Flanking the Frankfurt School

Why does Carl Trueman want to fight bad philosophy with bland pastoral advice?

For my first From the Archives, I’m re-upping my review of Carl Trueman’s To Change All Worlds, published last summer at Civitas Outlook. It speaks to all this week’s themes, but especially the importance of the Christian philosophical tradition. The book assesses the work of the Frankfurt School, a group of Jewish Marxists who fled Germany after the rise of the Nazis and ended up teaching in American universities.

Critical theory (the main brainchild of the Frankfurt School) could be seen as a kind of cousin or variant of postmodernism, and it shows its strengths and (significant) weaknesses rather well. Trueman’s book is very helpful for explaining why. Indeed, I find much to admire in Trueman’s work: he’s responsible, careful, and willing to glean real insights from unsympathetic sources. But it’s frustrating how he’s so unwilling to dig into the Christian tradition to offer robust philosophical answers to bad philosophy. His pattern is to critique critical theory on its own merits and then urge Christians to combat this with virtuous living. Virtuous living is good! But why not answer bad philosophy with good philosophy?

As I remark near the end of this review:

Insofar as critical theory has eroded many of the foundations of healthy, rational discourse, the proper response is to rebuild them. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel of Western Civilization; it’s often enough to remember where we left it. But there is much work to be done in rebuilding “traditional theory,” by which I mean “theories that treat the truth as something worth finding, not as a mere instrument for converting the world to mindless activism.” Given his other priors and commitments, it seems like Trueman must agree with this, but he shows little sign of it in To Change All Worlds. I found myself chuckling at the end, wondering whether an intelligent (but ignorant) person could read the whole book with genuine understanding, and find himself wondering at the end, “Why haven’t Christians ever bothered to do philosophy? Maybe they should try it!”

Yes, let’s do! Or rather, let’s keep doing philosophy, standing on the shoulders of giants who have gone before.

Interestingly, I had already planned to re-up this article today, but yesterday I saw that Paul Gottfried at Compact had a new article out about “What the Right Can Learn from the Frankfurt School.” Feel free to read that too, for comparison. I’ll just say that while Gottfried and I both agree that some real insights could be taken from the Frankfurt School, he seems to want to “learn” a lot more from them than I do.

Happy Friday. Enjoy “Carl Trueman’s Trek through the Inferno.”