Critical inquiry: the Marxist heritage

In discussing interpretivism in the previous two chapters, the issue of critical inquiry has already emerged for us. By and large, interpretivism is an uncritical form of study. Phenomenology, to be sure, at least in its more authentic guise, is self-professedly critical. Still, not all phenomenologists have recognised the critical character of their enterprise or exploited it to the full. As Brenkman is able to claim (1987, p. 5), the critical challenge mounted by the Frankfurt School ‘has also figured—sometimes as negative counterpoint, sometimes as shared project—in the phenomenological tradition’. Similarly, while Paul Ricoeur can point to a critical demystifying hermeneutics (as in Marx, Nietzsche and Freud), he also acknowledges that for some (Rudolf Bultmann, for instance), hermeneutics is merely demythologising. In the former, the text is considered to represent false reality and efforts are made to remove the masks and illusions and gain new interpretation. Thus, Ricoeur expressly links demystification with ‘suspicion’ and ‘disillusionment’ (1974, p. 408) and states that demystification ‘recognizes myth as myth but with the purpose of renouncing it’ (1974, p. 335). In the case of demythologisation, however, the text is reverenced and its hidden meaning caringly sought after. As Ricoeur points out, ‘demythologization is distinguished from demystification by the fact that it is moved by the will to better comprehend the text’ (1974, p. 389).

In large part, therefore, the critical inquiry that forms the subject matter of this chapter stands in stark contrast to what we have been considering under the heading of interpretivism. It is a contrast between a research that seeks merely to understand and a research that challenges .. . between a research that reads the situation in terms of interaction and community and a research that reads it in terms of conflict and oppression . . . between a research that accepts the status quo and a research that seeks to bring about change.

There have always been social critics, of course. From Socrates on, and no doubt earlier still, society has not lacked members ready to call it into question. While the role of the social critic may have come to the fore in modem times and its importance may have been heightened, Walzer is right to argue (1989, p. 4) that the modem social critic is ‘not the first’. It is sometimes claimed that criticism as a self-consciously chosen role is a recent phenomenon; that, unlike the social criticism of earlier times, today’s version is levelled at the social order itself, at institutions and stmctures and not merely at individual behaviour; and that the social critic today is alienated and isolated to an extent not experienced by counterparts in other eras. Walzer does not accept any part of this argument. He insists that, in the first two of these respects, today’s critics are litde different from those encountered in the recorded history of the past and that, in regard to the third, the very opposite is the case.

All the same, today’s critical enterprise is carried out in a very different world. In speaking of critique, we are not referring to violent revolution, let us remember. Unlike Mao Zedong in his famous dictum, we are not talking about the power that comes out of the barrel of a gun. We are talking of the power of ideas and it is certainly conceivable that critical thought today has more potency. This is the case that John Ralston Saul argues. As Saul sees it, critical thought is now being put forward in a world whose mling elites carry greater burdens of knowledge than ever before and have a greater dependence on those burdens of knowledge than ever before. The knowledge that the elites control may be their strength but it also constitutes their vulnerability. Saul says of the elites that the ‘possession, use and control of knowledge have become their central theme—the theme song of their expertise’. He believes that ‘their power depends not on the effect with which they use that knowledge but on the effectiveness with which they control its use’ (1992, p. 8).

When we look around at the influence and strength of money, of armies, of legal officials, or indeed at the ease with which writers are silenced through censorship, violence and imprisonment, it seems that the word is a fragile blossom. But one step back from this immediacy is enough to reveal the power of language. Nothing frightens those in authority so much as criticism …

Language—not money or force—provides legitimacy. So long as military, political, religious or financial systems do not control language, the public’s imagination can move about freely with its own ideas. Uncontrolled words are consistendy more dangerous to established authority than armed forces, (Saul 1992, p. 8)

Another difference is that social critics today rarely stand alone. In an age of popular mobilisation, democratic and totalitarian politics, state- sponsored schooling and mass communication, it is, Walzer suggests, ‘more likely that wherever they go, they go in crowds’. Indeed, the people themselves are frequendy the critical subjects, so that ‘the critic participates in an enterprise that is no longer his alone; he agitates, teaches, counsels, challenges, protests from within’. Such critics ‘need to find a place to stand, close to but not engulfed by their company’ (Walzer 1989, pp. 24-6).

This dilemma of standing close but not being engulfed is shared by the critics whom Walzer makes the subject of his study. These are Julien Benda with his crusade against ‘intellectual treason’; pragmatist Randolph Bourne pleading for cosmopolitanism in the face of a concerted move towards a uniform Americanism;                                                                                                           existential

phenomenologist Martin Buber seeking a true Zion (‘We have full independence, a state, and all that pertains to it, but where is the nation in the state? And where is that nation’s spirit?’); founder of the Italian communist party, Antonio Gramsci, and his Prison Notebooks; Ignazio Silone abandoning communist party activism for the writing of novels about peasants and villages; George Orwell, creator of 1984 and internal critic of English socialism; Algerian-born existentialist novelist Albert Camus, for whom the Algerian issue proves a nemesis; another existentialist, pioneer feminist Simone de Beauvoir, with her ambiguous feminist goal of women’s ‘more and more profound assimilation into our once masculine society’; Frankfurt School member Herbert Marcuse, critic of the ‘one-dimensional man’; Michel Foucault and his institutional genealogies; and finally Breyten Breytenbach, the ‘critic in exile’.

These are all, Walzer says, ‘men and women of the left’ (1989, p. 26), even if they ‘don’t often match the stereotype of a leftist social critic’ (p. 225). This is not to say, however, that they are all Marxists, or neo-Marxists, or post-Marxists. It is customary today to see the towering figure of Karl Marx casting his shadow over all inquiry that describes itself as critical. In social science literature, without a doubt, the neo- Marxist (post-Marxist?) Frankfurt School is now accorded a monopoly on the descriptor ‘critical theory’. For all that, it needs to be remembered that social critics emerge from a multitude of background orientations. In going on to discuss the seminal work of Marx and to explore the remarkable history and invaluable contributions of the Frankfurt School membership, we should keep in mind that critical inquiry is not co­extensive with either of these, or with both of them together.

Source: Michael J Crotty (1998), The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process, SAGE Publications Ltd; First edition.