Liberating Critical Theory: Eurocentrism, Normativity, and Capitalism: Symposium on Amy Allen’s The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, Columbia University Press, 2016

• Author: Robert Nichols,Amy Allen,Claudia Leeb,Yves Winter
• Date: 01 October 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591718759469
• Published date: 01 October 2018
• Subject Matter: Review Symposium

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591718759469

Political Theory

2018, Vol. 46(5) 772 –800

© The Author(s) 2018

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0090591718759469

journals.sagepub.com/home/ptx

Review Symposium

Liberating Critical

Theory: Eurocentrism,

Normativity, and

Capitalism: Symposium

on Amy Allen’s The End

of Progress: Decolonizing

the Normative Foundations

of Critical Theory,

Columbia University

Press, 2016

The Contemporary Frankfurt School’s

Eurocentrism Unveiled: The Contribution

of Amy Allen

Claudia Leeb

School of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs, Washington State University

In her latest book, The End of Progress, Amy Allen embarks on an ambitious

and much needed project: to decolonize contemporary Frankfurt School criti-

cal theory. As with all of her books, this is an exceptionally well-written and

well-argued book. Allen strives to avoid making assertions without backing

them up via close and careful textual reading of the thinkers she engages

with. In what follows I will state why this book makes a central contribution

to contemporary critical theory (in the wider sense), after which I pose a few

questions. These questions are not meant to prove that there are any serious

problems with her argumentation. Rather, they are meant in the spirit of dia-

logue and to allow her to further elaborate her work for the audience.

Throughout the book, and in particular chapter one, Allen brings femi-

nist post- and de-colonial theory in conversation with contemporary

759469PTXXXX10.1177/0090591718759469Political TheoryReview Symposium

other2018

Review Symposium 773

Frankfurt School thinkers. Here she exposes the lack of engagement with

such literature by contemporary Frankfurt School thinkers, in particular

Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rainer Forst and those scholars who

(uncritically) draw on these thinkers. Her critique is important, because it

exposes that the contemporary Frankfurt School’s lack of attention to femi-

nist post- and de-colonial theory does not make it equipped to adequately

respond to the post- and neo-colonial world of today. Furthermore, and

most importantly—which Allen so convincingly exposes in this excellent

book—it does not allow Habermas, Honneth, and Forst to critically reflect

upon their own Eurocentrism, particularly as it surfaces in their idea of

progress.

In particular, she convincingly shows us that we find in Habermas’s and

Honneth’s neo-Hegelian re-constructivist strategy, which grounds critical

theory in the normative resources of the Enlightenment and European moder-

nity, a backward-looking idea of progress, which views European modernity

as developmentally more advanced than pre-modern and non-European cul-

tures. And although Forst’s neo-Kantian constructivist strategy aims to artic-

ulate a universal moral–political standard, the basic right to justification that

is not grounded in a backward-looking story of historical progress but rather

in an account of practical reason, his theoretical framework does not escape

the charge of Euro-centrism.

What I find particularly important is that the project of decolonizing criti-

cal theory is undertaken by a thinker, Allen, who is herself firmly located

within contemporary Frankfurt School critical theory, which allows her to

challenge them with their own often abstract and inaccessible language, and

which makes her critique particularly effective. Furthermore, although the

contemporary Frankfurt School is in general not particularly open to and

rarely engages with feminist thinkers, it does engage with the work of Allen,

which is another reason why this book is so important—it promises that the

thinkers she critiques might actually read her book and take up her sugges-

tions on how to decolonize their theoretical frameworks to make critical

theory relevant for the twenty-first century again.

In her second chapter on Habermas, Allen shows us that Habermas’s

recent response to challenges to his neo-Hegelian re-constructivist strategy

for grounding normativity—his idea that there are “multiple modernities”—

does not go far enough, because it remains committed to the progressive view

of history that does not escape the charge of Eurocentrism. In her careful

reconstruction of Habermas’s theoretical framework she shows us that his

view of the Euro-American participant in dialogue, “as developmentally

superior to members of traditional or ‘non-modern’ cultures, is at odds with

his professed desire for an intercultural dialogue in the global public sphere