Willem de Vlaming (October 2025, AI assisted paper)
Critical Social Theory sees social reality as a complex holistic system that needs to be understood as a whole, rather than as the sum of superficial phenomena or actions or rationalizations of individuals and groups.
Critical Social Theory is dedicated to understanding, exposing and transforming the social, cultural, and psychological mechanisms of domination and inequality. Rather than assuming societies are neutral systems governed by objective laws, it contends that they are shaped by historical forces, culture, language, psychological factors, ideological interests, power relations, et cetera.
The purpose of critical inquiry, therefore, is not merely to understand and interpret the world but to change it.
Emerging from the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory in the early twentieth century, it draws deeply on the philosophical legacies of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud to understand how ideology, culture, and the unconscious sustain systems of domination. Later developments, particularly Michel Foucault’s structural and post-structural analysis of power, further broadened the theory’s reach beyond economics to the subtle workings of discourse and institutions.
Critical Theory’s emergence cannot be understood without acknowledging the foundational influence of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud—three thinkers whose work radically redefined how power, meaning, and the self are understood.
Marx’s analysis of capitalism provided Critical Theory with its foundational notion of ideology critique—the idea that social consciousness is shaped by material conditions and relations of production. The Frankfurt School extended Marx’s critique beyond the economy to culture and communication, exploring how capitalist societies reproduce domination through mass media, consumerism, and the culture industry. Marx’s insistence that theory must serve human emancipation remains central to all subsequent forms of Critical Social Theory.
Nietzsche introduced a radical suspicion of universal morality and rationality, emphasizing how claims to truth often mask underlying wills to power. His method of genealogy—tracing the historical emergence of moral and epistemic values — profoundly influenced later critical theorists, who adopted his insight that systems of knowledge and norms are historically contingent rather than natural or objective. Nietzsche’s deconstruction of moral authority prefigures the later post-structural and Foucauldian turn in Critical Social Theory.
Freud’s psychoanalytic theory contributed an understanding of how domination operates within the psyche itself. Thinkers like Adorno and Marcuse drew on Freud to explain how individuals internalize oppressive norms, producing forms of psychological repression that sustain social control. Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955) combined Marx and Freud to show how modern societies repress human instincts to maintain capitalist order. Thus, Freud introduced a psychodynamic dimension to social critique, revealing how power operates not only through structures but also through desire and subjectivity.
Together, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud supplied the economic, genealogical, and psychological foundations upon which Critical Theory was built—what Paul Ricoeur famously called the “three masters of suspicion.”
Building on these foundations, the Frankfurt School sought to develop a comprehensive critique of modern capitalist societies. Thinkers such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and later Jürgen Habermas integrated Marx’s materialism with Nietzsche’s critique of rationality and Freud’s psychoanalytic insights.
In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Adorno and Horkheimer argued that Enlightenment reason, intended to liberate humanity, had paradoxically become a tool of domination through technological and bureaucratic control. Habermas later reoriented Critical Theory toward the ideal of communicative rationality, suggesting that genuine human emancipation depends on undistorted, democratic dialogue free from coercive power.
Critical Theory thus established itself as both diagnostic and normative: it seeks to reveal the hidden mechanisms of domination and to articulate conditions for human freedom.
In the later twentieth century, the terrain of critique expanded through the influence of Michel Foucault, whose structuralist and post-structuralist analyses redefined how power and knowledge are understood. Foucault departed from the Frankfurt School’s largely economic and ideological models by emphasizing that power is not centralized or possessed but diffused through social institutions, discourses, and everyday practices.
His studies—ranging from prisons (Discipline and Punish) to sexuality (The History of Sexuality)—demonstrated that power operates through the production of knowledge and the shaping of subjectivity. For Critical Social Theory, Foucault introduced a crucial insight: emancipation requires analyzing how language, norms, and institutional practices construct what is considered normal, true, or deviant.
Thus, Foucault’s work marks a transition from classical Critical Theory to contemporary Critical Social Theory—a broader, more decentralized critique attentive to the microphysics of power and the multiplicity of identities (race, gender, sexuality) through which domination is experienced.
Critical Race Theory (CRT), emerging in the 1970s and 1980s, exemplifies how Critical Social Theory’s principles can be applied to concrete domains of injustice. Developed by scholars such as Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, CRT extends the Frankfurt School’s project to the sphere of race and law.
CRT holds that racism is not merely individual prejudice but a systemic feature of legal and social structures. Drawing implicitly on Marx’s material critique, Nietzsche’s genealogical method, and Foucault’s concept of power/knowledge, CRT examines how racial categories and hierarchies are historically produced and institutionally maintained.
Its key principles include:
Structural racism: Discrimination is embedded within the design of institutions.
Interest convergence: Racial progress occurs only when it aligns with dominant interests.
Intersectionality: Multiple systems of oppression intersect in complex ways.
Counter-narratives: Marginalized voices challenge dominant epistemologies.
CRT thus represents Critical Social Theory in practice—a normative, interdisciplinary effort to uncover and dismantle the cultural and institutional logics that reproduce inequality.
Critical Social Theory stands as a dynamic tradition that unites the insights of Marx’s materialism, Nietzsche’s genealogical critique, and Freud’s psychoanalysis with Foucault’s analysis of power and discourse. Together, these perspectives provide an ever-evolving framework for understanding how domination operates across economic, psychological, and cultural dimensions.
Critical Race Theory, as one of its contemporary expressions, demonstrates the continuing relevance of critical thought in confronting the structural realities of racism and injustice. Ultimately, Critical Social Theory remains faithful to its emancipatory aim: to reveal the hidden mechanisms of power that constrain human freedom—and to imagine ways of transforming them.
When understanding and analysis are used for transformation, they can themselves become instruments of exclusion or domination. In other words, Critical Social Theory aims to liberate through critique — to expose power relations, raise consciousness, and facilitate emancipatory social change. But this very process depends on normative interpretive authority: someone must “understand” the structures of oppression and lead the way toward transformation.
This creates a paradox:
Epistemic privilege — Those who “get it” (who understand ideology, hegemony, etc.) can claim moral and intellectual superiority.
Moralization of understanding — Those who “don’t get it” may be framed as complicit, regressive, or morally defective.
Weaponization of critique — Critical insight becomes a tool of blame, rather than a path to shared understanding and emancipation.
So, instead of enabling transformation, the discourse risks reproducing new hierarchies of understanding — an ironic form of domination through critique itself. This concern echoes ideas from several thinkers:
Nancy Fraser: warns against “misrecognition” and “reification” within critical theory itself — how critique can slip into moralizing or identity politics that exclude.
Jürgen Habermas: stresses the need for communicative rationality — where understanding is reached dialogically, not imposed by experts or activists.
Michel Foucault: would say that even emancipatory knowledge can produce new regimes of power — “power/knowledge” operates in every discourse.
Pierre Bourdieu: warns that critical intellectuals can generate symbolic violence by imposing their categories of understanding on others.
A more reflexive critical theory must:
Treat understanding as collective and participatory, not a marker of virtue or enlightenment.
Remain awareof its own power effects — how critique can alienate or dominate.
Emphasize dialogue over denunciation, education over accusation, and solidarity over moral hierarchy.
Critical Social Theory is caught in a fundamental paradox.
When its analytical insights are mobilized for social transformation, they risk becoming vanguardist — concentrating epistemic authority in an elite who claim privileged access to truth. Yet, when the theory emphasizes permanent reflexivity and dialogical openness, it can lapse into inertia, unable to act decisively against the very injustices it critiques.
Thus, CST must constantly negotiate between the perils of authoritarian understanding and paralyzed critique.