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

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The past few years have witnessed an increasing interest in the intersection between political theory, including the history of political thought, and empirical political science. Largely absent from this discussion has been a form of political-theoretical inquiry that explicitly saw itself as part and parcel of empirical social scientific research. Critical theory began as an attempt to square the emancipatory theoretical frameworks of Marx, Freud, and others, with the findings and methods of a "social science of understanding" (verstehen) that stood at the basis of modern political science and sociology. The critical theorists viewed this interaction between understanding and emancipation to have special significance for debates over ideology and propaganda, or, in the language of this year's theme, mis- and dis-information.

This panel tries to return critical theory to the heart of the debate over how, and why, political theories can both contribute to as well as learn from empirical research on politics and society, and particularly the way in which information circulates (or fails to circulate) between experts, citizens, and politicians. The panel brings together an international group of early-career, ladder, and contingent scholars covering the history of critical theory and related thinkers, and contemporary puzzles over the normative and empirical from the perspective of contemporary theorists who have tried to bridge this divide. Central questions include: How might research programs in critical theory return to the empirical sensitivity of the movement's origins? How can the methodological reflexivity central to the Frankfurt School's approach contribute to the empirical study of mis- and dis-information today? What unnoticed resources for understanding the empirical circulation of political information exist in the historical archive of the Frankfurt School and its interlocutors?

The approach of the panel is exemplified by Clavey and Gray's paper on emancipatory polling. Public opinion polling is an essential aspect of both the contemporary political public sphere and the data-generation of empirical political science. Clavey and Gray trace an unnoticed tradition of emancipatory polling back to Karl Marx's 1880 survey of garment workers, and show how methods familiar to contemporary researchers were integrated into the emancipatory project of ideology critique even before the Weberian turn taken by the Frankfurt School. They go on to situate this Marxian project against both the "deliberative polling" theorised and practised by deliberative democrats and more radical proposals for "activist scholarship."

Keum's paper likewise pursues the historical intersection of critical theory and political misinformation through a debate in midcentury Germany as to the permissibility of what she calls "emotively laden elements" in democratic politics. This debate was motivated in large part by the legacy of National Socialism's misuse of historical images, words, and ideas. Keum pays special attention to the "symbolic politics" of two participants in the debate - Jürgen Habermas and Hans Blumenberg. Habermas' theorization of rational political discourse became canonical, while Blumenberg's more equivocal understanding of non-rational forms of information transmission is less well-studied. Each of their approaches gains special relevance in light of the return of emotively laden politics today.

With Lebow's paper, we reach the information pathologies of the present moment. Following Wendy Brown, Lebow examines the nexus between regulatory policy and political economy, given the rise of authoritarian or far-right populism. The tradition of emancipatory critical theory of which Brown is a part has long treated political economy as a central object of analysis. Lebow shows how the legal and regulatory changes identified by recent comparative studies of democratic and backsliding regimes are a crucial component of a fuller understanding of how political economy creates politics.

Abolafia's paper tries to connect the three moments in the interaction between political science and critical theory, past, present, and future. It begins with the historical aspiration of critical theory to provide a foundational alternative for a non-positivistic (though not unempirical!) form of social research, attested to both in Adorno's project of a critical sociology, and Habermas' work on the method of the social sciences. Abolafia suggests that this approach to critical theory as a methodological doctrine has been unfairly neglected (including by Habermas himself), and that it can help solve contemporary problems from both the theoretical side (Rahel Jaeggi's attempts to formulate a critique of informational pathologies created by "forms of life") and the empirical side (the methodological impasse identified by Saba Mahmood and reiterated by the recent agential turn in political sociology).

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Marx at the Polls: Recovering the Democratic Potential of Emancipatory Surveys - Charles Clavey, Harvard University; Sean W.D. Gray, Memorial University of Newfoundland

• The Value Form, Regulation, and the Wounds of Neoliberalism - David Lebow, University of Chicago

• The Past, Present, and Future of Empirical Critical Theory - Jacob Samuel Abolafia, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Chair

• Adriana Alfaro Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico

Discussant

• Carmen Lea Dege New York University