Rainer Forst is a leader of what is sometimes called the third generation of Frankfurt School critical theory, and The Noumenal Republic in many ways synthesises a career’s worth of groundbreaking work. It furthers Forst’s signature turn to the theory of justification and his subsequent development of the notion of ‘noumenal power’ to bolster the case for justification’s political relevance and efficacy. I believe it fair to say that the project aims at reclaiming and revitalising a critical agenda combining deep commitments to democratic self-determination and to the transformational power of rational critique. It has long been a core thesis of Forst’s that norms matter, that a politics of principle is both possible and urgently needed. The Noumenal Republic continues to build a strong case for this, with which I have a good deal of sympathy. And yet I want to take the opportunity to pose a question about its potential limits: what are the implicit historical or contextual conditions on which the success of a politics of justification depends?
This question is urgent today because most of the objections Forst’s chapters take pains to answer, like Amy Allen’s post-Foucauldian critique of progress, presuppose the social and political efficacy – for good or ill – of the sort of large-scale ideologies and theoretical narratives constructed and contested by the highly educated segment of society who went to university. This made a good deal of sense in the historical period stretching from the massification of the universities in the 1960s – and the rise of new social movements they helped to incubate – down through the 1990s and early 2000s, as the rising political power of the new, university-educated middle classes reshaped political parties across the democratic world. But since around 2016 (2014 in India), new political forces have increasingly seized the initiative and turned the tables – in one important part as voters without university degrees, especially in the countryside and post-industrial regions far from capitals of commerce and culture, have found a new voice and new leaders by organising on social media. This is true not least in the USA, the UK, and in Germany.
To ask about potential limits to the politics of justification outlined in Forst’s Noumenal Republic, I will not contest its theses point by point. Instead I want to bring into the discussion a slightly different and more oblique perspective, by situating this work in the longer history of Frankfurt critical theory and Marxism. I hope thereby to do two things: first, to clarify the stakes of Forst’s turn to justification by contrast to some earlier approaches in critical theory that this turn has eclipsed; and second, to draw attention to ways in which earlier critical theorists often reflected directly and explicitly on the particular historical situation of their times, alongside philosophical arguments, in developing and defending their critiques.
German revolutions
By the period after the First World War, when the Institute for Social Research was founded at Frankfurt, Marxism had become a certain sort of theory. Marx’s and Engels’ own work had its origins in the French popular politics of the 1840s, alongside figures such as Louis Blanc and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. At least in Europe, much of the nineteenth century can be seen as a great struggle over the political rise of the popular classes. By 1920 republics or parliamentary monarchies where the monarchs no longer ruled dominated Europe and the Americas, and had spread as far as China. The last great-power dynasties – from the Hohenzollerns and the Habsburgs to the Romanovs and the Ottomans – collapsed by the end of the Great War. But what would come next was still very much up for grabs, and nowhere more so than in Germany’s fledgling Weimar Republic.
Marxism was one of the great credos of the popular revolution that crested in 1918. Like nationalism and republicanism, it too put great stock in the progress of history. All were right that the future would belong to ‘the people’, but each was wrong to suppose that future could only take a single form. Marxism’s long-awaited German Revolution did not produce a monolithic socialist society but a complex and precarious new political order riven by conflict among competing popular forces traversing the political spectrum. This was ‘progress’ in consigning dynastic rule to the dustbin of history, but it was a very much more ambivalent and less deterministic progress than the sorts preached by the Second or Third Internationals.
This is the world into which the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research was born. It comprised several strands of study, but that which eventually came to the fore in Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse marked itself off from orthodox Marxism in at least two ways. First, it was concerned with culture (or ‘the cultural sciences’) as much as economics, and second, it was centrally preoccupied with the rise of what we might today call right-wing populism. Traditional Marxism had denounced nationalism and Bonapartism, but generally suggested they would be swept aside by the forces of historical progress.Footnote 1 It thus had few resources for explaining the interwar rise of Italian Fascism and National Socialism. However, leading Frankfurt thinkers described those dangers as arising from ‘progress’ and modernity, no less than the potential for emancipation. So they crafted an immanent critique – not only of the existing capitalist system but also of versions of revolutionary change and chiliastic myths that might themselves endanger human freedom. It is not just that ‘the proletariat’ was missing or had not won. Increasingly, after 1933, the problem was that the very popular forces who, in loosing themselves from their chains, were supposed to usher in a rational society instead brought Mussolini and Hitler.
This context explains the famously ambivalent view of many first-generation Frankfurt thinkers both to progress and to reason. For Adorno, the aim was to continue a philosophical project of immanent critique inside a popular and revolutionary tradition – not to give up on either, but to avoid reifying either one in such a way that languages of freedom might themselves become tools of mystification and control in the hands of unscrupulous leaders bent on power. This is why the negative element was so central, in pointed contrast to every attempt simply to get the positive content of reason right. In other words, the critique of right-wing populism was not simply that it is wrong or immoral, irrational or unreasonable. It was of how any principle or ideal may become only a simulacrum and perversion when pursued in the manner of the overzealous Reformer, a way too narrowly focused on the validity of content and not enough on the variety of uses to which, in human relations, the same content might be put. Or in Adorno’s inimitable prose, looking back decades later: ‘Negative dialectic requires thought to reflect on itself, so that thinking, to be true, must (at least today) evidently also think against itself. Unless thinking measures itself by that which furthest escapes the concept, it leads only to the sort of musical accompaniment loved by the SS, for drowning out the screams of their victims’.Footnote 2
Context also helps explain the early Frankfurt turn to culture. This extended a major line of rationalist and cosmopolitan thought amongst the late nineteenth-century German Bildungsbürgertum. It and socialism were then the main rivals to nationalism. Although they sometimes overlapped, the key difference was that the argument from culture was pitched to the lettered middle classes. Major representatives of this Enlightenment tradition included the philosophers Hermann Cohen, Edmund Husserl, and Ernst Cassirer. Although not all its proponents were, like them, Jewish, it is easy to understand the attraction of its antinationalist universalism also to German–Jewish intellectuals. It anchored cosmopolitan ideals – with no grounding in exclusive religious or ethnic communities – in the nonetheless distinctively German culture of Aufklärung and the progress of universal science, in which Germany was an undisputed nineteenth-century leader. That is why figures on the right like Heidegger detested it.
Horkheimer and Adorno aimed to integrate this broadly ‘Enlightenment’ tradition with Marxism – in effect providing the theoretical language for a cross-class alliance of workers and the university-educated middle classes. But they also hoped to save both traditions from their naively optimistic faith in historical teleology, by subjecting the myths of Enlightenment and emancipation to their own immanent critique.
What is important to see is that this move was not narrowly philosophical or antipolitical. To the contrary, it was, as Marx’s work had been in his day, in many ways a deeply ‘realist’ response grounded in an incisive Zeitdiagnose. After 1918, a socialist victory in the West had proved impossible without the support of the educated middle classes, yet those classes were being seduced by a powerful right-wing populism promising them a share in the spoils of unbridled national self-assertion.
One can thus see why this sort of theory would later take on new life with the mass expansion of university education in the 1960s and the rise of new student movements that followed. Although Marcuse and Adorno had very different relations to those movements, one can see why both became points of reference. They offered a language of critique and potential resistance not monopolised by established parties and so open to creative adaptation by new movements among the university-educated, book-reading public. This, then, is the context in which Jürgen Habermas came to lead the ‘second-generation’ Frankfurt School.
The turn to Kant
In the 1960s and 1970s, Habermas explicitly tried out several different ways of regrounding Marxist aspirations for emancipation in a theory of knowledge or culture, in works from The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1962 through Legitimation Crisis in 1973. Habermas actively engaged with the new student movements until disagreements led him to take his distance. By the 1980s, with The Theory of Communicative Action and his work on discourse ethics, Habermas had settled on an alternative we might call broadly the return to Kant. The core move is to stake everything on the demand for reasoned – or ‘reasonable’ – justification.
This broke from Adorno and Horkheimer by reviving the more classic faith in the force of argument that had characterised the German Enlightenment tradition before them, and which they had abandoned in the face of the spectacular defeat of that tradition by competing popular forces between the wars. It also broke from Marcuse’s more optimistic approach by insisting on clearer standards of rational justification – and, especially with Between Facts and Norms in 1992, on the parliamentary government associated with them.
This strategy has clear advantages over either Adorno or Marcuse – it offers a positive standard for mobilisation with more democratic content than Marcuse’s Great Refusal. But is there perhaps also something lost? In Habermas’s mid-century context, one might well agree that the most pressing challenge was to provide a new and positive orientation for emancipatory politics consistent with parliamentary democracy. That was a time of rebuilding, and then of bringing new movements of university-educated youth – including the women’s movement – into the democratic fold. And it was a time when organised popular forces of the far right had been crushed, but intellectuals who had sympathised with them remained in prominent positions in law and academe. For these reasons, fights in the academy and the lettered public sphere carried special historical weight.
But what if our world today looks less like Habermas’s in the 1960s and 1970s and more like Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s? Today the rise of a powerful right-wing populism threatens a constitutional consensus built on cooperation between educated elites and mass parties representing workers who have not been to university. Today new forces are on the march to champion voters in rural areas and left-behind regions – like Appalachia in the USA, forgotten seaside towns in Britain, or Germany’s former East – where locals feel underrepresented at the pinnacles of power under the rule of traditional parties with bases somewhere else.
So the question is: does continuing to stump for the primacy of reasoned argument make the same sense today that it did in the postwar period when populist nationalisms had recently been crushed by force of arms, and the tide of history was, for a time, towards the priorities of the swelling ranks of the university-trained? When the rising movements were often led by students on the left? Although there are new movements like that today, too, they are in many countries at least matched by popular movements on the right – which is more like the interwar period than the 1960s.
I do not think the universities are no longer important – indeed they are often under attack. Perhaps the best we can do is to shore up support among the educated and raise the quality of public argument for those still with ears to hear. But maybe that is not enough: might we not also need to learn again how to reach out to some forces beyond the book-learned, to build a broader political coalition strong enough to stand up to popular movements on the other side? That was what the old left did by the end of the nineteenth century, even if their methods may no longer be those for today. At least this is a real question we should be asking. We need to take seriously the risk that the ‘unforced force of the better argument’ alone is no longer enough, when numbers are not also on the side of those who learned to parse better and worse arguments at university. Could it be that it only seemed we could focus entirely on the arguments because, for a few decades after the war, it was possible to take the numbers for granted?
Progress in The Noumenal Republic
This finally brings me directly to Forst’s book. I think we agree that it further develops and deepens the return to Kant. Forst is today among the leading proponents of this at Frankfurt and worldwide. (Here I lack space to discuss his debates with other contemporary post-Kantians and critical theorists.)
Now I rather agree with nearly all that Forst has to say about justification, as I have noted elsewhere.Footnote 3 And yet … I want to ask instead: what are the limits of interpreting politics so singly as a question of justification, and what might it mean to make justification more aware of its own limits? Although today our answer cannot be quite the same as Adorno’s, I do think this question was very much also his. And so it is one internal, even central, to the Frankfurt tradition of critical theory – and to the longer traditions of both German idealism and Marxism as well. It is about the stakes of the turn to justification, and away from other ways of talking about politics, sometime in the decades since 1968.
I am not asking ‘isn’t some other standard of judgment better after all?’, or ‘because principles have often been used for bad ends, aren’t we better off without them?’ To these familiar challenges Forst has very strong replies (notably in chapter 2 and part III). My concern is different: even if we agreed entirely with Forst about the practice of justifying principles – and also on the emancipatory potential of ‘noumenal power’,– what other questions might we also need to ask to make good on the promise of critical theory today?
I pose two. First, who is the collective agent we might expect to act on Forst’s principles and make them matter in politics? In other words, who is the subject doing all the justifying and judging, and then acting on those judgements to make them count? Who might fill the place of the nineteenth-century ‘proletariat’, or new social movements in the 1960s and 1970s? And if the answer is something like ‘the reading public’, then what are the stakes of tying political agency so narrowly to educational attainment, when so many other people also vote? Second, concerning progress: How might we differently understand the politics of historical narrative if we approached it not as posing yet another question of justifiable standards but instead as a way of helping to construct and sustain those agents we need to make justifications count?
Now both questions were central to German idealism and to Marxism. Regarding the agent of political judgements, Kant made a qualified endorsement of Hobbes’ sovereignty a centrepiece of his own state theory, as most clearly and notoriously expressed in his claim that every revolution is immoral. Fichte, Hegel, and all the other German idealists, Romantics, and nationalists in the period were centrally preoccupied with the nature of the collective subject behind judgements of right and wrong. They wanted to show how that subject came into being, and how the need to hold it together posed irreducible constraints on traditional notions of justice and natural law. The reason, of course, was that the French Revolution seemed to show that questions of fundamental law could no longer be reserved to dynasts and jurists, but would henceforth be taken up by political forces drawing both legitimacy and unprecedented political power from their pretence to represent the will of an entire people in arms.Footnote 4 This was the central issue in both French and German theories of revolution throughout the nineteenth century, not least in the socialist construction of the so-called ‘proletariat’. And it again came to the fore in Marxist debates just before and after the First World War, in figures from Sorel and Gramsci to Lenin and Lukács. Consider for instance how in Marx’s own core concept of alienation, an essential step in the argument is the categorical difference between the way capitalism confronts individuals as a power they genuinely cannot control – as individuals – no matter what they think of it or its justification, and the same power as it first becomes amenable to deliberate control only when brought under the command of an organised, collective people. Consider how central that point was to Marx, but how it appears only in passing, without further consideration of the political implications, in Forst’s otherwise exceptionally lucid reconstruction of Marx’s critique.
This is why it is so striking how much the question of the collective agent of justice (or popular rule) has dropped out of recent critical theory. Characteristically, Habermas first proposed the theory of the public sphere he developed in his Habilitationsschrift as a defence of the coherence of Enlightenment principles against the Hobbesian challenge posed by Carl Schmitt and Reinhardt Koselleck.Footnote 5 That is, the question of collective agency was made into one of justifying principle and using it to criticise society (as in the pre-French-Revolution Enlightenment), rather than of how to build a collective agent that might be capable of putting those principles into practice (as in Marx). And I think this comes through even more clearly in Forst’s systematic focus on justification.
Now, of course one way of building a collective agent is to persuade a reading public to rally around a set of reasoned principles. That was the strategy of at least some strands in the Reformation and the Enlightenment, and I don’t mean to underplay its power. But history also shows its limits, especially whenever rising political forces draw strength from those other than the public who reads books, Die Zeit, or the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Then the political question is not only how we ought to judge those upstart movements before the enlightened tribunal of our fellow literati with degrees, but also how to understand the power of the collective agent they are building, and how one might bring well-justified critical principles back into contact with a shifting historical reality that risks leaving them behind.
Consider again the question of ‘progress’: Forst makes a strong case for ‘a reflexive and emancipatory, non-teleological conception of progress’, committed to creating conditions in which others can participate in dialogue towards overcoming exclusions and injustice (77). But that is a very specific way of thinking about philosophy’s relation to history – in effect, history is just one more challenge to overcome in justifying principles (as it was for Kant). Once we have our well-defended reflexive principle, we can forget all the details of the actual history. But Marx or Tocqueville, for instance, did something very different with history by (among other things) trying to find in it trends that pointed towards the rise of new historical agents and so opened new political possibilities and dangers. And Horkheimer and Adorno – at least on one reading – explored the history of ways in which principles of freedom had so often become instrumentalised in the pursuit of power, and so turned from tools of liberation to technologies of terror. These are lessons of history, or ways of questioning it, that we risk losing sight of if we accept that critical theory can be reduced entirely to questions of justification or the general proposition that principles are not always without power. Yes, norms can have power – but for whom, exactly, and under what conditions?
This is the question I think The Noumenal Republic leaves unresolved. I think it is an urgent question, as only too often in history people with the better principles have supposed that alone enough to save them – not least in Germany, since at least the 1840s – and I fear in too much of the academy today. And yet none of this is really a direct objection to the principled arguments in which The Noumenal Republic excels.
The work synthesises a tremendously powerful oeuvre and stands as an essential point of reference for any contemporary discussion of democratic theory or emancipatory politics. Anyone engaging critical theory today will have to wrestle with Forst’s cogent and provocative project, a grand example of the form.
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