Critical Theory Matters

A Review of To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse by Carl R. Trueman

All of a sudden, everyone seems to have an opinion on critical theory. The once-obscure names of Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Wilhelm Reich, and others are now bandied about with an air of familiarity. But do we really know what we’re talking about? How are we to think about critical theory—or, to put it more accurately, critical theories?

Enter Carl Trueman to clear the fog. Trueman has published a string of stellar books on the philosophical and cultural forces that have shaped our world today. And with this new one, To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse, he has added another to the list. In this book he sets out to help readers better grasp some of the foundational critical theorists on their own terms. In this sense, the book is not nearly as sweeping as his 2020 volume, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, nor perhaps as accessible as his 2022 book, Strange New World, though certainly there are some familiar names and ideas that provide important groundwork for all three. But this latest release is no less important, for it can help us make sense of some philosophers of the past few centuries who are difficult to understand but whose ideas have made an outsized impact on the lifeways and thought patterns of the modern West.

The Central Question: What it Means to Be Human

Trueman explains that this book is “an attempt to expound the critical theoretical ideas of a few chosen thinkers associated with the early development of critical theory in order to help us engage with more clarity on some of the most pressing issues of our own age.” Those pressing issues include everything from critical race theory to LGBT issues, from calls for abolishing the police to DEI policies in human resource departments. Trueman argues that all these types of hot-button topics are symptomatic of confusion at a much deeper level: “the issue of anthropology, the understanding of what it means to be human.” As Trueman provides an invigorating and incisive tour of key critical theorists, he returns to this foundational question and expounds on how the true understanding of human beings, as understood within Christianity, informs or interacts with the views advanced within a critical theoretical framework.

Critical Theorists in Their Own Words

Trueman places the origin of critical theory in the works of Hegel and Marx, then traces its development through thinkers like Karl Korsch and Georg Lukács to the Frankfurt School and Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Reich. As he lets these thinkers speak for themselves from their own writings, he provides the necessary commentary and clarification to draw out what is really there—what it is they are really putting forth. What Trueman delivers turns out to be a much more complicated and nuanced picture than an outright rejection (common among the political right), or full-throated acceptance (from the left), of critical theory. At the end of each chapter, he offers short postscripts with key takeaways from a Christian perspective—falsehoods that must be rejected, but also elements of truth the theorists were picking up on, though in a distorted way.

Trueman’s balanced and thorough approach reminds us that,

The challenge to which critical theory therefore summons the church is to show, not merely to argue, that she has the answers. Critical theory does not so much provide Christians with a useful tool to think about the world as clarify a set of questions to which we have the answers already, if we open our eyes to see them.

And those questions are being asked by increasing numbers of people today, which gives us all the more reason to be ready to give an answer for the hope that is within us.