Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry
Martin Jay. Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School Under Pressure. New York: Verso, 2023. 231 pp.
Review by Alexei Procyshyn
3 July 2025
Over the last fifty years, Martin Jay has consistently produced some of the best scholarship on the history of the Frankfurt School. His nuanced reconstructions contain an absolute wealth of information while providing much-needed historical contextualization to help readers appreciate how social events shaped the views of critical theorists. Immanent Critiques continues this trend. Indeed, one could recommend this collection of previously published essays simply for the footnotes. Each of the volume’s eight chapters (plus an Introduction) is encyclopedic, providing references to seminal publications in the field, important contributions to (ongoing) debates, and the most recent scholarship that deserves consultation. The book is therefore an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the themes addressed—it is a goldmine for anyone who likes to chase footnotes.
As the title intimates, though, Immanent Critiques’ contribution extends well beyond its scholarship. Each of Jay’s essays address a timely social theme. For instance, chapter 1 (“1968 in an Expanded Field: The Frankfurt School and the Uneven Course of History”) explores in fascinating historical detail the Frankfurt School’s ambivalence to the student youth movements of 1968 by considering the impact of 1967’s Six Day War in the Middle East on radical left political movements, while positioning recent de- and postcolonial criticisms of critical theory within this nuanced social setting; the historical background provides an invaluable resource for engaging with recent efforts to decolonize contemporary critical theory, on the one hand, and for examining contemporary criticisms of Israel’s politics, on the other. Similar themes are raised in chapter 3 (“Blaming the Victim? Arendt, Adorno, and Erikson on the Jewish Responsibility for Anti-Semitism”), wherein Jay outlines Hannah Arendt and others’ efforts to understand the emergence and prevalence of antisemitism. The discussion’s results generalize in an unexpected way to diagnose any tendency to favor ethnic/racial/tribal solidarity over political solidarity and a concomitant retreat from secular, pluralistic, and democratic political engagement as genuine dangers—tendencies that are presently observable at home and abroad.
The retreat from democratic practices of political engagement and the lure of apolitical forms of solidarity turn out to be leitmotifs of Immanent Critiques. They figure in chapters 2 (“Adorno and the Role of Sublimation in Artistic Creativity and Cultural Redemption”), 4 (“The Authoritarian Personality and the Problematic Pathologization of Politics”), and 5 (“The Age of Rackets? Trump, Scorsese, and the Frankfurt School”). Indeed, chapters 2 and 4 detail critical theorists’ efforts to stem the retreat from political engagement into artistic or so-called academic scholarship and to avoid a pernicious tendency to psychologize or moralize—pathologize—political or intellectual disagreement, whilst chapter 5 gives us an incisive view of what apolitical solidarity entails via the early Frankfurt School analyses of rackets that replace solidarity with mob-like transactional relationships.
The final three chapters (“Go Figure: Fredric Jameson on Walter Benjamin,” “Leib, Körper and the Body Politic,” and “Marx and Mendacity: Can There Be a Politics without Hypocrisy?”) examine what retrieving the requisite sense of solidarity and political action might involve. Here, Jay investigates the role falsehoods and specific conceptions of the body politic play in political action, whilst attributing to a specific sense of falsehood a constructive, counterfactual status that serves as a rallying point for political solidarity as a shared motivating goal. These chapters will undoubtedly force a reader to discover a splinter in their eye as Jay delivers his assessments. For instance, his negative view of Fredric Jameson’s efforts to retrieve a coherent Marxian position from Walter Benjamin’s writings will undoubtedly provoke readers sympathetic to Benjamin or Jameson. His analysis of the distinction between active subject and (its) passive physical body will prompt a reconsideration of recent political protests that emphasize precarity rather than strength, and unsettle older convictions about the nature of political activism. And his plädoyer for the necessity of falsehoods in politics—particularly Jay’s trenchant criticisms of Alain Badiou’s position, culminating in his remark that “politics as a ‘truth procedure’ . . . may be an oxymoron”—requires response; at the very least, it will prompt serious reconsideration of contemporary political discourse (p. 213).
Immanent Critiques leverages Jay’s encyclopedic understanding of critical theory’s history against a set of pressing contemporary problems to unpack the tensions in both. Each essay reflects upon an irrevocable loss while resisting any facile effort to transform it into a point along the bending arc of the moral universe. This is a rare virtue. Jay’s engagements here serve the dual role of public intellectual, shaking readers out of any unearned convictions (about, for example, moral progress), and academic, revealing how critical theorists from Benjamin to Badiou have responded to problems similar to our own while exposing the frailty of these responses. Together, the essays also identify concrete ways in which we can continue these engagements and perhaps improve on them—even hinting at emerging forms of solidarity—while foregrounding their stakes for our contemporary social spaces. These essays will reward a reader’s critical engagement; I therefore recommend them highly.
