Titus Stahl, Immanent Critique, trans. with John-Baptiste Oduor. London: Rowan & Littlefield, 2021; 348 pages. ISBN: 9781786601797.
Alexei Procyshyn, Queen’s University Belfast
Originally published in a lengthier German edition in 2013, this ambitious book from Titus Stahl aims to explain the possibility of “immanent critique” through a familiar two-step procedure. First, he delineates what he takes to be the conceptual coordinates that all efforts to engage in immanent critique share, while clarifying why many approaches within this frame have been largely unsuccessful. This step involves explaining what immanent critique is. As Stahl argues, immanent critique distinguishes itself from other forms of social criticism by providing access to the “immanent normativity” of social practices. Insofar as immanent critique can thematically engage the potentials implicit in a social situation to critique it, it contributes to the Enlightenment ideal of progress because successful immanent critique initiates changes in our self-understandings or social practices for the better. The second step aims to articulate the preconditions of such an approach. This involves introducing a longstanding problem in epistemology and metaphysics that contemporary social theorists need to address: the meaning and assessment of rule-following. According to Stahl, a theory of collective intentionality resolves the problem of rule-following and thus articulates the preconditions for immanent criticism. It explains how norms are institutionalized in social practices in order to account for their immanence, how agents orient themselves in action via these norms, and why orienting ourselves via these norms makes us accountable to each other such that genuinely efficacious—i.e., transformative—social criticism becomes possible.
The thrust of the book’s argument informs its overall structure. Step one comprises the first four chapters, which work out the basic commitments and target phenomena shared by immanent critics. These chapters explain why immanent critics focus primarily on social practices and clarify the two basic approaches critics adopt. According to Stahl, there is a hermeneutical form of immanent critique, which targets the coherence of social practices and self-understandings to better integrate or align them. This form can be found, he contends, in the work of Michael Walzer, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor (33–75). There is also a practice-based form, which analyzes both our practices and self-understandings to access a normative potential that could transform a practice or a self-understanding and yield new practices or new self-understandings. Stahl interprets Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth as having developed practice-based immanent critical methods (75–117). Step two spans the next four chapters wherein Stahl argues that any approach to immanent critique depends on social ontological assumptions concerning collective intentions, and the way in which our social spaces determine our expectations of one another. Here, for example, Stahl engages with Kripke’s rule-following paradoxes to show why our first-person orientation to social practices is necessary but insufficient for successful social criticism. The final two chapters provide a proof of concept by illustrating what a successful—i.e., socially transformative—form of immanent criticism would look like based on a Lukácsian conception of reification. The book thus effectively culminates in a broadly Marxist call for socially ameliorative praxis, something that was central to first generation Frankfurt School critical theory but which has diminished since.
The line of reasoning in Immanent Critique is not as straightforward as the synopsis above suggests. For instance, Stahl casts a rather surprising set of thinkers in the role of immanent critic. MacIntyre, Taylor, and Walzer, for example, do not explicitly conceive of their work as engaging in immanent critique. Rather, they explicitly embrace “internal” or “constructive” forms of criticism. So it is surprising to discover self-proclaimed internal critics pressed into the service of immanent critique—especially given Stahl’s efforts to distinguish immanent critique from internal critique (14–17). Furthermore, Stahl insists that under his interpretation, their efforts are unsuccessful in some instructive way. This seems uncharitable. As a basic interpretative point, attributing a commitment to thinkers that they do not explicitly affirm only to conclude that they fail to satisfy it should falsify the interpretation rather than the thinker being interpreted—at least until a substantive argument to support the attribution is made. Unfortunately, no such argument is given.
Such interpretative concerns are particularly clear in Stahl’s discussion of Habermas (75–94). As he notes, Habermas has explicitly repudiated immanent critique in the form of ideology critique (76). Despite this fact, Stahl insists that Habermas’ communicative theoretical paradigm “can nevertheless be understood as a theory of immanent critique that focuses not on ideologies but on the form of practices” (77). He then proceeds to offer an account of communicative rationality as a form of immanent critique that faces two weaknesses: “First, […] it remains unclear how communicative norms are institutionalized as social norms within the wider context of social practices […]. Second, […] the general norms of communicative action [are] the only relevant sources of immanent normativity” (93). Perhaps Stahl is right in suggesting that one can interpret Habermas as a practice-based immanent critic. But it remains unclear why one would do so, especially when it produces difficulties for the theory so interpreted. I found no explanation for this in Immanent Critique and therefore found Stahl’s interpretative effort perplexing. It also prompted me to worry that characterizing Habermas as an immanent critic unhelpfully lumps “internal criticism,” “immanent criticism,” and “transcendental argumentation” together. As Raymond Geuss pointed out, Habermas’ formal pragmatics of communication relies on an indispensability argument to identify a set of idealizing suppositions for communication that all possible social actors would need to accept, irrespective of the social practices they are caught up in (Geuss 1981, 64–65). This is meant to replace the kind of internal or immanent criticism that earlier critical theorists relied on. A virtue of Habermas’ account is its flexibility about what can count as a successful justification (or a justificatory practice) and what a reason/norm would look like within some historically defined situation. The weaknesses Stahl presents in Habermas’ philosophical apparatus, thus, seem to be artefacts of his own interpretative lens rather than problems in the theory of communicative action itself.
Stahl’s account of Honneth’s recognitive theory (94–116) is excellent, helpfully charting out the shifts in Honneth’s thinking and cogently presenting his recognition-theoretic model of criticism. It also makes explicit the relationship between recognitive practices and social progress, which is typically left underdeveloped. I also found Stahl’s observation that Habermas’ and Honneth’s positions downplay the Hegelian-Marxist role of social production (111–12) helpful. This insight is important for Stahl, as it motivates his return to a Lukácsian form of critique in the final chapters of the book. Still, I wish that Stahl’s discussion of Honneth would have contrasted Honneth’s notion of recognition and its role in social critique with Taylor’s. This would have helped clarify the difference between “hermeneutical” and “practice-based” critical practices and perhaps even allayed my previous concerns about casting Taylor as an immanent critic in the first place. Perplexingly, however, Stahl ultimately argues that Honneth’s ‘recognition’ introduces a normative ideal (283–87) that functions in much the same way as constitutive values internal to a tradition do for Taylor or MacIntyre. So the discussion of Honneth ultimately seems to exacerbate my reservations about the effectiveness of distinguishing between the two approaches to immanent criticism (along with the effort to distinguish between internal critique and immanent critique).
Turning to the second step, viz., establishing the possibility of leveraging immanent normativity so as to yield social progress, Stahl reformulates recognition in terms of collective intentionality, while also foregrounding the epistemological problem of rule following that practice-based and hermeneutical social critics face. Although rule-following paradoxes, along with efforts to characterise recognition in terms of collective intentionality, have been mainstays of research in social ontology, Stahl is the first to make them central to immanent critique. He demonstrates conclusively that the problem of rule-following cannot be avoided by any practice-based approach to social criticism. Anyone currently working on any form of social criticism will therefore benefit from consulting Stahl’s overview of these problems. Stahl also helpfully clarifies what ‘recognition’ means in social ontology (284), while explaining how a theory of collective intentionality could be methodologically foundational for immanent critique. The clarification of substantively distinct senses of ‘recognition’ is helpful as these are often conflated in social ontology and social epistemology. Stahl also introduces a cogent response to rule-following paradoxes in a way that explains how critics gain access to the immanent normativity implicit in our social practices.
The concluding pair of chapters introduce Stahl’s preferred form of immanent critique: the critique of reification. As Stahl understands it, this form of critique is sensitive to the constitution of value-forms themselves in addition to the normative content that these forms express. In thematizing the form and content that a specific norm takes in addition to the social practices licensed by it, Stahl introduces a novel approach to social criticism that assesses the rational acceptability of a value-form’s creation, maintenance, or content in relation to the social actors’ self-understandings and social situation. Stahl thus introduces the provocative idea that we might find ourselves committed to the right values but that the processes responsible for their institutionalization as norms or social practices, or their maintenance, are rationally unacceptable. Simply put, the right convictions have found themselves in the wrong practical vehicles. Stahl labels such a critical orientation “immanent metacritique” (259), and it is a compelling idea that deserves attention.
Overall, Immanent Critique is an important piece of scholarship. It mounts an original argument that immanent social critics must be committed to a robust notion of social progress and that they need to establish some kind of access to the immanent normativity implicit in social practices. Stahl shows that immanent critique needs to satisfy both commitments, and he introduces a novel approach—immanent metacritique—to achieve this goal. His position thus aligns with Habermas’s “unfinished project of Modernity,” and situates Stahl as a stalwart defender of the centrality of social progress within recent debates in critical theory criticizing this very notion (e.g., Amy Allen’s The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory). Despite the ambiguities of his figure-based interpretations and lingering concerns about the meaning of “immanent normativity” and the nature of progress in Stahl’s argument, Immanent Critique is certainly an important contribution to the metatheoretical debates about the nature and scope of critical social theory today.
Works Cited
Geuss, Raymond. The Idea of Critical Theory: Habermas And the Frankfurt School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.