Critical Theory, Truth, and Protest

In the 1960s, theoretical quarrels over truth in the tradition of postwar political theory found themselves at the center of political conflict about the validity and value of student protest. This article traces those quarrels to argue that Herbert Marcuse was not merely a “guru” polemicist of the New Left, and that Jürgen Habermas’s emerging deliberative theory was not just the result of austere philosophical debates. Each self-consciously pursued justificatory links between their interpretations of Hegel, their debates on truth and justification, and their conflicting views on student protest. Both thinkers, I show, cited these theoretical debates in both public writing and private correspondence on the student movement. In the process, I suggest that prevailing histories of critical theory have underappreciated the ways these two divergent critical epistemologies were marshaled to justify different responses to student protest. More broadly, I argue that critical theory’s protest decade reanimates long-standing questions about the normative and political commitments latent in the twentieth century’s recurring debates about truth, language, and the objectivity of future possibilities.