 Come back to the 19th and 20th century philosophy. I'm Matt Brown. And today we're talking about Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, and the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory. So, first thing I wanna talk about today is just the question, what is critical theory? Right? Now, critical theory has a narrow and a broad meaning. In the narrow sense, it's the name or a description of the approach of that tradition of philosophers and social theorists known as the Frankfurt School, associated with the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt University in Germany. And this is a group of philosophers and social scientists working from a broadly Marxist perspective. In the broader sense of critical theory, a critical theory is any kind of social theory that is aimed at both the explanation and transformation of systems of domination in human society. Okay? Now, according to the Frankfurt School, the idea of critical theory begins with Karl Marx. Marx defined what would come to be called as a critical theory as, quote, the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age. You can see there's both the descriptive aspect in struggles and the sort of liberatory or normative aspect in wishes there. Marx was really emphasizing the ways in which philosophy needed to move from, and social theory as well, needed to move from a sort of totally theoretical stance to more of a practical stance to not only observe and theorize, but also to change. And Marx would, of course, influence a wide variety of thinkers in the 20th century, but one group of those thinkers were the Frankfurt School critical theorists. Now, like many other 20th century Marxists, the critical theorists were addressing a kind of problem for 20th century Marxists. Why had there not been a revolution in the West, a proletarian revolution in the West? Why had there not been a successful change from the capitalist system to something else as Marx seemed to have predicted? Meanwhile, another aspect of this problem is that the Bolshevik Revolution, which had taken place in Russia and then would sort of become over the whole area that would become the Soviet Union, that had not taken place in the industrialized West as Marx had predicted it would. But in what you might think of as a kind of almost still feudalistic, rural, almost backward society, and it had led not to a sort of utopian socialist vision that Marx had, but to another form of totalitarianism in the kind of like Bolshevik, especially the Stalinist form that had taken in mid-20th century. Well, yeah, even before. So these thinkers that formed the Frankfurt School, all influenced by Marx include Max Horkheimer, Theodoro Dorneau, Herbert Marcuse. Interesting, Marcuse also worked with Heidegger and with Husserl at Freiberg. So there's an influence there from Heidegger. Some of the other members of the Frankfurt School include Walter Benjamin and Eric Frum, right? So this is kind of the first generation, if you will, of critical theorists, mostly all Marxists in one way or another, also some influenced by Heidegger, some influenced by Sigmund Freud. And then the more recent critical theorists associated with the Frankfurt School include Jürgen Habermas, who was a student of Horkheimer, oh, sorry, of Theodoro's. Andrew Feenberg, who studied with Herbert Marcuse and of course, the other figure we're talking about today, Angela Davis, who also studied with Herbert Marcuse, studied with Theodoro as well more briefly. The kind of primary aim of critical theory is human emancipation, right? So the analysis of structures of unfreedom and domination and the emancipation of people, the liberation of people. And in many ways, they wrote about liberty and what Horkheimer, I believe, called real democracy. They wanted to create not just superficial political systems of democracy where people vote, but ones in which our lives are actually governed by free choice and collective action and cooperation, which they thought of as what democracy really entailed. Most social science is descriptive and explanatory. It tries to describe how society, as it exists, really works, right? Critical theory includes an aspect of this. It has a grounding in explanatory descriptive science, but critical theory also includes a normative theory of how society ought to be or at least a normative frameworks and ideas about how society ought to be focused around, typically, human liberation. And it has a practical aspect focused on what is necessary for actual transformation of society out of a state of domination into a state of liberation. And these components are mutually related to one another for the critical theorists. It's like Marx's focus on the move from theory to practice. His claim that philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world while the point is to change it, right? Now, I'm talking a lot about theory here, but the critical theorists do not necessarily focus on or emphasize what we might call sort of grand universal theories of human nature and human society in the kind of classic political theory tradition. But they do think that sort of social inquiry has to involve all of these components. At the same time, unlike other views that it's often associated with, including the broad heading of continental philosophy and social theory and postmodernism, whatever that means, critical theorists are strongly opposed to a kind of a general skepticism and relativism, right? So they don't go in for the kind of approach that would treat social sort of questions as totally constructed issues with no real meaning behind them. So they're trying to balance, on the one hand, universalism, which is not so plausible and skepticism or relativism, which they see as unhelpful, right? Incompatible with the project of improving society. So instead they have a kind of pragmatic and historicist, but also anti-sceptical account of social inquiry. And by pragmatism here, I mean, just like little P pragmatism, not trying to connect them with the tradition of Purse, James and Dewey. Although I think there are interesting relations there, but just a kind of pragmatic attitude about social theory. And one of our main figures today is Herbert Marcuse, born 1898, died 1979. As we've said, a member of the Frankfurt School interested in Marxism from his early work, but also he worked with Husserl and Heidegger in the late 20s. Later, Marcuse fully repudiated Heidegger, but some scholars have continued to see an influence on Marcuse's thinking throughout the rest of his career. Marcuse is also influenced by Freud, who I mentioned earlier, Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalyst and psychologist. And one way to think about some of Marcuse's work is he's sort of trying to synthesize Freud and Marx in order to respond, on the one hand, to the so-called crisis in Marxism, and on the other hand to kind of bring a phenomenological sort of aspect into Marxism. That's an oversimplification, but it's a one way to think about Marcuse, this sort of Freud-Marx synthesis with phenomenological sort of underpinnings or at least flavorings. Marcuse was hired by the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt that was run by Horkeimer, but never actually worked there, having to flee the Nazis as the other members of the Frankfurt School had to do. So he followed the Frankfurt School in exile, so to speak, to temporary locations in Geneva. He went to Paris and eventually ended up in New York, connected with Columbia University, the University that John Dewey was at, by the way. And then Marcuse actually went in 1942 and worked for the US government, for the Office of War Information, and then with the Office of Strategic Services to help with the war effort against the Nazis. It's worth, I think, just briefly bringing up something that Marcuse says about his old mentor, Martin Heidegger, but much later in his career. So Marcuse says, how does the individual situate himself and see himself in capitalism at a certain stage of capitalism under socialism as a member of this or that class and so on? This entire dimension is absent from Heidegger's thinking. To be sure, Dasein is constituted in historicity, but Heidegger focused on individuals purchased of the hidden, sorry, purged of the hidden and not so hidden injuries of their class, their work, their recreation, purged of the injuries they suffered from their society. There's no trace of the daily rebellion of the striving for liberation. The man, the anonymous anyone, is no substitute for the social reality. So in this way, Marcuse sort of criticized and distanced himself from Heidegger's thought while acknowledging that there's some resonance. And in Marcuse's work, he's fond of using paradoxical sounding language like euphoria in unhappiness and repressive satisfaction. We'll talk about these concepts more in class, but I think these ironic phrases try to capture the ironic situation of life under advanced industrial capitalism, where at the same time we have a kind of consumerist society that provides entertainment, provides variety of delights. But on the other hand, fails to satisfy something deep in our set of needs, and actually, by virtue of our commitment or in transmit by these sort of satisfactions and euphoric moments, actually we contribute to our own repression, right? Gotta make more money to keep the Netflix subscription and get the hi-fi TV and live in a nice house and all that sort of thing, right? This is the way in which our satisfaction becomes repressive. Angela Davis was a student of Marcuse's. She was born in Alabama in 1944, but migrated north and ended up at Brandeis University where Marcuse taught, and then at UC San Diego where Marcuse later taught. She received her master's degree there. Davis also studied at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt with Adorno, and she received her PhD from Humboldt University in East Berlin as well. Davis is a Marxist and a feminist. She's been a black power activist, a race theorist, an ethnic studies scholar. She's well known as a prison abolitionist. I believe we should abolish prisons and a police abolitionist. We should abolish the police on her view. And she's been on the FBI Most Wanted list. She's been the vice presidential candidate for the Communist Party. She has lived a quite extraordinary life at the level of both academic theory and real world practice. She's very important as a connection between critical theory in the narrow sense of the Frankfurt School and in the broad sense that includes critical theories of race, of gender, of class, and other aspects of domination and oppression. In fact, she was doing intersectional analyses of race, gender, and class before that term was even coined. I won't say that she was the first intersectional black feminist, I don't think she was, but she certainly was doing work on that forefront already in the 70s, early 80s. Davis also was really making the link between prisons and slavery that's only become commonplace fairly recently. She was making that link 50 years ago, 1971, she was writing about this. And we've really, last 10, maybe 15 years, this has become something that's a little bit more of in our consciousness. And even more recently, it's become kind of broadly part of the discourse, social discourse, but she was ahead of the game on this as well. And for Davis, the history and the contemporary function of modern policing and modern prisons can be traced back to slavery, slavery can be traced back to racist institutions, Jim Crow, and the rest. There's really, prisons and policing are really rooted in racism, according to Davis. So that's what I wanted to talk about here as a kind of introduction, there's a lot more we can say, major concepts from Markuza and Davis related to liberation, to true and false needs, to technology, so there's a lot for us to talk about. If you have any questions or comments, you can leave them as a comment for this video or we can discuss them on Discord or in our class meeting today. I look forward to talking with you and otherwise I'll see you next time as we discuss late 20th century ethics and political philosophy within the analytic tradition via Rawls and Thompson. See you then.