Critical Theory
Critical Theory
Critical theory, in its broadest sense, is the tradition of social analysis that does not merely describe social structures but asks whose interests they serve and how they could be otherwise. The Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas) originated the term in the 1930s, fusing Marx’s critique of political economy with Freud’s analysis of the psyche to ask why people consent to domination — why revolution had not come where Marx expected it, and what cultural and psychological mechanisms sustained the existing order.
The tradition extended through Foucault, who displaced the Frankfurt School’s focus on ideology and consciousness with an analysis of how power operates through institutions, knowledge production, and the formation of subjects. Foucault’s concepts — power/knowledge, discourse, biopower, governmentality — provide the analytical vocabulary for understanding how populations are managed not through top-down command but through the production of the categories through which people know themselves and are known.
Povinelli extends this analysis to late liberalism — the phase of liberal governance that manages its own crises through recognition and procedural reform rather than structural change. Her concepts — economies of abandonment, endurance, quasi-events, geontologies — describe how power operates through withdrawal, through the governance of the Life/Nonlife boundary, and through the production of events that look like rupture but function as maintenance.
Both Foucault and Povinelli have their own subdomains here with full term and text collections.
- Abolition
- Affect Theory
- Anarchism
- Biopolitics
- Black Radical Tradition
- Feminism
- Foucauldian Analysis
- Marxism
- Postliberalism
- Povinellian Analysis
- Queer Theory
- Situationist International