Immanent Critique as Self-Transformative Practice: Hegel, Dewey, and Contemporary Critical Theory

Abstract

There are two traditions of immanent social critique. One of them, prominent in contemporary Frankfurt school critical theory, regards the immanence of critique as a quality of the standard employed. Such a conception of immanent critique needs to show, prior to the concrete practice of critique, how the standard is immanent in the object of critique. Showing this is the task of a “model of immanent critique.” The other tradition, going back to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and practiced in particular by Dewey in his later works, regards the immanence of critique as the form of critical practice itself. Because such a conception of immanent critique does not, at the outset, ask how the standard is immanent to its object, it also does not need a model licensing critical practice. Indeed, it must be inherently hostile to any attempt at modeling immanent critique because the immanence lies in the power of critical practice to transform any models it applies.