A distinguished presbyterian theologian and incisive critic of the modern cult of the individual, Carl R. Trueman devotes his latest book, To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse, to the Frankfurt School and the rise of critical theory. The Frankfurt School’s attempt to define reality through changing historical circumstances and its rejection of “essentialism”—that is, any recognition of a permanent human identity—fascinated Trueman because these positions are so fundamentally different from his own. As a faithful Christian, he assumes the existence of a permanent human condition. So, to better understand his own assumptions, he set out to study those who proceed from a diametrically opposed perspective, and discovered the most intelligent and compelling case for the other side.

The Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) became a meeting place for self-described iconoclasts in interwar Germany. The indulgent father of Max Horkheimer, one of the Institute’s founding members, paid for the rental space in which his son’s radical ideas flourished. Those who formed the first generation of the Frankfurt School—most prominently Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and Erich Fromm—acquired large international followings, particularly after the School’s leading figures moved to New York City and developed a relation to Columbia University following the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Their commitment to dealing critically with existing social and cultural realities, often in a no-holds-barred manner, made Frankfurt School theorists exciting to younger generations of intellectual rebels. This founding generation influenced what became the New Left in the 1960s, a movement in which such Frankfurt School luminaries as Marcuse and Adorno became almost household names.

The theorists devoted themselves to unmasking fascism and “the pseudo-democratic personality” in which this evil expressed itself, producing The Authoritarian Personality in 1950 while still in exile, an anthology of sociology essays written in almost unreadable Teutonic English. A year later, the Allied Occupation government in postwar Germany made sure that the Frankfurt School was returned to its city of origin and attached to the University of Frankfurt, thinking maybe this group could help Allied attempts to “reeducate” the defeated Germans. By then critical theory had become integral to the struggle against fascism, or whatever was described as such. At least in this respect, what Trueman views as a coterie of naysayers became the vanguard of a never-ending quest to reconstruct humanity.

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Trueman stresses thematic continuity as he moves in his narrative from Karl Marx to Herbert Marcuse. He explains the stage-by-stage development of critical theory in this lapidary passage: “Early critical theory really does set the basic foundations for its later iterations.” Despite his emphasis on “later iterations” of the same themes and projects, Trueman is aware that changes took place in the evolution of the movement his book examines. He begins with Immanuel Kant’s subjective understanding of consciousness and then looks at how Kantian philosophy led conceptually to G.W.F. Hegel’s dialectical view of history. Trueman elaborates on Marx’s materialist reformulation of the historical dialectic and the variations on Marx’s understanding of the historical process, before dealing specifically with the Frankfurt School and its theoretical accomplishments.

Particularly enlightening is Trueman’s discussion of Karl Kautsky’s presentation of Marx’s teaching about class conflict. According to this prolific Austrian Marxist and his followers, the Marxist dialectic would lead ultimately to a socialist society regardless of what actions left-wing activists took or failed to take. Critical theorists rejected this quietism (to what degree Kautsky himself actually held this stance is debatable) and convinced themselves that “ideas” can have revolutionary impact. Instead of waiting for the historical process to produce the desired socialist outcome, as Kautsky hoped, intellectuals expounding revolutionary positions could supposedly advance the Marxist dialectic through the printed word. Trueman explains how the interpretation of Marxist revolutionary practice as a critical mental exercise provided a foundational belief for his subjects and how the socialist theorist Karl Korsch pioneered and exemplified this belief.

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Trueman also examines the historical situation behind the creation of critical theory. Leftist intellectuals in Germany circa 1920 began to wonder whether orthodox Marxism made sense of their world. According to Trueman, they typically asked these questions: “Why did the revolution fail in a country [Germany] where it should have stood the best chance of succeeding? And why in the subsequent years did significant numbers of the German working class move toward the reactionary parties of nationalism rather than toward the internationalist cause of the communists?”

Some Marxists like Kautsky and Korsch asked another timely question after Lenin and Trotsky established their regime in Russia: did the October Revolution really create Marxist socialism in a backward European country that had never undergone a transition to a bourgeois society? An alternative and more cogent explanation for Russian events was that they didn’t correspond to what Marx understood as a “socialist revolution.” Still, there were others close to the Frankfurt School, like Hungarian literary critic Georg Lukács, who faithfully defended the Soviet regime even after Stalin’s ascent to power.

Like the critical theorists, Trueman believes that an ominous departure from traditional morality and social understandings took place during the Enlightenment, which broke from a worldview shaped by a Christian conception of man. His evaluation of the Enlightenment and its conception of reason pushes Trueman further in the direction of the Frankfurt School. The quantification of human labor, the division between a private sphere and a public life from which the individual feels alienated, and the reduction of human identity to subjective choices made outside of a communal context are all developments that Trueman, like the Frankfurt School, links to modernity broadly understood.

Trueman excoriates the use of our reasoning power to manipulate others: Christians “should have a concern for not reducing value to the terms of instrumental reason and also acknowledge that life here and now is not as it should be, that alienation is a real thing.” He also embraces the Frankfurt School’s critique of the “tendency of the Enlightenment to trade in generalized abstractions.” This tendency “turns human beings themselves into individual examples of an abstraction: human nature, subject to measurement, calculability, and analysis.”

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It’s hard for me not to share Trueman’s distaste for abstract universals being turned into a substitute for a more probing discussion of what people believe or should believe. It is also the case that such universals are often wielded to intimidate those who question their reality. Finally, as Trueman notices, the practice in question reduces humans to interchangeable, universalizable entities who are linked to rhetorical abstractions. We should be grateful to critical theorists for calling this problem to our attention, whatever reservations we may have about their solutions.

I will, however, quibble with the entirely negative connotation that Trueman and the Frankfurt School bestow on “bourgeois modernity.” Much of value came out of that political culture: the sense of individual responsibility, careers open to talent, nation-states, and the right to read the Bible openly without political or ecclesiastical intervention—deeply valued by Protestants like Trueman. It’s also unclear what the critics of bourgeois modernity hope to substitute for their object of derision. Critically analyzing its defects is a purificatory action, but targeting a civilization that is already under attack and greatly weakened raises the question of what exactly one hopes to put in its place.

Despite Trueman’s intermittent efforts to separate himself philosophically from his subjects, he accepts their view that the modern emphasis on rationality led to irrational excess. In The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, written during the Second World War and published in 1947, Adorno and Horkheimer trace back Nazi mass murder to the quantification of human life that began with the Age of Reason. Like the surrounding bourgeois society but in a more ruthless way, the Nazis reduced humans to exchangeable and ultimately disposable material objects.

To understand Trueman’s generally favorable view of what he refers to in abbreviated form as “D.E.” requires a closer look at this work. The book’s targeting of “positivism” refers first and foremost to its critique of the school of scientific positivism that arose in interwar Vienna, which way of thought the Frankfurt School regarded as dogmatically scientistic. Horkheimer argues against the rise of neo-Thomism as an alternative to positivism. Instead, he attempts to chart an existential alternative to both instrumental “subjective” reason and the return to neo-medieval metaphysics. The Dialectic of the Enlightenment also takes aim at state-directed economies in Western countries, which the authors view as being structurally like the Nazi model. Such economies are seen as illustrating the exploitative use of reason that was anathema to Adorno and Horkheimer.

Their book can be read as a farrago of critical observations relating to disputes that the authors were engaging in with their contemporaries. Adorno and Horkheimer combine their broadsides against the Enlightenment with a peculiar defense of Marxist socialism, one mixed with references to Greek myths, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the Marquis de Sade. Although Horkheimer calls for a return to “objective reason” in the book and in a related work, Eclipse of Reason (also published in 1947), in neither disquisition is there much evidence that modern society could recover a moral mission worthy of its rational resources. The focus on ancient myth is driven by the search for noble behavior in prerational sources, which in Horkheimer’s view remained open to “Nature.”

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One aspect of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory that clearly offends Trueman and from which he understandably recoils is the tirade against traditional sexual relations launched by Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich. Their rejection of bourgeois society arose largely out of their concern with sexual repression. Trueman sees a clear path leading from this war on traditional understandings of sexuality to the scorning of normal heterosexual relations by the increasingly radicalized cultural Left.

The journey from Marx to Marcuse that Trueman recounts may require a bit more clarification. Critical theory went well beyond Marx’s concepts of historical materialism and class struggle and absorbed other sources in creating its own brand. The Frankfurt School fused Marx’s view of socio-economic alienation with Freudian psychology, and it brought forth, particularly in the writings of Adorno and Marcuse, a creative combination of socialism and erotica.

Traditional Marxists have pooh-poohed critical theory as the dilettantish invention of a pampered, sex-obsessed bourgeoisie. But this reproach could be stated in a less derogatory way. Reading through Rolf Wiggershaus’s authoritative, massive study, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theory and Political Significance, first published in 1988, one notices the remarkable eclecticism characteristic of critical theorists. Although orthodox Marxists were associated with this group, most of the major Frankfurt School thinkers were only Marxists in a qualified sense—and what qualified their Marxism was often more essential to their work than their obligatory homages to Marx.

Moreover, as Trueman knows, radical movements change as they move from one generation to the next. One should be careful about assuming continuities that are more limited than they seem to be. As in the case of the current woke Left, a newer form of radicalism has incorporated ideas and impulses which are not directly traceable to an earlier Left. We are therefore no longer dealing with mere iterations of Frankfurt School themes and fixations when we speak about what the Left has become in recent decades.

The founders and first generation of this school of thought were hardly fans of homosexuality, which, like Sigmund Freud, they considered to be deviant behavior. And there is nothing in their work that suggests they rejected biologically fixed gender identities, hoped to get rid of gender-specific pronouns, or planned to eliminate fossil fuels. Although there is a very discernible tie between critical theory and the New Left, as Christopher Rufo has demonstrated in America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (2023), the line of continuity from older to newer forms of radicalism becomes less clearly defined as we approach the present and the rise of wokeness as a state-sponsored ideology. This is not to say that there is no common thread between them. It is only to recognize that these Lefts are also different.

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But it is unfair to fault Carl Trueman for making intergenerational connections that he may not be drawing at all. The burden of his work is to show how the Frankfurt School writers provide thought that influenced him, even though as a Christian he doesn’t accept all their conclusions. Trueman studied critical theory “grappling as it does with questions of what, if anything, it means to be human.” It also seems historically relevant to study thinkers who dealt critically with power “in a world where the political correctness that shattered the Western canon has itself become an ideology that demands obedience.” One also shouldn’t lose sight of Trueman’s critical engagement with critical theory. As a Christian he rejects the path chosen by his subjects to address social and moral problems. He believes the course they pursued terminates in profound negativity. If one is determined to “change all worlds,” the best starting point is found in Christ’s promise of redemption.

Trueman is correct that the first generation of the Frankfurt School was the most impressive and presented the most interesting insights. I fully share his transparent admiration for Max Horkheimer, who may have been the most sensible and learned of the Frankfurt School’s founding generation. Horkheimer lived long enough to become a conservative critic of Germany’s turn toward the radical left in the late 1960s. He warned against the anti-national course taken by the German Left, which he argued would destroy both national identity and true democratic government in his country. He was unfortunately correct in both these judgments.