THE END OF PROGRESS – resume

Published in 2016 by the Columbia University Press, and written by

Pennsylvania State University professor Amy Allen, The End of Progress:
Decolonizing the normative Foundations of Critical Theory, aims to criticize the idea of
progress and modernity in three of the most expressive representatives of the Frankfurt
School Critical Theory: Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth and Rainer Forst, proposing a
new approach by using the critical material provided by post-colonial and decolonial
critique and revisiting Adorno's theory of progress and Foucault's theory of history.
Allen seeks to demonstrate the need for Frankfurt Critical Theory scholars to
revisit the idea of progress as a fact (as she named it) and modernity in their proposals.
The author argues that these ideas are full of more Eurocentric than truly universal
ideals. Using the critical arguments in Edward Said’s Orientalism book, she describes
how Frankfurt keeps silent about the dominations and oppressions in modern society,
such as racial, gender, and anti-imperialist resistance, important to the ideal of
universality in which her proposals is directed.
The idea of progress as a fact, as Allen argued in the book, is linked to Hegelian
thinking of historical progress. Therefore, progress as a fact is "deeply weeded”
(citation) in the arguments of Enlightenment modernity which, despite the achievements
and gains that modernity may have given to contemporary society, served to justify
colonialism, imperialism and the whole system of oppression that was built in the
colonies, and which remains today in new forms with neoliberalism. Thus, conceptions
such as practical rationality, social and political institutions emerged from European
modernity “as the result of a cumulative and progressive developmental or historical
learning process”, for this reason, progress in Critical Theory rests on this idea of
"progress as fact", self-congratulating for the achievements of modernity, forgetting the,
to use a Walter Mignolo’s term, "the dark side of modernity”.
In the following, in the second chapter, the author tries to reconstruct the
Habermasian argument and shed light on some criticisms about his ideals of progress
and modernity. As described by Amy Allen, although Habermas seeks answers through
a pragmatic linguistic sense, he does not give up on the idea of progress as a fact,
understanding modernity “as the outcome of a process of moral-practical learning”,
linking his idea with the idea of historical progress.
 In this sense, for the most influential philosopher of Frankfurt's second
generation, his task, as a critical thinker, is to propose a diagnosis and build “upon
existing historical possibilities”, and in the process of doing so, he advocates a new
Marxist approach to historical methodology, focusing less on capitalism critique, and
more on a reconstruction of historical materialism, considering himself, at this time, as
"the last Marxist”. For this project, Habermas committed himself to an empirical
philosophy of history, where progress and development could be measured and, on the
other hand, with a practical political intention, relying on progress as a fact, since he
understands it as an imperative.
Allen then addresses her critique of Habermas' theory of communicative action,
where the German philosopher argues that there is a universal core to communicative
competence, involving three validity claims: truth, rightness/appropriateness and
sincerity; and three global relationships: objective, intersubjective and subjective
worlds, where each utterance raises at least one of these three claims of validity in a
process of understanding and taking a yes/ no position. It is this internal connection that
is the source of normativity for him.
For the North American author, by using a universal pragmatic approach and by
using the potential of language to present a normativity in order to provide the criteria
that can assess the differences in worldviews and the structures of the world of life,
Habermas assumes that the individuals who are part of this linguistic relationship
masters modern language, hence this conception is established in a certain conception
of historical progress and rationality that implies the acceptance of modern categories in
order to be able to participate in this dialogue.
To follow this statement would be problematic if we think about the terms on
which the normative foundations of this theory are based, namely European terms. And
even though Habermas recognized the Enlightenment's silence about colonialism, he
continues to subscribe to the fact that the rationalization of the world of life in Europe
represents the result of a process of historical learning, which puts in check the
participation of those who are not included in this idea of progress (nonmodern
cultures), as well as the standards his theory claims, not solving the problem of
colonialism and imperialism in modern theories.
In the following chapter, Amy Allen focuses on the Hegelian contextualism of
Honneth, where the field changes from the idea of domination-free communication to
intersubjective and sociological preconditions. His theory is based on a sociological
analysis of the experience of injustices and struggles for recognition, offering an
abstract formal conception of ethical life in order to remove the conditions necessary for
full ethical self-realization that would serve as a normative basis for social critique.
Allen argues that his historical reconstructively strategy “presents the formal
conception of ethical life as the result of a direct process of historical development”,
therefore, Honneth describes that the normative goals should consists in “the reciprocal
enabling of self-realization” grasped by the results of the human process developmental
analysis. According to the North American author, Frankfurtian Critical Theory uses the
idea of historical progress not only as a normative necessity to not fall for relativism nor
conventionalism, but also as practical-transcendental necessity.
Thus, “Critical Theory must be grounded in some notion of basic interest in a
progressive realization of socially instantiated reason”, and this reason is only possible
by the social level. Influenced by the Kantian vision of history, Honneth understands as
teleological, as a learning process necessary to shape historical self-understanding, a
process that must be continuous. In addition, he understands that the normative terrain
of Critical Theory must be anchored in social reality, revealing once again the idea of
progress as a fact.
The idea of the German philosopher of normative reconstruction begins with
values and norms that have been immanently justified through the historical process,
even if he does not share the Hegelian understanding of the historical process where
freedom is gradually and progressively realized as inevitable. Honneth shares a more
pessimistic view of the realization of freedom, despite his belief in a historical project
not only as the basis of a normative project, but also as an immanent criticism. This
reconstructivist approach rests on the idea that the norms that are embedded in our
practices and institutions deserve our allegiance not because or to the extent that they
conform to certain abstract procedural requirements (…) but because we can, indeed,
must, understand them as the outcome of a historical learning process.”
The problem with this approach is that such social values of freedom, practices
and institutions that helped to shape the normative ground are understood as advanced
in relation to the other nonmodern forms of life. Therefore, once again, those societies,
that suffered with the colonization and the imperialism, are compelled to search, and
organize themselves in a way that can be shaped in this modern European form of
development and progress.
 In chapter four, Allen will reconstruct Forst's argument, arguing that, for him,
normativity is not based on a philosophy of history, but on a neo-Kantian conception of
practical reason, designed to " provide freestanding foundation for normatively
dependent concepts (…)”. That is, it requires a practical reason itself, where norms are
provided by means where judgments and historical progress can be made.
Hence, Forst believes in progress toward justice, where progress also functions
as a critique of historical events, acting as a normative impulse in stratified or
entrenched societies, where relationships of domination must be overcome. Thus, for
him, the problem is based on who determines what progress is, a crucial issue,
considering that he has the right to justification as a basic category for his theory,
understanding it also as a right to self-determination. Such answers can be found in
practical reasons, where the argument can be reconstructed in an internal analysis of the
characteristics of our internal world.
Such process would incur in a circularity, and Forst, in order to avoid that,
adopts a strategy where he admits such circularity as the construction in which the
procedure is grounded, since he considers this to be virtuous, working as reflexive
rather than a vicious circle. Then, Validity must always be redeemed in an
intersubjective justificatory context. In conclusion, practical reason can serve as the
basis for a universalist conception of “context” of morality, and can be filled in by
multiple kinds of ethical and political contexts, as long as they do not contradict the
requirements of morality or of the practical reason.
The problematic, according to Allen, is that such proposal provides an
unsatisfactory analysis of power, that, when theorized from the point of view of reasons
becomes nonmental, and the concept of practical reason is not ahistorical, but has its
historically contingencies to it. And yet, it is negligent to the fact that it can be distorted
by ideologies, dominations relations and subordination, and can even admit an
imperialistic form. And it is in this point that Allen describes how his proposal ends up
following the same problem of the progress as a fact, once it admits certain standards
that rely on the modern European moral in order to achieve the universalistic paradigm
that his theory aims.
Reaching the chapter where the North American author discusses the proximities
between Adorno and Foucault’s theories, she starts the chapter revealing that both the
French and the German philosophers share a skeptical position about progress, where
this concept is not seen in a forward-looking, but in a backward-looking way, and, yet,
they nether negates the abstract negation of the enlightenment rationality.
Instead, Adorno understands reasons as entangled with power in such a way that
cannot be identified or use by a stratum of reason that’s not entangled, and so the task of
the philosopher is not to abandon this category, but to transcend it. Nor is Foucault
putting reason under a trial, but also including a critical thought in his own rational
activity to reflect reason, attaching it to the problematic of power. In the same way, both
seam, in Allen’s view, to understand history not as a progressive unfolding process, but
as a tool in which is possible to analyze the process of exclusion and domination by
taking a critical distance “on that historical a priori that we can see it as a system of
thought”, and for her this is made possible by not using history as unfolding, “but
resisting recuperation into the dialectic”. That is, trying not to conciliate or unifying the
logic of modernity but instead confronting their “nonidentical” and “unreason”
categories” exposing the fractures of the modern project.
Finally, after the reconstruction and critique of the normative grounds,
modernity and idea of progress in Frankfurt Critical Theory, Amy Allen reaches the last
chapter named “’truth,’ reason, and history”, where she presents her proposal for
decolonized Critical Theory. In order to achieve this, she defends the necessity to
escape from narrative of conciliation, as she argued in the fifth chapter, and even
though, both Adorno and Foucault don’t problematize colonialism and imperialism in
their theory, yet, they provide a critical material to think the problem of colonization.
So, she proposes a metanormative contextualism as an alternative to the progress
as a fact, where the openness to the Other, the subaltern, might be possible, as well as
stablished normative grounds with standards that don’t come only from a Eurocentric
perspective. Such approach, as Allen explains, is possible through this “critical
distance” of history is made possible by the work of Adorno and Foucault. Such
approach, would allow us to understand progress as “the fuller realization of certain
normative commitments that we take to be fundamental—for example, equality—and is
not linked to any sort of claim about whether the historical form of life in which such
normative commitments are embedded is developmentally superior to pre- or
nonmodern forms of life.”
As we can see, Allen does not negate the benefits of the modernity, nor does she
negate progress, but instead searches to put them in a more critical approach, where its
imperialistic characteristics can be pulled out, permitting that the subaltern can
participate in this process, and so, finally, decolonizing the normative ground of Critical
Theory.