Immanent critique
from 1807 Hegel's practice; named and made central by the Frankfurt School
Do not judge a thing by your standards; hold it to its own, and show it fails them.
- Active
- from 1807
- Where
- Jena, later Frankfurt
- Also
- immanente Kritik
- Status
- In use
- Tradition
- Continental procedures
What it is
Immanent critique refuses to import a standard. It takes the standards a position or institution announces for itself and shows that the position or institution does not meet them.
The advantage is that the target cannot reject the standard. An external criticism can always be answered by rejecting the critic's values; a critique built from the target's own commitments has nowhere to be pushed back to.
How it works
Identify the standards the target states for itself — in its charter, its policy, its stated purpose. Take them seriously and at their strongest, not sarcastically. Show, from the target's own materials, that it fails them. Ask what would have to change for it to meet its own standard.
The second instruction is what distinguishes this from mockery. If the standard is stated only to be jeered at, the critique has become external again.
The moves, in order
- Identify the standard the target sets for itself
- State it at its strongest and adopt it for the argument
- Show from the target's own evidence that it fails that standard
- Decline to import any outside standard at any point
- Ask what would have to change for it to meet its own
The procedure
Proposition The consultation policy fails on its own terms.
- The policy states its purpose: that affected residents have a genuine opportunity to influence decisions before they are made. That is the council's standard, adopted here without amendment and taken seriously.
- The policy's own reporting shows that in the last two years, eleven of thirteen consultations opened after the preferred option had been costed and after the funding application had been lodged.
- The policy itself provides that submissions are summarised for councillors rather than provided, and its template records the number of submissions but not their content.
- On the council's own definition, an opportunity to influence requires that the decision be open when the opportunity is offered. Its own timeline shows it was not in eleven cases.
- No outside standard has been used. The argument is entirely from the policy's stated purpose and the council's own reporting.
Therefore The consultation policy does not deliver what it says it exists to deliver, and the remedy that follows from its own standard is to open consultation before the funding application rather than after.
The council cannot answer this by rejecting the critic's values, because no values of the critic's were used. That is the whole strategic point of the method.
What it is good for
Institutions, policies and organisations that have written down what they are for. It is the most effective form of criticism available inside any body that has a charter, and it is nearly impossible to deflect.
Where it fails
It needs a target with stated standards, and it is powerless against one that has none or that openly rejects the standards attributed to it. A frank statement that the consultation exists to satisfy a legislative requirement and nothing more would defeat the argument above entirely.
It can also be answered by lowering the standard. An institution that responds to immanent critique by rewriting its stated purpose has escaped the argument, and made itself worse in a way the method has no vocabulary for objecting to.
And it cannot reach a coherent position it disagrees with. Something that fully meets its own standards is immune, however objectionable those standards are, and at that point an external argument is required and immanent critique has nothing to offer.
Common misconceptions
That it is the same as accusing someone of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is a charge about a person's sincerity; this is a structural claim about an institution, and it works even where everyone involved is entirely sincere.
Where it came from
Hegel's practice throughout the Phenomenology, where each position is undone by its own commitments rather than by an external standard. Named and made programmatic by Adorno and the Frankfurt School.
What became of it
The signature method of critical theory, and the one part of that tradition most readily adopted by people with no interest in the rest of it.
Lasting influence
It is the standard structure of effective institutional criticism, of most successful investigative journalism, and of judicial review on the ground that a body failed to follow its own policy.
Why it still matters
The most immediately usable method in group D.
Put another way
Measuring the building against its own plans.
Texts
Theodor Adorno, Prisms
The essays demonstrate the method rather than describing it, particularly the cultural criticism pieces.
Where to start
Take any organisation's stated purpose and its own annual report, and read one against the other. That is the method entire.
The surprising bit
The most practically devastating method in continental philosophy is also the most conservative in form, since it never asks anybody to accept anything new.
In their own words
The critique of ideology is not something opposed to it from outside, but the confrontation of ideology with its own truth
Who held it
Rahel Jaeggi
Connections
- Relies on
- Sublation, Reductio ad absurdum
- Parallel to
- Socratic elenchus
The verdict
The most effective criticism available against anything that has written down what it stands for, and useless against anything that has not.