The Foundations of

Social Research
Michael Crotty
Chapter 6:
Critical Inquiry-The Marxist
Heritage
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Research
 Demystification v. demythologizing
 Paul Ricouer
 Demystification=suspicion/disillusion
ment; the text represents a false
reality and efforts are made to
remove the masks and illusions and
gain new interpretation
 Demythologizing=text is reverenced
and its hidden meaning caringly
sought after
 One is critical, one is interpretive
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Research
 Research that seeks to understand v.
research that challenges
 Research that reads the situation in
terms of interaction and community
and research that reads it in terms of
conflict and oppression
 Research that accepts the status quo
and research that seeks to bring
about change
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Research
 Critical Inquiry is about the power of
ideas.
 Saul: “language provides
legitimacy…”
 Is all critical inquiry necessarily
Marxist?
 Why start with Marx?
 Who was Marx? Pp. 115-116
 “All social life is essentially
practical.”
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Research
 Marx retains Hegel’s central view of
history: that the succession of
societal forms and regimes we find in
history also represents stages in our
human self-understanding.
 Marx retains the concept of the
dialectic, integral to Marx’s view of
history, called dialectic
materialism/historical materialism
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Research
 To recognize the dialectic is to
recognize that realities are never
isolated entities standing in a linear,
causal relationship to one another.
Dialectically, reality can only be
understood as multifaceted
interaction. Reality and thought are
the bearers of contradiction, forever
in conflict with itself.
 Each “stage” of society is a society
essentially at war with itself.
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Research
 For Marx, this perennial antagonism
within every form of society, comes
to be encapsulated in the term ‘class
struggle.’
 The ultimate synthesis of this
struggle emerging from the dialectic
of thesis and antithesis, ala Hegel, is
the culmination of a truly socialist or
communist or classless society
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Research
 Driving this struggle/liberating
process are the relations of
production
 Production=mode of life, action of
human beings on the world,
dependent upon the material
conditions.
 Means of production differ from era
to era as do social relations created
by means of production
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Research
 Over time the relationship between the
forces of production and the
corresponding social relations of
production is an uneasy one. Eventually,
new productive forces emerge and the
social relations of production have to
change in order to accommodate them.
When this happens, society’s basic
economic equilibrium shatters and new
forms of social relations of production
must be established.
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Research
 How does Marx characterize other
factors and causes in societal
evolution? What does he call them?
How does he explain them? Hint: p.
120
 What impact does the ruling
economic class have on society
according to Marx? Hint: p. 121 top
 What does this permeating rule do to
the working class?
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Research
 Marx’s concept of alienation
 The activity or process by which someone
becomes a stranger to himself
 Economic alienation is at the root of any
other form that alienation may take
 Work no longer belongs to the worker,
what ought to be an expression of their
very being becomes merely instrumental,
a means of subsistence, therefore, the
worker does not fulfil himself/herself in
his/her work.
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Research
 The alienation of the thing: the
relationship of the worker to the
product of labor as an alien object
which dominates him.
 Humans are also alienated from
other humans. The proletariat must
emancipate itself.
 Marxism after Marx?
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Research
 Western Marxism switches focus to
superstructures, culture rather than
economic substructures
 The Frankfurt School
 Founder Felix Weil (Institute for
Social Research) and Kurt Gerlach
 Inaugural director Carl Grunberg
 Marxism the starting point, but is the
Frankfurt school really Marxist?
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Research
 What happened to the institute and
its affiliates during World War II and
the Nazi era? Where did they go?
What happened to them? What did
they do when they got there?
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Research
 What is ‘critical theory’?
 Is it unified and coherent?
 Horkheimer attempts to define:
 Traditional theory: theory that merely reflects
the current situation v.
 Critical theory: theory that seeks to change the
current situation
 Traditional theory is not wedded to practice
because of its cartesian dualism of thought and
being
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Research
 Philosophy and science must find a
way to inform each other in
dialectical fashion
 Adorno
 Musicologist; wrote a lot about
arts/aesthetics
 We substitute concepts for what they
represent, but no concept can ever
capture the richness of the reality.
Objects do not go into their concepts
without leaving a remainder.
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Research
 Adorno wants us to defend the irreducibility of
non-conceptual material against the ravenous
power of the concept.
 Negative dialectics: Philosophy must strive by
way of the concept to transcend the concept and
thus reach the nonconceptual
 Adorno: concerned with mimesis/mimetic or
imitation
 Constellations (borrowed from Benjamin) rather
than conceptual systems
 It is a temporary structure only, for negative
dialectics means thinking in such a way that the
thought form will no longer turn its objects into
immutable ones, into objects that remain the
same.
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 Adorno is engaging in a
phenomenological critique