Critical Theory, Materialism, and Progress

08 Nov 2025

Workshop: Critical Theory in the De-globalizing Period

Sun Yat-sen University

Frankfurt School critical theory emerged from a critique of orthodox Marxist conceptions of historical materialism. Early critical theorists, such as Horkheimer and Adorno, rejected the idea that intellectual and cultural “superstructure” phenomena could be explained by a determinist economic theory. They retained, however, the idea that we can only understand the possibility of critical theory if we can explain how it is connected to an emancipatory interest that is already present in the social and economic historical developments of contemporary societies, and they therefore preserved at least one part of the commitments that also animate Marxist historical materialism. The more, however, the first generation of the Frankfurt School moved towards a critique of modern rationality or even of purposive-instrumental reason as such, the more unclear it became what exactly would be the historical dynamics which supported the assumption of such an immanent potential. Later critical theorists, such as Habermas, Honneth and Jaeggi, have all returned to the idea that critical theory can only justify its methodology of immanent critique if it assumes that there is some progressive potential in contemporary modern societies that such a theory can reconstruct. This assumption is clearly visible in Habermas’s theory of social evolution, in Honneth’s reconstructive theory of modern ethical life, and – albeit more formally – in Jaeggi’s theory of progress as problem-solution process. It is less clear, however, whether we can characterize their theories in any reasonable sense as “materialist”. The necessary connection between the method of immanent critique and the assumption that we must be able to reconstruct some form of historical learning process, has recently opened up critical theory to the objection that it is necessarily entangled in a Eurocentrist narrative that uncritically endorses Western modernity as a normative standard which it then applies to measure all societies, and thereby implicitly reproduces a colonialist narrative. Amy Allen, who has constructed the most convincing form of this argument, therefore argues that critical theory needs to give up its commitment to immanent critique and should replace it with the method of genealogy. In my paper, I acknowledge the force of this objection, but I argue that Allen underestimates the resources that the tradition of historical materialism and the Frankfurt School have at their disposal. Once we reconstruct a plausible version of a historical materialist theory of progress that goes beyond the dualism of Habermas’s theory, beyond the institutionalism of Honneth and beyond the formalism of Jaeggi, we can argue for two claims: first, that such a theory is general enough to be able to characterize forms of modernization as progressive that do not follow the pattern of Western European history; second, that such a theory of progress can also plausibly reconstruct the claim, central to critical theory, that Western modernity exhibits forms of pathological rationalization that undermine the conditions of realization of its own forms of rationality. Far from an apologia of colonialism, such a theory can serve as the basis for an immanent critique of colonialism.