I
Approaching the one-thousand-year-old Oxford Castle and Prison from the east, at the corner of Castle St. and New Rd., the entire crosswalk is emblazoned with rainbow colors, indicating the Oxford city council’s solidarity with the local LGBTQ+ community. The juxtaposition of the ancient walls of the castle towering above the symbol of the sexual revolution is striking. One represents an ancient culture and tradition; the other stands for revolution and freedom from any conservative values the former would seek to impose upon it. This jarring contradiction stands at the heart of the culture wars which have been raging in the West since at least the 1960s.
In his new book, To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse, Carl Trueman traces the intellectual roots of Critical Theory as it was developed by the Frankfurt School. He argues that anthropology is the main problem with critical theory, and intends this book to provide the reader with more background into the nuances of the theory’s arguments.
A Professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Grove City College, and author of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (2020), Trueman is a formidable intellectual historian. He cut his teeth on Reformation history and is recognized as one of today’s leading Christian public intellectuals. His latest book is a much-needed examination which will help Christian pastors and their parishioners understand the nuances of critical theory, give them tools to interact with others who may be attracted to its claims, and ultimately bring a greater emphasis to the centrality of the church as a witness to the world.
To Change All Worlds develops chronologically. Chapters one and two deal respectively with the importance of Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School philosophers’ adoption of certain aspects of Hegel (1770–1831) and Marx. Chapter three touches on two influential Marxists, Karl Korsch (1886–1961) and Georg Lukacs (1885–1971), who articulated a form of Hegelian Marxism which proved useful to later critical theorists. Chapters four through seven deal with the Frankfurt School. Here, the book demonstrates the way in which they contributed directly to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the criticism and use of mass media to influence society. The final chapter provides Trueman’s analysis of the merits of critical theory and the extent to which Christians should know its nuances while still rejecting its core claims. Because of the numerous characters (ranging from Feuerbach to Judith Butler) and terms, this review does not attempt to interact with each section. Instead, I will give a broad overview of Trueman’s explanation of critical theory as it was formulated by the Frankfurt School, with a particular emphasis on the role of religion, the church, and sexuality, and will conclude with a general assessment of the overall strengths and weaknesses of the book.
II
Critical Theory was born out of disillusionment with the grand narratives of the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century. After the First World War, a small group of Jewish Marxists, originally centered in Frankfurt, Germany (known as the Frankfurt School), was struggling to understand the seeming failures of Marxism. Karl Marx (1818–83) had railed against capitalism, in which he saw small classes of wealthy business owners and merchants (the bourgeoisie) subjecting their workers (the proletariat) in order to profit off their labor. If only the workers of the world would unite, he thought, they could throw off the domination of their capitalist overlords and usher in a communist utopia. The revolution, however, had not materialized as Marx had envisioned it. The most advanced industrial nations of the early twentieth century had not become communist, and Russia, having adopted Marxist ideology after the 1917 revolution, had itself become a totalitarian state. Faced with this paradox, Theodore Adorno (1903–69), Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), and other members of the Frankfurt School, set out to formulate a theory which would ultimately jolt the proletariat out of their doldrums and spark the final revolution. The philosophy they developed is known as critical theory.
Under a capitalist system, they said, the individual human being is transformed from a subject—a thinking, feeling person who has their own desires—into an object. The factory owner does not care about the hopes and dreams of the worker. Instead, he views them as nothing more than a dollar sign or a number on a spreadsheet. This process of objectification takes on a life of its own, as the worker—now a cog in the system—begins to unconsciously live life and make decisions as an object. An example given by Trueman is in the way we think about education. Whereas education used to be about contemplating higher things and gaining timeless knowledge, we now choose a degree based on what will make us the most money or bestow the most status within the given system. This process of objectification—the transformation of an individual into a tool—ultimately benefits the upper-class business owners and the social elite. Any supposed freedom or leisure time in which the worker partakes, such as weekend rest, reading literature in their off-time, watching movies, etc., is really just masking the fact that they are slaves to their capitalist masters. This reality of economic objectification is not a simple flaw in the system which can be worked out through improving worker safety, ending child labor, or decreasing hours on the factory floor, they said. Instead, it is a contradiction inherent to capitalism. It cannot be mitigated by improving the system. The entire system must be destroyed through revolution to make way for a new, utopian society.
One of the key contributions of the Frankfurt School was to expand the categories of objectification beyond simple economics. All of the normative categories and institutions in our society, they said, contribute to the transformation of individual humans into slaves of the system. Today we might see this playing out in the way categories such as “whiteness,” “male,” “female,” or “cisgender,” are treated with such suspicion by adherents of critical theory. The institutions of society (law enforcement, the church, etc.) also serve to maintain the status quo. Under the influence of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72), Marx had said that religion was the “opium of the people.” The proletariat, under the decadent rule of capitalism, had essentially dreamed up a god who made up for all the things they lacked. They projected their desires for happiness, fulfillment, and a world in which their needs were met. In other words, what they did not have in the here and now they hoped for as pie in the sky. The danger of religion, thought Marx, was that it kept those same workers docile and submissive instead of revolting against the elites. Now, under the influence of the Frankfurt School, religion and the church were viewed not only as an opiate, but as an active tool of the bourgeoisie to keep the proletariat in line and maintain their own power.
The church and religion play their role in maintaining systematic injustice for the oppressed in the area of sexuality. By connecting Marxist theory to Freudian psychology, early critical theorists claimed that human beings were defined by the desire for sexual pleasure. Society, however, in an attempt to keep the proletariat suppressed, used institutions like the church and traditional morals to repress individual sexual freedom. In our society, said the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, the concepts of traditional sexuality and the nuclear family benefit the elite in three ways: it creates private ownership by allowing property to be passed to one’s descendants; it turns submission to authority into an honorable trait through familial patriarchy; it keeps children and women dependent on men. Again, the goal of critical theory is not to improve education for women or to expand individual opportunity—that would just paper over the unsolvable contradictions of our society. Instead, the traditional family and sexual norms must be completely destroyed along with the church and religion in order to pave the way for a world in which people are freed to be individual subjects. The critical theorists of the 1960s called on people to take subversive action to overturn the system. Homosexual acts, for example, were viewed as revolutionary acts, which directly challenged the imposed idea of monogamy and traditional sexual mores.
The irony here is obvious. The intent of critical theory was to stop the objectification of individuals in society. It was supposed to grant freedom to be a subject—a person who experiences and relates to others. As Trueman observes, in an attempt to overthrow the oppressive restrictions imposed by self-serving elites, the sexual revolution promoted by Wilhelm Reich and Marcuse made personal satisfaction the only goal of sex. The resulting hookup culture of today, however, has turned human beings into nothing but objects of pleasure. So too, the “ubiquity and mass consumption of internet pornography” has transformed human actors on the screen into “consumer items” who perform sexual acts “not for their benefit but for the benefit of the third parties staring at the computer” (177). Just as intellectuals in the 1940s observed that science—which had formerly been viewed as that which would usher in human flourishing and peace—had discovered in nuclear fission the terrible secret of world destruction, so it seems that the hopes of the Frankfurt School have brought about the very objectification they wished to abolish.1
Having concluded that critical theory is “by definition destructive,” Trueman goes on in the last chapter to assess the theory from a Christian perspective (179). The nature of this theory demands it be handled with care. First, he argues that we must understand critical theory on its own terms in order to properly interact with it. Second, he writes that there are certain overlapping areas of concern between critical theory and Christianity, such as the repudiation of turning people into objects for our own pleasure or desires. Further, just as with the Arian heresy of the fourth century, critical theory does embody “some singular aspect of truth” (177). It then proceeds, however, to undermine the very “truth which it embodies” (177). Third, Trueman cautions that the categories provided by critical theory are inherently revolutionary. This should give us serious pause before using concepts such as intersectionality on behalf of the Christian faith. Finally, he writes, Christians must repudiate the claim made by critical theorists that it is impossible to escape enslavement to a system’s power without revolution. Instead, it must be demonstrated in the local church, where we partake of the means of grace and learn to love one another because of Christ’s work on our behalf, that the church “is the place where God addresses human beings as persons and where all humanly constructed barriers are to be demolished” (226).
III
Though the strengths of this book are many, my biggest criticism is the lack of historical context in which these intellectuals and their ideas are presented. Wilhelm Reich, for example is introduced with no background history or dates. Little attention is given to the massive social upheaval of the 1960s and virtually no mention is made of how an obscure philosophy developed by a small group of intellectuals in Germany came to dominate the current culture wars. This runs the risk of lending credence to assertions that intellectual history overemphasizes ideas while ignoring other historical factors. This does not outweigh, however, the book’s strengths.
The best feature of To Change All Worlds is Trueman’s gift for taking the notoriously turgid prose of a Hegel or an Adorno and making it easily accessible for the rest of us. Again and again, a block quote from a philosopher will be presented, followed by Trueman’s explanation, followed by another even more basic explanation. This is often accompanied by one or more examples from every-day life which truly help solidify the concepts. Each key figure who appears in the book is accompanied by a footnote containing a bibliography for those interested in further reading. Editorially, it would have been nice to have a bibliography at the end for simplicity’s sake, but one cannot have everything. In summary, anyone who wants to understand the intellectual roots of critical theory from a confessional perspective will benefit greatly from Trueman’s work. I highly recommend this book.
Note
- Many intellectuals and public figures cited the irony presented by scientific discovery and atomic energy in the 1940s. See, for example, Etienne Gilson, The Terrors of the Year Two Thousand (Toronto: University of St. Michael’s College, 1949), and D. Elton Trueblood, Foundations for Reconstruction (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1946). Perhaps the most public expression of this sentiment was made by Dwight D. Eisenhower during his inaugural speech in January 1953.
©Paul Fine. All Rights Reserved.
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Paul Fine
Paul C. Fine is pursuing a DPhil in the history of modern theology at Oxford University (Wolfson College) where he focuses on the development of American civil religion during the early Cold War. He previously served in the United States Marine Corps and as a contractor for the US Government. Paul holds an MA in Historical Theology from Westminster Seminary California and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania.
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