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What did Horkheimer mean by ‘traditional’ versus ‘critical’ theory?

Hugo Marchetti Contributor
· 4 replies · 180 views
Society & cultureContinentalCritical theoryMarxismMax Horkheimer#emancipation#frankfurt-school#traditional-theory
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I operate a gantry crane at the container port in Marseille and I'm a union delegate. Someone at a union education weekend said the Frankfurt School started with an essay by Max Horkheimer called "Traditional and Critical Theory", from 1937, and that everything since comes out of that distinction.

I've tried reading it. I understand the words, but I don't understand the difference. Isn't all theory supposed to describe the world accurately? What would make a theory "critical" rather than just a theory with opinions? And is "traditional theory" a criticism of science, or of something else?

I'd be grateful for a plain explanation. I read Simone Weil and Camus, so I'm not afraid of philosophy, but German social theory is new to me.

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  1. Johanna Reinhardt

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    Hugo, I write on the Frankfurt School, so let me try.

    Traditional theory, for Horkheimer, is the ideal of theory you find in the natural sciences and in most social science: a system of propositions, checked against facts, by a theorist who stands outside what he describes. He doesn't say this is worthless. He says it has a blind spot: it treats the facts it describes, and its own role in producing knowledge, as simply given.

    Critical theory starts from the recognition that the theorist is inside society. The "facts" of a society, who works and who owns, what counts as normal, are products of human activity under particular arrangements, so they could be otherwise. A critical theory describes those arrangements and asks what they make thinkable and unthinkable, whose interests they serve, and what they would look like from the standpoint of people they harm. Its aim isn't only to explain but to help people free themselves from conditions they didn't choose.

    So "critical" doesn't mean "with opinions". It means a theory that is reflexive about its own position and has an emancipatory aim.

    Your crane is a good example. A traditional theory of the port measures throughput and efficiency. A critical theory also asks why efficiency is defined as it is, and for whom.

    Helpful · 1
    1. Hugo Marchetti

      Contributor

      Thank you, Johanna. So the difference is not that one is true and the other false, but that one forgets where it stands and the other doesn't. I'll take Javier's warning too. At the port we have plenty of people who can say "who benefits?" and fewer who can say what would change their minds.

Other answers

  1. Javier Morales

    Fellow

    I lecture in economics, so I'm the "traditional theorist" Johanna describes, and I'd add a warning. The distinction is illuminating, but it can become an excuse to dismiss any empirical finding as "serving interests". Horkheimer himself didn't reject science; later followers sometimes did. Ask a critical theorist what evidence would change their mind. The good ones have an answer.

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  2. Mateo Quispe

    Fellow

    From Lima: the same distinction travelled to Latin America and changed there. Liberation philosophers like Dussel took the standpoint of the excluded, the poor, the colonised, and asked what European theory looked like from there. That's critical theory's move, but from outside Europe. Horkheimer's question "for whom?" was more radical than he knew.

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