptual status by contextualism on the metanormative level. Yet both Laden's account as well as Allen's distinction between normative and metanormative commitments are in tension with her criteria of essentially impure reason and radical self-reflexivity (Section 3).This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Lonely and beyond truth? Two objections to Bernard Harcourt’s Critique & Praxis

“… 3 3 Allen (2016) revives this debate, that has been abandoned rather than ended in the 1990s, in a helpful manner. On the distinction between normativity as a paradigm and as a phenomenon, see Vogelmann (2021). …”