Critical Theory and the Machinery of Society

From the opening pages

Critical theory is what happens when philosophy stops admiring the furniture and asks who owns the house, who cleans it, who is watched inside it, and why the fire alarm has been reclassified as “negative sentiment.” It is not simply the habit of criticizing things, although the modern world supplies material with admirable efficiency. It studies how social arrangements produce power, dependence and suffering while presenting themselves as natural, neutral or inevitable. It asks not only whether a system works, but what “working” means, for whom it works, and who has been entered under “external costs.”

The phrase acquired its classic meaning through Max Horkheimer, director of Frankfurt’s Institute for Social Research, especially in his 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory.” Horkheimer contrasted critical theory with approaches that accept the existing order as the fixed background of inquiry. A conventional study might measure unemployment, productivity, screen time or carbon emissions. Critical theory wants the measurements, then asks why these are the measurements, whose purposes shaped them, and whether the investigator is as detached from society as a fish is detached from water. Facts matter, but facts arrive organized by institutions and interests. Critical theory joins empirical research to a practical aim: exposing domination and enlarging the possibility of emancipation.

This makes it suited to the present, when nearly every exercise of power comes with a dashboard. Employers do not supervise; they optimize. Platforms do not observe; they personalize. Governments do not classify; they deploy decision-support systems. Fossil-fuel companies do not extract hydrocarbons; they participate in the energy transition, frequently by changing the colour palette of the annual report.