Unearthing the roots of critical theory

G.W.F. Hegel was right in at least one thing: To understand an age, you must understand its philosophy. Carl Trueman, a professor at Grove City College, has been invaluable for helping Christians understand the philosophy of our current age. With his magisterial The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (Crossway 2020), Trueman established himself as an insightful, rigorous, and incisive analyst, who writes lucidly about complex ideas and places them into a Christian context. He followed up that book with a smaller summary volume called Strange New World (Crossway 2022), which added new material. His newest effort, To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory From Marx to Marcuse (B&H Academic, 256 pp.), addresses in greater detail elements taken up in that previous work—the nature of critical theory and its influence in contemporary culture. His in-depth analysis is rich in primary-source research and is pertinent for understanding contemporary cultural and political currents. As Christians, we must expose these un-Biblical ideas and counter them with truth.

Trueman patiently and non-polemically explains critical theory. To do so, he explores the philosophies of major figures such as Hegel, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud and culturally significant thinkers from the German Frankfurt School, such as Herbert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer. He also consults neo-Marxist thinkers such as Georg Lukacs and Karl Korsch and the Neo-Freudian Wilhelm Reich. As a historian, Trueman’s aim is more elucidation than refutation, and he explains difficult ideas in readable prose—no mean feat. However, he is wisely critical of critical theory.

In his analysis several salient ideas emerge. First, all these thinkers, with the exception of Freud, denied that humans had a fixed human nature. We are, rather, shaped by cultural forces. Hegel thought that history produced variations in culture and thinking driven by the inexorable Geist, or spirit, which provided a teleology of sorts. As an atheist, Marx dropped Geist, and his followers stressed the formative power of economic relationships, while later thinkers, such as Marcuse and Theodore Adorno, added distinct cultural elements.

Second, all these thinkers—beyond Hegel—possess a critical or negative spirit. Trueman quotes Mephistopheles from Goethe’s epic drama, Faust: “I am the spirit that always negates, and right so, since everything that comes into existence is only fit to go out of existence and it would be better if nothing ever got started.” Although none of these thinkers believe in the divine creation of humanity or the historic Fall (Genesis 1-3), they indict Western society in toto as oppressive in one way or another. Thus, the entire system must be overturned. It is beyond mere reform. As Marx wrote in his Theses on Feuerbach, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it.” Marxists and their heirs have certainly changed it, but not for the better.

Third, the major and basic institutions of society must be destroyed since they are based on repression and injustice. None of these thinkers has a substantial account of what a world beyond repression would mean (although Marx waxed idiotically poetic about it), but the traditional family and capitalism must be crushed. What Christians take as God-given norms for the family, for example, are mere reifications—artificial constraints deemed objective and normative. Marcuse and Reich combined Marx and Freud to advance the idea that the ruling class repressed others not only by the control of property, but through sexual taboos. Liberation comes from releasing pent-up sexual urges unbound by the restraints of traditional morality. This includes all manner of sexual deviancy.

Despite the grim and false philosophy advocated by critical theory, Trueman notes that it raises significant questions about the structure of society and sometimes gives helpful insights into how culture works, especially in the assessment of “the culture industry” (how culture is shaped by institutions) by Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Trueman writes, “Of all the areas covered by the early Frankfurt School, the material on the culture industry is perhaps the most useful to Christians.” Trueman notes our values and ideas are often subtly shaped by aesthetics and other factors unrelated to rational arguments.

To Change All Worlds is not an easy book to read, but it repays careful reading for anyone who wants to discern the intellectual roots of our cultural malaise. If we are to out-think the world for Christ, we must take serious books like this seriously.