The Foundations of

Social Research
Michael Crotty
Chapter 6:
Critical Inquiry-The Marxist Heritage
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Research
 Demystification v. demythologizing
 Paul Ricouer
 Demystification=suspicion/disillusionment;
the text represents a false reality and
efforts are made to remove the masks and
illusions and gain new interpretation
 Demythologizing=text is reverenced and
its hidden meaning caringly sought after
 One is critical, one is interpretive
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 Research that seeks to understand v.
research that challenges
 Research that reads the situation in terms
of interaction and community and
research that reads it in terms of conflict
and oppression
 Research that accepts the status quo and
research that seeks to bring about change
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 Critical Inquiry is about the power of
ideas.
 Saul: “language provides legitimacy…”
 Is all critical inquiry necessarily Marxist?
 Why start with Marx?
 Who was Marx? Pp. 115-116
 “All social life is essentially practical.”
 Marx’s critique of Hegel’s view of history
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Research
 Marx retains Hegel’s central view of
history: that the succession of societal
forms and regimes we find in history also
represents stages in our human self-
understanding.
 Marx retains the concept of the dialectic,
integral to Marx’s view of history, called
dialectic materialism/historical materialism
 The Foundations of Social
Research
 To recognize the dialectic is to recognize
that realities are never isolated entities
standing in a linear, causal relationship to
one another. Dialectically, reality can only
be understood as multifaceted interaction.
Reality and thought are the bearers of
contradiction, forever in conflict with itself.
 Each “stage” of society is a society
essentially at war with itself.
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 For Marx, this perennial antagonism within
every form of society, comes to be
encapsulated in the term ‘class struggle.’
 The ultimate synthesis of this struggle
emerging from the dialectic of thesis and
antithesis, ala Hegel, is the culmination of
a truly socialist or communist or classless
society
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 Driving this struggle/liberating process are
the relations of production
 Production=mode of life, action of human
beings on the world, dependent upon the
material conditions.
 Means of production differ from era to era
as do social relations created by means of
production
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 Over time the relationship between the forces of
production and the corresponding social
relations of production is an uneasy one.
Eventually, new productive forces emerge and
the social relations of production have to change
in order to accommodate them. When this
happens, society’s basic economic equilibrium
shatters and new forms of social relations of
production must be established.
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 How does Marx characterize other factors
and causes in societal evolution? What
does he call them? How does he explain
them? Hint: p. 120
 What impact does the ruling economic
class have on society according to Marx?
Hint: p. 121 top
 What does this permeating rule do to the
working class?
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 Marx’s concept of alienation
 The activity or process by which someone
becomes a stranger to himself
 Economic alienation is at the root of any other
form that alienation may take
 Work no longer belongs to the worker, what
ought to be an expression of their very being
becomes merely instrumental, a means of
subsistence, therefore, the worker does not fulfil
himself/herself in his/her work.
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 The alienation of the thing: the
relationship of the worker to the product
of labor as an alien object which
dominates him.
 Humans are also alienated from other
humans. The proletariat must emancipate
itself.
 Marxism after Marx?
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Research
 Western Marxism switches focus to
superstructures, culture rather than
economic substructures
 The Frankfurt School
 Founder Felix Weil (Institute for Social
Research) and Kurt Gerlach
 Inaugural director Carl Grunberg
 Marxism the starting point, but is the
Frankfurt school really Marxist?
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Research
 What happened to the institute and its
affiliates during World War II and the Nazi
era? Where did they go? What happened
to them? What did they do when they got
there?
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Research
 What is ‘critical theory’?
 Is it unified and coherent?
 Horkheimer attempts to define:
 Traditional theory: theory that merely reflects the
current situation v.
 Critical theory: theory that seeks to change the
current situation
 Traditional theory is not wedded to practice because
of its cartesian dualism of thought and being
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 Philosophy and science must find a way to
inform each other in dialectical fashion
 Adorno
 Musicologist; wrote a lot about arts/aesthetics
 We substitute concepts for what they
represent, but no concept can ever capture
the richness of the reality. Objects do not go
into their concepts without leaving a
remainder.
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 Adorno wants us to defend the irreducibility of non-
conceptual material against the ravenous power of the
concept.
 Negative dialectics: Philosophy must strive by way of the
concept to transcend the concept and thus reach the
nonconceptual
 Adorno: concerned with mimesis/mimetic or imitation
 Constellations (borrowed from Benjamin) rather than
conceptual systems
 It is a temporary structure only, for negative dialectics
means thinking in such a way that the thought form will
no longer turn its objects into immutable ones, into
objects that remain the same.
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 Adorno is engaging in a phenomenological
critique