The Past, Present, and Future of Empirical Critical Theory

• In Event: Critical Theory in/as Political Science: Past, Present, Future

Abstract

From Max Horkheimer’s inaugural address, to Theodore Adorno’s work on a non-positivist, critical sociology, and on to Jürgen Habermas’ early work on the methodology of the social sciences, a central concern of the first and second generations of the Frankfurt School of critical theorists was to reconceive the relationship between emancipatory philosophical theory and empirical social and political science. As late as the 1980s, Axel Hönneth tried to reformulate the idea of critical social science as an alternative to both functionalism and post-structuralism (Bonss and Hönneth eds, 1982), and something like this position was reiterated, at least in theory, in the 1990 (Brunkhorst 1996). More recently, however, critical theory as a form of political theory seems to have ceded the empirical field and retrenched as a purely negative check on the often-ideologically freighted impulses of the social sciences (e.g. Allen 2016); or retreated to the abstraction of metacritique (as per Jaeggi 2021).

If some critical theorists are still committed in principle to the possibility of research programs that are both empirical and emancipatory, the actual attempt at formulating or carrying out such research seems to have fallen by the wayside. This paper is an attempt to formulate how a new form of critical empiricism, employing the “dual perspectives” of agent and observer both in research design and analysis, can enrich both the emancipatory projects of contemporary political theory, and help break out of the impasse threatened by a recent “agential turn” in sociology, anthropology, and qualitative political science. The paper begins with a brief recovery of the empirical aspirations of the Frankfurt School, before turning to two contemporary case studies where, it posits, a non-positivist, empirically sensitive form of theory could prove decisive.

The first of these case studies is inspired by Rahel Jaeggi’s project of critique of forms of life (Jaeggi 2021). Jaeggi argues that critical theory has given up the sort of emancipatory critiques of ideology and the pathological circulation of misinformation that characterised its early history. Jaeggi conceives of the solution as a form of immanent critique, but the content and targets of this critique are left unspecified. The paper shows how empirical studies of the actual practices and beliefs of agents, including historical research, is necessary to perform the sort of critical analysis of ideology that Jaeggi desires. Without empirical support, immanent critique risks becoming merely an exercise in metalogic.

The second of these cases is Saba Mahmood’s justly famous study of agency, The Politics of Piety (Mahmood 2005). Mahmood’s analysis of her qualitative data consciously positions itself against the external “emancipatory” perspective associated with critical theory. Mahmood makes a persuasive case for the agential perspective as its own form of negative check on the ideological impulses of even well-intentioned observers, but her method has the potential to vitiate the comparative impulse behind social scientific understanding (verstehen). Recognizing the dialectical relationship between agent and observer has the potential to include Mahmood’s insights while also incorporating the pragmatic horizon (context) within which agents and practices are formed.

These two cases point in a preliminary way to the paper’s conclusion that critical theorists should be more open to the sort of empirical collaboration that characterised the early and middle periods of the Frankfurt School’s first generation. This research program has the potential to both break critical theory out of some of the theoretical stalemates that have plagued its “postmetaphysical” period, and to contribute to an empirical social science that has become increasingly allergic to emancipatory standpoints.

Author

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