Critical Theory as Anti-Emancipatory Project
by Collin May
The rapid expansion of woke ideology and its attendant cancel culture has produced both a popular and an academic backlash. The recent appearance by the trio of university presidents before the House of Representatives Education Committee has only served to focus that backlash against the conformism and anti-free speech culture that dominate many university campuses.
On a popular level, we are all familiar with concepts such as anti-racism, settler colonialism, and the ubiquitous EDI—equity, diversity, and inclusion. On the intellectual level, the backlash focuses on a growing sense of scholarly puritanism attributed to anti-Enlightenment theories that underly these public concepts. The theories include: neo-feminism; postmodernism, often with a Foucauldian inspiration; and critical theory. As far as critical theory is concerned, the spotlight shines on German-American critical theorist Herbert Marcuse.
Marcuse is famous for an essay he wrote in 1965 entitled “Repressive Tolerance.” In it, he argued that tolerance in the liberal capitalist West was simply a veil that oppressive right-wing movements and state institutions used to dominate public discourse while silencing left-leaning activism. In response, Marcuse called for the outright suppression of speech and discourse deemed right-wing. In other words, intolerance for allegedly right-leaning narratives, with untrammeled promotion of the supposedly emancipatory left-leaning narratives.
Marcuse was a neo-Marxist and leader of what came to be called the New Left in the United States. He also saw himself as part of the critical theory movement, reaching back to its origins in the German Frankfurt School. The goal of critical theory as devised by its founders, was to employ Marx’s critique of class relations to uncover repressive structures of power embedded in modern, enlightened, Western societies.
For some critical theorists this included going beyond Marx’s emphasis on class to apply critique to unequal power relations built around race, gender, disability, age, etc. Departing from the more objective Marxist analysis, some in the critical theory movement began to emphasize subjective sources of oppression deriving from narratives around identities. Eventually, the theory of intersectionality—the view that there are multiple overlapping identities, each with its own discourse of oppression—gathered up these subjective identities in a collective of intolerance that privileged the most afflicted narratives while actively seeking to silence any objective public narrative on the political or social level. Add to this the Foucauldian instinct that there is no objective ground to assess social oppression, only perpetually competing claims to power, and the modern woke ideology is born.
The difficulty is that, today, this ideology has itself become a pervasive source of suppression of public free speech, on the one hand, and open scholarly discourse, on the other. Marcusian critical theory, on the pretense of emancipation, has itself reified subjectivity, actively shutting down any form of contrary dialogue that might challenge the premises of woke ideology. But it goes even further. Because Marcuse conceived of any political movement, institution, or narrative that was not given the imprimatur of the leftist apparatchiks as inherently part of the oppressor narrative, any speech or scholarly undertaking that does not actively promote indulgence of the subjective intersectional discourse is open to criticism as an instance of oppression.
I experienced this firsthand in 2022. After being appointed by the provincial government as Chief of the Alberta Human Rights Commission, I was attacked by a cabal of leftist bloggers, politicians, academics, and journalists. My crime was an academic book review I had written thirteen years earlier on the historical penchant of Muslim regimes toward imperialism and militarism through a succession of caliphates. For merely raising the topic and agreeing, in part but only in part, with the author, I was called racist, Islamophobic, a purveyor of hate speech. The woke mob, modeling repressive intolerance, came for me, and I was fired, with my reputation publicly shredded in the process. It was even said that my nondescript review, likely read by no more than ten people at the time of its online publication, was a direct cause of violence against black Muslim women in Alberta thirteen years later. A less obvious causal connection could not be imagined, but logic and causation are now condemned as just another link in the chain of the repressive Western, individualist, and capitalist regime.
Oddly enough, also in 2009, I had written another book review. This one was on the collection of essays from Paul Piccone, founder of Telos. In that review, I examined Piccone’s concerns with some in the critical theory movement who, like Marcuse, had turned critical theory’s focus on uncovering oppressive structures into its own positive source of oppression. According to Piccone, these theorists had abandoned the emancipatory goals of modernity, opting for a power-laden scheme that not only failed to uncover intolerant right-wing movements but also actively assumed their tactics and propaganda in the hopes of creating an equally oppressive power matrix under the guise of emancipation.
It is this misuse of critical theory that occupied Piccone. The shift to a subjectivist doctrine that privileges power over emancipation is the antithesis of critical theory’s goals. Today, in our universities, media, corporations, and public sector, we are seeing this insidious dogma play out. Following Piccone, it appears that critical theory’s agenda going forward must be to uncover this blatant misuse of critical theory itself. It is time to turn critique on the critics.
Topics: Israel Initiative
Collin May is a lawyer in Calgary, Canada, specializing in estate planning, professional regulation, and workplace investigations. Collin studied political philosophy and religion at Harvard, Boston College, and the École des hautes études in Paris before obtaining his law degree from Dalhousie University. Collin worked with the United Nations International Telecommunication Union and the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva before practicing law in Alberta. From 2019, he served as a Commissioner of the Alberta Human Rights Commission and was appointed Chief of the Commission in May 2022. Collin has published a number of book reviews and scholarly articles in political philosophy and critical theory. In 2023, Collin was appointed Adjunct Lecturer in Community Health Sciences at the University of Calgary Cumming School of Medicine in recognition of his work in patient safety and advocating for health equity for the elderly and Indigenous communities.