I’d heard a lot about critical theory but didn’t really understand what was being talked about. The Frankfurt School of the 1930s wasn’t really a school. It was philosophers and academics who were arguing with each other about how the world actually works — and about why people keep accepting arrangements that hurt them. And like many things called ‘theories’, it’s easy to be confused about what’s actually being said.
Their core insight: most of what we call “normal” was designed by someone, for a reason, and that reason might not be your reason.
Traditional science tries to describe the world as it is. Critical theory asks: “who benefits from the world being described that way?”
When an economist says “the market determines wages,” that sounds neutral. But it isn’t. It’s a choice about what to measure and what to ignore. It’s a story. And stories can be told differently.
Pioneers like Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse (followed and reworked by Habermas)— looked at modern industrial society and noticed that Reason, with a capital R, which was supposed to liberate us, had turned into a tool of control. The Enlightenment promised freedom. What we got instead was efficiency.
They called it instrumental reason: the habit of thinking about how to do things without ever asking whether we should.
Reification: when the made-up becomes the inevitable
The word that unlocks the concept is reification. Human social relations and systems appear as natural, thing-like and outside our control because we end up treating them as if they were rocks. Permanent. Objective. Not up for discussion.
“That’s just how business works.”
“That’s just how things are.”
“You can’t fight human nature.”
Each of those sentences is a reification. Someone built a thing. Now they’re insisting it can’t be unbuilt.
Critical theory’s job is to thaw what has been frozen. To remind us that the rules we’re following were written by someone, and can be rewritten.
Systems are often invisible, and they hide behind normal. When in doubt, consider the system that we’ve assumed is the only way.
The Frankfurt School wasn’t just academic. They were trying to explain how otherwise reasonable people went along with war, consumerism and conformity.
Their answer: the system shapes what feels obvious. What feels like common sense. What feels like “just being realistic.”
Which means the most important thing a marketer, a leader, a maker can do is ask: am I solving a real problem, or am I reinforcing a convenient story about what people are supposed to want?
When someone points at a system and describes the interests of those who supported it, two things can happen.
The first: curiosity. Who built it? Why? What would a different version look like?
The second: discomfort.
If you’ve organized your identity around the map being true — if your status, your choices, your self-image all depend on the current arrangement being natural and inevitable — then someone questioning the map isn’t being philosophical.
They’re threatening you.
The fact that your status feels threatened is a self-reflective tell. Of course it feels threatened. That’s what the system wants you to feel.
“The market rewards hard work” isn’t just an economic claim for a lot of people. It’s a story about why they deserve what they have. Poke that story and you’re not critiquing capitalism. You’re telling them their success was partly luck, partly structural, partly the result of systems that excluded others.
Most of the fury isn’t intellectual. It’s tribal.
Critical theory became associated with universities and with certain political movements. So defending against it became a marker of identity for the other tribe. You’re not critiquing the argument — you’re signaling which team you’re on.
That’s ironic, right? Because “this belief is really about status and belonging, not truth” is exactly the kind of thing critical theory would say about the people attacking critical theory.
It’s tempting to announce that some questions aren’t allowed.
Those are usually the most important questions.