Book Review: Critique and Praxis, by Bernard Harcourt

• Author: Renee Heberle
• Published date: 01 August 2022
• Date: 01 August 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211057617
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

662 Political Theory 50(4)

Critique and Praxis, by Bernard Harcourt. New York: Columbia University Press,

2021. 684 pp.

Reviewed by: Renee Heberle, Political Science, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, USA

DOI: 10.1177/00905917211057617

Dorothy Allison married Alix Layman in 2008 when the California Supreme

Court ruled that prohibiting same-sex marriage was a civil rights violation.

As a self-identified radical lesbian feminist, Allison spent a good part of her

life criticizing the institution of marriage; she married her partner as a politi-

cal gesture in response to her son’s insistence that it was the right thing to do

in that moment. What had felt like a “concession” given her prior thinking

about the value of state-sanctioned marriage became a gesture of political

solidarity. Her son reminded her of the temporality of what had been to her a

foundational value: to criticize and resist participation in patriarchal, hetero-

normative institutions, including marriage. This kind of critical, reflexive

approach to values is, at least in part, what Bernard Harcourt argues for

throughout Critique and Praxis.

Critique and Praxis is a wide-ranging effort to take up the conundrum

of critical theory, which has been with us since Marx wrote the eleventh

thesis—that is, that we think and act in and on a damaged society, one that

critical theorists, including Bernard Harcourt in this book, typically argue to

be in varying stages of crisis. Because we are part and parcel of the damaged

world, we cannot assume our work will not be further damaging, untimely,

out of place, or just wrong. Though I hesitate to identify him as a critical

theorist in the same vein, Michel Foucault argues that, as we are always

already embedded in relations of power, there is no “innocent” outside to

patriarchy, heteronormativity, or other systems of dominance that will not,

when set in action, constitute its own set of norms and exclusions. Yet it is

necessary to act. Harcourt wants to rethink and reconstruct how we think

about the relationship between critique (interpreting conditions in which we

live) and praxis (changing conditions in which we live) for the twenty-first

century. His tone is urgent and personal as he moves across the landscape of

critical theorizing of the last two hundred years to assess and explain his

basic concern—that is: “what more am I to do” in the name of “infus[ing]

the world with the values of compassion, equality, solidarity, autonomy, and

social justice” (1).