Moralized, realist, and epistemic ideology critique

OZSW Conference 2024

Technical University of Eindhoven

In the tradition of critical theory, ideology critique plays a central methodological role. Typically, ideology critique is supposed to deliver an indictment of people's distorted reasons for accepting a political status quo that is based on epistemic considerations: ideologies are wrong, because they misrepresent reality. Contemporary critical theorists, however, downplay this epistemic dimension since they consider it as a possible source of authoritarianism, or because they assumethat the norms of ideology critique are better understood to be moral, rather than epistemic. Themantle of epistemic ideology critique has been taken up instead by political realists such as Rossi,Prinz and Aytac who see an epistemic critique of self-justifying power as an attractive alternativeto moralized forms of ideology critique. In my paper, I will argue that neither the moralists northe realists succeed in capturing the attractive, if underdeveloped features of the critical theory tradition. Whereas moralism fails to distinguish ideology critique from moral critique, the realistsadopt an unconvincing epistemology that fails to take seriously the practice-dependence of normativejudgments. In particular, it must assume an individualist ideal of socially unaffected cognitionthat is empirically unconvincing and normatively misleading. Both the revision and the attempted restoration of ideology critique assume that what is at stake is the truth of people's beliefs. By contrast, I argue that the original account ofideology we find in the main figures of the critical theory tradition is one that is focused not on beliefs but on the epistemic appropriateness of conceptual frameworks. Once we reformulateideology critique in these terms, we can see how it can be characterized as a non-moral, epistemiccritique of, primarily, people's conceptual frameworks and only secondarily of their beliefs. Whilenot moralized, this critique is nonetheless rooted in a political normativity of human emancipationand can therefore also evade the authoritarianism objection.