Impossible hope: New critical theory and the spirit of liberation

The rapprochement between critical social theory and liberal political theory raises the question of whether Critical Theory remains adequately equipped to respond to contemporary global crises such as nationalism and ecological devastation. Recent Critical Theory—represented by the 2nd generation Frankfurt School writings of Jürgen Habermas and his U.S. reception—has neglected the original program of critical theory as an oppositional methodology oriented to liberation. This liberatory spirit has been replaced by an internal debate whose boundaries are set by current discourses within the philosophy of language and moral/political philosophy, and by the one-sided response of Critical Theorists to the influx of postmodernism to the academy. Habermas\u27s procedural framework for democratic legitimation, in which meeting formal conditions legitimates the outcome of discursively-based decisions, implies minimal background conditions which, when met by existing institutions and mechanisms of consent-generation, lead Habermas to tacitly legitimate both anti-democratic practices and geo-political calamities. This brings Habermas\u27s theory quite close to the uncritical Enlightenment discourse of John Rawls. While Habermas argues he is the bearer of a “counter-discourse of modernity,” his theory, like Rawls\u27s excludes the margins of opposition in which hope for liberation from existing institutions is most clearly found. I thus recommend a return to first-generation critical theory, reread as a philosophy of praxis. I argue against recent post-Marxist social theory that the mere proliferation of discourses is inadequate to respond to the demands of liberation articulated by the disenfranchised and oppressed. I also argue against neo0Heideggerian “politics of thought.” These discourses are replaced by a New Critical Theory which refuses abstract polarization between modern and postmodern thought, and seeks to displace both current discourses of legitimation and the regimes they support. New Critical Theory is exemplified by recent developments in feminist theory (developing a paradigm of asymmetrical reciprocity) and postmodern social theory (as seen in recent works of or influenced by Jacques Deride). Though ongoing pathologies of modernity resist global attempts at either remediation of radical change-and thus ope for liberation continues to appear impossible-I conclude that oppositional theory and oppositional movements have not yet exhausted all possibilities for mutual reinforcement