I was reading economist Noah Smith’s blog Noahpinion this morning—if you haven’t subscribed yet, I recommend it!—and came across an essay on wokeness. Excellent essay, but I’m going to push back on part of it.
Among the people who publicly and loudly oppose wokeness, a particular story about the ideology’s origins has become conventional wisdom. Their story is that wokeness is a branch of Marxism, modified to emphasize cultural rather than economic issues. This modification, they believe, was chiefly done by the Frankfurt School, an early 20th century group of European leftist scholars.
In 1923, the Marxist law professor Carl Grünberg founded the first Marxist research center at a German university, the Frankfurt School, which developed “critical theory” to analyze power structures in society and culture with the aim of bringing about socialism.
In 1930, Max Horkheimer took over as director and shifted the school’s focus from economic to cultural issues. He and longtime friend Theodor Adorno, whom he recruited to the school, were renowned Marxist critics of the “culture industry,” a term they coined to explain how culture produces movies, music and other products to placate us into accepting our economic circumstances and, by extension, capitalism itself.
Another major Frankfurter was the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who critiqued popular culture by claiming consumerism and the culture industry dupe us into thinking our totalitarian society is democratic.
So yes, the Frankfurt School was Marxist and it did modify Marxism to emphasize cultural rather than economic issues, but is wokeness an extension of the Frankfurt School? No, it’s more a grassroots movement with other, more important influences that also makes use of critical theory. But then Smith switches to talking about critical race theory (CRT) as if it’s interchangeable with “wokeness.”
It’s certainly true that within academia, some of the academics who invented Critical Race Theory and Critical Legal Studies saw themselves as more closely allied to so-called Critical Marxists like the Frankfurt School than to traditional Marxists. And to gain respect within the academy, scholars of Critical Race Theory certainly had to cite some scholars who came before them, and the Frankfurt School people were probably the most convenient to cite.
Smith is a great writer and a brilliant thinker, but I find it a little preposterous to claim that CRT scholars cite Frankfurt thinkers because they “certainly had to cite some scholars” and chose Frankfurt ones simply because they “were probably the most convenient to cite,” as if the school that created critical theory to study culture did not inspire the use of critical theory to study race, which would be like saying Marxism did not inspire Marxist feminism.
But that doesn’t mean CRT was actually inspired by the Frankfurt School. As any academic who has dealt with the dreaded Reviewer 2 knows all too well, citations are often an institutional genuflection rather than an indicator of true intellectual influence. Instead, as this excellent essay by Bradley Mason explains, they were inspired by the Civil Rights movement, the Black Power movement, and the abolitionist movement that had come before.
As noted above, Smith moves back and forth between “wokeness” and “CRT,” and I agree that wokeness is more a populist combination of things like CRT, the civil rights movement, the Black power movement, the abolitionist movement, and I would add the Frankfurt School, the Democratic Party platform and postmodernist philosophy.
But there’s an important distinction to be made between CRT and wokeness, which we might think of it as lay CRT. Just as we have Christian theology and lay Christian belief, which is a blend of things including non-Christian superstitions and politics, so too is wokeness a street-level pastiche of many influences.
Yet when Smith writes that CRT thinkers citing Frankfurters in their work “doesn’t mean CRT was actually inspired by the Frankfurt School,” he’s right. It doesn’t necessarily follow that they were, neither does it follow that they were not. But the fact is, CRT was inspired by the Frankfurt School.
Smith then says he asked “some very woke friends in a humanities department what authors woke academics read for inspiration.” He lists the names, then adds, “none of the Frankfurt School authors are listed here.” Of course, his friends may not cite Frankfurt thinkers as authors that they think woke academics read, but this does not mean woke academics do not actually read Frankfurt thinkers, nor does it mean CRT is not a branch of the Frankfurt School. That said, here’s the list.
W.E.B. Du Bois
Zora Neale Hurston
Ralph Ellison
James Baldwin
Frantz Fanon
Sylvia Wynter
Audre Lorde
June Jordan
Angela Davis
Patricia Hill Collins
Cornel West
Kimberlé W. Crenshaw
Combahee River Collective
Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields
Roxane Gay
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ibram X. Kendi
One thing worth noting is that almost everyone on this list was as one time or another socialist, with the notable exception of anti-communist conservative Hurston. Du Bois believed capitalism was the main cause of racism, Ellison edited communist publications, Baldwin was socialist, Fanon was Marxist, Wynter, Lorde, Jordan…
Fine, you may be thinking, but were they Frankfurt-inspired? Well, yes. Angela Davis, for example, was not only Frankfurt-inspired but her doctoral advisor was none other than Marcuse himself. Harder to get a more direct-line connection without being an actual member of the school.
Then there’s Patricia Hill Collins who, in Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory, describes intersectionality, one of the main concepts in CRT, as having emerged from the tradition of Black feminist thought and…the Frankfurt School.
Next we have Cornel West, not only a self-professed devotee of the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, but also someone who, when asked about his influences, has said:
Dorothee Sölle was my colleague […] She and I had a common interest in the Frankfurt School, and I would teach a lot of Walter Benjamin […] She was very, very much influenced by the Frankfurt School of Adorno and Benjamin […] Moltmann and Sölle are probably the two most influential.
This is not, as Smith put it, “genuflection” or citing Frankfurt thinkers simply because they are “probably the most convenient to cite.” This is West citing the Frankfurt School as one of his primary influences.
Moreover, offering a list of people his friends think woke academics read is a sleight-of-hand because it doesn’t tell us whether CRT theorists are in fact inspired by the Frankfurt School. If we really wanted to figure out whether CRT is, we should instead pull up a list of CRT thinkers and look at who inspired them.
Derrick Bell
Kimberlé Crenshaw
Charles Lawrence
Linda Greene
Neil Gotanda
Richard Delgado
Cheryl Harris
Charles Lawrence
Mari Matsuda
Patricia J. Williams
It’s not a definitive list but these are the founding thinkers of CRT, foremost among them, the incredible Bell himself. And yes, they were inspired by the Frankfurt School. Williams, for instance, whose mentor was Bell, has talked about how CRT evolved from, or as a reaction to, critical legal studies, whose scholars she says “were descendants of a kind of Frankfurt School continental philosophy conversation.”
Or there’s Delgado, one of the giants of CRT, who was once asked where CRT comes from and answered:
CRT stems from critical legal studies and, a little before that, the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, which is most closely associated with the work of Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse.
But if we’re looking for the actual moment of its conception, we must turn to Bell, who became Harvard Law’s first Black tenured professor in 1971.
In a New Yorker piece about Bell titled “The Man Behind Critical Race Theory,” Jelani Cobb describes one of the factors that led to the birth of CRT: the Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in Bakke v. University of California, in which a white prospective medical student named Allan Bakke challenged affirmative action in higher education after being rejected by U.C. Davis, arguing that affirmative action was “reverse discrimination.” He won and was admitted to the school. Cobb writes:
[Bell] criticized the decision as evidence that the Court valorized a kind of default color blindness, as opposed to an intentional awareness of race and of the need to address historical wrongs.
In his now famous 1980 article, “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,” Bell argued that recent racial progress was not the result of a moral awakening but a product of “interest convergence” and Cold War pragmatism. Namely, the Soviet Union was making the US look bad by highlighting its racial hypocrisy. Cobb:
The civil-rights movement’s victories, Bell argued, were not a sign of moral maturation in white America but a reflection of its geopolitical pragmatism.
Bell’s novelty was to take the Frankfurt School’s critical theory and turn it on the civil rights movement itself, unmasking it as capitalist, imperialist, if not even racist (hence the need for a new, anti-racist movement). His book, Race, Racism and American Law, is considered a foundational text.
But during his time away from Harvard, his class, based on the book, was not being taught, and some saw this as a sign that Harvard wasn’t sufficiently concerned with the ideas the book presented. So legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who later developed the theory of intersectionality, helped organize an unofficial class to teach the material. In a subsequent such meeting, she used the term “critical race theory” and that’s it. CRT was off and running.
Finally, in the passages that I quote above, Smith links twice to an essay on CRT by Bradly Mason. It’s a good essay, but it doesn’t actually support the idea that CRT is not Frankfurt-inspired and, in fact, here’s a passage from another essay by Mason:
Both CLS and CRT scholars saw themselves as working within the sociological “Critical Marxist” tradition of György Lukács, Karl Korsch, and the Frankfurt School, as opposed to the philosophical, economic, and political “Scientific Marxist” tradition of the Communists. And rightly so.
So that’s my kindergarten main path analysis. As a final note, please don’t take any of this as a criticism of the Frankfurt School, critical theory, CLS, CRT or, especially, Smith and his often delightful and deeply informative writing or even, I should add, his essay on wokeness that I’ve been discussing all this time—it’s fantastic, go read it. I merely disagree with that one point. In fact, I’d go so far as to say CRT is the modern Frankfurt School, shifting the focus from economics to culture to now race. And that’s not a bad thing, either.