To students interested in the Frankfurt School, I used to recommend Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination (1973), but Malte Frøslee Ibsen might have just changed that. In A Critical Theory of Global Justice, Ibsen offers a compelling reconstruction of the Frankfurt School’s idea of critical theory by means of six paradigms: Max Horkheimer’s original paradigm (27-65), Theodor Adorno’s negativist paradigm (85-126), Jürgen Habermas’ communicative paradigm (149-199), Axel Honneth’s recognition paradigm (227-282), Amy Allen’s contextual paradigm (299-312), and Rainer Forst’s justification paradigm (313-341). The synthesis that he offers of these authors’ work is superb, accessible to nonspecialists, clear without sacrificing any of the notorious complexity of some critical theorists, and very original. Ibsen shows that transversal to these scholars’ otherwise vast interests is a common concern with the historical embeddedness of reason in social practices and institutions (the historical dimension), with the basic structure of society as that which gives form to social life (the sociological dimension), and with a normative account of human autonomy (the normative dimension). The historical dimension recalls Hegel, the sociological, Marx, and the normative, Kant, making Frankfurt School critical theory into an innovative synthesis of German philosophy in which “these three dimensions are methodologically integrated in a critique of the historical genesis, present, and possible future forms of the basic structure of society that can guide emancipation in practice” (346).
But does the book’s reconstruction of these paradigms offer a critical theory of global justice? Here, Ibsen overpromises. The geopolitical imaginary of the book, notwithstanding the inclusion of Allen’s work, is not only Eurocentric and anthropocentric but Germano-centric and andro-centric. What Edward Said once said about Orientalism—that it is a “system for citing works and authors” (Orientalism, 1978, 23)—is also true of Eurocentrism, when you can claim to reach the globe without even having to leave Germany a la Kant. This might seem justifiable in a book about the Frankfurt School, but that is no longer the case once you claim to offer a critical theory of global justice. For instance, it is problematic that Ibsen gives so little space to Allen’s work. Allen is the sole feminist critical theorist included—Nancy Fraser’s redistributive paradigm is entirely overlooked, as she is dismissed in one page (246)—and the only one to look for theoretical resources outside of Euro-North America in her call to decolonize critical theory. Unlike the other scholars, who Ibsen sees as developing a critical theory of world society, Allen is relegated to the more limited place of offering “a self-interrogation of European or Western modernity” (310). She gets downgraded to the more subordinated diversity-check function that can help to hold all these real paradigms accountable for their “potential complicity in ideological justifications of neocolonial and neoimperialist forms of domination” (350).
Ibsen’s best definition of critical theory as a theory of global justice takes place when power finally appears as a central part of the paradigm—that is, with Honneth’s return to Hegel and the struggle for recognition to distinguish between three forms of power: agential, structural, and relational (234). Ibsen contends that a critical theory of global justice is a theory that explains how the structural power of capitalism, understood as a global structure, undermines the agential power of the individual (human autonomy) because it fragments the proletariat, distorting in that way their relational power. But it is precisely in relation to power’s entanglement with reason that Ibsen collides with Allen on a fundamental level. First, there is a disagreement about the validity of the negativist paradigm of Adorno and, incidentally, that of Foucault. This negativist paradigm analyzes the embeddedness of reason in history not from the point of view of emancipation (as do Kant, Hegel, and to some extent Marx), but from the point of view of domination (as do Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, Fanon, Foucault, Judith Butler, and Achille Mbembe, among many others today). Scholars like Allen hold that, whether instrumental or communicative, reason not only empowers the agency of the subject but disciplines it, shaping the individual in ways that extend rather than redress domination. Within this critical theoretical tradition, power is not exclusively repressive but also produces the subject through which it circulates. But Ibsen rejects the critical purchase of this negativity at work in Adorno, Foucault, and Allen’s anti-normative/normalizing position in terms virtually exchangeable with those of Habermas in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1990). That is to say, Ibsen rejects what he calls their “negative moment” for “ignoring the injunction to ‘hold fast to moral norms,’” as if this injunction constituted the sole valid “practical guidance for emancipatory collective action” (311). Second, there are different understandings of capitalism at work within this broader tradition. Horkheimer and Adorno endorsed the Marxist view that democratic emancipation was fundamentally incompatible with capitalist modernity. However, scholars from the second generation of the Frankfurt School onwards no longer characterized capitalism as democracy’s ultimate contradiction but as its economic partner, cutting off a crucial aspect of what made critical theory critical in the first place. In celebrating Habermas, Ibsen’s hero (vi), and the pivotal author of this shift, he risks giving up on that radical foundation as well.
In short, the book seems to endorse, rather than critique, the philosophical move from Horkheimer and Adorno to Habermas, Honneth, and finally to Forst that turns away from Marx to revendicate Kant (notwithstanding Honneth’s Hegelianism). That epistemological endorsement conceals a more troublesome political one, in that it signifies a move away from critical theory’s attempt to ground its theory in the agency of the working class, as a revolutionary subject, via the empirical research social sciences (what drove Marx to Engels and Horkheimer to Erich Fromm), to its ultimate abandonment. For Habermas, Honneth, and Forst, capitalism appears more likely to deliver on the promise of global justice than does its overthrowing. (By the end of the book, I was not entirely sure where Ibsen stood in this regard.) Consequently, you end up with a critical theory that not only ends up calling the police on the revolutionary students who were resisting the administered society (as Adorno did) but one that offers now to organize “a global police force to act on behalf of the basic rights of cosmopolitan citizens who need protection against their own criminal governments or other violent gangs operating within states” (as Habermas does, cited in Ibsen 206). In Capital: Vol. I (1990), Marx described capitalism as coming on the face of the earth “dripping from head to toe…with blood and dirt” (926), a description that has lost none of its value in the face of today’s ecological and human catastrophe (war, genocide, climate disaster, debt-servitude, global apartheid, etc.). From Ibsen’s reconstruction of the most recent paradigms of critical theory, one gets the feeling that the Frankfurt School has not only become unable to see the blood and the dirt, but that it now works towards their erasure.
Fortunately, these are not the only available critical theories, nor even the only theorists the Frankfurt School inspired. In addition to Fraser, take, for instance, Black feminist intersectional critical theorist, Angela Davis. Influenced by Herbert Marcuse (who was absent from Ibsen’s reconstruction) and radically embedded in revolutionary movements, Davis calls not for the creation of a global police force to administer the postnational constellation, but for the abolition of the prison-industrial and military/police complex, as the materialist way of delivering global justice (see her 2016 book, Freedom is a Constant Struggle). Or take Bolívar Echeverría’s way of dialectically synthesizing Walter Benjamin’s anarchist embrace of the general strike—Benjamin is another notable absence in Ibsen’s account—with Indigenous peoples’ political practices of survival against European colonization in his 1998 book, La modernidad de lo barroco. Inspired by Benjamin, Echeverría theorizes a globally more pluralistic baroque modernity, one which is resonant with Enrique Dussel’s transmodernity, and capable of realizing the ecologically emancipatory promise of the neo-technic revolution—a promise effectively denied by the accumulation of capital under “actually existing” Eurocentric modernity (Modernity and ‘Whiteness, ’ 2019, 16).
The truth is that Ibsen doesn’t ever leave the parochial imaginary of the “West,” even when he is engaging with its critics. Why are French poststructuralism (Foucault) and American liberalism (John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Thomas Nagel) the main interlocutors for the Frankfurt School’s global theory of justice, rather than the Black radical tradition (W. E. B. DuBois, C. L. R. James, Cedric Robinson, etc.) or decolonial theory (Aníbal Quijano, Sylvia Wynter, Maria Lugones, Santiago Castro-Gómez, etc.)? The latter both engage with the totality of global capitalism as a world-historical system whose absence Ibsen laments in poststructuralist and liberal thinkers. This decision is even more shocking given that Ibsen seems genuinely concerned by Allen’s critique of the Frankfurt School’s Eurocentrism, which reappears in every single chapter he devotes to the limitations of each paradigm. Alternatively, why not reorient critical theory in the direction of Spinoza, rather than Kant, given Ibsen’s spot-on understanding of climate disaster as “the definite struggle of our time.” (351). And if that is the case, why are not Donna Haraway, Jason Moore, and Kohei Saito, among others, not more important interlocutors for the critical theory of the Frankfurt School?
Ibsen conceives of a critical theory of world society as “an inherently cooperative effort” (348), vindicating Horkheimer’s original paradigm of critical theory as a “materialist programme of interdisciplinary social research, in which [European] philosophy is assigned the mediating role of integrating insights won in the fragmented social-scientific disciplines” (29). Since the emergence of the Black radical tradition, decolonial theory, settler colonial critique, queer of color critique, intersectional Black feminism, indigenous criticism, decolonial feminism, and more, European philosophy has no longer served as the sole mediator of that effort, and rightly so. For a critical theory of world society to begin, such a project must pluralize the philosophical discourses it uses as mediation. A Critical Theory of Global Justice is undoubtedly an excellent book on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. But it is also a demonstration of how far we still are from any real cooperation at the level of critical theory, in the plural and in the global.
