Luca Hemmerich (TU Darmstadt), "Against Negativism: Why Critical Theory Should Appeal to the Good"

Political Philosophy, 2024

By Luca Hemmerich

Critical theory is haunted by an ongoing debate about the foundations and methodology of social critique. A widespread view, held by both classical and contemporary critical theorists, says that critique should proceed in a ‘negativistic’ manner. Negativists think that we should not appeal to positive normative concepts like human flourishing, social justice, or an ideal society when we criticize social structures. Some negativists, especially those working within a Foucauldian tradition, believe that we should reject appeals to normative standards entirely. Others, like Adorno, think that such appeals should be purely negative: Social critics should denounce suffering or injustice without presupposing what flourishing or justice might look like.

In my paper, I argue against negativism. I do this, first, by undermining the main motivations for the negativistic view. Second, I argue that appeals to ‘the good’ – i.e., to explicit and positive normative standards like human flourishing or social justice – are important for the project of critical theory. I understand critical theory, broadly construed, as a diverse class of approaches in social and political theory whose main focus is the critique and transformation of various kinds of social relations of domination, aiming at human emancipation.

The two main motivations for negativism are epistemic and normative in nature, respectively. First, negativists argue that appeals to the good are epistemically precarious: From within a bad world riddled with domination and ideology, we cannot grasp what a good society might look like. If we nevertheless attempt to do so, we will inevitably end up justifying and reproducing structures of domination. Second, many negativists believe that appeals to the good are normatively inadequate: It is paternalistic or undemocratic for critical theorists to develop conceptions of the good, rather than leaving this to other social agents or a democratic process.

I think that these arguments are unsuccessful, and I respond to them in the article. Here, I focus instead on the second part of my argument: why appeals to the good are important for the project of critical theory. In my view, there are at least two roles that explicit and positive normative standards may serve for critical theory. First, they can account for the grounds of its social critique. And second, they can provide guidance regarding the direction of desirable social transformation.

Social critique involves normative claims. Accounting for the grounds of critique means disclosing and defending the standards underlying these claims. Now many negativists deny that normative accounting is important at all. Some even view the demand for normative accounting as tantamount to a call for an affirmative turn towards justifying the world as it is. However, I argue that there are two significant reasons why normative accounting is important for critical theory.

First, accounting can counteract the danger that our social critique unwittingly reproduces hegemonic ideologies and structures of domination. By explicating their normative standards, social critics are forced to subject these standards to rigorous criticism and challenge preconceived notions and implicit biases. If critics are exempt from this requirement and their implicit standards remain unexamined, the danger increases that such problematic notions find their way into their critique.

Second, accounting can serve a ‘disciplining’ function. As the idiom ‘having your cake and eating it, too’ illustrates, we as human beings often desire various things that are inconsistent with each other. It looks like this could equally apply to the standards that we implicitly presuppose in our social critique. If we explicate these standards, we can acknowledge conflicting goals and trade-offs and make a conscious decision about them. If we reject such explication, however, we are likely to overlook many of these tensions. At best, we would then leave it to chance how trade-offs are made. At worst, our critique could remain entirely ineffective because it is internally contradictory. This is a problem for those who reject the need for normative accounting.

There are other negativists who agree that accounting is important but deny that the underlying standards of critique need to be positive ones. On their view, critical theory should diagnose suffering and unfreedom, but refrain from developing a positive conception of a good life. The problem is that such a purely negative orientation appears normatively inadequate. This becomes clear when we examine the second role of positive normative standards: providing guidance regarding the direction of social transformation.

We can imagine a world like the present one in every respect, except that it lacks many of its positive aspects. Perhaps, for example, the hypothetical world contains less genuine friendships. It seems that a negativistic approach, appealing only to negative standards, could not tell the normative difference between this clearly worse world and our present world. Negativists might object that this is an unrealistic example that is irrelevant for a critique of the real society in which we live. But even if we concede that critical theories need not cover hypothetical cases, this one is only an extreme (and therefore particularly vivid) example of a more general problem: that a negativistic approach cannot give us reasons to avoid worlds that are worse than the present world in the respect that they contain fewer of its positive aspects. In this respect, its guidance for social transformation is insufficient.

Moreover, it is unclear whether a negativistic approach can motivate transformative action that is sufficiently ambitious. After all, the aim of social critique is not only to abolish the worst current social ills, but to enable all human beings to lead flourishing lives. Negativistic critique can, for now, only recommend actions aimed at eliminating social ills. Negativists must then hope that a more positive vision of the good life, ostensibly unbound by current epistemic limits, emerges in the course of this process. If this is not the case, then a negativistic critical theory risks missing its goal of genuine human emancipation.

Overall, then, there are at least two important roles that explicit and positive normative standards play for the project of critical theory: accounting for the grounds of its critique and guiding social transformation. Negativistic forms of social critique, or so I argue, cannot adequately fulfill these roles. Social critique needs normative standards, and these standards cannot be purely negative. Critical theory should not only diagnose the social ills that permeate our current social world, but also give us an idea of what kind of world we should strive for.