The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory

by Amy Allen

While post- and decolonial theorists have thoroughly debunked the idea of historical progress as a Eurocentric, imperialist, and neocolonialist fallacy, many of the most prominent contemporary thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School--J?rgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rainer Forst--have persistently defended ideas of progress, development, and modernity and have even made such ideas central to their normative claims. Can the Frankfurt School's goal of radical social change survive this critique? And what would a decolonized critical theory look like?

Amy Allen fractures critical theory from within by dispensing with its progressive reading of history while retaining its notion of progress as a social imperative, so eloquently defended by Adorno and Foucault. Critical theory, according to Allen, is the best resouce we have for achieving emancipatory social goals. In reimagining a decolonized critical theory after the end of progress, she rescues it from oblivion and gives it a future.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 12, 2016

About the author

Amy Allen is a Liberal Arts Research Professor of Philosophy and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University, and she is also the current Department Head. Previously, she was the Parents Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy and Gender and Women's Studies at Dartmouth College, and was Chair of the Department of Philosophy from 2006-2012. Her research takes a critical approach to feminist approaches of power, examines the relationship between power and autonomy in the constitution of the subject, and attempts to broaden traditional feminist understandings of power to apply to transnational issues.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Joeri · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good overview of contemporary critical thinking and it's problematisation due to the colonial influences on which it rests. Although the suggestions for decolonizing critical theory are excellent, I'm not so sure if Critical Theory as such can be given a future only through this way.

[Victoria Hawco · Rating 3 out of 5]

First I had to suffer through dialectics, now you’re telling me there’s such a thing as NEGATIVE dialectics? Count me out.

[Mikey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nice work. It is a careful and detailed study of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory. Unlike those superficial criticisms from some French theorists, Amy Allen reconstructed the internal logic of contemporary critical theory and treated their work seriously. She is so familiar with the secondary literature and important debates within critical theory that her work even can be read as a textbook on Habermasian critical theory.

However, I doubt that going back to a genealogy-inspired immanent critique could be seen as a way out. Not only would it miss the methodological peculiarity of critical theory, but it also misses the mission that combining normative theory and social analysis, thus makes second-order inquiry collapsed into first-order analysis.

[Alyssa]

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