Beyond ideology critique
Benjamin Studebaker
Platypus Review 179 | September 2025
I’VE RECENTLY GIVEN two different talks for the Platypus audience in which I’ve tried to articulate a problem I have with ideology critique. The first was a paper I presented at the Caucus for a Critical Political Science in Texas in February. The second was a workshop I did in Charlottesville for the chapter at the University of Virginia.1 I haven’t been entirely satisfied with the two talks. The Texas talk focused too much on Habermas, at the expense of Adorno. The Virginia talk tried to cover too much ground in too short a time, and so my remarks about Adorno sounded, understandably, too Althusserian.
Part of the trouble is the language — because Marxists don’t generally use the concept of “legitimacy,” they have tended to build it into their understanding of ideology. This enriches their concept of “ideology” at the cost of making it harder to use and easier to abuse. So, in my new book, Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies (2024),2 I try to acknowledge this richness while at the same time conceptualizing ideology less expansively. Ideology and legitimacy become “two faces of the same concept.” This allows me to make a division — the senses in which ideology is positive and generative become associated with legitimation. What remains of ideology is its negative, critical side.
So, when I give a talk about ideology critique and its limits, it might seem like I am denying or failing to acknowledge what is generative in the concept of ideology. But I am retaining all of that, albeit relocating it under the heading of legitimacy. I’m doing this because I think that the positive side of ideology is too often buried or forgotten. Ideology has a negative connotation, and it takes a lot of work to extract and display its positive side to a mixed audience. Instead, we can allow ideology to play the role it now plays while redeeming its lost content under the heading of an alternative term. Once we’ve done this, we can then join normal people in criticizing an excess of ideology critique — which becomes, more precisely, an excess of negation. Chris Cutrone is constantly having to ask, “why not this,” and, “why not that,”3 because the Left has lost the capacity not just to affirm anything, but to find potential — or even silver linings — in anything that happens or in anything anyone proposes to do.
We also become free to criticize Habermas’s theory — which was, of course, a theory of ideology critique masquerading as a theory of legitimacy — as a theory of legitimacy. Habermas’s theory in Legitimation Crisis (1973) operated on the premise that we could expose a contradiction between the state’s purported values and its behavior to extract meaningful concessions. This involved positively championing particular abstractions — “substantive democracy,” which of course heavily involved “equality.” Because Habermas’s account involves advocating for particular positive values, it is a theory of legitimacy. It just isn’t a very good one.
To make this case to you effectively, I need to address Adorno properly. You’re not going to be convinced if I don’t spend some time showing you that I’ve thought seriously about Adorno. I can tell you to read what I write about Adorno in my book, but unless you put my new book on the summer reading list, that probably isn’t going to happen.4 And Adorno isn’t an easy thinker to handle on a podcast or in an interview. For Adorno, thinking in terms of definitions you can grab onto and possess is ideological, because it implicitly identifies concept with thing. Adorno works very hard to leave his terms open, so that they can be conceptualized in different ways by future people. This has led to many appropriations of his work for purposes he likely would not have endorsed but also did not definitively exclude.
It's for this reason that some of you don’t bother to read Adorno properly. I get the sense that many otherwise diligent Plats read most of the Platypus syllabus, but when Adorno comes around, they get a bit baffled. So, they listen to Cutrone talk about Adorno and accept his account as good enough. That’s far from the worst thing you could do. Cutrone has a good and plausible reading of Adorno. I’m not here to negate his reading. Rather, I’m here to draw attention to why Adorno is generally read in other ways.
Adorno functions as a hinge figure. He can be read as the last in a series of old Marxists, but he can also be read as the progenitor of the New Left and even of French theory. When he is read these ways it’s not intentional abuse. When you leave your abstractions open to future people, you rely on those future people having the capacities — the intellectual virtues — necessary to wisely conceptualize, to prudently apply abstractions to their concrete situations. If people don’t have those virtues because they’re being debased by a university system that is mired in regression, the openings you create generate opportunities for barbarians to dogmatize your terms. For all those worries about regression, Adorno ultimately trusted us to be good stewards of his concepts. And if we aren’t good stewards? As long as a single copy of Negative Dialectics (1966)exists, it’s a message in a bottle for someone, someday, who deserves the trust we don’t.
What then becomes of the generations who are too wretched and vulgar for Negative Dialectics? We have already seen what happens — they become trapped in dogmatized iterations of ideology critique that generate fear and paranoia in them, that make them afraid of abstractions and afraid of their human capacities. But it must be emphasized that while this is Adorno’s legacy in our barbarized times, it need not always remain so.
Let’s talk About Negative Dialectics
At different points in Negative Dialectics, Adorno describes ideology in different ways. Ideology “lies in the substruction of something primary, the content of which hardly matters; it lies in the implicit identity of concept and thing, an identity justified by the world even when a doctrine summarily teaches that consciousness depends on being.”5 A little later, it is “a screen for society's objective functional context and a palliative for the subjects’ suffering under society.”6 Then Adorno says that ideology is, “the surreptitious acquisition by indirect things of a directness.”7 Just a few pages later, it is “an attempt to justify the very order that drives men to despair and threatens them with physical extinction.”8 Finally, it is “the pledge that there should be no contradiction, no antagonism.”9
So, what are you supposed to do with all of that? You might want Adorno to pick a definition and stick to it, but this would be to demand directness from an abstraction that, for Adorno, must itself be engaged with in an indirect way. Ideology has all of these aspects. It is a conflation of concepts and things, a screen, a palliative, a false acquisition of directness, an attempt to justify a fell order, and a pledge to abolish contradiction. It clearly overlaps with legitimacy at the level of function — it is an attempt to justify an order. But there are two trends in the way Adorno talks about ideology that stick out: (1) For Adorno, ideology is a deceptive coping mechanism. This gives the term a negative valence. It tends to retain that negative valence, even when used non-negatively. (2) Adorno heavily associates ideology with a variety of aspects of the human experience that seem only indirectly to do with order.
This second aspect allows Adorno’s conception of ideology to critique many cultural practices that might not seem, at first glance, to be about justifying order. Take, for instance, this passage:
Barter as a process has real objectivity and is objectively untrue at the same time, transgressing against its own principle, the principle of equality. This is why, of necessity, it will create a false consciousness: the idols of the market. It is only in a sardonic sense that the barter society's natural growth is a law of nature, that the predominance of economics is no invariant. The thinker may easily comfort himself by imagining that in the dissolution of reification, of the merchandise character, he possesses the philosophers’ stone. But reification itself is the reflexive form of false objectivity; centering theory around reification, a form of consciousness, makes the critical theory idealistically acceptable to the reigning consciousness and to the collective unconscious.10
Bartering and other forms of negotiation operate from the basis that both parties have the option to accept or reject offers. In one sense this is true, but in another it is not, because under capitalism there is a power imbalance that puts workers, for instance, at a disadvantage. If, however, we believe that there is a labor “market,” that is natural in character, then we can believe that wages are determined by a natural process, and that shields us from having to confront the power disparity. In this way, the market is “reified,” it is treated as if it were a capital-R “Real” thing, external to us, when we ourselves have constructed the labor market and can — if we work together — deconstruct it.
The “thinker” can see through this reification, intellectually, and imagines that this realization itself is emancipatory. But by centering the theory around this realization, the thinker inadvertently shores up the order. For Adorno, rejecting reification outright is an “undialectical” response, because it negates concepts instead of tarrying with them. We have the concept of the market because our society is structured in a manner that gives rise to this concept. Recognizing that the concept of the market is reified does not in itself challenge the structure that gives rise to that concept. In this way, the critique of reification does not eradicate ideology or the order that ideology attempts to justify. Instead, it papers over it. In Adorno’s words:
We can no more reduce dialectics to reification than we can reduce it to any other isolated category, however polemical. The cause of human suffering, meanwhile, will be glossed over rather than denounced in the lament about reification. The trouble is with the conditions that condemn mankind to impotence and apathy and would yet be changeable by human action; it is not primarily with people and with the way conditions appear to people. Considering the possibility of total disaster, reification is an epiphenomenon, and even more so is the alienation coupled with reification, the subjective state of consciousness that corresponds to it.11
So, for Adorno, it is not just that we participate in ideology when we barter with capitalists and pretend as if we negotiate on equal footing or in accordance with natural economic processes. We also participate in ideology when we think we have accomplished something merely by intellectually challenging that first move. If we intellectually recognize that we do not escape ideology merely by intellectually recognizing ideology as ideology, and we respond with despair, that too becomes an ideology, because despair does nothing to change conditions, either. Adorno calls despair the “final ideology.”12
In this way, many different modes of thinking and feeling can be assimilated under the heading of ideology. But the thing ideology obstructs is the thing legitimacy protects against — the possibility of political action to change the order that, for Adorno, “drives men to despair.”
Do you see what tends to go wrong here? Most of the time, ideology critique liquidates into a lament about reification. Instead of intervening in material reality to produce new conditions that unlock our latent potential, we whine about the way other people are thinking and talking. We think that because we are thinking and talking better than them, that we have made an advance, but we have actually retreated into a kind of stupid pride. People refer to this lament, to this prideful stupidity, as “ideology critique.” But this isn’t what Adorno wanted us to do. He didn’t want us to simply adopt a worldview that makes us feel more knowledgeable and more advanced than the people around us. Our task is not to reinterpret the world, it’s to change it.
The thing is, if we are caught in barbarized circumstances that leave us with no obvious way of acting effectively — if there is no workers’ movement, no socialist party, no political structures through which we can do anything — what then? Some people will insist on acting anyway, even though this action is useless or counterproductive, while other people will recognize the futility of this action and settle for negating it. They will take up the critique of reification (or the critique of the critique of reification, or despair, or even the critique of despair) and call it “ideology critique.” And, in time, this will come to be the way “ideology critique” is understood. The possibility of ideological critique as meaningful action to change the conditions is obscured.
What about Althusser?
Althusser associates ideology with a discrete set of “state apparatuses.” These include the churches, the schools, the family, the law, the political parties, the trade unions, the media, and the arts. He contrasts these “ideological state apparatuses” with the “repressive state apparatus”— the government, the civil administration, the army, the police, the courts, and the prisons.13 For Althusser, the repressive state apparatus functions predominately “by repression” while the ideological state apparatuses function predominately “by ideology.”
Each ideological state apparatus has its own ideology, but all of these ideologies are united under the “ruling ideology,” associated with the ruling class. For Althusser, “ideology” is “an imaginary relation to real relations.”14 But this imaginary relation is created through a set of discrete practices associated with a particular apparatus. For instance, for Althusser, religious ideology involves participating in a set of religious rituals prescribed and facilitated by some church.
Althusser argues that the function of ideology is to constitute “concrete individuals as subjects.”15 We are constituted as subjects insofar as it seems obvious to us that we are individually “endowed with a consciousness” in which we “freely form” or “freely recognize” the ideas in which we believe.16
But at the same time, “man is an ideological animal by nature.” We are “always already subjects.” Therefore, we “constantly practice the rituals of ideological recognition, which guarantee for us that we are indeed concrete, individual, distinguishable, and (naturally) irreplaceable subjects.”17 This means that for Althusser it is human nature to believe we are in imaginary relations that differ from the real relations. We are always already imagining ourselves as subjects, and so we are always already subjects, even in the absence of ideological state apparatuses. Why, then, does the state need ideological state apparatuses in the first instance? For Althusser, ideological state apparatuses accomplish “by ideology” what the repressive state apparatus accomplishes predominately through repression. Repression makes us do what the state wants us to do. The ideological state apparatuses take advantage of our ideological nature. We want to believe — indeed we always already believe — we are endowed with consciousness and can freely form ideas in which we believe. The ideological state apparatuses induce us to believe we have freely adopted ideas that imply acting in accordance with the state’s order. If we act in a manner that contradicts the ideas we understand ourselves to have freely chosen to affirm, we appear to ourselves as “wicked.”18
The thing is, this association of ideology with subject constitution is not without precedent. There are points where Adorno sounds similar. For instance: “To use the strength of the subject to break through the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity— this is what the author felt to be his task ever since he came to trust his own mental impulses.”19 Althusser’s account is distinctive insofar as it is an attempt to render ideology philosophically precise. In the course of doing this, Althusser associates ideology with specific institutions — the “ideological state apparatuses,” along with the specific rituals and practices laid down by these institutions. The effect is to make ideology a very top-down concept, in which particular institutions are framed as guiding the form that subjectivity takes. This more straightforwardly connects ideology to the maintenance of the state’s order. But this kind of straightforwardness is always avoided by Adorno, who in the 50s expressly rejected the idea that ideology can be absorbed by philosophy, in part because the concept of “ideology” is itself a product of the processes it is used to describe, and therefore itself subject to change.20
So, there is a sense in which Althusser is taking up Adorno, but in taking Adorno up in a precise, cataphatic way, he also betrays Adorno.21 This betrayal seemed, however, necessary — it seemed to Althusser that ideology was too abstract to be taken up effectively in his time and place. There was, for Althusser, a need to make it mean something in particular. Sometimes, you have to step away from God, but always in his service.22
But did Althusser know what was in his service? What have been the effects of Althusser’s conceptualization of ideology? Has it done good?
In Althusser’s hands, we are ideological by nature. Now, “nature” is a tricky abstraction. You can use that term in a Thomist way, to make transhistorical claims about human beings, or you could use the term the way, e.g., Giambattista Vico used it, to refer to what can be sustained as common sense in a particular stage.23 Most of the time, it liquidates in the Thomist direction, and Althusser gives us little reason to think that he means it in some other way. You could nonetheless take it in some other way, but the text doesn’t make this easy or inviting.
This thought that we tend to think, that we are individuals who are free to choose our own beliefs, may stem from the separation of persons into different bodies. And there is a real question as to whether this would continue to cause serious trouble for us, even if we were to overcome capitalism. We’ve never made it to socialism. We don’t know what happens if we get there. But for many of you, there’s nothing obviously wrong with individuality. Socialists who retain liberalism typically remain committed to the individual as a concept. For me — one of those silly Platonists — there is some attraction here. I understand why Althusser would want to raise this.
But was this the best way to go about it? If you haven’t gone through Platonism, if you haven’t returned to the One, how is this idea likely to hit you? I would think that it would make you uncomfortable with your own mind. You’re always already thinking of yourself as an individual, all the time. So, you’d continuously need to engage in rigorous self-criticism to fight a forever war against a tendency that’s always already present in you. That does sound very much like original sin. In an unreconstructed person, it’s likely to produce intense feelings of shame and guilt.
And, for Althusser, there is a single, unitary “ruling ideology.” This ideology is served by various distinct apparatuses, but the apparatuses must ultimately fold in under a single, discrete thing. This locks these apparatuses into a subordinate role. It might plausibly have seemed to describe post-war France or West Germany reasonably well. They might have seemed very state-dominated to Althusser. But could you apply this effectively to the United States, to a large federal republic with an enormous marketplace of social organizations? Even in the 50s, it would have been a stretch. There does seem to be more pluralism than this.
This pluralism becomes invisible when you use post-war French theory to make sense of the contemporary United States. Because post-war French theory was conceptualized for post-war France, its precision comes at a cost to its universal applicability. Even if Althusser’s theory was appropriate for that time and place, that appropriateness would come at a cost to its value for us.
And, since no one armed with Althusser’s theory ever succeeded in positively transforming France, there is a thick, concrete sense in which Althusser’s theory failed as ideology critique. Instead, it became a sophisticated view you could use to make yourself feel better than the French people who didn’t have that view. And then, the post-structuralists adopted further, still more sophisticated views, to make themselves feel better than Althusser. All the while, France remained in capitalism.
And what were the effects of these further developments in the theory? Those that followed further rotted our belief in our capacity to act in any meaningful way. At most, we could replace one regime with another. But why take the risk?
Running back to Adorno
So, perhaps the impulse is to say that this was all simply a mistake. Why don’t we just go back to Negative Dialectics? The thing is, Althusser got a hold on the way ideology is now generally conceptualized. When you use the term, you have to go to great pains to avoid having to use it the way Althusser used it. You have to reopen a concept that is, for many people, closed. And it’s not just closed — once Althusser concretized the concept, it became much easier for people to simply reject it as unhelpful. The theorists who have tried to return to Adorno for the purposes of reconceptualizing ideology have thus tended to have to defend their intervention by offering yet another concrete conceptualization.
Raymond Geuss loves Adorno, and, to help Adorno out, he tried to salvage ideology by tying it to a conflation of particular interests with universal interests.24 More recently, Enzo Rossi has tried to associate ideology with scenarios in which the state acts as a judge in its own case.25 But these attempts to defend the concept have only further embedded it in negation. Clearly, for Geuss and for Rossi, the moves that they describe are bad and objectionable. The way to do ideology critique, for them, is to challenge arguments that take a particular form or are produced in a particular way. These are still objections at the level of argument. They are not ideology critique in Adorno’s sense, which involves initiating a change in conditions. Geuss and Rossi emphasize that you need to grasp reality as a prerequisite for changing things. On that basis, their epistemic emphasis is not entirely unhelpful. But it’s also not entirely sufficient, either. Ultimately, you must be motivated to change things, even at significant personal risk.
It is necessary to believe in something. Adorno understood this. Pragmatism is insufficient:
As the means usurp the end in the ideology swallowed by all populations on earth, so, in the metaphysics that has risen nowadays, does the need usurp that which is lacking. The truth content of the deficiency becomes a matter of indifference; people assert it as being good for people. The advocates of metaphysics argue in unison with the pragmatism they hold in contempt, with the pragmatism that dissolves metaphysics a priori. Likewise, despair is the final ideology, historically and socially as conditioned as the course of cognition that has been gnawing at the metaphysical ideas and cannot be stopped by a cui bono. . . . We despair of what is, and our despair spreads to the transcendental ideas that used to call a halt to despair.26
This is not, for Adorno, something to celebrate or negate. It’s a problem to be worked through.
BEYOND
Cutrone and I have each tried to approach this problem by championing an abstract universal – freedom in his case, the good in mine. But for both of us, the way forward is to take up this abstraction apophatically.27 Freedom, for Cutrone, cannot be limited to any one particular cataphatic instantiation. It is not merely the right of labor — though at points it has to mean precisely this. Capitalism transforms the ways in which we conceptualize freedom. Through capitalism, we ourselves come to understand freedom in new ways, but we remain alienated from our capacity to conceptualize it directly. Instead, freedom confronts us as a necessity, it appears to us as reified. Socialism sets freedom free by enabling us to access our latent capacity to decide for ourselves what freedom ought to mean.
Now, to decide for ourselves what freedom ought to mean, we would have to be able to make decisions. We would have to have developed the relevant capacities. So, to do socialism, we have to identify the capacities we need as well as the ways in which human beings can and do develop these capacities.28 The purpose of these capacities is not to cause us to embrace any one fixed, transhistorical notion of freedom. Rather, their purpose is to enable us to decide how to conceptualize the abstraction in specific situations. In capitalism, these capacities remain fettered and alienated in various ways, and so we are forced to work within the limits prescribed by capitalist conditions. This can mean taking up a particular conceptualization of an abstraction, even if that conceptualization is a product of unreflective, fettered consciousness. But we do not simply acquiesce to whatever language is being used and whatever activity is taking place, because we are ourselves committed to abstract universals. That commitment enables us to exercise judgment.
And that’s the problem. For many readers of Adorno, this is an attempt to prop up transcendental ideas. For them, we’re dinosaurs. Raymond Geuss doesn’t do this kind of stuff. He assiduously avoids committing himself to universals. For him, ideology is the framing of the particular as universal. And since, for him, everything is particular, people like us can only commit to freedom or the good by engaging in ideology. This then becomes a reason to reject projects like ours. He would insist that we are the ones who have betrayed Adorno. We have trafficked in universals, and in so doing, we’re the ones who have regressed.
This is a kind of hell. But I know a way out of hell.29 If ideology and legitimacy become two faces of the same concept, then the necessity of the universal abstraction becomes clear. To legitimate an order, it’s necessary to use abstractions that will strike some people as ideological. But this ideological mode is just one of two modes. The other mode — the mode in which it really could be the case that we ought to be motivated to act on the basis of an abstract universal — is at every point also always available to us.
Our task, when we are confronted with an imperative, is to decide whether it conforms with the abstractions to which we are committed. Would it be good to do this? Would it lead to freedom? How should we understand the good, how should we understand freedom, in relation to the situations we find ourselves in?
Our specific universals won’t be taken up universally. I’ll probably never convince Cutrone that he ought to put the good first, and he’ll probably never convince me that I ought to put freedom first. But we don’t need to convince each other of these things if we take our respective abstractions sufficiently apophatically. At any given point in capitalism, demands are made that can be put in multiple conceptual languages. Those demanding the right of labor are not just demanding freedom — they are also demanding that their labor secure for them their fair share of what they take to be good. The demand for employment is a demand for freedom, equality, prosperity, and the good. And the demand to be freed from labor, to be freed from employment, is a demand for all of these same things, conceptualized a bit differently.
If we are able to ride the ladder of abstraction up — if we are able to be sufficiently apophatic — we can adopt a pluralist attitude to abstractions and to conceptualizations. Even under capitalism, freedom is not merely the right of labor, and the right of labor is not merely about freedom. So, even under capitalism, freedom comes to mean more than one thing at once. It also comes to share primacy with other abstractions. This deep pluralism is immanent to capitalism — it is itself a consequence of the way capitalism is transforming our understanding of universalism.
It used to be that a person would need intense philosophical training to approach all that. Deep pluralism is an evident fact, because we have gone through enough capitalist transformation that the right of labor has been partially eclipsed. It has, at the same time, both a seeming necessity and a seeming obsolescence. There is a sense in which we still make bourgeois demands, but there is also a sense in which we make demands that point beyond bourgeois subjectivity. We have not yet moved to a point where we can discard either side. We remain bourgeois, but not merely bourgeois.
This “middle capitalism” is distinct from early capitalism, but it is not yet the late capitalism of the New Left. Its disadvantage is that it tends to produce fragmentation — it becomes much harder to bring everyone around to a particular tight set of legitimation stories. But, if we can acknowledge that we cannot “win,” in the sense that we cannot impose a worldview or a tight set of narratives, then we are able to open up what winning might mean. Instead of getting people to conceptualize our abstractions in our preferred ways, we can focus on getting people to think with abstractions — to move between the cataphatic and apophatic modes. This will not give us socialism immediately by any means, but no one is achieving socialism immediately, anyway. Middle capitalism is difficult to navigate. People tend to get lost along the way.
This effort requires a greater level of intellectual commitment than the dogmatist projects of the 20th century. But it can produce theorists who are able to help workers see the potential in each other’s projects. To organize in our own time, we need people who can cooperate, even though they think and speak in different terms. I have tried to model this in my engagements with Cutrone — rather than impose my concepts, my aim is to show you that it is possible to pursue what you value through alternative languages. You could find freedom in and through the good, if you wanted to, just as I could find the good in and through freedom. You don’t have to, and I don’t have to, but our mutual recognition that we could allows us to cooperate.
It also allows us to see what must be opposed — the negation of universals. To take a universal apophatically — to say that it is not merely what it has heretofore been taken to mean — is a very different thing from negating the universal outright. Too often, the moderns negated the good as a universal, preferring to substitute freedom for it.30 They saw the good and freedom as in opposition, and they insisted that one be chosen and the other discarded. Now the post-moderns are doing the same thing to freedom — they are negating it, along with all other universals. They would destroy the capacity to think apophatically, to hold concepts open. In doing this, they would condemn us to a fragmented multitude of petty dogmas, isolated and incommunicable, all dependent upon the state for protection. They would destroy pluralism in the name of difference. This is the intellectual equivalent of kicking away a ladder.
Why Habermas failed
Habermas attempted to work with universals, but he failed to take up the challenge of deep pluralism. It is for this reason that he has been so thoroughly negated by Geuss.31 In Legitimation Crisis (1973), Habermas argued that state interventions into the economy inevitably produce cultural changes that estrange citizens from the state.32 It is only possible to manage the economy through technocratic structures that exclude citizens from participation. When the citizens become conscious of this exclusion, they demand substantive democratization, and because the state lacks the capacity to eternally repress them, it acquiesces.
For Habermas, this change can be accelerated by raising consciousness of the contradiction between democracy as a normative principle and the technocratic system that reigns in its place. Demonstrating the hypocrisy of these regimes, destroying their ideological carapace by force of argument — he took this to be the assignment of the critical theorist. When the critical theorists succeed, demands for substantive democratization must follow, and the technocratic state would eventually either accede to demands for reform or give way to something else.
Many critical theorists tried to follow Habermas. Some of them have done so consciously. Others have unwittingly adopted similar positions. But it hasn’t gotten anyone very far, despite a half century’s efforts. Indeed, it would be hard to argue that the United States is substantially more democratic now than in 1973. So, it’s not just that we haven’t been able to accelerate democratization — it’s not clear that the process Habermas described occurs at all.
And, in the meantime, many who purport to be on the Left have taken the side of the technocratic structures. Earlier this year, I was at a talk in Frankfurt, where it was argued openly that European states must use the law to regulate speech online. If the state doesn’t criminalize this speech, it was argued, a marketized public discourse would facilitate the rise of the far Right. It seems the deliberation these days is too far from ideal to be permitted to run its course.
This camp includes the elder Habermas, who in 2023 argued that the “shared space of the political” has degenerated “into the battleground of competing publics.”33 For him, “communicative contents” can “no longer be exchanged in the currency of criticizable validity claims.” Since we no longer even agree that we are making claims that can bear criticism on the basis of shared argumentative or epistemic norms, we have lost the capacity to have political deliberations.
The first step, then, is for the technocratic administrators to right the ship by making the necessary interventions. For Habermas, the state needs to do some managing. It’s the experience of the management that produces the sense of hypocrisy that generates demands for democratization. If the state doesn’t do enough managing, we don’t reach the point at which these demands can be sufficiently political.
The Habermas of the 70s understood this management in reference to the economy. Without Keynesian management, full employment would be unsustainable. Without full employment, there would be civil unrest. Habermas proposed a plan to generate revolutionary energy without mass unemployment. Instead of assuming the management would fail, he assumed it would succeed and, through its success, come to grief. By going through the management that was to prevent mass unemployment, we would reach a stage where the managers could be confronted.
Today Habermas wants a different kind of management — the management of the discourse. The state is meant to manage the discourse to prevent the rise of the far Right. By preventing this first kind of change, it’s meant to create the conditions for another. In this way, the new Habermas and the old Habermas aren’t so different from each other. Habermas belongs to both the proponents of democratization and the defenders of technocracy, because for him management is a self-overcoming process.
It didn’t work. For Habermas, the Keynesians were supposed to solve the problem of capitalism economically but failed to solve it politically. The inability of the economic solution to generate political legitimacy was to be its downfall. But none of that actually happened in the 70s. Instead, there was stagflation — an apparently new economic problem, different from the problem of mass unemployment. Then the neo-Keynesian managers were replaced with neoliberal managers.
Why did he get it wrong? For Habermas, there has to be positive convergence on a particular notion of democracy. The function of the management is to produce convergence. Habermas remains caught in something Althusserian — the conviction that the administrative state can operate in this very flush way, producing a universal subjectivity.
That isn’t what administration does. It comes about as capitalism moves into its middle stage, managing the tensions of the middle stage, not by pacifying them but by exacerbating and proliferating them. Administration generates so much disagreement that there are problems of coordination and communication. This has a stupefying effect; it causes us to become lost and estranged. It doesn’t do anything like what Habermas thought it would do. That’s why Habermas now has to beg for the speech police. He cannot tolerate pluralism, much less work through it.
Habermas needed to be able to grasp plurality without abandoning universalism. But despite Adorno’s tutelage, he lacked the conceptual architecture to do this. More recently, scholars of populism have tried to turn pluralism back into convergence upon floating signifiers and special leaders.34 They have made the same mistake, only worse, because they’ve made it later, when the seriousness of the mistake is more evident.
Instead of attempting, repeatedly, to use propaganda and management to liquidate pluralism for the purpose of imposing a stultifying democracy, we need to nurture the capacity to take each other up, to speak each other’s languages without feeling ourselves to have betrayed something. To take each other’s universals seriously — without negating or insisting upon subordination — we need capacities that Adorno, for all his merits, was rarely able to produce in his students. They retained a conceit that they were still, in some sense, beyond Plato. In retaining this conceit, they liquidated Adorno’s concept of ideology, a concept that relied, implicitly, on the ability to think apophatically, to think like a Platonist. To recover what was good in Adorno, we must be able to consider the possibility that we are recovering what was Good. But if you’d rather say that we’re working toward setting concepts free, comrade, I’m okay with that. |P
1 Benjamin Studebaker, “Ideology critique and its limits: Adorno, Habermas, Geuss, Rossi, and beyond” (March 17, 2025), <https://youtu.be/xO2xZ5_VG7E>;
Benjamin Studebaker, “Contemporary class structure, liberal democracy, and the Left” (December 5, 2024), <https://youtu.be/a7mUki6W7Zo>. This second talk I gave in London was better, but it approached many of the same ideas through different terms. Starting with ideology makes the talk harder, because the concept is bogged down. It’s for this very reason that I feel it’s necessary to make this case.
2 Benjamin Studebaker, Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024).
3 See, e.g., Chris Cutrone, “Why not Trump?,” Platypus Review 89 (September 2016), <https://platypus1917.org/2016/09/06/why-not-trump/>.
4 Please wait for the less expensive paperback, which should be out within 12 months of the hardcover release (which was on November 30, 2024). It’ll be at <https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-legitimacy-in-liberal-democracies.html>.
5 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 2007), 40.
6 Ibid., 66–67.
7 Ibid., 82.
8 Ibid., 89.
9 Ibid., 149.
10 Ibid., 190.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 373.
13 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 79–80.
14 Ibid., 82.
15 Ibid., 84, italicized in the original.
16 Ibid., 82.
17 Ibid., 85.
18 Ibid., 82.
19 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, xx.
20 Theodor Adorno, “Beitrag zur Ideologienlehre,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 6 (1954): 360–75.
21 The cataphatic/apophatic distinction comes from theology and from the Platonic tradition. In Christianity, it’s often used to discuss how the “God” abstraction is being conceptualized. Cataphatic theology approaches God by stating what God is, while apophatic theology approaches God negatively, by stating what God is not (or, to be more precise, is not merely). I use these terms in a very Platonic way to discuss movement up and down a ladder of abstraction. When we use a term in a cataphatic way, we conceptualize it, we concretize it in relation to some specific context or situation so that we can use it to do something good. When we consider a term apophatically, we reopen its content so that it can be redeployed. In this way, we return to the one abstraction from which the particular conceptualization emanated. You see Socrates do this all the time in the dialogues — he asks questions to get people to reconsider their cataphatic claims and reopen their abstractions. We call that Socratic method the “elenchus.” Plato, in suggesting that the good is “beyond being,” invites us to consider that the good cannot be fully captured at the level of the cataphatic. We cannot bring the good into being in its fullness — our attempts to do this are necessarily one-sided or partial. This does not mean we should refrain from creating or from engaging in the cataphatic. That would be a gnostic heresy. Rather, it is a reason to create again and again, to never be satisfied with any one instantiation. So, if I am unsatisfied with my ideology talk in Texas, I give it again in Virginia, and then I have a conversation with Chris Cutrone and Doug Lain about it, and then I write a paper for the Platypus Review. I do all this because political theory is my object of devotion, my muse, my sacred art, my way of reaching toward the One. But at some point, I’ll write about something else, not because I produce anything perfect, but because there’s only so far I can get tarrying with any particular abstraction — it would not be good for a political theorist to spend his whole life thinking only about ideology. Too many other people have already made that mistake.
22 From the film Doubt (2008), <https://youtu.be/cf2cBWaK190>.
23 See Giambattista Vico, New Science (1725).
24 Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 55.
25 Ugur Aytac and Enzo Rossi, “Ideology Critique Without Morality: A Radical Realist Approach,” American Political Science Review 117, no. 4 (2023): 1215–27.
26 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 372–73, 375.
27 There is a sense in which Cutrone can be regarded as a Platonist who prefers different words. For Plato, it’s the city that gives rise to different opinions about the good, and for Cutrone, it’s capitalism that gives rise to different iterations of freedom, but the mechanisms are very similar. In both accounts, you have a historical process that you appear beholden to, but which is at the same time a result of your activity. And, in both accounts, there is a possibility of this historical dynamic overcoming itself and producing a period in which human capacities more fully develop.
28 This is what Plato and, in so far as he agrees, Aristotle are doing with the good — they’re looking to identify the capacities we need to be able to think about what might be good, and they’re looking to identify the kind of civic conditions under which these capacities can be developed in situations like the one they’re in.
29 See the scene in Gandhi (1982), <https://youtu.be/0adv8zQsa9I>.
30 Arguably beginning with Machiavelli.
31 Raymond Geuss, “A Republic of Discussion: Habermas at ninety,” The Point (June 18, 2019), <https://thepointmag.com/politics/a-republic-of-discussion-habermas-at-ninety>; Raymond Geuss, “The Last Nineteenth Century German Philosopher: Habermas at 90,” Verso blog (August 14, 2019), <https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/4408-the-last-nineteenth-century-german-philosopher-habermas-at-90>.
32 JĂĽrgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975).
33 JĂĽrgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics (Polity: London, 2023).
34 See especially Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985); Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005); Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London: Verso, 2018).
