Critical theory

About: Critical theory is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5372 publications have been published within this topic receiving 164765 citations.

Donald Trump: A Critical Theory-Perspective on Authoritarian Capitalism

Abstract: This paper analyses economic power, state power and ideological power in the age of Donald Trump with the help of critical theory. It applies the critical theory approaches of thinkers such as Franz Neumann, Theodor W. Adorno and Erich Fromm. It analyses changes of US capitalism that have together with political anxiety and demagoguery brought about the rise of Donald Trump. This article draws attention to the importance of state theory for understanding Trump and the changes of politics that his rule may bring about. It is in this context important to see the complexity of the state, including the dynamic relationship between the state and the economy, the state and citizens, intra-state relations, inter-state relations, semiotic representations of and by the state, and ideology. Trumpism and its potential impacts are theorised along these dimensions. The ideology of Trump (Trumpology) has played an important role not just in his business and brand strategies, but also in his political rise. The (pseudo-)critical mainstream media have helped making Trump and Trumpology by providing platforms for populist spectacles that sell as news and attract audiences. By Trump making news in the media, the media make Trump. An empirical analysis of Trump’s rhetoric and the elimination discourses in his NBC show The Apprentice underpins the analysis of Trumpology. The combination of Trump’s actual power and Trump as spectacle, showman and brand makes his government’s concrete policies fairly unpredictable. An important question that arises is what social scientists’ role should be in the conjuncture that the world is experiencing. See also the related blog post "How The Frankfurt School Helps Us To Understand Donald Trump’s Twitter Populism" http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/christian-fuchs1/how-the-frankfurt-school-_b_14156190.html?utm_hp_ref=uk-donald-trump The German translation of this shorter piece was published in Der Falter 5/2017: 21-23.

How Far is it from Virginia and Rochester to Frankfurt? Public Choice as Critical Theory

Abstract: Public choice and critical theory constitute two very different and often mutually hostile research traditions. An opportunity for conversation across the two traditions arises inasmuch as public choice has itself demonstrated the incoherence of a politics – in particular, a democratic politics – of unconstrained rational egoism. By deploying an expanded, communicative conception of rationality, critical theory can help move public choice beyond several related impasses. Critical theory benefits from this encounter by gaining content for its currently rather abstract critiques of politics and rationality, and additional insight into the forces conducive to different kinds of rationality. More importantly, political science stands to gain an account of politics more powerful than either tradition can muster by itself.

Writing Ethnography: Representation, Rhetoric, and Institutional Practices

Abstract: In composition and rhetoric, ethnography has emerged during the last decade just as the anthropological tradition from which it came has undergone radical revision. Beginning with the work of Mina Shaughnessy and Stephen Wilson, a number of early ethnographic works on writing began to appear in the late seventies and early eighties. At the same time, anthropologists interested in Marxist and poststructuralist theories of text, writing, and representation began to question the security with which ethnographers have traditionally presented their work because studies of the way representation reproduces the structures of ideology and power by critics like Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, and Edward Said made it impossible to write ethnography without considering the rhetoric and politics of the ethnographer's discourse. Faced with this critical awareness, researchers who study culture have had to recognize that their own discourse proceeds, like the orientalism Said described, "according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections" (8). I take up the issue here because I am concerned by the facility with which ethnographic research on writing passes into articles, textbooks, and pedagogy. Along the way, its findings are displaced from their sources in the everyday activity of subjects and become part of a disciplinary discourse whose production of authorized knowledge resists the theoretical self-consciousness of the original research ethos. Put more directly, the reflexivity of postmodern ethnographic theory conflicts with the demands of a professional, institutional practice. The authority generated by textbooks and the daily demands of curriculum and pedagogy often resist the critique of knowledge and representation described by postmodern theory. As members of the research community, we need to understand the way our disciplinary discourse appropriates the experience of the research subject and represents it in our institutions. We need to consider our discourse as both a communally maintained rhetoric and as an institutional practice shaped by the material conditions in which researchers and teachers work. As the experience of penetrating an "other world" and making it known through written description, ethnography is a thoroughly textual practice. As Carl G. Herndl is an Assistant Professor of English at North Carolina State University. He is currently working on social rhetoric and critical theory.

Towards a Critical Multicultural Marketing Theory

Abstract: Critical multiculturalism has generated considerable interest in the social sciences and humanities but has rarely surfaced as a distinctive theoretical approach in marketing. This paper is a first...